GIAMBONO (MICHELE DI TADDEO BONO) (fl. 1420-1462), Italian painter and mosaicist, active in Venice from 1420-62. His grandfather was a painter of Treviso called Giam Bono (also Zambono) and he himself is generally called by this name. He was the most distinguished member of a large family of artists working chiefly in Venice for nearly a century and a half, from 1396 to 1546. The decorations of the Ca Doro and of the cele brated Porta della Carta leading into the court of the doge's palace, most accomplished examples of the highly ornate Late Gothic architecture in Venice, were executed by members of the family at the time when Michele was painting his altar pieces which embody the same taste in another medium and are en closed in elaborate Gothic architectural framework. Giambono belonged to the generation preceding that of Giovanni and Gen tile Bellini. It is not known in whose studio he was trained.
There are but few fully authenticated works by this master extant. The Venice academy has a large polyptych representing the Saviour and four Saints, signed "Michel Cambono pinxit," and a "Coronation of the Virgin" which, according to documentary evidence, was copied by the artist from a work by Giovanni d'Alemagna and Antonio Vivarini. There is an exquisite "Vir gin and Child," signed by the artist, in Rome (Hertz bequest). Among the works attributed to him are the "St. Mark" in the National Gallery (Mond bequest), London, the St. Michael in Berenson's collection, and a "Pieta" in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. After the death of Jacobello del Fiore in Giambono was made director of the mosaic works in the church of St. Mark's, and he there composed the mosaics on the left side of the vault in the Capella dei Mascoli, representing the Nativity and the Presentation in the Temple. The figures are set against a background of Gothic architecture, and there is a first attempt to introduce three-dimensional representation in a technique, where up till that time the monumental two-dimen sional design of the Byzantine tradition had reigned supreme.
See Paoletti di Oswaldo, Raccolte di Documenti inediti (Padua, 1895) ; J. R. Richter, Mond Collection (191o) ; L. Testi, La Storia della Pittura Veneziana (Bergamo, 1915) .