CARPACCIO, VITTORIO or VITTORE (c. 1465 c. 1522), Italian painter, was born in Venice, of an old Venetian family. The facts of his life are obscure, but his principal works were executed between 1490 and and he ranks as one of the finest precursors of the great Venetian masters. The date of his birth is conjectural. He is first mentioned in 1472 in a will of his uncle Fra Ilario, and Dr. Ludwig infers from this that he was born c. 1455, on the ground that no one could enter into an inheritance under the age of fifteen; but consideration of the youthful style of his earliest dated pictures ("St. Ursula" series, Venice, 1490) makes it improbable that at that time he had reached so mature an age as thirty-five; and he was more probably about 25 in 1490. What is certain is that he was a pupil (not, as sometimes thought, the master) of Lazzaro Bastiani, who, like the Bellini and Vivarini, was the head of a large atelier in Venice, and whose own work is seen in such pictures as the "S. Veneranda" at Vienna, and the "Doge Mocenigo kneeling before the Virgin" and "Madonna and Child" (formerly attributed to Carpaccio) in the National Gallery, London. In later years Carpaccio appears to have been influenced by Cima da Conegliano (e.g. in the "Death of the Virgin," at Ferrara). Apart from the "St. Ursula" series his scattered series of the "Life of the Virgin" and "Life of St. Stephen," and a "Dead Christ" at Berlin, may be specially mentioned.
See Pompeo Molmenti and Gustav Ludwig, Life and Works of Vittorio Carpaccio, Eng. trans., R. H. Cust (19o7) ; and Roger Fry, "A Genre Painter and his Critics," in the Quarterly Review (April, i9o8).