Nicola Giolfino

Nicola Giolfino was born in Verona in 1476, the son of a woodcarver, and began his training in the family workshop. From 1492 he apprenticed with Liberale da Verona, one of the leading painters of the Veronese school, and went on to build an independent practice centered on devotional panels and large fresco commissions across Verona.

Among his documented works are the Madonna dei Gelsomini, painted around 1510 and now in the Museo di Castelvecchio, a fresco cycle at the church of San Bernardino in Verona whose exact dates are not documented in the sources reviewed, and an allegorical fresco cycle on the Liberal Arts from around 1530, originally made for the Teatini convent of San Nicolo and now also held at Castelvecchio. He is documented working until the end of his life: a signed drawing dated 3 May 1555, depicting the Valverde area near Verona's Porta Nuova, was his last known commission, and the delivery record from about a month later notes that the artist had already died. Giolfino died in Verona in 1555. No source in the surviving record gives an exact death date beyond the year, and no evidence of any later activity exists, so his status as a historical, deceased artist is not in question.

Art-historical sources place Giolfino firmly within the school of Liberale da Verona and describe him as one of the more active Veronese painters of the early sixteenth century, working across devotional panels, fresco cycles, and drawings. Museum and scholarly references (the Web Gallery of Art, the UniCredit Art Collection, and the University of St Andrews' Venice in Blue project) consistently frame him as a significant, if regionally focused, figure of the period. No exact, attributable critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed in the available research, so none is reproduced here.

No all-time auction record can be confirmed with certainty for Nicola Giolfino. The best documented result available is a pair of paintings, The Murder of the Magus Smerdis and The Coronation of Darius, which an aggregator listing records as realizing USD 100,800 at Sotheby's New York in May 2021, against an estimate of USD 80,000 to 120,000. The exact day of sale is not given in that source and no second source could confirm it, so this should be treated as the most complete data point found rather than a verified record. A separate old-master saleroom listing, a Madonna col Bambino offered by Wannenes in Italy, carried a pre-sale estimate of 20,000 to 30,000 euros with no confirmed result available in the dossier. Taken together, this points to a market that is thin and largely routed through European old-master specialists rather than major international day sales, with most known works already resting in museum collections rather than circulating privately.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Nicola Giolfino, and attribution of individual works depends on connoisseurship, museum scholarship, and the limited archival record that survives from his lifetime. His name also appears in several spellings across sources, including Niccolo Giolfino, Nicolo Giolfino, Golfino, and the signature form Ursino Veronensis, all of which refer to the same artist. Given the absence of a confirmed, well-documented auction record, collectors should treat any online price figure attached to his name with caution until it can be tied to a specific work, house, and sale date.