ALTICHIERO DA ZEVIO In the years after the completion of the Scrovegni chapel in Padua, Giotto’s influence was giving results in the whole of the Veneto region. One of these results, and one of remarkable importance, was Altichiero from Zevio, in the province of Verona. In 1384, he painted, together with Avanzo, the oratory of St. George, near the church of St. Anthony of Padua. Some years before he had decorated in the same church the chapel of St. James, but it is in St. George’s oratory that Altichiero reaches the highest level of his art. In this pictorial cycle, placed amongst the traditional iconography of the life of Christ, scenes from the lives of St. Lucy and St. Catherine are unravelled. In his painting, Altichiero lets in the sense of real life.    The frescoes are like an uninterrupted choral concert, in which the most varied mankind tends to come out of anonymity in which it had been confined. There is in Altichiero a taste for the portrait, for the realistic detail and for the plebeian participation of his crowd to the tale. This crowd, alive and determined, is conquering its individuality and is, henceforth, aware of its position inside a social context which is definitely freeing itself from feudal schematism. It may be said that Altichiero, on bringing this analytic attention to the human figure, contributes to closing a period and sow the seeds for the imminent explosion of Venetian painting, that will begin with a painter born on the soil of Padua : Andrea Mantegna.