Giambettino Cignaroli (July 4, 1718 – December 1, 1770) was an Italian painter of the Rococo and early Neoclassic period.

He was born and died in Verona. He was a pupil of Santo Prunato and Antonio Balestra and active mostly in the area of the Veneto. He became the director of the academy of painting and sculpture of Verona in December of 1764.

For the Austrian governor of Lombardy and a collector of antiquities, Count Leopold von Firmian, Cignaroli painted two canvases on Greco-Roman episodes, a thematic preferred by Neoclassic painters: Death of Cato (1759) and Death of Socrates. The postures and grouping though could be easily mistaken for the death of saint.

[edit] Sources

• Web Gallery of Art
• Giambettino Cignaroli's Deaths of Cato and of Socrates, Joseph Geiger. Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (1996) pp270-278.
• Studi sopra la storia della pittura italiana dei secoli xiv e xv e della scuola pittorica. By Cesare Bernasconi. Published 1864 (google books). Original from Oxford University