Giovanni Antonio Sacchis was called Il Pordenone for the town in the northern Italian province of Friuli where he was born. He worked throughout northern Italy, and settled in Venice at the age of fifty-two, where he became Titian’s chief artistic rival. Pordenone was ambitious and amoral, hiring assassins to murder his brother so that he could inherit his father’s estate and plotting to oust the artist who began a series of frescoes in the cathedral of Cremona so that he could finish the job himself. According to Vasari, Pordenone was poisoned to death.