The great-nephew of Palma il Vecchio, Palma il Giovane was the leading painter in Venice after the death of Veronese and Tintoretto. His formative years were spent at the court of Urbino and in Rome.
When he returned to Venice in the early 1570s he was already a mature artist, practising a style at first reflecting the Roman late Mannerism of the Zuccaro, but then increasingly consisting of an eclectic synthesis of the major Venetian masters of the later sixteenth century.
An immensely productive painter, Palma served the needs of counter-reformation religion in Venice by filling the city's churches and the meeting rooms of devotional confraternities with vast numbers of altarpieces and narrative cycles. He also played a major role in the large-scale redecoration of the Palazzo Ducale after the fires of 1574 and 1577.
