Italian painter (Forlì 1438 – same place 1494). He was formed on Piero della Francesca, whose works he came in contact with at Urbino where he stayed in the court of the Montefeltro and where it seems he made the drawings for some panels of Duke Federico's small study, that were then carried out by Giusto di Gand and by P. Berruguete. His first works remains the fresco Fondazione della Biblioteca Vaticana (1477) depicting the Foundation of the Vatican Library, now detached and kept in the Pinacoteca Vaticana. In the fresco, intense with color and worthy of note on account of the rigorous setting of the perspective, the characters have a more reduced nexus concerning the composition with the architectonic cornice as compared to Piero della Francesca's work, but, even in the solemnity of the attitude, they present an individual characterization and a sense of human kindness that Piero's works lack. Around 1480 Melozzo had painted a vast fresco with the Ascensione in the apse of the church of SS. Apostoli in Rome, setting a bold perspective construction, rich of foreshortenings and painted with luminous and lively colors; of the fresco, largely destroyed during the eighteenth century re-building of the church , only the famous Angeli musicanti remain which are kept in the Quirinal (iter 3) and in the Pinacoteca Vaticana (iter 9) . Other works by him include the two paintings with S. Marco Papa and S. Marco Evangelista in S. Marco's church in Rome , the decoration of Loreto's Basilica (done in 1477, in collaboration with M. Palmezzano) and the frescos of Cappella Feo in S. Biagio in Forlì. Melozzo exercised a profound influence on, besides his fellow-townsman and collaborator M. Palmezzano, Timoteo Viti, on Giovanni Santi and on the roman school of the late sixteenth century.