Nicola Verlato (born February 19, 1965) is an Italian painter, sculptor, architect and musician based in Los Angeles, California.
Nicola Verlato was born in Verona and began painting at a very early age, learning from Fra' Terenzio, a painter in the monastery of Franciscan friars of Lonigo.
Nicola Verlato creates his works through an articulated process that makes use of classical techniques as well as modern technology such as 3D Modeling programs such as Maya and ZBrush.
His work has been defined by Suzanne Hudson as, "Nicola Verlato retains a kind of classicism that has traditionally implied conservatism, upholding a neorealist style evocative of Old Master painting, which he puts to use in near-apocalyptic, largely allegorical scenes of soldiers and bodies leaping from crashing vehicles.
Verlato appropriates the campy, exaggerated violence common to the High Baroque and contemporary video games to comment on the clash of civilizations played out between polytheism and monotheism, and to underline its consequences for representation: cults of idols (figuration) versus prohibitions on graven images (abstraction).