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Pordenone underwent his early training as a painter in an artistic context still heavily influenced by Mantegna. Subsequently he experienced a multiplicity of different fashions and styles in Venice, Ferrara, Loreto, Rome and Urbino where he came into contact with Giorgione, Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo, Melozzo da Forli, Raphael and Michelangelo. The taste which arose from this wide-ranging education was marked by an expressive Mannerist vitality that found itself in conflict in Venice with the courtly classicism of Titian. Such expressive passion loses some of its intensity in the later phase of Pordenone's career and under the refined Mannerist influence of Parmigiano his figure groupings became more studied and tightly organized.
It is to this last period of Pordenone's activity that the great altar-piece of St Lorenzo Giustiniani belongs, with the saint pictured standing between two "fratelli turchini" and St Francis and St Augistine on the left and St Bernardino and St John the Baptist on the right. The work was completed in 1532 for the church Madonna dell'Orto where the Canons of San Giorgio in Alga (the fratelli turchini, so-called because of the blue-green colour of their vestments) celebrated mass. In the play of light and shade achieved with considerable dramatic tension by means of the circular sky-light in the architectural structure, the figures of the saints are presented as a magnificent series of interlocking shapes, a dense interweaving of sentiments.
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