Xavier Mellery was a Belgian painter, draftsman and illustrator.  One of the precursors of Symbolism .
He was born in Laeken, Belgium. Initially worked with the painter-decorator Charles Albert before attending the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts from 1860 to 1867. There his teachers included Portaels (1818-1895). He won the Prix de Rome, and took his first trip to Italy after that.  He admired works by Giovanni Bellini and Masaccio .  He made a few of copies of Vittore Carpaccio .  In Rome he met the sculptor Paul De Vigne , who became a friend for life.  During his stay in Rome, Mellery formulates his whole life sustained artistic credo: 'He who will manage to have us forget colour and form at the price of emotion will achieve the highest goal of all.'
In 1878 he took a new Italy trip.
 In a less introverted, more public domain, Mellery sought to create an allegorical art in which classically-inspired figures, set against flat, golden backdrops and frequently accompanied by texts, expanded universal ideas or truths. Such works, greatly informed by his visit to Italy in 1871 and a subsequent trip to Germany, Switzerland and Austria in 1887, were generally conceived on a monumental scale as programmes for major public decorative cycles. While Mellery never realised this ambition, these works were exhibited in reduced version, both at Sàr Péladan's Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris in 1897, and in Brussels.  Mellery exhibited regularly at Les XX as an invited artist from 1885 (1888, 1890, 1892), and he subsequently contributed four times to La Libre Esthétique (1894, 1895, 1899, 1908). He was a founding member of Pour l'Art, and a member of Kunst van Heden, the Société Royale Belge des Aquarellistes and the Belgian Académie Royale. Mellery also produced book illustrations, such as those for Lemonnier's La Belgique (1888), and executed designs for sculpture, including the small bronze statuettes personifying various trades for the park of Le Petit Sablon in Brussels in 1882, and a few years later, symbolic figures on the fa?ade of the Palais des Beaux-Arts, now the Musée d'Art Ancien in Brussels.