SEGA has announced Niccolo Balce as the winner of the “Bayonetta Re-Envisioned” art contest at WizardUniverse.com , centered on the heroine of SEGA’s Bayonetta. After hundreds of votes were cast to assist the judges from Wizard and SEGA in gauging fan favorites, the collective panel selected its eleven favorites with the overall winner being chosen by PlatinumGames’ Hideki Kamiya, the creative visionary behind the game.

As the grand prize winner, Balce will receive an Xbox 360, a 50 inch Panasonic TC-P50X1 HDTV Plasma TV, a developer-autographed copy of Bayonetta for Xbox 360 and will have his submission featured in Wizard magazine. The runner-ups will all be posted in a special gallery on WizardUniverse.com and each will be awarded an autographed copy of the game when it is available in January 2010.

Bayonetta is a cinematic, stylized action game in which the game’s protagonist, is a graceful, gun-wielding witch who awakens after being entombed in a coffin at bottom of a lake for 500 years with no memory. As players embark on this quest with Bayonetta, they will begin to unfold the mystery behind her past and her purpose in the game, such as why she fights against angels and other countless fantastic enemies. In combat, Bayonetta uses weapons, magic, acrobatics and her larger-than-life hair to redefine the look and feel of the action genre.