Biography

Member of an Italian family of painters. Panfilo Nuvolone painted many frescoes and altarpieces, in a style still linked to late Mannerism, and a number of more original still-lifes. His son Carlo Francesco Nuvolone, who responded to early 17th-century Milanese art, was a more powerful artist. He became the leading painter in Lombardy in the mid-17th century, producing frescoes, altarpieces, devotional works and portraits. Carlo's younger brother Giuseppe Nuvolone assisted him. Giuseppe's art is of lower quality, yet richer in colour, and his many religious works spread the Baroque style throughout Lombardy.

Carlo Francesco first studied with his father and subsequently at the Accademia Ambrosiana in Milan, where he was a pupil of Cerano and came into contact with Daniele Crespi and Giulio Cesare Procaccini. His first signed and dated work, the Miracle of St Martha (1636; Venegono Inferiore, Seminario Arcivescovile), which is much influenced by Morazzone and Giulio Cesare Procaccini, suggests his response to new artistic developments in Milan. The Death of Lucrezia (private collection), of which there are several versions, is probably slightly later. This work exhibits the soft, atmospheric quality of his art, often explained by his knowledge of Murillo, which, however, is difficult to establish. His contacts with Crespi, Francesco Cairo and above all with Giulio Cesare Procaccini, were of greater significance; from the last-named he learnt how to achieve a delicate modulation of light and shade and to impart sweet facial expressions to his figures.

In the 1640s he painted many altarpieces that suggest an awareness of van Dyck, whose work he knew through Valerio Castello and Giovanni Andrea de' Ferrari. Outstanding are the Purification of the Virgin (1645; Piacenza, Museo Civico), the Assumption of the Virgin (1646; Milan, Brera) and the Virgin in Glory with Saints (1647; Parma, Galleria Nazionale). In these paintings Nuvolone reveals himself to have been heir to the first generation of innovative painters in 17th-century Lombardy, although he used a less dramatic language, which also reflects an awareness of Emilian art.