PROCACCINI, Camillo
(b. ca. 1555, Bologna, d. 1629, Milano)

Biography

Italian painter, printmaker and draughtsman, son of Ercole Procaccini I. He was first mentioned in 1571 as a student in the Bolognese painters' guild when his father, Ercole I, was its head. This, and the stylistic maturity of his earliest surviving documented works, the frescoes in San Prospero, Reggio Emilia, suggest his date of birth. Trained by his father, he went to Rome c. 1580 with Conte Pirro Visconti, an important Milanese collector. His studies in Rome, particularly of the art of Taddeo Zuccaro, clearly affected his work after his return to Bologna. In 1582 he decorated the side walls of the apse of San Clemente, Collegio di Spagna, Bologna, and these frescoes (partially photographed before their destruction in 1914) seem to have been an energetic reflection of the exaggerated forms and contrasts of scale typical of mid-16th-century central Italian painting.

In 1587 he participated in the fresco decoration of the Basilica della Ghiara in Reggio Emilia. In the late 1580s he moved to Milan, where count Camillo Visconti Borromeo commissioned him the decoration of his villa in Lainate. The organ shutters for the Cathedral of Milan were painted after 1590 by Camillo, Giuseppe Meda (died 1599), and Ambrogio Figino. His other works of note include the frescoes of the nave and the apse of the Cathedral of Piacenza in collaboration with Ludovico Carracci, and the vault and choir in Santi Paolo e Barnaba of Milan. Also famous is a Nativity in the Sacro Monte d'Orta. Among his pupils is Carlo Biffi.