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.

Giuseppe's art is close to that of Carlo Francesco but reveals a greater interest in complex and crowded compositions. The influence of his brother is apparent in his first dated work, the Holy Family (1648; Bregnano, Como, S Giorgio), and in the Ecstasy of St Francis (1650; Cornate d'Adda, parish church). During the second half of the 1660s Giuseppe appears to have been active in Chiavenna, where he painted the Virgin and Child with St Anthony (1657; S Laurenziana), and in Bergamo (Cain Killing Abel, 1659; Bergamo, S Maria Maggiore). He assisted his brother in the chapels of the Sacro Monte at Orta and in the frescoes in S Francesco at Trecate and received important commissions in Novara and Cremona: one of the scenes from the Life of St Augustine in S Agostino at Novara is dated 1665, while in 1668 he painted the frescoes in the former church of S Domenico at Cremona. In 1671 he painted the grandiose St Dominic Raising Cardinal Fossanova together with the two side paintings representing the Blessed Rolando and the Blessed Moneta da Crema (all Cremona, Museo Civico Ala Ponzone). In 1695 he executed four canvases for the Cappella della Vergine in S Giovanni Evangelista, Brescia.