Alessandro Araldi

In the Benedictine convent of San Paolo in Parma, the abbess Giovanna da Piacenza hired a local painter named Alessandro Araldi to cover a room with grotesque ornament, delicate fantasies of foliage and small figures in the antique taste. A few years later she summoned a younger artist, Correggio, whose ceiling in the neighbouring chamber would become one of the marvels of the Italian Renaissance, and Araldi's careful room slipped into its shadow.

Born in Parma around 1460, Araldi spent his working life in the city. He absorbed the manner of the Venetians Giovanni Bellini and the Vivarini, along with Lorenzo Costa from nearby Ferrara, and worked beside Cristoforo Caselli, a fellow Parma painter. For the same abbess he also painted scenes of Saint Catherine and an unusual Annunciation dated 1514.

From 1503 Araldi lodged inside the San Paolo complex, and it was there, in 1529, that he died during an outbreak of plague.