Bartolomeo Schedoni

On 23 December 1615 a Parma chronicler recorded the death of the duke's painter, Bartolomeo Schedoni, at 37. He wrote that Schedoni died in a fit of passion after heavy losses at gambling, and some historians have read that as suicide. The record does not settle it.

Schedoni was the son of a mask-maker who worked for the ducal courts of Modena and Parma. In 1595 Ranuccio I Farnese, Duke of Parma, sent the gifted boy to Rome to train under Federico Zuccari, the painter who then headed the city's academy of artists. Illness brought him home early. A few years later a spell in prison for assault pushed him out of Parma to Modena, where he worked for its duke, Cesare d'Este, and painted ceiling frescoes in the town hall alongside the local painter Ercole dell'Abate.

In 1607 he went back to Parma and from then on worked almost only for Ranuccio, who valued him enough to give him a farm at Felegara when he married in 1611. The pictures of those last years are few. A Charity of 1611 shows a woman handing bread to poor children, with the softness of Correggio, Parma's great painter of the 1520s, and a Deposition of 1613 borrows its design from Caravaggio's Entombment in Rome. He had about eight working years back in Parma, and he spent them on one patron.