Carlo Bonatto Minella

The parish church of Frassinetto, a mountain village in the Canavese north of Turin, has a Deposition from the Cross dated 1874. Carlo Bonatto Minella painted it for his home village at 19, and local tradition, still remembered by his relatives a century later, holds that he used his own parents as models for the Virgin and Christ.

He trained at the Accademia Albertina in Turin, where at 15 he copied Raphael's Madonna of the Chair for a course taught by the painter Enrico Gamba. His few surviving pictures date mostly from 1876 to 1878, a Judith and a Jewish Woman among them, and scenes of the ancient world, painted in quiet, subdued colour that critics have compared with the English Pre-Raphaelites. He died in 1878, aged 23. The Turin Promotrice gave him a small memorial showing that year, and in 1922 the Venice Biennale tried to bring his name back.