Carlo Francesco Nuvolone

The plague that reached Milan in 1630 killed something close to half the city, and it took Daniele Crespi at 32, the most admired young painter there. Giulio Cesare Procaccini had died five years before that. Cerano, the old head of the Milanese school, who had taught both of them, was gone by 1632. Carlo Francesco Nuvolone was 21 when the epidemic came and had trained under Cerano at the Accademia Ambrosiana. By the 1640s he was the leading painter in Lombardy.

He came out of a painting household. His father Panfilo had come up from Cremona and made his living from frescoes and small still lifes. His younger brother Giuseppe worked beside him for years. The canvas in the Brera shows the whole arrangement, painted around 1650 at the height of his practice: Carlo Francesco at the easel, Giuseppe with a lute, a woman at the harp, Panfilo standing behind them.

Collectors thought his smooth, warmly lit manner came close to Guido Reni, the Bolognese painter every Italian court was chasing, and they called him il Guido della Lombardia, the Guido of Lombardy. He frescoed chapels at the Sacro Monte di Varese and the Sacro Monte di Orta, pilgrimage hills north of Milan, and died in the city on 1 August 1661. The family picture stayed in Milanese private hands, listed in a household inventory of 1759, and came to the Brera in 1806.