Dionisio Guerri

Two different deaths are on record for Dionisio Guerri. The Castelvecchio museum in Verona, which owns his pictures, says he died very young in the plague of 1630, the epidemic that carried off most of the city's painters. A Veronese biographer of the early 19th century, Diego Zannandreis, told it another way. He wrote that Guerri was killed at the age of 30, in 1640, and quoted a note the painter Giambettino Cignaroli had written in the margin of an older book of lives. An envious hand had murdered him in the courtyard of San Niccolò, Cignaroli was told, and the story came from Guerri's own relatives.

On his training the sources agree. After his first lessons in Verona he went to Mantua, to the school of Domenico Fetti, court painter to the Gonzaga dukes. For the sacristy of the church of Sant'Eufemia in Verona he painted four scenes from the life of Saint Augustine, and Zannandreis believed the young man kneeling in a corner of one of them was Guerri himself.