Francesco Benaglio

In 1475, the chroniclers of Verona record, Francesco Benaglio went out at night and painted obscene figures with horns, the old sign of a cuckold, on the front of the Sagramoso family's palace. Some of the city's nobles had put him up to it, and he spent four months in prison.

His father Pietro was a grain merchant from Bergamo, and the painter's original name was Francesco di Pietro della Biada, from that grain trade. He later took the surname of the Benaglio, a noble Bergamo family. He is documented in Verona from 1456, and a record of 1472 giving his age as 40 is the reason his birth is placed around 1432.

He was among the first in Verona to take up the new manner of Andrea Mantegna, the painter from Padua, and younger local painters probably learned in his workshop, which his son Girolamo took over. The last record of Francesco himself is a tax assessment of 1492, the same year Girolamo is listed as fatherless.