Francesco Cairo

Francesco Cairo painted death and religious ecstasy with a strange, hothouse intensity. Born near Milan in 1607, he made his name young enough that in 1633 the Duke of Savoy, Vittorio Amedeo I, called him to Turin as court painter, and the following year had him knighted into a Savoy order of chivalry. Ever after he was Il Cavaliere del Cairo, the knight, the title he is still catalogued under.

His large altarpieces filled churches across Lombardy and Piedmont, but collectors have always been drawn to his smaller cabinet pictures of grisly, feverish subjects, where acts of violence and a kind of morbid eroticism sit side by side. A good example is his Herodias, painted in those Turin court years. Herodias, the woman who had urged her daughter Salome to demand the head of John the Baptist, swoons back at the sight of the severed head brought to her on a dish.

Cairo absorbed Venetian colour and the elegance of van Dyck across a career spanning nearly 40 years. He died in Milan in 1665.