Gerolamo Giovenone

Gerolamo Giovenone was a carpenter's son from Vercelli, a town that then belonged to the Duchy of Savoy, and Vercelli stayed the centre of his working life. His father Amedeo and his brother Giovanni Pietro both worked in wood, and by 1524 Gerolamo had a house and a workshop of his own in the San Lorenzo district.

He probably trained with the Piedmontese painters of the generation before him, Giovanni Martino Spanzotti and Defendente Ferrari. Then a newcomer changed the town around him. Gaudenzio Ferrari, a painter from the Valsesia hills to the north, was winning commissions in Vercelli, and in 1521 Gerolamo's younger brother Giuseppe was apprenticed to him. From the 1520s Gaudenzio's influence shows more and more in Gerolamo's own pictures, and the tie became a family one when his daughter Dorotea married Bernardino Lanino, a pupil of Gaudenzio. Gerolamo made his will on 27 August 1555 and was dead by 9 September, in Vercelli.