Gian Paolo Lomazzo

Giovan Paolo Lomazzo went blind in 1571, at 33. He had been painting in Milan for about 15 years, trained by Giovanni Battista della Cerva though he looked to Gaudenzio Ferrari as his real master. He had frescoed a copy of Leonardo's Last Supper for one Milanese church and filled the Foppa chapel at San Marco with a religious cycle. After the blindness he made no more pictures.

He wrote instead. The Trattato dell'arte della pittura appeared in 1584, seven books covering proportion, movement, colour, light, perspective and practice, the longest and most systematic treatise on painting printed in the 16th century. In 1590 came the Idea del tempio della pittura, which sorts painters by temperament and builds an imaginary temple on seven columns, each one a master he thought worth following. Gaudenzio Ferrari stands there beside Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian and Mantegna. An Oxford physician, Richard Haydocke, put the first treatise into English in 1598, which is how Lomazzo's rules reached Elizabethan painters.

Before any of that he had a public role in Spanish-ruled Milan as compà Zavargna, abbot of the Accademia della Val di Blenio, a company of artists and writers who made burlesque verse in the dialect of the porters from a valley north of Como. He painted himself in that costume in 1568, wearing a wreath of vine leaves and holding the ivy-wound staff of Bacchus. A compass and a canvas in the picture mark him out as a painter.