Giovanni Serodine
1630 · Old Swiss Confederacy, Papal States · Caravaggisti, Baroque
The story
Many families from the lake country of what is now Ticino earned their living in Rome as builders and stucco-workers, and Giovanni Serodine came from one of them. His father, Cristoforo, was a master builder from Ascona on Lake Maggiore, and the family had settled in Rome by the end of the 16th century. Whether Giovanni was born there or in Ascona is not known, and his birth is put either in 1594 or in 1600. He learned the trade in the workshop of his elder brother, Giovan Battista, a sculptor and stuccoist, and in 1623 the two were still working together on three rooms of Palazzo Borghese.
As a painter he took up the manner of Caravaggio, who had died in 1610, and handled it with his own rough, quick brushwork. He died in Rome on 21 December 1630, at about thirty. Only about 15 of his paintings survive, and roughly half of them are in Ticino, among them his last, a very large Coronation of the Virgin in the parish church of Ascona. The Italian critic Roberto Longhi did more than anyone to bring him back to notice, with a book on him published in 1950.
