Giulio Campi

In 16th-century Cremona, a city in Lombardy in northern Italy, painting was close to a family trade, and the Campi were its leading house. Giulio Campi, the eldest son, learned his first lessons from his father Galeazzo before going to Mantua around 1522 to study under Giulio Romano, the pupil of Raphael who had inherited the master's grand Roman manner.

Campi carried that manner back north. He looked hard at Raphael and at Correggio, the painter of nearby Parma known for soft, glowing figures, and worked their lessons into his own altarpieces and frescoes. His scenes from the life of Saint Agatha, finished in 1537, and the frescoes he painted in the church of San Sigismondo just outside Cremona between 1539 and 1542 set the pattern for a whole local style.

He also taught the next generation of his own family: his younger brothers Antonio and Vincenzo both became painters in their own right. When people speak of a Cremonese school of painting, it is Giulio Campi's workshop they mean, and he was still at work in the city when he died there in 1572.