Giulio Cesare Procaccini

Giulio Cesare Procaccini began his career in marble. In the 1590s he was carving stone for Milan Cathedral and for the church of Santa Maria presso San Celso, one member of a whole family of artists his father Ercole had moved from Bologna to Milan around 1585.

Sometime after 1600 he put down the chisel and turned to paint, and the sculptor's feel for the body stayed with him — his saints and angels twist and lean with real physical weight, lit in sharp silver and rose. Art in Milan then answered to Cardinal Federico Borromeo, a powerful churchman rebuilding Catholic imagery after the Reformation, and Procaccini worked under that patronage beside two rivals, the painters known as Cerano and Morazzone. The three of them even shared a single large canvas, the Martyrdom of Saints Rufina and Seconda, each painting his own figures.

He died in Milan in 1625, remembered as the most graceful of that Lombard group, and the one whose colour comes closest to the Flemish warmth of Rubens, whose work he had seen.