Portrait of Galeazzo Campi, the Artist's Father

This is the only painting Giulio Campi ever signed, and the man he chose to sign it under is his own father. Galeazzo Campi was a painter in Cremona, in northern Italy, and he gave his son his first lessons at the easel. By 1535, when this was made, the old man was near the end. He died about a year later, around 1536. So the son, already the more ambitious artist, sets down the face of the teacher he was outgrowing, plainly and without flattery, an ageing craftsman in dark clothes against a bare ground. Giulio went on to run a busy workshop in Cremona with his two brothers, all of them painters. On this single panel, and on nothing else he ever made, he wrote his name beside his father's.