Self-Portrait as Abbot of the Accademia della Val di Blenio

Milan in 1568 was a Spanish-ruled city being tightened up by its archbishop, Carlo Borromeo, who was reordering its religious life on strict lines. That year the painter Giovan Paolo Lomazzo was elected abbot, nabàd in dialect, of an academy whose members met dressed as porters and talked like them. The porters were real enough. Men came down from the Ticino valleys to do the carrying work of Milan, and those from the Val di Blenio were numerous enough to be a recognisable trade in the city. In 1560 a group of artists borrowed their name for a company of their own, with Bacchus as its patron and its verse written in an invented version of the porters' speech. The members were not marginal men. The sculptor Annibale Fontana belonged to it, so did the painter Aurelio Luini and Giuseppe Caimo, organist of the cathedral. This canvas is their abbot in office, lettered along the bottom with the name the academy had given him, Zavargna. Their verses were printed in 1589 as Rabisch, the Milanese word for the twisting grotesque ornament painters ran along the edges of things.