Carpoforo Tencalla

Carpoforo Tencalla (or Tencala) (10 September 1623 - 9 March 1685) was an influential Swiss-Italian Baroque painter of canvases and frescoes. He is little studied and has come only recently to the attention of art critics. He introduced the style of 17th-century Italian painting with its mythological subjects to Central Europe, reviving the art of fresco on large surfaces.

Tencalla was born in Bissone in southern Switzerland. He began his apprenticeship in Lombardy, probably in Milan, Bergamo and Verona, possibly under the master Isodoro Bianchi, related to his mother. Other possibilities are Giovanni Stefano Danedi (1608–1689), Giuseppe Danedi, Giovanni Battista Lampugnani (active between 1619 and 1653) and Carlo Francesco Nuvolone. His works also show influences from the Bolognese, Roman and Venetian schools.

He began in 1655 as a fresco painter under the direction of the Italian architect-engineer Filiberto Luchese in the Pálffy castle at Červený Kameň (now Slovakia). Through these paintings he was influential in introducing the Early Baroque style in Central Europe.

An early painting of his can be found in the Palazzo Terzi in Bergamo. In 1659 he received a commission from the Benedictine Lambach Abbey in Austria for a number of frescoes in the presbitary of the monastery church. In 1660-61 he decorated the palace of the Count von Abensperg and Traun in Vienna. These no longer exist.

In the period 1662-65 he returned to Italy, where he painted the altar canvas in the San Giacomo church as well as the frescos for the Palazzo Solza and Palazzo Terzi, all in Bergamo.

Between 1665 and 1667 he returned to Vienna, where he decorated the rooms of the new Leopold wing of the Hofburg palace (no longer in existence). He also became the court painter of Eleonore Gonzaga (1630–1686), widow of Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor.

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