Vincenzo Campi

Vincenzo Campi (Italian pronunciation: [kam'pi]; c.1530/5–1591) was a 16th-century Italian painter working in Cremona during the Late Renaissance. Campi is best known as one of the first northern Italian artists to work in the Flemish style of realist genre painting.

Campi was born into a family of prominent artists. He was the son of Italian Renaissance painter Galeazzo Campi, and younger brother of painters Giulio and Antonio. Vincenzo and Antonio are thought to have trained in the workshop of their older brother Giulio, a prominent painter and architect working in Cremona. Few records exist of Vincenzo's early years, with the first record of the artist’s work being a portrait (now lost) of Archduke Ernest and his brother Rudolf of Austria painted during their stay in Cremona during 1563.

While his brothers Giulio and Antonio worked closely within the Cremonese Mannerist style, Vincenzo was celebrated for his naturalism and ‘descriptive mode of painting’ as described by Filippo Baldinucci in his Notizie as, ‘(a) good naturalist, keeping always to the imitation of the real.’ Vincenzo's development in style is thought to have been motivated by both the death of his brother Giulio in 1573, and the influence of an important commission received in that same year. Vincenzo was commissioned to fresco the spandrels of the Cremona Cathedral left unfinished by painter Il Pordenone some fifty years previously. It is suggested that it was through the loss of the stylistic guidance of his brother, and the influence of Pordenone’s raw and expressive frescos, that Vincenzo began to merge the styles of Cremonese Mannerism and Lombard naturalism in his painting.

Although it is not what he is best known for, Vincenzo and his brothers were most active as painters of religious subjects. Pordenone’s influence can be clearly seen in Vincenzo’s 1575 altarpiece, Christ Before the Crucifixion that shows the artist’s developing Lombard naturalism. The crucifixion is unconventionally depicted with Christ standing awkwardly over the cross while his arm is pulled to the ground by the hand of the executioner poised between his legs. The peculiar pose was appropriated from an early drawing by Il Pordenone depicting the Passion of Christ.

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