CARNEVALI, GIOVANNI, known as il PICCIO. - Painter, b. at Montegrino near Luino on 29 Sept. 1806, d. at Caltaro sul Po on 10 July 1873.
One of his earliest works, Deposizione dalla Croce (1820), met with approval. His subsequent works, Morte di Abele, Sacra Famiglia, Educazione della Vergine (1826), and Agar nel deserto (1820), show him to have been almost untouched by the then prevailing neoclassical rhetoric and rather a follower of the Lombard and Emilian tradition. His varied pictorial output, and in particular his series of portraits, in which he blends sober Lombard grace with a sound constructive vigour of his own, show that “he understood colour as richness and vibration of similar tones, persisting through lights, shadows, and half-tones.”
Luisa Marzoli Fesilkenian