LANFRANCO, GIOVANNI. — Painter, born in Parma on 26 January 1582, died in Rome on 30 November 1647. He was a pupil of Agostino Carracci, but later came under the influence of his brother Annibale, with whom he worked in Rome in his youth. After a brief stay in Bologna, which brought him numerous commissions in the religious sphere, including commissions for the churches of Parma and Piacenza, L. returned around 1612 to Rome, where he worked intensively until 1631, executing, among other works, the altarpiece for the high altar of S. Giuseppe a Capo le Case, the frescoes in the Bongiovanni Chapel in S. Agostino (1616), the friezes in the Sala Paolina at the Quirinal, the decoration of the dome of S. Andrea della Valle, the scenes of the Passion in the Sacchetti Chapel in S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, and the frescoes in the Chapel of the Crucifix in the basilica of S. Pietro.
Having moved to Naples around 1633, he left a notable imprint there through the frescoes in the charterhouse of S. Martino and in the church of the same name, as well as those on the dome of the Tesoro di S. Gennaro in the Duomo, begun by Domenichino. Returning to Rome in 1646, he completed his final decoration with the Gloria del Paradiso in the apse of S. Carlo ai Catinari (1647). L. deserves to be called the greatest Baroque exponent of the Carracci school, since more than any other Emilian painter he succeeded in adapting Correggio’s manner to the climate of seventeenth-century Rome, exploiting space, especially in his fresco works, for striking and theatrical effects of colour and chiaroscuro, not without a somewhat superficial perspectival dynamism, rarely prompted by genuine lyrical impulses. Despite his predominant figurative technicalism, the Parmesan master occasionally reveals, in his easel paintings, the ability to assimilate the spirit of Correggio with free fluency, as can be seen in the lower part of the canvas Il Paradiso (Pinacoteca di Parma) and in the Angeli musicanti in the church of the Cappuccini in Rome, fragments of a burned altarpiece. — Vedi tav. LIV.