MORAZZONE, PIER FRANCESCO MAZZUCCHELLI, known as Il Morazzone. — Born in Morazzone, near Varese, in 1573 according to an anonymous 18th-century catalogue, not confirmed, died in Piacenza in 1626. He was regarded by Marino, in the Adone, along with the Serrano and the Boccaccini, as one of the greatest Milanese painters.
He worked in Rome; but of his Roman works only the frescoes in the church of S. Silvestro remain, marked by a sweet beauty and chromatic suggestiveness and an exact naturalism, which, besides echoes of the Sienese Baroque milieu, retain traces of a previous Lombard education. He is said to have studied Tintoretto in Venice; from 1602 to 1605 he stayed in Varallo, engaged in the frescoes of the