Carlo Carlone

Who was Carlo Carlone?

Carlo Innocenzo Carlone was an Italian painter and engraver, active especially in Germany.

He was a native of Scaria, near Como, in Lombardy, but may have been from the Carloni family of Genoese painters. He was the son of a sculptor, but he preferred painting, and was placed under the care of Giulio Quaglio. He afterwards studied at Venice and at Rome, until he was 23 years of age, when he visited Germany, where he has left works in oil and in fresco at Ludwigsburg, Passau, Linz, Breslau, Prague, and Vienna.

He painted large decorative fresco cycles for palaces in Vienna, Prague and Southern Germany. For example, Carlone is known for painting the ceiling images in the Upper Belvedere of the Belvedere palace complex. His The Glorification of Saints Felix and Adauctus was commissioned for the cupola of the church of San Felice del Benaco on Lake Garda. He died at Como.

As an engraver he has left us the following plates, mostly from his own compositions :

Conception of the Virgin.

The Holy Family, with St. John kissing the Foot of Jesus.

St. Charles Borromeo communicating the Plague-stricken.

The Death of a Saint.

An allegorical subject of Opulence, for a ceiling.