CAVEDONE, Giacomo
Italian painter and draughtsman. He is best known for his monumental altarpieces but he also executed numerous frescoes and narrative easel paintings. Except for his late Self-Portrait (early 1630s; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), all of the 92 extant paintings and frescoes are religious.
In 1591 his father Pellegrino, a minor decorative painter from Sassuolo, obtained from the local authorities a three-year stipend that enabled Giacomo to study painting in Bologna with Bernardino Baldi and Annibale Carracci. In 1595 Annibale moved to Rome, but Cavedone remained in Bologna and by the late 1590s had become one of Lodovico Carracci’s principal assistants, participating in such projects as the decoration of the cloister of San Michele in Bosco outside Bologna, where he frescoed the Death of St Benedict (1604-05). Cavedone inherited the title of Caposindaco of the Accademia degli Incamminati from Lodovico Carracci on the latter’s death in 1619. In the autumn of 1609, he sojourned in Rome for a year to work under Guido Reni, and is known to have worked in Venice from 1612-1613. His masterpiece is the large altar painting Virgin and Child in Glory with San Petronio and Saint Alò (1614, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna).
His career as a painter was cut short by a set of misfortunes; these included a 1623 fall from a church scaffold and, in 1630, the death of his wife and children from the plague. He lived until 1660, and died in poverty.
