Isidoro BIANCHI
Campione 1581 - Campione 1662
Biography
Born in the Lombard town of Campione (now named Campione d’Italia), on the border with Switzerland, Isidoro Bianchi has long been regarded as a pupil or follower of his fellow Lombard painter Pier Francesco Mazzuchelli, known as Morazzone (1573-1626). Yet they were only eight years apart in age, and it is perhaps more likely that the relationship was more of a general influence and sometime collaboration on the part of the younger artist. Little is actually known of Bianchi’s artistic training. In 1605, at the age of twenty-four, he is recorded as working in Prague, but by 1614 was active in Turin, working as court painter to the Royal House of Savoy for Duke Charles Emmanuel I. He painted decorations, now lost, for the Palazzo Reale, and from 1623 worked alongside Morazzone on the decoration of the Castello di Rivoli; although Morazzone’s frescoes were destroyed later in the 17th century, some of Bianchi’s work there survives. He painted a vault fresco for a chapel in the church of San Fedele in Como, completed in 1623, and for several years in the 1630s he was engaged on the extensive decoration, in both fresco painting and stucco, of the church of Santa Maria dei Ghirli in Campione. Another Savoy commission in Turin was for the fresco decoration of several rooms in the Castello del Valentino, on which Bianchi worked in the 1630s. In 1642 Bianchi left the employ of the Savoy court and settled in his native Campione, while also working in Como, Cressogno, Monza and at the Sacro Monte at Varese. Sometime in the 1640s he painted an extensive fresco cycle in the small church of Santa Maria della Rovana in Cevio, in Canton Ticino in Switzerland. Bianchi was sometimes assisted by his sons Pompeo, an architect, Francesco, a painter, and Carlo, a sculptor.
