Francesco Paglia Biography
Francesco Paglia (Brescia, 1635 – Brescia, 1714) was an Italian painter and art critic. The correct dates of birth and death of Paglia were made known by Camillo Boselli in 1964 on the basis of unpublished documents from the archive of the church of San Giovanni Evangelista, to which parish the painter belonged given that he claims to live in the Pallata district ( now Corso Garibaldi) in an estimate from 1685. He trained in Bologna in Guercino's workshop, but his first period as a pupil is difficult to reconstruct. Guercino died in 1666, so Paglia's stay in Bologna can be dated around the 1660s. Some works can already be placed in this period, including an episode of the Stories from the life of Saint Scholastica for the church of Santa Maria in Organo in Verona. The first work of Brescian production is the altarpiece for the church of Santa Maria della Carità with Saints Sebastiano, Antonio and Rocco, dated 1672 on the back. The Assumption for the aforementioned church of San Giovanni, his masterpiece and best-known work of all, can be dated to 1675. Paglia's career, however, does not remain relegated to the province of Brescia; thanks to the studies of recent years, works by the artist have emerged especially in Veneto, as in the case of the three altarpieces for the cathedral of Candiana, from the early nineties; Boschini, in a letter to Leopoldo de' Medici, remembers Paglia as active in the Venetian church of San Nicolò al Lido for an entire cycle of canvases, now lost. Furthermore, from the analysis of many pages of the "Garden of Painting", Paglia demonstrates that he directly knows many of the places he describes, including Veneto, western Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, and central Italy. Between the second half of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century, Paglia wrote and published, on several occasions and in several editions, the Garden of Painting, a great composition in combined prose and poetry. It is a ponderous guide written in a dialogic form, in which Poetry and Painting dialogue and describe the works of Brescia, the Brescia area and the rest of Italy; still today it is the most important ancient source for seventeenth-century Brescian art. He had three children, Antonio Paglia, Angelo Paglia and Eufrasia, all painters.
