Carlo Antonio and the bottega Procaccini

This study investigates the career of Carlo Antonio Procaccini, a member of one of the most prominent artistic families of the early Italian Seicento. Together with his brothers Camillo and Giulio Cesare, he was instrumental in establishing a famous workshop in Milan which played a fundamental role in the artistic renovation of the Borromean era. Celebrated by seventeenthcentury sources, Carlo Antonio’s career has been largely underestimated. The essay reaffirms his legacy as the most important North Italian landscape painter of the first three decades of the seventeenth century, highlighting how his art thrived in the uniqueness of the Milanese artistic environment, which was characterized by post-Tridentine reform and prosperity, Spanish patrons, and Northern European connections as well as artistic eclecticism.