Sadeler and Procaccini: The Secular Decoration of Castello Visconti di San Vito in Somma Lombardo

Abstract

The paper investigates the pictorial decoration of Castello Visconti di San Vito in Somma Lombardo, one of the finest examples of Lombard aristocratic villa of the first half of the seventeenth century. Built on a pre-existent medieval structure, the castle was richly decorated by a secular iconographic program that, drawn from Flemish sources, was executed in the period 1604–1609 by an equipe of painters gravitating towards the bottega Procaccini: the most important Milanese workshop of the time. The study, for the first time, retraces the genesis of this commission as well as the execution of the decorative program. Specifically, it individuates the complex series of iconographic sources used by Carlo Antonio Procaccini and his assistants, highlighting a coexistence of both Emilian and Flemish artistic references that is unprecedented in Lombard early Baroque art.