Belisario Corenzio

Background

Belisario Corenzio was a Greek by birth.

Education

Belisario Corenzio studied at Venice under Tintoretto, and then settled at Naples, where he became famous for unscrupulous conduct as a man and rapid execution as an artist.

Career

Though careless in composition and a mannerist in style, Belisario Corenzio possessed an acknowledged fertility of invention and readiness of hand; and these qualities, allied to a certain breadth of conception, seem in the eyes of his contemporaries to have atoned for many defects.

When Guido Reni came in 1621 to Naples to paint in the chapel of St Januarius, Corenzio suborned an assassin to take his life.

Corenzio vainly endeavoured to fill Guido's place in the chapel of St Januarius.

His work was adjudged to have been under the mark, and yet the numerous frescoes which he left in Neapolitan churches and palaces, and the large wall paintings which still cover the cupola of the church of Monte Casino are evidence of uncommon facility, and show that Corenzio was not greatly inferior to the fa prestos of his time.

Corenzio died, it is said, at the age of eighty- five by a fall from a scaffolding.

Achievements

• Corenzio's florid style, indeed, seems well in keeping with the overladen architecture and fullblown decorative ornament peculiar to the Jesuit builders of the 17th century.