Giulio Benso

1592 – 1668

Italian painter and draughtsman. Around 1605 he came to Genoa, where he presented himself to a leading patron of the arts, Gian Carlo Doria, who gave him lodging and recommended him to Giovanni Battista Paggi (1554-1627), in whose influential studio he trained. Students were required first to copy sketches, then paintings and reliefs and, finally, to draw from nature. Benso made many copies after a variety of source material, among them the Sacrifice of Abraham (Florence, Uffizi) after Luca Cambiaso and the Joseph Sold into Slavery (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett) after Raphael. While still with Paggi, Benso produced 'bizarre sketches of great number and variety, as he had a fertile mind along with a lively and vigorous imagination'. In order to learn perspective he constructed architectural models, which were greatly admired; they enabled him to achieve formidable feats of aerial perspective in his paintings, in which figures and ornament are boldly foreshortened. Apart from his work in Liguria, he decorated the Palazzo Grimaldi in Cagnes-sur-Mer with the Fall of Phaethon and sent works to the Abbey of Weingarten in Germany. In the 1630s, he completed his masterpiece, a fresco in the presbytery and apse of the church of the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata del Vastato. There are also paintings of his in his hometown of Pieve di Teco as well as in the parish church of Sant'Ambrogio in Alassio.

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