The Contrasts of Life and Shade

Giulio Campi - The Chess Players - 1530s - Oil on canvas, 90 x 127 cm - Museo Civico, Turin (click photo for larger image)The Campi were a family of 16th century Italian painters in Cremona. In the north of Italy, where they had the splendid example of the Venetians and some knowledge of Flemish and German art, the contrasts of light and shade could express the Mannerist feeling perfectly, as in the work of the Campi at Cremona. Giulio Campi (ca. 1508-1572) worked chiefly in Cremona. His first altarpieces reveal ideas from Brescia and the Emilia. He collaborated with Camillo Boccaccino, and was later influenced by Giulio Romano and Pordenone. In northern Italy, during the sixteenth century, chess and sometimes cards were accepted as appropriate courtly pastimes, and were often shown as allegories of love, with amorous and aristocratic players. Giulio Campi's “Chess Players”, with its subtle play of gesture and expression, is an example of Lombard genre paintings.