The Four Seasons

Having trained under Alessandro Varotari and spent some time in Bergamo, in 1638 Carpioni settled in Vicenza where he was to produce most of his work. At this time Francesco Maffei was the pre-eminent painter in Vicenza and Carpioni was deeply influenced by the painterly freedom and mannered elegance of his work. Although perhaps most admired for his small-scale bacchanals, Carpioni was very active as a painter of large-scale decorative series, amongst which is the unusually long frieze of putti, allegories and sibyls painted for the Palazzo Negri, Vicenza, in circa 1665, and eleven canvases showing the Triumph of Saint Nicolas and the Virtues executed in 1671 for the ceiling of the orartory of San Nicola, Vicenza. Pilo (loc. cit.) proposes an earlier dating of circa 1650 for the present series, comparing them to the vanitas allegory in the Museo Civico, Vicenza, which shares the same attention to still-life detail.