Cesare Pronti

Cesare Pronti (November 30, 1626 – October 22, 1708) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, active mainly near Ravenna.

Biography

He was born at Cattolica, near Rimini, and was brought up at Bologna, training in that city under Guercino. He then helped complete the quadrature for the Villa Albizzi in Bologna, working with Carlo Cignani.^[1] He then moved to Ravenna, where Pronti helped decorate with a mix of quadratura and allegorical figures representing four Continents in the Rasponi family's palace, Palazzo di San Giacomo, near Russi. He also helped decorate, with oculi with flying putti, the former church of San Romualdo, now a museum in Classe (in the Biblioteca Classense),^[2] and formerly a Camaldolese Abbey. In Ravenna, he was commonly called Padre Cesare da Ravenna. He became an Augustinian monk as a young man, and was afterwards principally engaged in painting altarpieces for the churches of his fraternity, of which one of the best is an altarpiece depicting St Thomas of Villanova for Sant'Agostino, Pesaro. He died at Ravenna.

References

• Hobbes, James R. (1849). Picture collector's manual adapted to the professional man, and the amateur. T&W Boone, 29 Bond Street; Digitized by Googlebooks. p. 110. 
• Bryan, Michael (1889). Walter Armstrong & Robert Edmund Graves, ed. Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Biographical and Critical (Volume II L-Z). York St. #4, Covent Garden, London; Original from Fogg Library, Digitized May 18, 2007: George Bell and Sons. p. 325.