Cesare Pronti

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Cesare Pronti (1626-1708) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, active mainly near Ravenna.

He was born at Cattolica, near Rimini, and was brought up at Bologna, training in that city under Guercino. He then helped complete the quadratura 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 a monk of the order of St. Augustine 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 a picture of St. Tommaso da Villanova, at the Augustines at Pesaro. He died at Ravenna.

[edit] 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, page 110. 
• Bryan, Michael (1889). in Walter Armstrong & Robert Edmund Graves: 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, page 325.