He was born in Venice in 1872. In 1888 he was enrolled at the Venice Academy, but his training took place above all in the studio of Cesare Laurenti, a well-known and esteemed painter with a symbolist tendency, and in the observation of the works of Ciardi, Favretto and Nono, artists from which he would have drawn multiple suggestions. His abilities are also shown in some works of a clearly symbolist character (compare, for example, La sera di Ca 'Pesaro, dated to 1899), or in the portrait (see that of Giuseppe Favaro of 1905), but his nature it was essentially that of a landscape painter well rooted in the tradition of the late nineteenth century in the Veneto region, to whose aura he would have remained faithful until the end of his life, recreating it in a vast production having the Veneto and Friuli countryside as its main subject. In 1895 he participated in the 1st Biennale with a work, Averte faciem tuam, domine, a peccatis meis, which is clearly under the sign of Nono and Laurenti, and which was marked with the prize of the president of the jury, William Michael Rossetti. He also participated in the II and III Biennials, always with works of character between the symbolist and the intimist, while in 1901 he was present at the Salon in Paris, in St. Petersburg and in Leipzig, and finally at the VIII International Exhibition in Munich, with landscape paintings in which a painting that was very attentive to atmospheric vibration was being defined. He would have tended more and more to render it, especially in small-sized paintings, through blurring and backlighting which are then recomposed, in the best possible results, through the careful arrangement of the spaces. In 1900 he moved near Treviso, where he built his own bell foundry, in 1910 he moved again, this time to Sacile, where he would stay until the defeat of Caporetto. Some landscapes of the Pordenone foothills are from these years that can be considered among his best results, such as Poffabro, from 1912, but C. would often return to the foothills and Friulian landscape also in the following years when, from 1918, he moved to Milan, where he found a favorable environment for the diffusion of his painting. In 1924 he became an honorary member of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. In the meantime he continued his exhibition activity, which saw significant stages: in 1909 again at the International Glaspalast Exhibition in Munich; in 1918 at the Brera National Fine Arts Exhibition; in 1921 at the 1st Roman Biennale; in 1926 at the 1st Friulian Biennial of Art in Udine, where he was present with nine works; in 1930 personal exhibition in Pordenone; in 1931 in Parma, among others. Cargnel died in Milan in 1931. The following year a large retrospective was held at the Milan gallery in Milan, in 1935 two of his works were present at the forty-year exhibition of the Biennale. The retrospective that was held in Pordenone, at the Sagittaria gallery, in 1968, was also decisive for a revival of interest in the painter's work, just as important were those of Sacile, at the church of S. Gregorio, in 1988, and again that of the Civic Museum of Pordenone in 1999 where, within the exhibition of the works of art of the Pia Baschiera Tallon Foundation, about twenty of his paintings were set up. Nuclei of Cargnel's works can be found at the Civic Museum of Art and the province of Pordenone.