Born in Pavia on 10 April 1837 and died in Milan on 10 June 1878. From 1848 to 1852 he attended the civic school of painting in Pavia directed by Giacomo Trécourt. Here he has Federico Faruffini as a fellow student and has the opportunity to meet one of the greatest Lombard painters of the nineteenth century, Giovanni Carnovali known as the Piccio, a close friend of Trécourt. For a year (1848-1849) he also followed the school of drawing, nude and engraving directed by Cesare Ferreri. In 1852 he moved to Venice, where in the same year he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. In the lagoon city he was able to study Venetian painting, especially of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and of the late Titian. He gets numerous academic awards and a three-year stipend from the Austrian government. In 1859, to avoid the Austrian military conscription, he went to the Savoy state, in Gropello Cairoli. In the same year he moved to liberated Milan, where he exhibited the painting A falconer in the sixteenth century at the annual exhibition of the Brera Academy (Milan, Galleria d’Arte Moderna). He enrolled in the painting school of the same Academy, directed by Giuseppe Bertini. Here he continued his study of the ancients, practiced portraiture and, following the example of Hayez, a teacher of painting in Brera together with Bertini, tackled issues of medieval history. His most typical historical-romantic paintings date from this period (1859-1863), such as A visit to the tomb of Romeo and Juliet of 1862 (Milan, Galleria d’Arte Moderna) and Marco Polo at the court of the Great Khan (1863, Rome , National Gallery of Modern Art). The second version of the Falconiere dates from the same year (Milan, Galleria d’Arte Moderna). While completing his academic internship, he began his collaboration as an illustrator of humor magazines; later he will also make drawings for lithographs, fashion sketches and newspaper headings, miniatures on ivory and some title pages for the Ricordi editions. From 1863 he began to frequent the group of “disheveled” artists, writers and musicians, including the painter Daniele Ranzoni, the sculptor Giuseppe Grandi and the musician Arrigo Boito. Among the works of this period are the Tradita (1866, private collection), Idillio, exhibited in Brera in the same year (a second version is from 1868), a small group of portraits (Carlo and Guido Pisani Dossi, 1867, private collection ; Nicola Massa, 1867, Pavia, Civic Museums; Luigi Perelli, 1867, Milan, Gallery of Modern Art; Emilio Marozzi, 1869, private collection). With The Kiss or The Two Cousins, from 1870 (Rome, National Gallery of Modern Art) - admired the following year in Turin and in Vienna in 1873 - he arrives in the way that will distinguish his mature works characterized by a '' twilight luminous tone and a shaded and pasty painting that gives the painting the freshness of a sketch. Followed by the Son of Love (1873), Amorous Silence (1873, Rome, National Gallery of Modern Art) and Attraction (1874, Milan, Gallery of Modern Art), both in seventeenth-century costume, Amor materno (1875 , Milan, Galleria d’Arte Moderna), Melodia e In Ascolto (1874, private collection), Giovinetta sick (1877, Rome, National Gallery of Modern Art), Smile (1878), up to his last known painting and the most famous, L’edera (1878, Turin, Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art). Of these same years are also the most beautiful and intense portraits, such as those of Luigi Luvoni (1872), of Maria Marozzi (1873), of Dario Papa (1874), of Mrs. Deschamps (1875) and of Mrs. Curti (1878), all five in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan, by Benedetto Junck (1874, Turin, Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art), the Sick Girl (about 1877, Rome, National Gallery of Modern Art), by Vittorio Grubicy (1877, private collection) and Cletto Arrighi. During the seventies his production of watercolors intensified, a technique with which he could freely express his luminous research until the shape was left uncertain, as in High Life (1877) and Tenderness by Ada, both in the Art Gallery Moderna in Milan, or I cousinetti (Rome, National Gallery of Modern Art). In 1874 he obtained the appointment as honorary member of the Brera Academy and, shortly before his untimely death, that of director of the Pavia School of Painting. Commemorative exhibitions are dedicated to him in the foyer of the Teatro alla Scala (1878) and in the Venice Biennale (1912).