Born in Milan. Self-taught, very studious, he was a good draftsman, skilled above all in grasping, as Camillo Boito notes in «Painting and Sculpture», «the pathetic face of the ridiculous and the funny face of the pretentious». For twenty years, director of the Venice School of Art, where he taught figure and industrial decorative composition, he devoted himself with care and love to his didactic task, paying little attention to the exhibitions, in which however his works were always appreciated. We mention: Vice and virtue; The indiscreet scenes; A villain in bad hands; In the sacristy; The acrobat at the bed of his dying wife; The holy murmuring and preparations for a masked ball, the latter two presented at the Exhibition held in Parma in 1870; Fiori di rupe and Pax, exhibited in Venice in 1887; An episode from the Venice carnival; The wife of the astray. He practiced art criticism with brio for Italian and French newspapers.