Francisco Camilo was a Spanish

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

 painter

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

. Camilo was the son of an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 who had settled at Madrid

Madrid

Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

. When his father died, his mother remarried, and Camilo became the stepson of the painter Pedro de las Cuevas

Pedro de las Cuevas

Pedro de las Cuevas, a Spanish painter, was born at Madrid in 1568. According to Palomino, he painted several pictures for private collections,for which he was more employed than for public edifices. He gained, however, more celebrity by his academy than by his own works...

.

De las Cuevas brought Camilo up as his own son, teaching him painting. At the age of 18, Camilo was asked to paint, for the high altar of the Jesuits’ house at Madrid, a picture representing St. Francis Borgia (which was afterwards removed to make way for an altarpiece in plastic).

The Count-Duke of Olivares ordered Camilo to do a series of paintings of Kings of Spain for the theater of Buenretiro, and also chose Camilo to adorn the western gallery of that palace with 14 frescoes from Ovid's

Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...

 Metamorphoses. Primarily a painter of religious works, Camilo did paintings for the monasteries of Madrid, Toledo

Toledo, Spain

Toledo's Alcázar became renowned in the 19th and 20th centuries as a military academy. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 its garrison was famously besieged by Republican forces.-Economy:...

, Alcalá

Alcalá de Henares

Alcalá de Henares , meaning Citadel on the river Henares, is a Spanish city, whose historical centre is one of UNESCO's World Heritage Sites, and one of the first bishoprics founded in Spain...

, and Segovia

Segovia

Segovia is a city in Spain, the capital of Segovia Province in the autonomous community of Castile and León. It is situated north of Madrid, 30 minutes by high speed train. The municipality counts some 55,500 inhabitants.-Etymology:...

. He painted and draped some of the statuary of Manuel Pereyra.