He has been confused for a long time with Cesare Calene of Lecce, due to his Latinised signature “Caesar Calensis” which he usually used. Cesare Calise was actually a painter from Forio of Ischia, where the Calise nickname is widely diffused.
Some envelopes from the Banco dell’Annunziata provehis presence in Naples in 1590 and there is a proof of Cesare Calise during those years in the archive of the San Vito parish in Forio. In 1601, he signed the Vision of Saint John’s the Evangelist in the sacristy of the Church of Saint Mary of Loreto in Forio, for which he painted in 1607 a Saint Nicholas of Tolentino. In 1611, in Naples, he painted two works for a client from Lipari, and he received 50 ducats. In 1620, although he was enrolled in the list of San Vito parish, he was the owner of a workshop in Naples, from which a painting of Saint Charles Borromeo came out with the portrait of the client and his son. Still in Naples in 1626, the Government of Annunziata paid him for two frescoes. In the thirties of the XVII century, he signed the Virgin Mary of the Church of Saint Rocco in Barano, the Saint Augustin Saint Chiara and Saint Nicholas of Tolentino in the Church of Rescue (Chiesa del Soccorso) and Saint Hyacinth in the church of Saint Charles in Forio, where there is also Saint Francis of Assisi, signed in Italian. In 1636, he pained Saint Januarius and Saint Cecile in San Vito. A stylistic examination of the Virgin of Salvation in the Church of the Holy Spirit in Ischia Ponte, probably an ex voto for an escaped shipwreck offshore from Ponza, claims the attribution of the work to Calise as well as the Saint Anthony of Padua in the Neapolitan Church of San Carlo al Corso from 1615. After that date, there have not been other references traced to him and he does not even appear in the parish list of 1641, which lets imagine that he died between 1636 and 1641, around the age of seventy, given that he was born between 1560/70.
