Julio Escámez Carrasco (November 15, 1925 – December 23, 2015) was a Chilean painter, engraver and muralist. His work includes numerous frescoes, oil paintings and engravings (lithography, woodcut and etching) produced both in Chile and abroad. He also designed scenography and made costumes for various ballet works, and had an outstanding career as a book illustrator from diverse writers, including the poet Pablo Neruda, whom he met personally. Along with other renowned painters such as Gregorio de la Fuente, with whom he collaborated in his youth for the creation of the mural Historia de Concepción, he belonged to the school of muralists of Chile. Biography Studies in Chile and abroad While still a teenager, he began his painting studies at the Adolfo Berchenko Academy of Fine Arts, located in Concepción, where he was also initiated in the performing arts. In 1943 he was chosen from among the different students of the academy, along with Sergio Sotomayor, as assistant to the muralist and painter Gregorio de la Fuente for the prestigious mural Historia de Concepción (1943-1946), located in the former Central Station of Concepción, considered "treasure of the Civic Quarter", and declared a Historic Monument of Chile. Later he moved to Santiago, where he continued his art studies at the School of Fine Arts and School of Applied Arts of the University of Chile, where he had as teachers Laureano Guevara in Mural Painting, Marco Antonio Bontá in Graphic Arts, Gregorio de la Fuente himself and Israel Roa. Once back in Concepción, he worked as a professor of engraving and mural painting at the Academia Vespertina de Concepción. But Escámez, who was interested in pre-Columbian culture, decided to travel to Peru and Bolivia, a trip that lasted until 1953, when he returned to Chile and was hired as a professor of Mural Painting at the Art Institute of the University of Concepción, where he also taught easel painting, ceramics, engraving and drawing. Between 1955 and 1957 he went to study with a scholarship to the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy, the mural technique of fresco, especially the painting of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries by Giotto and Piero della Francesca. He then continued studying at the academy of fine arts in Düsseldorf, Germany, where he worked in Graphic Arts and Painting Technology, and later continued studying at the Vienna museum of art history, Austria. In addition, he also studied