Camillo Innocenti was born in Rome in 1871. His first contact with painting came through a family friend, Ludovico Seitz, who used him as a model for a fresco in the Galleria dei Candelabri in the Vatican when he was 14. Innocenti began painting academic canvases under Seitz’s tutelage. His formal artistic training amounted to less than a year at the Institute of Beaux Arts in Rome when Innocenti became disillusioned with academic teaching. His development after this time owed more to the influence of his contemporaries such as Antonio Mancini, Domenico Morelli and Ettore Tito. By the 1890s he was exhibiting in Italy and Germany, and in 1895 illustrated the first of several books for Pirandello. On his return to Rome he became a founding member of the “25 della Campagna Romana," a group of artists including Dante Ricci, Enrico Coleman, Umberto Coromaldi and Onorato Carlandi. In 1903 he exhibited three works at the Venice Biennale. In 1909 he had an entire room devoted to him at the Biennale and the 20 works he exhibited showed hazy, bourgeois interiors reminiscent of Boldini and Vuillard, and plein-air landscapes. By 1912 Innocenti was in the front line in the art movement in Rome and his involvement in the organization of the Roman Secession led him to Paris with the aim of inviting Rodin to visit the first exhibition. For the same reason he got in touch with Klimt, whose influence can be detected in the swing towards Art Nouveau in some of Innocenti's work. In 1923 Innocenti visited Egypt to organize an exhibition of his work. This led him to found Cairo Beaux Arts. The post was to keep him in Egypt for the next fifteen years. Innocenti was awarded the Légion d'Honneur and the Croce di San Maurizio e Lazzaro.

Innocenti's work is in the collections of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome; the Galleria Nazionale dell'Accademia di San Luca, also in Rome, and in the Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Palermo.