Valentin De Boulogne | Baroque painter

With the exception of Valentin de Boulogne's baptismal record, bearing a disputed date of either 1591 or 1594, the artist's early life is undocumented.

The son of a painter and stained glass worker, Valentin likely received his first training with his father in his native Coulommiers, near Paris.

He may subsequently have studied with an artist in Paris or in Fontainebleau.

It is not known when he departed for Italy, where he resided the remainder of his short life.

Joachim von Sandrart remarked (1675) that Valentin reached Rome before Simon Vouet (1590-1649), who arrived around 1614.

Valentin de Boulogne | The Crowning with thorns, 1620

This masterpiece of Baroque naturalism is among the first known works painted by Valentin de Boulogne, Caravaggio’s most accomplished French follower and arguably his greatest acolyte.

Painted in Rome in 1615 or shortly thereafter, it shows to what extent and how quickly the Frenchman had absorbed Caravaggio’s radical innovations.

Valentin de Boulogne | The Crowning with thorns, 1620 (detail) | Sotheby's

Sleeping Hermaphroditus / L'Ermafrodito dormiente

The ambivalence and voluptuous curves of this figure of Hermaphroditus, who lies asleep on a mattress sculpted by Bernini, are still a source of fascination today.

His body merged with that of the nymph Salmacis, whose advances he had rejected, Hermaphroditus, son of Hermes and Aphrodite, is represented as a bisexed figure.

The original that inspired this figure would have dated from the 2nd century BC, reflecting the late Hellenistic taste for the theatrical.

Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities: Hellenistic Art (3rd-1st centuries BC) Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities - Musée du Louvre.

Carlo Francesco Nuvolone | Baroque painter

Carlo Francesco Nuvolone (Milan, 1609-1662)) was an Italian painter of religious subjects and portraits who was active mainly in Lombardy.

He became the leading painter in Lombardy in the mid-17th century, producing works on canvas as well as frescoes.

Because his style was perceived as close to that of Guido Reni he was nicknamed il Guido della Lombardia (the Guido of Lombardy).

Caravaggio and the birth of Baroque

Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) "put the oscuro (shadows) into chiaroscuro".

Chiaroscuro was practised long before he came on the scene, but it was Caravaggio who made the technique a dominant stylistic element, darkening the shadows and transfixing the subject in a blinding shaft of light.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, uomo ed artista universale

Oltre ai suoi autoritratti e ad un ritratto fattogli dal Gaulli (Roma, Gall. Corsini), il Bernini è stato descritto fisicamente e moralmente da numerosi autori: basti ricordare lo Chantelou, ed il figlio Domenico, che lo disse "aspro di natura, fisso nelle operazioni, ardente nell'ira".

Egli fu l'artista più intimamente legato al cattolicesimo risorgente nella temperie postridentina, e non può esserci dubbio sulla sua convinzione religiosa; pare che negli anni successivi al 1630 la sua fede si fosse approfondita e che nell'ultimo periodo della sua vita frequentasse assiduamente gesuiti e oratoriani: era amico intimo dei padre G. P. Oliva, gesuita, per il quale disegnò il frontespizio al secondo volume delle Prediche (1664) e ebbe come consigliere spirituale anche un suo nipote, padre Marchesi, oratoriano.

Gerard ter Borch | Baroque painter

Gerard Terborch, Terborch also spelled Ter Borch or Terburg (1617-1681), Dutch Baroque painter who developed his own distinctive type of interior genre in which he depicted with grace and fidelity the atmosphere of well-to-do, middle-class life in 17th-century Holland.

Terborch’s father had been an artist and had visited Rome but from 1621 was employed as a tax collector.

Francesco Hayez / Shakespeare | The Kiss, 1859 / Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an

ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

Francesco Hayez | The Kiss, 1859 | Pinacoteca di Brera