Friday, March 22, 2019

Giovanni Battista Gaulli, called Baciccio (1639-1709) - Rome

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
Portrait of a Woman
ca. 1670-80
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
Portrait of Pope Clement X 
ca. 1670-71
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
Portrait of Cardinal Luigi Omodei
ca. 1670
oil on canvas
Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
Portrait of Gianlorenzo Bernini
ca. 1675
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

"Born in Genoa in 1639, Giovanni Battista Gaulli (sometimes called Baciccio) first trained under Luciano Borzone, but moved to Rome at an early date.  He was fortunate in having subsequently attracted the attention of Gianlorenzo Bernini, to whom credit is due for having decisively contributed to his material and artistic success.  Gaulli's earliest works were portraits.   . . .  He learned a great deal from Bernini with respect to the treatment of the human figure and the handling of drapery folds; he is also clearly very much dependent on Bernini in his manner of combining figures into animated groups.  The two artists were also innately extremely alike in their personal nature, in the liveliness and volatility of their temperament, a circumstance which makes the closeness of their relationship even more readily understandable.  Gaulli was justifiably much prized as a portraitist; no one knew as well as he how to grasp and preserve the momentary, "speaking" expression of a face – no one, that is, except Bernini himself, from whom Gaulli may have learned the secret of capturing such fidelity to life; the observation of the freely moving, rather than the statically sitting model."

– Hermann Voss, from Baroque Painting in Rome (1925), revised and translated by Thomas Pelzel (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy, 1997)

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
Portrait of a Man
ca. 1700
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
Portrait of Cardinal Marco Gallo
1681-83
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
St John the Baptist
before 1709
oil on canvas
Manchester Art Gallery

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
St John the Baptist preaching
ca. 1690
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
Blessed Abbess receiving the Host from the hands of Christ
ca. 1690-1700
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Giovanni Battista Gaulli after Peter Paul Rubens
Venus and Adonis
(study for Gaulli's painting after Rubens)
ca. 1675-85
drawing
Royal Collection. Great Britain

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
Venus and Adonis
ca. 1675-85
oil on canvas
Burghley House, Stamford, Lincolnshire

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
Death of Adonis
ca. 1680-85
drawing
British Museum

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
Death of Adonis
ca. 1680-85
oil on canvas
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
Study of Dancing Youth
ca. 1680-82
drawing
Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
Youth with Tambourine, and Two Putti
before 1709
drawing
British Museum