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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Four figures with trees before 1680 drawing Royal Collection, Windsor |
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Landscape before 1680 drawing Royal Collection, Windsor |
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Landscape with two male figures and central tree before 1658 drawing British Museum |
"An all-around talent who worked as painter, printmaker, draftsman, and architect, Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi first studied in Bologna in the circle of the Carracci. Around 1626 he went to Rome; by 1635 he was a member of the Accademia di San Luca and associated with the artists working with Pietro da Cortona. In Rome, Grimaldi regularly collaborated on public decorations with other artists, including Alessandro Algardi and Gaspard Dughet.
Although he spent most of his career in Rome, Grimaldi did work elsewhere. From 1649 to 1651, he worked with Giovanni Francesco Romanelli in Paris, both in the palace of Cardinal Mazarin (now the Bibliothèque Nationale) and in the Palais du Louvre. Between 1656 and 1659 he was probably designing the chapel of the Immaculate Conception in Tivoli Cathedral.
An accomplished fresco painter, Grimaldi painted a variety of subjects, but his decorative landscapes were most popular with leading Roman families. Organized around a clear sequence of planes leading into the distance punctuated by people and buildings, Grimaldi's landscape drawings remained based in the Carracci tradition. His many etchings and drawings spread the influence of the Bolognese landscape throughout Europe."
– curatorial notes from the Getty Museum
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Landscape with high exterior walls of a garden before 1658 drawing British Museum |
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Landscape with winding river and boats before 1680 drawing British Museum |
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Landscape with river and prow of sunken boat before 1658 drawing British Museum |
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Landscape with tree in middle foreground before 1680 drawing British Museum |
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Landscape with small temple before 1680 drawing British Museum |
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Landscape with two men before 1680 drawing Royal Collection, Windsor |
Grimaldi's landscape drawing above reveals a good deal more than the mere spirit of the Bolognese landscape tradition as established by the Carracci. It is in fact a very close copy of an earlier landscape drawing by Annibale Carracci himself (below). Placing them side by side suddenly makes Grimaldi's work look crude (note that he omits the fantasy-profiles and sketch-heads along the lower left edge of Annibale's version).
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| Annibale Carracci Landscape with two men ca. 1595-1605 drawing Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Landscape with villa behind trees by the sea before 1680 drawing British Museum |
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Landscape with rocky banks of a river before 1680 drawing British Museum |
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Landscape with crude bridge in foreground before 1680 drawing Royal Collection, Windsor |
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Landscape with porticoed villa beside a river before 1658 drawing British Museum |
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Two youths by a wall before 1658 drawing British Museum |