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 |