Giovanni pietro bellori biography template

Italian painter (1613–1696)

Giovanni Pietro Bellori (15 January 1613 – 19 February 1696), also known as Giovan Pietro Bellori or Gian Pietro Bellori, was an Italian art theorist, painter and antiquarian, who is best known for his work Lives of the Artists, considered the seventeenth-century equivalent to Vasari's Vite. His Vite de' Pittori, Scultori et Architetti Moderni, published in 1672, was influential in consolidating and promoting the theoretical case for classical idealism in art. As an art historical biographer, he favoured classicising artists rather than Baroque artists to the extent of omitting some of the key artistic figures of 17th-century art altogether.

Biography

Bellori was born in Rome on 15 January 1613, the son of Giacomo, a farmer. He was reared and educated by his maternal uncle, Francesco Angeloni, who was an antiquarian, writer of comedies, dialogues and operas, a numismatist (Historia Augusta, 1641) and collector of art, antiquities and natural history (he had Correggio, Bassano and Titian among his paintings). Angeloni fostered in Bellori an interest in collecting and interpreting antiquities, and indeed his interest in the antique was pivotal to his whole career. On his death in 1652, Angeloni designated Bellori as his sole heir, but the will was invalidated by Angeloni's brothers, who sold off mo

INTRODUCTION

After the Death of Raphael and his Schollars (for, as for Michelangelo, he made no School), Painting seemed to be decaying, and for some years there was hardly a Master of any Repute all over Italy. The two best at Rome were Joseph Arpino and Michel Angelo da Caravaggio, but both guilty of great Mistakes in their Art: the first followed purely his Fancy, or rather Humour, which was neither founded upon Nature nor Art, but had for Ground a certain Practical, Fantastical idea which he had framed to himself. The other was a pure Naturalist, copying Nature without distinction or discretion; he understood little of Composition or Decorum, but was an admirable Colourer. But, much about the same Time, the Caraches of Bologna came to Rome, and the two Brothers painted together the famous Gallery of the Pallazzo Farnese: Hannibal, the Youngest, was much the greatest Master, though his eldest Brother Augustin was likewise admirable; They renewed Raphael’s Manner, and Hannibal particularly had an admirable Genius to make proper to himself any Manner he saw, as he did by Correggio, both as to his Colouring, Tenderness and Motions of the Figures: in a word, he was a most accomplished Painter both for Design, Invention, Composition, Colouring, and all parts of Painting, having a soveraign Genius which made him Master of a great school of the best Painters Italy has had.

   Thus did William Aglionby recount, in 1685, in Painting illustrated in three diallogues, the crisis and rebirth of Italian painting, events of nearly a hundred years earlier. If the English and a certain simplification can be ascribed entirely to Aglionby, the ideas and even the words were taken bodily from the Vite de’ pi