Bartolomeo Cavarozzi

The paucity of documentary information on Bartolomeo Cavarozzi’s life is more than made up for by the biographies of him penned by Giulio Mancini and Giovanni Baglione¹, whose work enables us to reconstruct his career with a fair degree of accuracy.

Bartolomeo’s baptism certificate informs us that he was born in Viterbo on 15 February 1587²; Mancini tells us that he moved to Rome while still a young lad in order to enter the workshop of the painter Tarquinio Ligustri, a fellow citizen of Viterbo. This event probably took place c. 1600, while Baglione, who fails to mention Cavarozzi’s early apprenticeship, informs us that he took his first steps as a painter in the household of an aristocratic Roman family named Crescenzi (to the point where he even took their family name, becoming a kind of adopted son), working side by side with Giovanni Battista Crescenzi and in his Academy, which met in Rome’s “palazzo alla Rotonda”, in other words the Pantheon. It still is not clear exactly what kind of lessons were imparted in this “artistic circle”, in which Pietro Paolo Bonzi, known as “the Carraccis’ hunchback”, also trained. Baglione, however, tells us that Bartolomeo «dwelt in the home of Messrs. Crecenzij to learn to paint, and to draw correctly […]». His lessons in painting in the Crescenzi household certainly had much to do with the family painter, Cristoforo Roncalli, to the point where it seems perfectly plausible to suggest that it was Roncalli himself, who is recorded as having an association with Ligustri, who introduced Cavarozzi into the Crescenzi household. Interestingly, we can see evidence of Cavarozzi’s youthful subscription to Roncalli’s style in his first surviving painting, St. Ursula and Her Companions, Pope Cyriacus and St. Catherine of Alexandria, now in the basilica of San Marco in Rome but formerly in the church of Sant’Orsola a Ripetta, commissioned by a citizen of Perugia named Aurelio Lupatelli in 1608³, in which Baglione himself underscores Roncalli’s considerable stylistic influence. And a now lost St. Charles Praying in the basilica of Sant’Andrea della Valle, painted for a chapel under Crescenzi patronage in or shortly after 1610, the year in which St. Charles Borromeo was canonised, is also likely to have betrayed the same stylistic influence.

Equally shrouded in mystery are Giovanni Battista Crescenzi’s role in his own Academy and his activity as an independent artist. Despite scholars’ best efforts and an extensive discussion of the issue in Baglione (the longest such discussion in his Lives), the only two surviving works that can be attributed to the Marquis with any certainty (an altarpiece and a still-life⁴) appear to paint a picture of an amateur closely bound to the manner of Pomarancio and, at the same time, of a patron of the arts who «was pleased that, in his household, virtue should always be exercised, and he constantly had divers young men, who had an inclination to paint, study there» in such a way as to foster a culturally fertile environment where «he enjoyed having them paint from life, and he went to seek out fine and curious objects in Rome, finding vases of fruit and animals and other strange things, and he gave them to the young men that they might draw them». This passage in Baglione appears to bear out the hypothesis that Cavarozzi painted still-lifes and that he is one and the same person as the Master of the Acquavella Still-Life, a suggestion first put forward by Gianni Papi⁵, who fleshes out his stylistic considerations with a passage in Mancini’s Life in which the writer describes Cavarozzi as «universal in all things and in every manner of work».

Baglione adds that Cavarozzi «then changed his taste and began to portray from life with great diligence, and with finishing touches applied with immense love». This phrase describes the change of style with which Cavarozzi appears to have marked his distance once and for all from Roncalli’s art and, after a transition period⁶, to have ended up developing a mature and personal assimilation of Caravaggio’s artistic vocabulary. It was probably though Crescenzi’s good graces that Cavarozzi forged ties with such patrons as the Mattei, possibly also the Altemps, and Cosimo II, producing such masterpieces as St. Jerome in his Study in Palazzo Pitti, painted precisely for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, where he reveals his personal response to Ribera’s teachings⁷, or the various versions of Aminta’s Lament, or St. John the Baptist in Toledo Cathedral and the Sacrifice of Isaac formerly in the Piasecka Johnson Collection in Lawrenceville – the latter paintings all significantly held, at one time or another in the not so distant past, to be by the hand of Caravaggio.

The bond between Crescenzi and Cavarozzi was confirmed once again when the Marquis moved to Madrid in 1617 to oversee the construction of the Pantéon de los Reyes in the Escorial, and took the painter with him. The two men joined the expedition organised by Cardinal Antonio Zapata y Cisneros to translate the mortal remains of Francesco Borgia to Spain with a view to his canonisation. The expedition made an initial halt in Genoa from May to August 1617, a halt that was to have a major impact on Cavarozzi’s career⁸. This was the same journey that also brought to Spain a Flemish painter named Gérard Seghers, whose style was to be deeply marked by the influence of Cavarozzi⁹.

According to Baglione, Cavarozzi «did many things» in Spain, while Mancini tells us that, «on being taken by the most illustrious Signor Giovan Battista Crescentij to the court of Spain, he gathered there with profit and honour the fruits of the many labours endured». Thus Cavarozzi painted numerous works during his time in Spain, two such being his extremely fine Holy Family with St. Catherine of Alexandria in the Prado, and The Holy Family (of which there are seemingly endless copies in the Iberian peninsula), a picture that unquestionably played an important role in the development of the young Velázquez’s naturalism¹⁰.

Crescenzi returned briefly to Italy in the spring of 1619 before settling in Spain for good. Cavarozzi may plausibly have accompanied the Marquis, even though his presence in Rome is documented only from mid-1621. This gap in the records, at any rate, has spawned a number of alternative hypotheses not borne out by any certainties: the painter may have stayed in Spain, or he may have travelled to Naples, or indeed he may have broken his journey in Genoa again¹¹. What does seem certain is that as of 1621, Cavarozzi could no longer count on Crescenzi’s protection (possibly on account of a rift between the two? It is difficult to say…¹²), and it seems likely that one of the consequences of this estrangement was a drop in the prestige of the commissions he took on, yet in which, despite everything, he maintained his customary quality (as Baglione stresses, «pursuing that manner of his, finished with an exact emulation of nature and painted with excellent style»). After his return from Spain, he painted a Madonna and Child for the church of Sant’Anna dei Funari, which Baglione mentions and which Voss may have identified in a picture formerly in the Museum of Upper Silesia in Gliwice, Poland¹³. But aside from this single commission in Rome, all the others appear to have been concentrated in and around Viterbo, possibly revealing a renewal of ties with his birthplace forced on him by a growing dearth of opportunities for work in Rome and by a changing artistic environment in which a painter such as Cavarozzi who, according to Baglione, was «shy and retiring», would have been at pains to find a place.

Bartolomeo died in Rome on 21 September 1625 and was buried in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo¹⁴. His premature death is described by Baglione with what appears to be sincere and heartfelt compassion, an emotion shared also by Mancini, who bemoans the fact that, had he lived, Cavarozzi could have «made enormous progress in the profession».