Simon Vouet

Born in Paris in 1590, Simon Vouet completed his training in Italy where he arrived in 1613, after spending a short time in Venice and conducting a mission to Constantinople in his capacity as official portrait artist to Ambassador Achille de Harlay, Baron de Sansy. Vouet’s lengthy stay in the Italian peninsula left a profound mark on his style and prompted him to settle in the papal capital, home to Europe’s most vibrant artistic scene at the time. He painted The Fortune Teller, one of his first Caravaggesque masterpieces (now in Palazzo Barberini), for Cassiano dal Pozzo in Rome in 1617. The influence both of Caravaggio and of those French and Flemish painters who gravitated around the workshop of Bartolomeo Manfredi, stands out very clearly in this and in his other early Roman works, which are marked by a dramatic handling of chiaroscuro, a strong emotional charge and a filtered, almost theatrical naturalism. We do not know a great deal about Vouet’s activity between 1618 and 1621, the year in which he travelled to Genoa to portray Princess Isabella Appiani (the future bride of Duke Paolo Giordano II Orsini) and embarked on what was to prove an extremely fruitful relationship with the Doria family. His output immediately after that period, however, which is far better documented, was marked by such important commissions as the series of Angels with the Instruments of the Passion painted for Monsignor Ascanio Filomarino, the Virgin Mary Granting the Rule to St. Bruno, which he despatched from Rome to Naples for the Carthusian monastery of San Martino, and the entire decoration of two chapels in the churches of San Lorenzo in Lucina and San Francesco a Ripa in Rome. “Monsù Simone” was also an extremely skilled portrait artist, capable of capturing, on both canvas and paper, not only the physical aspect of his sitters but also their temperament and status thanks to a penetrating psychological exploration of their personality.

In his final years in Rome, marked by the election to the papal throne of pro-French Pope Urban VIII Barberini (reigned 1623–44), Vouet was gratified with even more prestigious commissions – for example, the altarpiece for the “Coro Novo dei Canonici” (New Canons’ Choir) in St. Peter’s Basilica – and with important accolades on both the professional and social levels, culminating in his election to the post of Prince of the Accademia di San Luca in 1624. The artist’s authority and charisma are confirmed by Rome’s parish registers, which report, in Easter of that year, the existence of a kind of private academy in his home-cum-workshop in Via Frattina, which had been attended by Orazio Riminaldi, Jacques De Letin and Jean Lemaire, among others. In those same years, that formidable centre of creativity also witnessed the presence of other French-speaking artists of the calibre of Claude Mellan and Charles Mellin, at the same time as Claude Vignon spent a short time in Spain.

Vouet returned home in 1627, after taking part in an important diplomatic mission to Spain in the company of Cardinal Francesco Barberini and Cassiano dal Pozzo. Laden down with honours, the now experienced artist had worked, by this time, for all the most important patrons in Rome: Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani, Marcello Sacchetti and several other members of the Barberini entourage. In April 1626, he had also married Virginia Vezzi, herself a painter of some talent and the daughter of Pompeo Vezzi and Plinia Ferri of Velletri.

Vouet’s return to France marked the start of a new phase in his career, because he was appointed premier peintre du Roi by Louis XIII, a post that offered him a position of considerable importance on the art scene in his native country. He received numerous official commissions for churches and palaces in France, in which the naturalism that he had learnt in Italy was tempered by an academic approach more in tune with his new surroundings, with more staid and rhetorical compositions built with a lighter palette. In his capacity as master of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Vouet trained an entire generation of artists (including Charles Le Brun, Eustache le Sueur and Pierre Mignard), who were to develop the French Baroque style under the influence of a guiding hand characterised by solemn classicism.