"There is no painter less creative than him, but sublime" says Vittorio Sgarbi, "one of the seventeenth century who got lost in the fifteenth century".
Giovan Battista Salvi ditto The Sassoferrato was born in the Ancona Marche, in a town near Fabriano called Sassoferrato, in 1609. (The Castello district is pleasant where it is possible to admire the Rocca Albornoz and the Museum. )
He learned the rudiments of painting from his father, also a painter in Sassoferrato but then moved to Rome where he frequented the Domenichino workshop, in the Monti district, under the influence of Francesco Albani and Guido Reni, his painting was inspired by this last but also to Albrecht Dürer and Hans Burgkmair. He seems to want to launch a challenge to the Germans: to mitigate their hardness with something soft, transferring their images into a marzipan dimension, as in a fairy tale it transforms the disturbing into a beautiful dream with all the colors in the right places, an unreal world but where it would be nice to live.
(above: on the left a woodcut Hans Burgkmair the Elder, 1519, on the right Bathsheba in the Bath by Giovan Battista Salvi)
But it is above all Raphael that he feels truly attracted to and with whom he continually measures himself, especially when he chases the ideal beauty of his forms.
Raphael's ideal is continuously chased in his paintings, his activity is frenetic and generous, he wants to continue the path of his inspirers, indifferent to time and history.
Very good and intense in portraiture. (in the photo above: Portrait of Monsignor Ottaviano Prati, Barberini National Gallery in Rome
