Baciccio - Giovanni Battista Gaulli
1639- 1709
Giovanni Battista Gaulli, also known as Baciccio, was a painter of the Italian High Baroque verging onto that of the Rococo. He is best known for his grand, Gianlorenzo Bernini-influenced illusionistic vault fresco in the church of the Gesł in Rome.
Gaulli was born in Genoa, where his parents died from the plague of 1657. He initially apprenticed with Luciano Borzone. In mid-17th century, Baciccio's Genoa was a cosmopolitan Italian artistic. Painters such as Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck stayed in Genoa for a few years. Baciccio 's earliest influences would have come from an eclectic mix of these foreign painters and other local artists including Valerio Castello, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, and Bernardo Strozzi, whose warm palette Baciccio adopted. In the 1660s, he experimented with the cooler palette and linear style of Bolognese classicism.
He soon moved to Rome and was accepted into the Roman artists' guild, the Academy of Saint Luke. The next year, he received his first public commission for an altarpiece, in the church of San Rocco, Rome. He received many private commissions for mythological and religious works.
From 1669, after a visit to Parma, Correggio's frescoed dome-ceiling in the cathedral of Parma, Baciccio's painting took on a more painterly aspect, and the composition, organized "from below looking up", would influence his later masterpiece. At his height, Baciccio was one of Rome's most esteemed portrait painters. Baciccio is not well known for any other medium but paint, though many drawings in many media have survived. All are studies for paintings.
Baciccio died in Rome, 1709.
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