Bernardo Strozzi
A canvas and fresco artist, his wide subject range included history, allegorical, genre and portrait paintings as well as still lifes.
Bernardo Strozzi initially trained in the workshop of Cesare Corte, a minor Genoese painter whose work reflected the late Mannerist style of Luca Cambiaso.
Sorri is credited with leading Strozzi away from the artificial elegance of Cambiaso's late Mannerist style towards a greater naturalism.
The work is now almost entirely destroyed and is only known through a preparatory oil bozzetto for the vault depicting ‘’The Vision of Saint Dominic (Paradise)’’, located at the Museo dell’Accademia Ligustica in Genoa.
The conflict came to a head in 1630 when Strozzi refused to go back to the monastery following his mother's death and his sister's marriage.
Other patrons included the Catholic Cardinal and Patriarch of Venice Federico Baldissera Bartolomeo Cornaro and some members of the prominent Grimani family, as well as prominent Venetian artists such as the musicians Claudio Monteverdi and Barbara Strozzi and the poet Giulio Strozzi (it is unclear whether the two families were closely related).
The Mannerism is expressed in the works of this early period in the elongated and curved figures, the tapering fingers, the inclined heads and the abstract patterns of draperies.
Strozzi's Calling of St Matthew (c. 1620, Worcester Art Museum)[11] is particularly close to Caravaggio in style and treatment of this subject, while still retaining certain Mannerist characteristics.
In his composition St. Lawrence Distributing the Riches of the Church (c. 1625, Saint Louis Art Museum) the artist achieved a clear and lucid treatment of space and an accurate definition of form by the use of light and shade.
[1] By the end of the 1620s, Strozzi had started to synthesize a personal style which fused painterly influences of the North (including Rubens and Veronese) with a monumental, realistic starkness.
[12] His style continued at the same time to reveal the strong influence of Rubens as is shown in Allegorical figure (Minerva?)
His latest works are luminous and sketchy, as can be seen in the David with the Head of Goliath (after 1640, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) and the Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well (after 1630, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden).
His Lute Player (after 1640; Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna) exudes a poetic mood likely derived from his study of the work of Giorgione.
[1] Strozzi was a sought after portrait painter who portrayed the leading aristocratic, clerical and artistic figures of his time.
In the late 1630s he was invited to participate in the creation of a series of portraits of distinguished members of the prominent Genoese Raggi family.
Other artists invited to participate in this project included Antony van Dyck, Jan Roos, Luciano Borzone and Gioacchino Assereto.
[1] Bernardo Strozzi's career as a still-life painter is still not very well understood and there remains confusion over his artistic development in this genre.
His relationship with still-life painters from Lucca such as Simone del Tintore and Paolo Paolini whom he is likely to have met during his supposed trip to Rome in 1625 is not yet fully understood.
The composition invokes Caravaggio's Still life of fruits and flowers in a basket (Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan) in the gentle light entering the scene from the left and the cream background.
