Cigoli

Initially, Cigoli trained in Florence under the fervid mannerist Alessandro Allori, and studied the works of Michelangelo, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto and Pontormo.

Other important pictures are St. Peter Healing the Lame Man in St Peter's; an unfinished Burial of St. Paul in the church of San Paolo fuori le Mura,[4] and a Story of Psyche in a fresco incorporated in the decorative scheme of the Villa Borghese; a Martyrdom of Stephen, which earned him the name of the "Florentine Correggio", and a Stigmata of St. Francis at Florence.

Shortly before his death, Cigoli was made a Knight of Malta at the request of Pope Paul V.[2][5] As stated by the prominent 17th-century painter, Andrea Sacchi, Cigoli's, St Peter Healing the Lame Man came to be recognized as the third most beautiful painting in Rome after Raphael's Transfiguration and Domenichino's The Last Communion of St Jerome.

Cigoli, a close personal friend of Galileo Galilei – and regarded by him as the greatest painter of the age – painted a last fresco in the dome of the Pauline chapel of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, depicting the Madonna standing upon a pock-marked lunar orb.

This is the first extant example of Galileo's discoveries about the physical nature of the Moon (as he himself drew it in his 1610 treatise Sidereus Nuncius) having penetrated the visual arts practice of his day.