Guido Cagnacci

According to Giovan Battista Costa (the artist's eighteenth-century biographer), Cagnacci "had been given such marvelous talent from nature to become a painter that he began to practice this noble art all by himself and one could say almost without master.

Although the identity of his master during this early period remains uncertain, Ludovico Carracci and Guido Reni are popularly cited as the young artist's Bolognese teachers.

But moving to Venice under the name of Guido or Guidobaldo Canlassi da Bologna, he renewed a friendship with Nicolas Regnier, and dedicated himself to private salon paintings.

[5] Although harshly criticized by the Venetian painters Pietro Liberi and Marco Boschini, his work found favor with collectors and gained great popularity through reproductive prints.

Art historian Luisa Vertova says the inconsistent quality of Cagnacci's work is bewildering: "his compositions amount to little more than empirical juxtapositions in uncertain spaces, his backdrops ... are rickety cardboard stage-flats", and "puffy ears and uncouth hands are attached to torsos modelled with great sensibility to skin-surface, but his inventive capacity is rudimentary.

"[5] Gloria Fossi says his painting is "warm with the heightened tones of grazing light, rich in the play of shadows and colors.