Bartolomeo Manfredi

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Bartolomeo Manfredi

Tavern Scene with a Lute Player by Bartolomeo Manfredi

Born August 25, 1582

Died December 12, 1622 (aged 40)

Nationality Italian

Bartolomeo Manfredi (baptised 25 August 1582 – 12 December 1622) was an Italian painter, a
leading member of the Caravaggisti (followers of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio) of the early
17th century.

Contents

 1Life
 2Gallery
 3References
 4Literature
 5External links

Life[edit]
Manfredi was born in Ostiano, near Cremona. He may have been a pupil of Caravaggio in Rome: at
his famous libel trial in 1603 Caravaggio mentioned that a certain Bartolomeo, accused of
distributing scurrilous poems attacking Caravaggio's detested rival Baglione, had been a servant of
his. Certainly the Bartolomeo Manfredi known to art history was a close follower of Caravaggio's
innovatory style, with its enhanced chiaroscuro and insistence on naturalism, with a gift for story-
telling through expression and body-language.
Caravaggio in his brief career — he rocketed to fame in 1600, was exiled from Rome in 1606, and
was dead by 1610 — had a profound effect on the younger generation of artists, particularly in Rome
and Naples. And of these Caravaggisti (followers of Caravaggio), Manfredi seems in turn to have
been the most influential in transmitting the master's legacy to the next generation, particularly with
painters from France and the Netherlands who came to Italy. No documented, signed works by
Manfredi survive, and several of the forty or so works now attributed to him were formerly believed to
be by Caravaggio. The steady disentangling of Caravaggio from Manfredi has made clear that it was
Manfredi, rather than his master, who was primarily responsible for popularising low-
life genrepainting among the second generation of Caravaggisti.
Manfredi was a successful artist, able to keep his own servant before he was thirty years old, "a man
of distinguished appearance and fine behaviour" according to the biographer Giulio Mancini,
although seldom sociable. He built his career around easel paintings for private clients, and never
pursued the public commissions upon which wider reputations were built, but his works were widely
collected in the 17th century and he was considered Caravaggio's equal or even superior. His Mars
Chastising Cupid offers a tantalising hint at a lost Caravaggio: the master promised a painting on this
theme to Mancini, but another of Caravaggio's patrons, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, had
taken it, and Mancini therefore commissioned Manfredi to paint another for him, which Mancini
considered Manfredi's best work.
Manfredi died in Rome in 1622. Gerard Seghers (or Segers; 1589–1651) was one of his pupils.[1][2]