Bernardo Strozzi

The powerful and painterly canvases of Bernardo Strozzi, celebrated for their radiant colours and broad, vigorous brushwork, made him one of the leading painters in seventeenth-century Genoa and then Venice. Born in Genoa, Strozzi briefly studied painting with the Sienese master Pietro Sorri before entering the Capuchin monastery of San Barnaba in 1598, earning him the nickname 'Il Cappuccino'. 

Strozzi was granted permission to leave the monastery in 1610 to care for his sickly mother and unmarried sister, and during this time he continued to paint. He never returned to religious life, instead relocating to Venice in 1630 where he became known as 'Il prete Genovese' (the Genoese Priest). There, he must have headed a large workshop, as the many versions of some of his works suggest. During the first two decades of the seventeenth century, Strozzi’s painting became increasingly free, his brushwork broader. Paintings such as the famous Saint Catherine of the Wadsworth Atheneum of Hartford, painted around 1615, with the sweetly elegant female figure bathed in clear light, are exemplary of Strozzi’s early maturity. 

Although his style was initially indebted to the models of late Tuscan mannerism and painters like Pietro Sorri (his first teacher) Ventura Salimbeni and Aurelio Lomi, both active in Genoa, his mature style was highly personal, combining the models of his early years with the influence of Rubens and Procaccini, especially in terms of their vivid and bright colours, as well as drawing upon the tenebrism and naturalism of the Caravaggesque painters who visited or whose work made its way to Genoa.