Pietro Paolini, 1603-1681 Peintre Caravagesque De L'étrange

A painter of 'great oddity and noble invention', Pietro Paolini was born in Lucca, Tuscany, where he spent most of his career. There he founded the first Academy of Painting, based on the principles of al naturale representation put into practice in his studio.

His stay in Rome in the 1620s brought Caravaggesque influences to bear on his scenes of cheats, matchmakers and fortune-tellers, in which he developed his taste for the bizarre. A keen connoisseur of music, Paolini invented iconographic motifs in a variety of versions: the lute-maker, the piva player and the lute-player. His art, tinged with neo-Venetianism, features learned and sometimes mysterious allegories and portraits of scholars and actors.

This catalogue raisonné adds to the corpus of the artist's autograph paintings through recent discoveries, while attributing many works to his studio. It sheds light on a complex art, sometimes disconcerting in its choice of subjects and pictorial technique, and reveals a talented painter, as disturbing as he was fascinating, a Caravaggio of the strange.