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Car;p Saraceni was an Italian early-Baroque painter. Though he was born and died in Venice, in style his paintings are more Roman, a city to which he moved to in 1598, and where he lived for the majority of his mature career, joining the Accademia di San Luca in 1607. He never visited France, though he spoke fluent French and had French followers and a French wardrobe. His painting, however, was influenced at first by the densely forested landscape settings for human figures of the German painter (resident in Rome) Adam Elsheimer’s small cabinet paintings on copper, a format Saraceni employed in six landscape panels illustrating The Flight of Icarus; in Moses & daughters of Jethro and Mars and Venus.

When Caravaggio’s notorious Death of the Virgin was rejected in 1606 as an altarpiece suitable for a chapel of Santa Maria della Scala, it was Saraceni who provided the acceptable substitute, which remains in situ. He was influenced by Caravaggio’s dramatic lighting, monumental figures, naturalistic detail, and momentary action (illustration, right), so that he is numbered among the first of the “tenebrists” or “Caravaggisti”. Examples of this style can be seen in the candlelit Judith and the Head of Holofernes.

Saraceni’s matured rapidly between 1606 and 1610, and the next decade gave way to his fully mature works. In 1616-17 he collaborated on the frescoes for the Sala Regia of the Palazzo del Quirinale. In 1618 he received payment for two paintings in the church of Santa Maria dell’Anima. The compositional details of his fresco of The Birth of the Virgin in the Chapel of the Annunciation of the church of Santa Maria in Aquiro are repeated in a panel on copper at the Louvre.

In 1620 he returned to Venice, where he died in the same year. He is said to have been influential for a still life painter in Rome known as Pensionante del Saraceni. Still wondering about an Italian painting in your family collection? Contact us…it could be by Carlo Saraceni.