BACICCIA (GAULLI, GIOVAN BATTISTA), so called. – Painter, born in Genoa on 8 May 1639, he went to Rome in 1657 and remained there until his death (2 April 1709), apart from a brief stay in Modena (1669) and in Genoa; in 1674 he was elected prince of the Academy of S. Luca.
In the Roman artistic milieu, where he benefited from Bernini’s friendship and support, B. first became famous as a portraitist, executing countless portraits of popes and cardinals, from the pontificate of Alessandro VII to that of Clemente XI: in them, the courtly Van Dyckian conception is enlivened by an intense richness of colour and expressive mobility, attained through contact with Bernini’s art (portraits of Clemente IX, in the gallery of S. Luca and the Rospigliosi collection in Rome; portrait of Cardinal Leopoldo dei Medici, in the Uffizi). The painter’s complex figurative formation, acquired in Genoa under Borzone and through contact with the fertile workshop of the De Wael family, is reflected in his early Roman works (altarpiece with the Madonna, Child and Saints, in S. Rocco, 1660–65; Pietà, Incisa collection, 1667; Assumption, formerly in the Chigi property at Castelfusano, 1667), revealing, alongside Rubens’s and Van Dyck’s Flemish manner and a Correggesque style often mediated through the Lombards, the study of the monumental altarpieces of the Carracci and Reni. The intimate pictorial conflict inherent in B.’s impassioned colourism in relation to a fully achieved draftsmanship is resolved through his Roman encounter with Bernini’s sculpture, whose essential significance as colour B. understood, enabling a new solution to the problem of mass and movement: in it
yet always understood with plastic solidity, thereby
allowing the rhythmic flow of the contour to produce an effect
of musical harmony.
The four Allegories of the Virtues in the pendentives of S. Agnese
in piazza Navona (1668–71) represent the first complete
assertion of the painter’s style. They are followed by the decora-
tion of the ceiling of S. Marta (1672; the two lateral tondi
owe their execution to another hand) and by the grandiose
one in the Gesù (1672–83: comprising the frescoes of the vault,
the dome, the pendentives, the apsidal conch, and the vault
of the chapel of S. Ignazio), commissioned from B. by the
superior general of the Order, Fr. Oliva. In the fresco of the great vault, with the
Triumph of the Name of Christ, B. makes use of his own abi-
lity in foreshortening and of the magnificent substance of his colour
to realize the most daring conception of masses in move-
ment, overwhelming every architectural term in a manner
analogous to what Bernini had achieved in the Cathedra
of S. Pietro: the decorative tradition summed up by Pietro da Cortona
was thus thoroughly renewed, opening the way to subsequent
developments.
To the same period as the works in the Gesù
belong some of B.’s noblest canvases (S. Giovanni Bat-
tista nel deserto, in S. Niccolò da Tolentino; S. Ludovico
Bertrando, in S. Maria della Minerva; Morte di s. Fran-
cesco Saverio, in S. Agostino at Ascoli Piceno; Natività, in the
Carmine at Fermo; Cristo e la Samaritana, Spada Gallery);
whereas in his later activity, purely decorative values
at times finally prevail, accentuating the theatrical ef-
fects (Nascita del Battista, at S. Maria in Campitelli;
S. Niccolò da Bari, in S. Maria Maddalena, 1697–98),
dulling the very vitality of the colour and bringing its
possibilities back within the limits of a customary manner. In the
decoration of the ceiling of the SS. Apostoli (1707), with the Triumph
of the Franciscan Order, B. reveals a veiled adherence to the
schemes and modes proper to the imminent eighteenth century,
contrary to his finest style. – Vedi Tav. XLI.