COURTOIS, JACQUES, known as the BORGOGNONE. –
Painter and engraver, born on 12 February 1621 at St-Hippolyte
in Franche-Comté and died in Rome on 14 November 1675.
A pupil of his father, the painter Jean-Pierre C., he came
to Italy as an adolescent (1636) and, in Milan, enlisted
in the Spanish army, without, however, ceasing to
paint.
Having laid down his arms and gone to Bologna, to the workshop
of a certain Jérôme, a Lorraine landscape painter, he there met Guido
Reni and Albani, following whose example he resolved to be-
come a painter of religious pictures. But after passing
through Florence and Siena, around 1640 he moved to Rome,
where the friendship of Pieter van Laer, known as Bamboccio,
of Michelangelo Cerquozzi, and of Pietro da Cortona – whom
he met while painting in the refectory of the convent
of S. Croce in Gerusalemme, where, upon his arrival, he had been
given lodging – brought him back to his true path, that
of a painter of battles, painted with «French fury»,
making use of the many sketches taken from life during
his military career. In Rome, around 1647, he married
a Maria Vaiani, but serious conflicts embittered his life
and drove him from his home. He was again in Florence
and Siena (1652 and 1654–55), in the service of Mattia dei Medici.
Having gone briefly to his homeland toward the beginning of ’55,
he painted, together with his brother Gianfrancesco, several pictures
for the Ursuline convent in Fribourg, where two sisters
were nuns. On returning to Italy, he passed through Bergamo
and Venice, was perhaps in Padua, and returned to Rome
by way of Siena and Florence, where on 13 December ’57
he entered as a temporal coadjutor among the Jesuits of S. Andrea
al Quirinale, and there pronounced his final vows on 2 February 1668.
Meanwhile he had continued to paint. In 1658,
together with his brother Guglielmo, he began the decoration
of the chapel of the Prima Primaria Congregation at the
Collegio Romano, which may be regarded as the best of his
religious works and which once again demonstrates his
predilection for agitated battle scenes. He painted several pictures,
now lost, for the refectory of the professed house at the Gesù,
others for the novitiate of S. Andrea al Quirinale, and in the final
years of his life he devoted himself to preparing the drawings
for a work that he was to paint in the tribune of the Gesù.
He is then found in Genoa; during Lent of ’75
he was in Pisa, then in Florence, where he left Grand Duke
Cosimo III his self-portrait; afterwards, having returned to Rome,
he was suddenly overtaken by death.
Mention has already been made of the fact that C. sometimes
made use of the collaboration of his brothers, who were
also painters: GUGLIELMO, born at St-Hippolyte in 1628 and
died in Rome on 15 June 1675, had been a pupil of Pietro
da Cortona and left various engravings as well as paintings
in the Roman churches of S. Marco, S. Giovanni in La-
terano, S. Prassede, S. Lorenzo in Lucina, and several
others; GIAN FRANCESCO (and not Giambattista, as has
often been repeated) was a Capuchin in a Roman convent
and painted chiefly religious pictures for the houses of his Order.