SACCHI, ANDREA. — Painter, born at Nettuno (Rome) on 30 November 1599, died at Rome on 21 June 1661.
His great public work is the altarpiece with the Miracle of s. Gregory, painted for the Vatican Basilica in the Clementine Chapel, commissioned from him by Cardinal Fr. Maria de' Monte in 1625 and which, perhaps in order to satisfy the latter’s taste, is among S.’s works the one that most clearly demonstrates a certain, albeit very slight, contact with the Caravaggesque world and with that of Rubens. The altarpiece representing the Miracle of the Corporal is now in the chapter hall of the Vatican, since in the eighteenth century it was replaced by a mosaic copy. Other important works securely attributed to S. are the four altarpieces executed for the four altars of the pillars of the Basilica of S. Peter: S. Veronica, the Beheading of s. Longinus, The Invention of the Cross, and S. Andrew, which are now also in the chapter hall of the Vatican Basilica. The work recognized as S.’s masterpiece is S. Romualdo narrating his vision, in the Vatican Pinacoteca, painted in 1640. His last noteworthy altarpiece depicts the Transit of s. Anne (S. Carlo ai Catinari, Rome). Other paintings attributed to him by critics are: Noah’s Drunkenness, of which two examples exist, one in the Sciarra Gallery in Rome (now the property of Chimirri in Catanzaro) and the other in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin; The Feast of the Lupercalia (Prado Museum, Madrid), formerly attributed to Pietro da Cortona; the Feast of the Gesù, in which the scene of Pope Urban VIII’s visit to the church of the Gesù on the occasion of the centenary of the Jesuits (1630) is painted with vivid realism.
S., slow in his work, with his broad, pastose brushwork and his creations of a particular, grandiose pathos full of naturalness, between the dry severity of the true Caravaggists and the decorative abundance of a Lanfranco and a Pietro da Cortona, marks a moment of serene classicism, both formal and chromatic, of the greatest interest for the subsequent development of Roman painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
His son and pupil was GIUSEPPE, a Conventual friar who died in his convent in Rome. He painted a notable picture for the church of the SS. Apostoli in Rome. An oil panel depicting s. Francis receiving the stigmata was removed and alienated by decree of the S. Congreg. dei Vescovi e Regolari of 7 September 1793. A Sibyl in Warsaw, attributed to Giuseppe Sacconi, may have been his.