SASSOFERRATO, GIOVAN BATTISTA, called SALVI. – Painter, born at Sassoferrato in 1605, died in Rome in 1685. Very little is known of his life apart from the brief information provided by Lanzi.
In the eighteenth century, on account of his archaizing painting, he was believed to have been a contemporary or immediate successor of Raffaello. His teachers were his father Tarquinio, a modest local painter, and probably Domenichino. S. worked extensively in Umbria and especially in Rome, where he came at a young age. He was above all a painter of Madonnas, which he almost always depicted half-length, with particular skill, using a few traditional colors against a neutral background, expressing piety and intimate contemplation. He possesses a special delicacy and sweetness of feeling that already led Burckhardt to say: « one always ends by succumbing to the subtle and gentle charm of S., whose Madonnas undoubtedly reveal a tender mother’s heart ».
His works of certain attribution include: The Holy Family, of which various replicas exist, one at Aspley House, one at the Musée Condé in Chantilly, one at the Doria Gallery, and one at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin; The Madonna of the Rosary, painted for the church of S. Sabina in Rome (1643), his masterpiece and his only large-format altarpiece; it is typical of his archaizing tendency and its gentle simplicity; The Madonna on the Crescent Moon in the Vatican Pinacoteca in Rome (1650); The Madonna with the Sleeping Child in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; The Madonna with the Laughing Child in the church of S. Maria Formosa in Venice; The Madonna of the Little Bird, in the Hermitage in Petersburg; The Madonna with the Infant S. John, also in the Hermitage; his characteristic Madonna, of which Voss distinguishes four types; The Deposition of Christ in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin; The Adoration of the Child in the National Museum of Naples. S. also painted the beautiful portrait of Monsignor Ottaviano Preti, now in Rome at the Corsini Gallery. Lanzi also mentions some of his landscapes. S.’s activity as a copyist is well known; he copied paintings by Raffaello, Perugino, Giulio Romano, Garofalo, Barocci, Caracci, Reni, and Albani, as well as by Venetian painters such as Tiziano.