SASSOFERRATO, GIOVAN BATTISTA, SALVI detto il. - Painter, b. at Sassoferrato in 1605, d. at Rome in 1685. Of his life very little is known apart from the brief notices provided by Lanzi.
In the 18th century, because of his archaizing painting, he was believed to be a contemporary or immediate successor of Raphael. His teachers were his father Tarquinio, a modest local painter, and probably Domenichino. S. worked a great deal in Umbria and in particular in Rome, where he came at a young age. He is above all a painter of Madonnas, which he almost always painted half-length, with special skill, using few traditional colors on a neutral background with the expression of piety and intimate recollection. He possesses a special delicacy and sweetness of feeling that already led Burckhardt to say: « one always ends up submitting to the subtle and soft charm of S., whose Madonnas undoubtedly betray a tender mother's heart ».
His works of certain attribution: The Holy Family, of which various replicas exist, one at Aspley-House, one at the Condé Museum in Chantilly, one at the Doria Gallery, 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 for its archaizing tendency and for its suave simplicity; The Madonna on the Crescent Moon in the Vatican Picture Gallery 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 Goldfinch, in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg; The Madonna with St. John the Baptist as a Child, likewise in the Hermitage; his characteristic Madonna, of which Voss distinguishes four types; the Deposition of Christ at the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin; the Adoration of the Child at the National Museum of Naples. S. also made the very beautiful portrait of Msgr. 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 Raphael, Perugino, Giulio Romano, Garofalo, Barocci, Carracci, Reni, Albani and also by Venetian painters, such as Titian.
Bibliography7 works
Emilia Durini