meeting

Pietro Paolini

Caravaggio's painter of the strange

22.04.2025

Artists
Nikita de Vernejoul
Claudio Strinati

Book presentation Pietro Paolini (1603-1681). Caravaggio’s painter of the strange by Nikita de Vernejoul, published in 2024 by Arthena.

Claudio Strinati (Accademia di San Luca) will introduce the event, and Nikita de Vernejoul will present the book.

“Fu il Paolini pittore di gran bizzarria, e di nobile invenzione […]”
(“This was Paolini, a painter of great oddity, and noble invention […]”)
Notizie dei professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua
Baldinucci, Decennale IV del secolo V [1681] Florence

A painter of “great quirkiness and noble invention”, Pietro Paolini was born in Lucca, Tuscany, where he spent most of his career. Here, he founded the first Academy of Painting, based on the principles of ” al naturale ” representation put into practice in his studio, which included the Del Tintore brothers.

A long stay in Rome in the 1620s nurtured Caravaggesque influences in his scenes of cheats, matchmakers and fortune-tellers, in which he developed his taste for the bizarre. A connoisseur of music, Paolini invented iconographic motifs in multiple versions: the violin maker, the piva player and the lute player. His learned allegories remain mysterious at times, and his portraits of scholars and the famous actor Fiorilli as Scaramouche testify to exceptional psychological depth.

The catalog raisonné enriches the corpus of the artist’s autograph paintings with recent discoveries, while attributing many works to his studio. It sheds light on a complex art, sometimes disconcerting in its choice of subjects and pictorial technique, and reveals a talented painter, as disturbing as he is fascinating, a Caravaggio of the strange.

This event is part of a cycle devoted to the figure of Caravaggio at Villa Medici. A study day is organized around Caravaggio’s representations of Saint Matthew, exhibited in the Contarelli Chapel of the Church of Saint Louis des Français.

Nikita de Vernejoul

After practicing cardiology in Paris, Nikita de Vernejoul, a collector of Italian Seicento paintings, obtained a doctorate in art history on the painter Pietro Paolini, under the supervision of Michel Hochmann at the Sorbonne University. Living between France and Italy, she continues her research on the Seicento.