Alessandro Vitali
1580–1630 · Italian · Baroque
The story
Alessandro Vitali worked so closely beside his master that scholars still struggle to tell the two hands apart. Born in Urbino around 1580, he became one of the favourite pupils of Federico Barocci, the city's great painter of soft colour and tender religious scenes, and he spent his career refining and repeating Barocci's compositions.
Much of his known output is exactly that: altarpieces of Saint Catherine and of the Annunciation, now in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, that follow his teacher's designs of the early 1600s. His most independent surviving picture is a portrait of the two-year-old Federico Ubaldo della Rovere, heir to the duchy of Urbino, painted in 1607 and now in the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Vitali stayed in Urbino, where he died around 1630.
