Antiveduto Grammatica

Antiveduto means foreseen. According to the Roman painter and biographer Giovanni Baglione, his father had a premonition that the child would be born on the road while the family was travelling from Siena to Rome, and named him for it. Even with that story the facts stay loose. He was born around 1570, and the sources still disagree on the year and on whether it happened in Rome or along the way.

In Rome he first made his name with heads. He trained with the Perugian painter Giovanni Domenico Angelini, who specialised in small pictures on copper and portrait heads, and he turned out so many likenesses of famous men that he was nicknamed the gran capocciante, the great painter of heads. Altarpieces followed, and the patronage of Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, the collector who had launched Caravaggio.

In 1624 he was elected principe, head of the painters' Accademia di San Luca. Within months an attempt to sell the Academy's altarpiece, then believed to be by Raphael, turned into a scandal, his rival the painter Tommaso Salini pressed the case, and Del Monte stepped in to restore the Academy's rules. Grammatica died in Rome in April 1626, four months before the cardinal.