Astolfo Petrazzi

Petrazzi kept a painting academy running in his own house in Siena, and 17th-century writers on art mention it among the things he was known for. One of the young men who spent time there was the Frenchman Jacques Courtois, later famous across Italy as il Borgognone for his battle pieces. Petrazzi himself came out of the Sienese workshops of Francesco Vanni and Ventura Salimbeni, half-brothers who between them dominated painting in the city around 1600.

By 1622 he was in Rome, signing an altarpiece of Mary Magdalene in glory for San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, the church of the Florentine community there, and he stayed about a decade. His Eros Triumphant, now in Athens, comes from those years. A naked winged boy with a bow stands over a harp, an astrolabe, carved armour, books and a painter's palette, the worldly learning that Virgil's line about love conquering all sets aside. Caravaggio had treated the subject some 20 years before. Petrazzi's boy looks straight out at the viewer and the handling is more restrained.

He was back in Siena by 1631 and worked steadily for its churches, so much so that critics complain of repeated types in the late pictures. In 1648 he signed the vault of the oratory of San Rocco. He died in Siena on 11 August 1653 and was buried in the cathedral.