Bartolomeo Cavarozzi

In 1617 the Roman nobleman and painter Giovanni Battista Crescenzi set out for Madrid to work at the Spanish court, and he took a young painter from Viterbo with him. That painter was Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, so closely tied to his patron's family that he was sometimes called Bartolomeo Crescenzi. In Rome he had studied in the academy Crescenzi ran near the Pantheon, where pupils drew fruit, flowers and animals directly from life.

In Spain, for about two years, Cavarozzi painted religious pictures in the manner of Caravaggio, with figures caught in a hard raking light against darkness, though his saints are quieter and gentler than Caravaggio's. One of them, The Holy Family with Saint Catherine of 1618, is now in the Prado, and canvases like it helped carry Caravaggio's style to Spanish painters.

Cavarozzi was back in Rome by 1619 and died there in 1625, aged 38. For a long time he was barely remembered. Only in the late 20th century did scholars piece his work back together, including still lifes of fruit and birds, such as a picture of grapevines with three wagtails in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.