Bernardo Cavallino
1616–1656 · Kingdom of Naples · Baroque, Neapolitan school
The story
Nearly everything certain about Bernardo Cavallino fits into one line of a parish register. He was baptised in Naples on 25 August 1616, son of Giovanni Maria and Beatrice Lopes. One painting carries his signature and a date, a Saint Cecilia of 1645. The rest of his work has been assembled by attribution.
His pictures went to private collectors. Naples in the 1630s and 1640s had wealthy buyers, the Flemish merchant Gaspar Roomer among them, who wanted small pictures of fine handling for a room at home, and Cavallino gave them biblical and mythological scenes at cabinet size, in a silvery colour he drew partly from Rubens and Van Dyck. The Massacre of the Innocents at Brera is one of his exceptions, close to 2 m across, painted around 1640 while the manner of Artemisia Gentileschi, who was then working in the city, still shows in it.
The Immaculate Virgin in the same room belongs to a group of about a dozen versions of that subject linked to his name, a measure of how badly Neapolitan buyers wanted it. In the summer of 1656 plague reached Naples and killed a large share of the city. Nothing records Cavallino's death, and it has been assumed ever since that the epidemic took him, at 39.
