Bernardo Strozzi

At 17 Bernardo Strozzi took vows as a Capuchin friar in Genoa, and the name stuck for life: everyone called him il Cappuccino, the Capuchin. Then, around 1608, his father died, and Strozzi won permission to leave the cloister to support his widowed mother and unmarried sister, earning their keep with his brush.

That brush was extraordinary. He worked with thick, loaded strokes and warm, glowing color, giving cooks and old women and saints alike the same earthy solidity. When his mother died and the order pressed him to return to monastic life, he refused, and around 1631 slipped away to Venice. The city had lost its great colorists and took him in, and there he became one of the founders of the Venetian Baroque, feeding the tradition of Titian and Veronese into a new century.

He kept the priest's title il prete genovese, the Genoese priest, and died in Venice in 1644, having never returned to Genoa.