Charles Mellin

On 18 September 1649 Charles Mellin made his will in Rome, and both witnesses came from his own homeland: the landscape painter Claude Gellée, known as Claude Lorrain, and the sculptor Claude Pernet. Mellin died three days later. Born in Nancy around 1597, he had spent nearly all his working life in Italy, where he was called Carlo Lorenese, Charles of Lorraine. The Lorrainers in Rome kept together. They often lodged in the same houses, had their own church, San Nicola dei Lorenesi, to which Mellin left a painting, and the Minim friars of Trinità dei Monti gave their commissions almost always to them. For the friars Mellin painted in the cloister and in the infirmary chapel.

His great Roman success came in 1631. For the chapel of the Virgin in San Luigi dei Francesi, the church of the French nation, he was chosen over two rivals, Nicolas Poussin and Giovanni Lanfranco. In 1636 and 1637 he painted a cycle of 15 pictures for the choir of the abbey of Monte Cassino, counted with the San Luigi chapel among his most important work. It was destroyed in 1944, in the battle for Monte Cassino.

From 1643 he worked in Naples, until the revolt led by the fishmonger Masaniello in 1647 drove him back to Rome. There, in his last two years, the French writer André Félibien, later a biographer of painters, came to know him.