Denys Calvaert

Denys Calvaert was born in Antwerp around 1540, but Italy made him, and Bologna renamed him. There he was known simply as Dionisio Fiammingo, Dennis the Fleming, a specialist in small, jewel-bright devotional pictures, often painted on copper for private prayer.

Around 1575 he opened a painting school in the city, and this is where his name really survives. Three of his pupils became giants of the next century, Guido Reni, Domenichino, and Francesco Albani, all central to the Bolognese Baroque. All three eventually left him, moving across town to the rival academy run by the Carracci family, whose more naturalistic teaching was pulling the ambitious young painters away.

Calvaert kept working in his older, polished Mannerist style to the end, and died in Bologna in 1619. The local biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia remembered him partly for a fierce temper, and partly as the first teacher of the men who would define painting in his adopted city.