Giovanni Baglione

Giovanni Baglione is remembered less for what he painted than for a lawsuit and a book. In the summer of 1603 mocking verses about him were passing around Rome, and he took the matter to court, suing Caravaggio, then the most talked-about painter in the city, along with three men he blamed for the poems. The trial record survives, and it holds one of the sharpest lines we have from Caravaggio's own mouth: asked what makes a good painter, he said he knew no one who thought Baglione was one.

The quarrel had a cause. Baglione had painted a 'Divine Love' in open imitation of Caravaggio's new dark, sharply lit manner and won praise and a commission that the younger man's circle felt should have gone to them. He could handle that Caravaggesque style well when he chose to, which is part of the irony.

He outlived his rival by more than 30 years, ran a busy Roman workshop, and late in life published 'Le vite,' the lives of the painters, sculptors and architects active in Rome from about 1572 to 1642. His account of Caravaggio is cold and hostile, and it is also one of the earliest ever written, which is why historians who dislike his tone still cite him.