Orazio Borgianni

Giovanni Baglione, a Roman painter who became Orazio Borgianni's first biographer and had no love for him, tells this story. A coach passed Borgianni in a Roman street with several artists inside, Caravaggio among them, and they laughed at him. He went into a druggist's shop, came back out with varnish and threw it at them. Baglione had reasons of his own to remember him. In 1606 Borgianni and the painter Carlo Saraceni were accused of arranging an assault on Baglione.

Borgianni was born in Rome in 1574, the son of a Florentine carpenter, and learned to paint from his brother Giulio. Late in 1597 he went to Spain and stayed for several years, working for the court and for religious houses. Nine of his paintings are still in the convent of Portacoeli in Valladolid, and in Madrid in 1603 he was among the founders of an academy of painting on the Italian model.

Back in Rome by 1606, he took up the dark grounds and hard, directed light that Caravaggio had made the new fashion. His Saint Charles Borromeo of 1612 still hangs in the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. He died in Rome in January 1616 and was buried in San Lorenzo in Lucina.