Orazio Riminaldi
1593–1630 · Grand Duchy of Tuscany · Baroque, Caravaggism
The story
Around 1615 a young painter from Pisa arrived in Rome, near the end of the movement Caravaggio had set off a decade earlier. Caravaggio himself was already dead, but his followers filled the city, and Orazio Riminaldi fell in with them, learning the hard shadows and street-level realism from painters like Bartolomeo Manfredi and Orazio Gentileschi, both leading Caravaggisti of the day.
His best-known picture hangs in the Uffizi: a triumphant Cupid, a winged boy trampling the tools of war, music and learning underfoot. The pose owes something to Caravaggio's own famous Cupid, but by the time Riminaldi painted it the raw naturalism had cooled into something smoother and more classical, closer to the French painter Simon Vouet, whom he also knew in Rome.
He came home to Pisa and worked there through the 1620s, including a large fresco inside the cathedral dome. In 1630 a plague swept northern and central Italy, killing something like a quarter of the people in many towns. Riminaldi caught it and died that December, 37 years old.
