Pietro Bellotti

In 1654 Pietro Bellotti signed and dated a canvas of Lachesis, the one of the three Fates who measures out the thread of each human life, and painted her as a very old woman with sun-darkened skin. It is now in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. Heads like hers, the aged and the poor seen from very close, were what collectors wanted from him, and a critic writing in 1970 found his magnified rendering of wrinkled skin almost unpleasant.

He came from the western shore of Lake Garda, then Venetian territory, and was baptised in Brescia in 1625. At 12 he was sent to Venice to train with the portraitist Girolamo Forabosco, and in 1660 the Venetian writer Marco Boschini gave him a passage in his long verse guide to the city's painters. The early biographer Pellegrino Orlandi lists patrons including Cardinal Mazarin, chief minister of France, and the Elector of Bavaria. In Mantua he served the Gonzaga, the ruling dukes, as superintendent of their galleries.

A self-portrait he signed and dated in 1658 is in the Uffizi in Florence. After years of moving between courts he returned to Lake Garda, where he died poor at Gargnano in March 1700.