Pietro Paolo Bonzi
1636 · Grand Duchy of Tuscany · Baroque, Still life painting, Landscape painting
The story
In Rome Pietro Paolo Bonzi went by his nicknames, il Gobbo dei Carracci and il Gobbo dei Frutti, the hunchback of the Carracci circle and the hunchback of fruit. Born in Cortona around 1576, he learned landscape from the Bolognese Giovanni Battista Viola and became one of the first painters in Rome to make still life a specialty, working for the Crescenzi family and, in 1622 and 1623, beside Pietro da Cortona on a gallery ceiling in Palazzo Mattei.
His two paintings at the Galleria Borghese are small works on copper made as a pair, Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the well and Christ walking on the water. From the 18th century they passed as Domenichino's, and one was later given to Garofalo. In 1996 the scholar Clovis Whitfield assigned them to Bonzi, arguing that in these years he repeated subjects by Domenichino, the Bolognese painter he was emulating.
