Sebastiano Mazzoni

Sometime in the late 1640s a Florentine painter, then in his thirties, arrived in Venice and never left. Sebastiano Mazzoni had trained in Florence under Baccio del Bianco and joined its drawing academy, but it was Venice that suited his temperament. There he fell in with Pietro Liberi, a leading painter of the day, and absorbed the loose, dramatic brushwork of Bernardo Strozzi, the Genoese master then working in the city.

What came out was strange even by Baroque standards. Mazzoni built his scenes at tilted, awkward angles and let the paint move fast, so figures seem caught mid-lunge. His Annunciation and his Saint Catherine, both in the Gallerie dell'Accademia, carry that restless charge.

He was also a poet and an architect, and by all accounts a difficult, sharp-tongued man who quarrelled with patrons and wrote satirical verse. He kept painting in Venice until his death in 1678, having spent roughly 30 years there as an outsider who had made the city his own.