Simone Cantarini

In 1647 Carlo II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, called him to court to paint a portrait. Cantarini took so long over it that the duke released him from the commission, and according to the Bolognese writer Carlo Cesare Malvasia, who gathered the stories about him a generation later, he had also been heard giving his opinion of the ducal picture collection rather too freely. He left Mantua ill, reached Verona, and died there on 15 October 1648, aged 36. Malvasia passed on a suspicion that a rival had poisoned him. Nothing has ever confirmed it.

The temper came with him from the start. Born in Pesaro in 1612, the son of a merchant, he arrived in Bologna around 1634 to work under Guido Reni, then the most celebrated painter in Italy. He learned to etch there, and he took on Reni's silvery colour so completely that pictures by the two have been confused ever since. He also refused to sit through the workshop drawing sessions and refused to put his master's designs onto copper. They fell out around 1637. He went home to Pesaro and then to Rome, where he studied Raphael's frescoes.

Reni died in 1642. Cantarini came back to Bologna, set up his own studio in the Palazzo Zambeccari and taught there, with Lorenzo Pasinelli and Flaminio Torre among his pupils. About 37 etched plates are accepted as his, most of them his own inventions. He painted Reni as well, a small round portrait that survives in more than one version.