Valentin de Boulogne

By the time Valentin de Boulogne reached Rome, Caravaggio was already dead, killed in 1610, and the city was full of young painters trying to work in his manner. Valentin, a Frenchman baptized at Coulommiers near Paris in 1591, turned out to be the most gifted of them. He painted by candlelight and cellar-light, half-length figures crowded around a table: soldiers, cardsharps, musicians and fortune-tellers, their faces caught between song and menace.

He lived among a rowdy company of northern artists in Rome who drank hard and called themselves the Bentvueghels, and the little that survives of his story is mostly trouble. Even his name is a mistake. The 'Moïse' by which he was sometimes known was a garbled Italian form of 'monsieur.' His actual Christian name is still unknown.

Recognition did come. In 1629 he won a major commission for Saint Peter's, the Martyrdom of Saints Processus and Martinian, hung as a companion to a canvas by his French rival Nicolas Poussin, the leading classical painter in Rome.

He did not enjoy it long. In August 1632, feverish and drunk, he plunged into an icy fountain to cool himself, worsened whatever illness he had, and died within days at 41, poor and in debt. He was buried in Santa Maria del Popolo, the same church that holds two of Caravaggio's altarpieces.