Except among some specialist art historians, Simone Peterzano is generally known only as the teacher of Caravaggio: the notable, great master of Baroque painting. Beyond that, he tends to be dismissed as a competent but unexceptional artist. On closer inspection, he becomes a fascinating example of how such artists can lay the foundations on which great masters build—a man who took some of the first steps towards the style Caravaggio would one day perfect.
A self portrait, 1589, by Simone Peterzano. (Public Domain)
Born circa 1535, Peterzano began training as a painter in Venice when the city was becoming Europe’s greatest center of artistic life. Titian and Tintoretto were at the height of their careers and would soon be joined by Veronese. Florence, long the capital of Renaissance art, had fallen to more modest status with the death of all but one of its greatest artists: Michelangelo (1475–1564). So too had Rome, to which Florentine artists had migrated a few decades earlier….