Ceiling decoration (detail)

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Ceiling decoration 1655-57 Fresco, 450 x 355 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris In 1655 Romanelli, who in 1646 decorated two galleries in the Palais Royal in Paris, was commissioned to decorate the summer apartments of Anne of Austria in the Louvre's Petite Galerie. He was assisted by the sculptor Michel Anguier and various stucco artists. The trompe-l'oeil paintings in the vaults framed by Anguier's stucco work evoke the Farnese and Barberini palaces in Rome as well as the Pitti in Florence.

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About the Artist

Giovanni Francesco Romanelli

1610 – 1662

Italian painter and tapestry designer. He was Pietro da Cortona 's outstanding pupil, and like his master a protégé of the Barberini family. Romanelli's graceful style was less energetic than Cortona's (he owed much to his first teacher Domenichino) and his restrained type of Baroque proved particularly popular and influential in France, where he worked 1645-7 and 1655-7. He introduced to Paris Cortona's characteristic manner of decoration, consisting of paintings combined with richly gilded stuccowork, and this was one of the sources for the great schemes of Lebrun at Versailles and elsewhere. Examples of Romanelli's work survive in the Bibliothéque Nationale (painted for Cardinal Mazarin) and (much altered) in the Salle des Saisons of the Louvre (painted for Anne of Austria, mother of Louis XIV).

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