Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari

1654 – 1727

Italian painter. He was the most faithful pupil of Carlo Maratti, keeping his art alive into the 1720s with a softer, more elegant version of his classicism. This in its turn influenced the style of Agostino Masucci (1690-1768), Maratti's last significant pupil. According to Pascoli, Chiari was apprenticed to the painter and art dealer Carlantonio Galliani at the age of ten before he joined Maratti's studio in Rome, in 1666. His first official commission was for paintings on the side walls of the chapel of the Marcaccioni in Santa Maria del Suffragio, Rome (Birth of the Virgin; Adoration of the Magi), entrusted to him on the death of Niccolò Berrettoni (1637-1682), who had originally been asked to do them. This project established his reputation, and thereafter he won the patronage of many noble Roman families and of foreign visitors to Rome. He frescoed rooms in the Palazzo Barberini, Palazzo Colonna, and Palazzo Spada, and he also painted for several churches in Rome. He was a teacher of William Kent (1685-1748), Paolo Anesi (1697-1773), and Giovanni Andrea Lazzarini (1710-1801). He became director or principe of the Accademia di San Luca (1723-25).

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