Giovanni Do

1617 – 1656

Spanish painter, active in Italy. An Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1623; Naples, Capodimonte) was attributed to Do by de Dominici in 1742 and remains the only work the attribution of which is widely accepted. Yet modern scholars who have reconstructed his career believe him to have made a major contribution to Neapolitan painting in the first half of the 17th century. Little documentary information survives. He is first mentioned in 1617 in Valencia, among the followers of Jerónimo Rodriguez de Espinosa (father of Jerónimo Jacinto Espinosa), and was enrolled in the Colegio de Pintores of Valencia. His style was formed in Valencia and Toledo in the circle of Pedro Orrente, Jerónimo Jacinto Espinosa and Juan van der Hamen y León, artists who were moving away from the Tuscan tradition of Counter-Reformation devotional painting towards the new realism of Caravaggio. By 1626 Do was in Naples, and that year he married Grazia, sister of Paceco de Rosa; the marriage contract describes him as Spanish and gives Giovanni Battista Caracciolo and Jusepe de Ribera as witnesses.

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