Bernardo Cavallino

Bernardo Cavallino (1616–1656) was a painter and draughtsman of Naples, and one of the most original artists working there in the first half of the seventeenth century. Little is known of his life. His first biographer, Bernardo de' Dominici, says he entered the studio of Massimo Stanzione at the age of ten, though his early work also suggests links with Jusepe de Ribera and Aniello Falcone. He may have died around 1654, or in the plague of 1656. After beginning with larger public commissions, he turned on the advice of his friend Andrea Vaccaro to smaller cabinet pictures, and in these his manner took shape, moving from the dark tenebrism of his early work towards paler, brighter colour, elegant poses and an intensely theatrical sense of gesture. Around eighty paintings are attributed to him, fewer than ten of them signed, and he sold through private dealers and collectors whose records are lost. Largely forgotten in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he was rediscovered in the early twentieth. Here: Christ driving the Traders from the Temple.