Pietro da Cortona

Pietro da Cortona (1596 or 1597–1669) was born Pietro Berrettini into a family of artisans and masons in Cortona, the Tuscan town whose name he took. He trained in Florence under Andrea Commodi and around 1612 moved to Rome, where he joined the studio of Baccio Ciarpi. He worked mainly in Rome and Florence, as a painter, a designer of interiors and an architect, and died in Rome in 1669. His ceiling for the main salon of the Palazzo Barberini, the Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power commissioned by Pope Urban VIII in 1633, marks a watershed in Baroque painting, with figures moving through a painted architectural framework as if the room opened to the sky. In Florence he decorated the Planetary Rooms of the Palazzo Pitti for the Medici, and in Rome he spent years on the ceiling frescoes of the Chiesa Nuova. With Bernini and Borromini he was one of the key figures of Roman Baroque architecture, and his church of Santi Luca e Martina was completed in 1664. Here: The Calling of St Peter and St Andrew.