Caravaggesque Painting in Rome: The ‘Manfredi Manner’

This project offers the opportunity to explore, both through comparative pictorial analysis and archival research in Rome, the pivotal part played by Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582-1622) and his circle in developing and redirecting the radical style of Caravaggio (1571-1610), who may have been Manfredi’s master. The seventeenth-century German artist and art historian, Joachim von Sandrart, informs us of a ‘Manfredi manier’ (Manfredi manner) that became especially popular with the many foreign artists from the Netherlands, France and Germany who flocked to Rome in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Traditionally thought to have been the key figure in the development of a Caravaggesque movement, this assumption about Manfredi has recently been challenged by Gianni Papi, who would like to reallocate that role to the great Spanish painter, Jusepe de Ribera. However, Manfredi was certainly a major figure, and this project seeks to document through archival research the artists with whom he definitely collaborated (some of them only known by name, like the Maltese Andrea Ristro), and to visually assess which of the known painters who visited Rome were especially responsive to Manfredi’s eloquent reformulation of Caravaggio’s revolutionary pictorial challenge. A knowledge of, or willingness to learn, Italian is essential.