TESTA Pietro

‘il Lucchesino’ (Lucca 1611 – Rome 1650)

Italian engraver, draftsman and painter, born from parents of modest social status that Baldinucci described as ‘excessively scarce of makeshift goods’. Basically, there are no news about his initial artistic training. At the age of eighteen he moved to Rome where, after an initial period of discomfort, he improved his living conditions under the protection first of the art patron and collector Cassiano dal Pozzo and then Cardinal Buonvisi, member of one of the most ancient and powerful families in Lucca.
After a brief apprenticeship at the school of Domenichino, he moved to Pietro da Cortona’s from which he was subsequently excluded for contrasts with him, mainly due to his difficult character.
Attending the house of Cassiano dal Pozzo, a meeting place for scholars and artists of the city, he became friend with the painter Nicolas Poussin and the painter and engraver Pier Francesco Mola.
Although esteemed author of important paintings and frescoes in Rome and Lucca, unfortunately largely lost today, he was mainly appreciated for his drawings and etchings with his great disappointment.
This conflict about his artistic production, together with personal negative episodes contributed to develop a sharp pessimism culminated with his suicide by drowning himself in the river Tiber.
Giovan Battista Passeri wrote about him “… almost abandoned himself at all, and away from the trade he wandered solitary for the most withdrawn places”.
Its etchings amount to about forty plates of very high quality both for the composition and for the technique.
His graphic works include sacred, moralizing, allegorical and mythological subjects.