Giovanni Battista Gaulli, Baciccio. Giovanni Battista Gaulli, also known as Baciccio or Baciccia, was an Italian artist working in the High Baroque and early Rococo periods.
He is best known for his grand illusionistic vault frescos in the Church of the Gesł in Rome, Italy. His work was influenced by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
Gaulli was born in Genoa, where his parents died from the plague of 1654. He initially apprenticed with Luciano Borzone.
In mid-17th century, Gaulli's Genoa was a cosmopolitan Italian artistic center open to both commercial and artistic enterprises from north European countries, including countries with non-Catholic populations such as England and the Dutch provinces. Painters such as Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck stayed in Genoa for a few years.
Gaulli's earliest influences would have come from an eclectic mix of these foreign painters and other local artists including Valerio Castello, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, and Bernardo Strozzi, whose warm palette Gaulli adopted. In the 1660s, he experimented with the cooler palette and linear style of Bolognese classicism. He was first noticed by the Genoese merchant of artworks, Pellegrino Peri, who was living in Rome. Peri introduced him to Gianlorenzo Bernini, who promoted him. He found patrons among the Genoese Giovanni Paolo Oliva, a prominent Jesuit. In 1662, he was accepted into the Roman artists' guild, the Accademia di San Luca, wh