• Was an Italian painter and engraver.
• Mei worked in his native Siena and in Rome, finding patronage above all in the Chigi family.
• Briefly a pupil of the Sienese cartographer and draughtsman Giuliano Periccioli.
• Bernardino passed to the studio of the painter Rutilio Manetti and probably also served in the workshop of Francesco Rustici.
• He painted in and around Siena, where his work came to the attention of Cardinal Fabio Chigi.
• Once he was elected pope as Alexander VII (1655), called Bernardino Mei to Rome in 1657.
• Through the fast friendship that bonded him to
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose studio he frequented, he applied that sculptor's sense of theatrical action to his own mythological and allegorical subjects.
• He died in Rome in 1676.
