Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582 – 1622),

• Was an Italian painter.
• Manfredi was born in Ostiano, near Cremona.
• He may have been a pupil of Caravaggio in Rome.
• Caravaggio in his brief career — gaining fame in 1600, exiled from Rome in 1606, and dead by 1610 — had a profound effect on the younger generation of artists, particularly in Rome and Naples.
• And of these Caravaggisti (followers of Caravaggio), Manfredi seems in turn to have been the most influential in transmitting the master's legacy to the next generation.
• No documented, signed works by Manfredi survive, and several of the forty or so works now attributed to him were formerly believed to be by Caravaggio.
• Manfredi was a successful artist, able to keep his own servant before he was thirty years old, "a man of distinguished appearance and fine behaviour" according to the biographer Giulio Mancini, although seldom sociable.
• He built his career around easel paintings for private clients, and never pursued the public commissions upon which wider reputations were built, but his works were widely collected in the 17th century and he was considered Caravaggio's equal or even superior.
• Manfredi died in Rome in 1622.
• Gerard Seghers was one of his pupils.