• Was an Italian High Baroque painter. • He was active in Rome. • He is best known as a printmaker and draftsman. • He was friends with Nicolas Poussin and Francesco Mola. • His early prints, from the 1630s, were often religious and were influenced by Federico Barocci. • Testa was influenced by Leonardo da Vinci. • Accounts of Testa's death are confused and contradictory, some suggesting murder or suicide (Testa was described as melancholic in temperament). • Yet his earliest biographer, the 17th-century author Filippo Baldinucci, indicates that the death was accidental. • Commenting on Testa's habit of "depicting night scenes and changes in the atmosphere and in the sky," Baldinucci states that Testa was standing on a Tiber riverbank, "drawing and observing some reflections of the rainbow in the water," when he fell in and drowned. • Next
Pietro Testa, Alexander the Great Rescued from the River Cydnus, ca. 1650
Original, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Visited in 2017-2023.
Pietro Testa, Alexander the Great Rescued from the River Cydnus, ca. 1650
