GUIDOTTI, Paolo - b. 1559 Lucca, d. 1629 Roma

Paolo Guidotti, known as Il Borghese or Cavaliere Borghese, Italian painter and architect, active in Rome.

As painter he was a representative of late Roman Mannerism. In 1610 he decorated the Sala della Felicità Eterna in the Palazzo Odescalchi Giustiniani in Bassano Romano in the province of Viterbo. His influence on painting in Lucca was important.

Many of his architectural works, completed for Pope Sixtus V have been lost. He completed a series of sculptures for Pope Paul V, who allowed him to adopt the surname Borghese, and made him conservator of the Campidoglio and leader of the Accademia San Luca. Somewhat of a polymath, he made the preparations for the ornamentation surrounding the canonization in 1622 of Isidore the Labourer, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Filippo Neri, and Saint Teresa of Ávila. He wrote an epic poem titled Gerusalemma Distrutta, concluding each eighth line with the same words of Gerusalemme liberata. He is said to have traveled to cemeteries at night to examine cadavers for drawing.

He claimed to have designed a flying machine, or parachute, but succeeded only on breaking a leg.

Allegory of Felicità Eterna

Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564-1637) was one of the most brilliant, and knowledgeable lovers of art in early seventeenth-century Rome. He assembled a renowned collection of roughly 1.800 works of classical sculpture and 600 paintings, among them eleven of Caravaggio’s most important works. He purchased a villa at Bassano Romano in 1595 which was then thoroughly remodeled and enlarged. The artists who painted there between 1595 and 1604 all worked in the Mannerist style.

The north wing of the enlarged palace was erected in 1607-09 and the painted decoration was accomplished in 1609-10. There are three rooms in the north wing, the Sala della Felicità Eterna (painted by Paolo Guidotti in 1610), the Sala di Diana (painted by Domenichino in 1609) and the Galleria (painted by Francesco Albani and assistants in 1609-10).

In the Sala della Felicità Eterna the ceiling is devoted to eternal happiness. It was painted by Paolo Guidotti, an eccentric who combined Mannerism and naturalism in a way that was both original and bizarre. The pictorial program celebrates the virtues of the villa’s owner and his wife by way of personifications and Old Testament scenes.