The Genoese painter Giovanni Battista Gaulli, known as Baciccio, arrived in Rome in 1657, escaping the plague that had devastated his native city and his family. According to his biographer Lione Pascoli, around 1664 the powerful Genoese art dealer Pellegrino Peri introduced Baciccio to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the prince of the Roman Baroque. This was the beginning of an important working partnershi
The centuries-old reference to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, seen on the support of this drawing, was first accepted by Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, who identified the work as a preliminary study relating to Truth (Borghese Gallery, Rome), the marble sculpture on which Bernini worked between 1646 and 1652. It was Manuela Mena Marqués who, alerted by the highly luminous application of was