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Nationality: Italian

Lifespan: 1654– 1714

Giuseppe Passeri (12 March 1654 – 2 November 1714) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, active in his native city of Rome.

Born the nephew of the painter Giovanni Battista Passeri, Giuseppe trained in the studio of Carlo Maratta. Among the paintings by Giuseppe is St. Peter baptizes the Centurion, transferred to mosaic; the original was moved to a church of the Conventuali in Urbino. The painter Luigi Garzi was his son-in-law.

He was trained by his uncle and then by Carlo Maratti. The early sources (Pio, Pascoli) claim that he became Maratti's favourite pupil and that, at his own expense, Maratti encouraged him to copy the Roman works of Giovanni Lanfranco, an assertion that is corroborated by surviving copies. Maratti taught him to respect the traditions of Michelangelo and Annibale Carracci, to study the mastery of composition, gesture and expression in works by Reni, Domenichino and Poussin, and to emulate the beauty of colour in the art of Titian and Correggio. Above all, Maratti recommended him to study Raphael, whom he himself revered. Many of Passeri's drawings after these and other artists have survived (three in Düsseldorf). It was through these studies that he developed a relatively independent painting style, one that is distinguished by increasingly free brushwork, a subtle use of colour and lively composition.

Artworks by Giuseppe Passeri (8)