St. Anthony from Padua

Simone Cantarini known as the Pesarese or Simone da Pesaro (Pesaro, April 1612 - Verona, 1648) was an Italian painter, Baroque in style and belonging to the Bolognese school. He was born in Pesaro in April 1612, at that time part of the Papal States, and was baptized the following April 12. His training followed various stages in the Marche region, including the guidance of the master Giovan Giacomo Pandolfi, as well as the influence in his early creative phase of the late Mannerist painting of the Marche region, the Caravaggio tendency of Orazio Gentileschi and Giovanni Francesco Guerrieri, and in a later artistic phase the influence of Barocci and Guido Reni. His education was not immune to naturalistic elements, which from 1640 onward were added to classical knowledge, transforming Cantarini into a "petit-maître" of high cultural and stylistic sensitivity. His stays in Venice at the workshop of master Claudio Ridolfi and his four-year stay (1635-1639) in Bologna, at the workshop of Guido Reni, were fundamental to his improvement. His most significant works were those related to the Bolognese period, suffice it to mention the Immaculate Conception and Saints, The Rest in Egypt, the Transfiguration and Loth with Daughters, all datable to the four-year Bolognese period. This was followed by a number of works made in Rome during his brief stay, including the Miracle of the Cripple and Salome Receiving the Head of the Baptist. Around 1641 Cantarini stayed in Rome where he devoted himself mainly to ancient sculpture and the study of Raphael's works. Soon after Reni's death (1642), Cantarini returned to Bologna, where he produced works of high quality, such as the Adoration of the Magi, and was active in the last years of his life. Cantarini's death came suddenly, and in this regard historical reports appear discordant and uncertain: while according to some sources, he found death in Verona in 1648 at the hands of the Duke of Mantua because of a failed delivery of a work, according to others he was murdered by a Mantuan painter after a violent quarrel. Cantarini's painting was characterized by a distinctive style, from the accentuated search for pictorial effects, through the suggestive power of colors or images, to the graduated colors and innovative poses of the figures. Of considerable value and originality is the graphic production of etchings, which boasts about forty subjects (37 of those catalogued) sometimes taken from more successful pictorial pieces. A graphic production that attests to the Pesaro painter's initial interest in the etchings of Federico Barocci and Guido Reni, to whom he is strongly indebted, only to break free from them in the works of his maturity, with subjects and compositions that are characterized by a greater expressive autonomy and a marked quality of sign.