Original text : (Automatic translation)
Giovani Battista Salvi Il Sassoferrato (Sassoferrato 1609 - Rome 1685). Madonna and Child. Oil on canvas. Sassoferrato's reputation in 17th century art is built almost entirely on his paintings of the Madonna, executed with a remarkable simplicity of color and composition, almost entirely without background scenery or reference to Baroque or Classical forms. His genius lay in capturing a vision of the Madonna of such exquisite beauty and devotion that set him apart from any other contemporaries. The same face appears with little variation in the major part of his tiny output and was to be imitated by successive generations of painters.

Giovanni Battista Salvi was born in Sassoferrato in 1609. His father was a local painter named Tarquinio, with whom he received his first training. As a young man he must have travelled to areas bordering the Marches, such as Umbria and Perugia, where beginning in 1630 he was employed by the Benedictine Convent of S. Pietro for which he produced a series of ten saints for the ceiling of the sacristy of their church. Though clearly influenced by other artists from the Bologna school, such as Guido Reni and Guercino, tradition holds that he studied in Rome and in Naples with Dominichino, who had left Rome for Naples in 1631. To that master he owes the pronounced clarity, refinement and idealized beauty that influenced his very individualistic style.

The first documentary evidence of Sassoferrato's presence in Rome, does not come until 1641, when he executed a painting for the Church of San Francesca di Paola. The following year, Princess Pamphili di Rossano commissioned him to paint one of his best known paintings, Our Lady of the Rosary, for the Church of Santa Sabina. At the time of his marriage, in 1648, he was living in the Roman parish of San Salvatore ai Monti, the artists' quarter, but for the next thirty years there is no further documentary record of his whereabouts, nor are any of his paintings signed or dated.