Piero Pompili

The Black and White Photography of Piero Pompili

Born in the Roman borgata of Borghesiana in June of 1967, Piero Pompili is an Italian photographer whose work explores working class people and the landscape of Italy’s major cities. A significant part of his oeuvre is the portraiture of local boxers, those epic heroes from central and southern Italy who fight daily in the cities. A project that has covered a twenty-year period, Pompili’s series establishes the boxers’ identities through their bodies, discipline and skill, as well as their fears and ambitions.

Fascinated by the social and urban landscapes of the inner Italian cities since his childhood, Piero Pompili developed a deep attachment to the energy and passion of the common people. His approach to photography is realistic, not idealized, and presents real people who struggle with doubt but accept discipline and sacrifice through commitment. Pompili focused his images not on the battle itself but rather the strenuous routine of daily workouts and the rituals practiced by the boxers before their entry into the ring.

In April of 2017, Pompili published his “Gladiatori Moderni”, a collection of photographs printed through media company Salzgeber’s book division Bruno Gmuender. The photographs of these modern gladiators were taken in the borgatas of Rome and Naples, within both the gyms and the catacombs where ancient gladiators prepared for their battles.

Pompili’s work was featured in 2023 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (MART). In conjunction with the exhibition, MART published the exhibition catalogue “Piero Pompili: Pugili”.

Note: The April 2nd 2017 edition of The Advocate has a short biographical article on Piero Pompili and a collection of images from the “Gladiatori Moderni” at its online site: https://www.advocate.com/books/2017/4/02/modern-gladiators#rebelltitem1

Top Insert Image: Piero Ppmpili, “Self Portrait”, May 2025, Instagram

Bottom Insert Image: Piero Pompili, “Lukaska”, 2018, “Gladiatori Moderni” Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Michiel Sweerts

Michiel Sweerts, “Wrestling Match”, 1649, Oil on Canvas, 86 x 128 cm, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany

Born in Brussels, Michiel Sweerts was a Flemish painter and printmaker of the Baroque period. known for portraits as well as genre and historical paintings.. During his stay in Rome, he became linked to the Bamboccianti, an informal association of Dutch and Flemish artists known for their paintings and etchings of peasant subjects in Rome and its countryside.

Michiel Sweerts, the son of a Catholic linen merchant, David Sweerts, and Martina Ballu, was baptized at Brussel’s St. Nicholas Church on the twenty-ninth of September in 1618. Nothing is known of his training or any other aspect of his life before 1646 when Sweerts, at the age of twenty-eight, registered as a resident of the Rome’s Santa Maria del Popolo parish. In 1647, Sweerts became an associate of the Accademia di San Luca, a prestigious artist association approved by Papal brief in 1577.

In Rome, Sweerts painted genre paintings in the style of the Bamboccianti and a series of canvases depicting the training of painters in studios and classes. He also was the teacher of William Guglielmo Reuter, a painter from Brussels who was influenced by the Bamboccianti. Having gained a solid reputation for his work, Sweerts was invited to enter the service of Rome’s ruling papal family under the patronage of Prince Camillo Pamphilj, the nephew of Pope Innocent X. Through Prince Pamphilj’s influence, the pope bestowed upon Sweerts the papal title of Cavaliere di Cristo, a honorary title of knighthood.

During his time in Rome, Michiel Sweerts developed a lifelong relationship with the Deutz family, one of the most prominent Amsterdam trading families. In 1651, merchant and financier Jean Deutz gave Sweerts the power of attorney to act as his representative at the local customs house and as an agent on the Italian art market. Despite these patronages, Sweerts left Rome for unknown reasons between 1552 and 1654; he is recorded in Brussels in July of 1655 at a baptism. In 1659, Sweerts joined the local Guild of Saint Luke which represented the trades of local artists. He also opened an academy in Brussels where his students could work from live models.

During his time in Brussels, Sweerts became more devout and joined the Missions Étrangères, a Catholic missionary organization that was committed to proselytizing in the Far East. Between 1658 and 1661, he spent several periods in Amsterdam where he supervised the construction of a ship for the transport of the Missions Étrangères group to the Turkish city of Alexandretta and then to the Far East. By December of 1661, Sweerts had arrived in Marseilles, France; he departed by ship for Palestine in January of 1662.

Michiel Sweerts met the Étrangères delegation of Bishop François Pallu and seven priests in Palestine and sailed with them to Syria. In the Syrian city of Aleppo, he painted and proselytized; however, Sweerts was dismissed from the mission after only two years because of his unstable and undisciplined character. He traveled overland through Persia and eventually reached the Portuguese Jesuit community in the Indian city of Goa, According to missionary records, Sweerts died at Goa in June of 1664 at the age of forty-five.

Sweerts’s surviving works were mostly created during his residency in Rome. As he rarely signed his paintings, the total number varies from forty to one hundred. Due to Sweerts’s popularity at the time, many copies were made by his contemporaries, both pupils and followers. None of Sweerts’s Biblical compositions, mentioned in contemporary inventories, or the work he produced after his departure from Europe are known to have survived.

Among the genre scenes attributed to Michiel Sweerts are two that reprised the popular subject of game players, the 1652 “Damspelers (Draughts Players)” and the 1646-1652 “De Kaartspelers (Card Players)”, both of which are housed in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Between 1646 and 1649, Sweerts produced a series of seven Biblical scenes, “Seven Acts of Mercy”, which display his masterly use of chiaroscuro to create dramatic lighting effects. He also developed new themes such as that of Roman street wrestlers in his 1649 “Wrestling Match”, again a strong example of his use of chiaroscuro.

Michiel Sweerts painted the majority of his portraits in Brussels and Amsterdam between 1655 and 1661. He was interested in depicting ordinary people and explored their distinctive characters through their curious expressions and sideway glances. Among these portraits are the 1654 “Head of a Woman” with its downward gaze, the simply-dressed maidservant in the 1660 “Portrait of a Young Woman” and the 1656 pensive “Portrait of a Young Man”, now in the collection of the Hermitage. Sweerts’s most ambitious work in terms of composition and technical achievement was the 1652-1654 “Plague in an Ancient City”, a dramatic depiction in the classical style of the devastation caused by the bubonic plague. This epic work is now housed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In July of 2023, Michiel Sweerts’s long-lost painting, “The Artist’s Studio with a Seamstress”, sold at Christie’s London for a record of 21.6 million Pounds, four times the previous auction record for an artist little known outside the Old Master world. Thought to have been painted around 1646-1649 in Rome, this signed work was discovered in untouched condition at a house in France.

Notes: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has an informative article entitled “Michiel Sweerts and Biblical Subjects in Dutch Art” written by Walter Liedtke for the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. This article can be found at: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/swee/hd_swee.htm

Top Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Self Portrait with Skull”, circa 1660, Oil on Canvas, 78.7 x 60.9 cm, Agnes Etherington Art Center, Queens University, Canada

Second Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Clothing the Naked”, 1646-1649, “Seven Acts of Mercy” Series, Oil on Canvas, 74 x 99 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Third Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Mars Destroying the Arts”, 1650-1652, Oil on Canvas, 69 x 51 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Hommes se Baignant (Bathers)”, 1655, Oil on Canvas, 109 x 164 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg, France

Bottom Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Boy in a Turban Holding a Nosegay”, 1658-1661, Oil on Canvas, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Gerard van Honthorst

Gerard van Honthorst, “Saint Sebastian”, circa 1623, Oil on Canvas, 101 x 117 cm, The National Gallery, London, United Kingdom

Born in November of 1592 in Utrecht, an important trade center of the Northern Netherlands, Gerard van Honthorst was a Dutch Golden Age painter who was known for his artificially lit scenes. In his early career in Rome, he had great success painting in a style influenced by the work of Caravaggio. Upon his return to the Netherlands, Honthorst became a prominent portrait and allegorical painter.

The son of a decorative painter, Gerard van Honthorst initially trained under his father and finished his education under painter and printmaker Abraham Bloemaert, a painter of historical subjects and an early advocate of the emerging Baroque style. Bloemaert was an important teacher who would train most of the Utrecht painters who were influenced by Caravaggio’s style. Upon completion of his education, Honthorst traveled to Rome where he lodged at the palace of Vincenzo Giustiniani, an aristocratic banker and art collector whose collected paintings and sculptures totaled over fifteen-hundred pieces.

Honthorst was influenced by the contemporary artists in Giustiniani’s collection, particularly those works by Caravaggio, Bartolomeo Manfredi and the Carracci family of artists. The technique used by these artists to depict light in their canvases strongly impressed the young artist. While lodged at Giustiniani’s palace, Honthorst painted his 1617 oil on canvas “Christ Before the High Priest”, a work in which lighting plays a particular importance. The scene of Jesus questioned by the priest Calaphas takes place at night with the only source of light being a candle in the center of the table. Jesus and Calphas are illuminated by that candle; all the secondary figures in the room are shrouded in darkness.

Gerard van Honthorst acquired an important patron in Rome, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a member of the Borghese family and also the patron of Caravaggio and Gian Lonrenzo Bernini. Through the Cardinal, Honthorst received important commissions at Monte Compatri and Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. He also received work from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II de’ Medici. In 1620, Honthorst returned to Utrecht and through his new work increased his reputation in the Dutch Republic and abroad.

In 1623, the year of his marriage, Honthorst became president of Utrecht’s Guild of Saint Luke, a city guild of painters and other artists in early Europe. His reputation was such that the English envoy at the Hague, Sir Dudley Carleton, recommended his work to Lord Dorchester and the Earl of Arundel, courtier to King James I and King Charles I. Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, the sister of Charles I, commissioned Honthorst as portrait painter and as drawing-master for her children. He was invited to England in 1628 where he painted several portraits, a vast allegorical scene featuring Charles and his queen as Apollo and Diana, and an intimate group portrait “The Four Eldest Children of the King of Bohemia”.

Upon his return to Utrecht in 1652, Gerard van Honthorst, still retained by Charles I, painted a 1631 group portrait of the king and queen of Bohemia and all their children. He also painted scenes from “The Odeyssey” for Lord Dorchester, historical scenes in 1635 for Christian IV of Denmark, and a portrait of Countess Leonora during her visit to the Hague. Honthorst opened a second studio in the Hague where he painted portraits of the members of the court, employed a large number of assistants to make replicas of royal portraits, and taught students, each paying one hundred guilders a year.

A prolific artist, Gerard van Honthorst passed away in April of 1656. Many of his paintings, cultivated in the style of Caravaggio, involved tavern scenes with musicians, gamblers and people dining. He was very skilled in the art of chiaroscuro, the strong use of contrasts between light and dark to affect the whole composition.

In November of 2013, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC purchased Honthorst’s 1623 “The Concert” from a private collection in France. The painting went on display for the first time in two-hundred and eighteen years at a special installation in the National Gallery’s West Building in November of 2013. It is now on permanent display in the museum’s Dutch and Flemish galleries.

Notes: Gerard van Honthorst was one of the first artists to portray Saint Sebastian as a half-length figure, slumped forward in a seated position. The pose was subsequently adopted by other followers of Caravaggio in Utrecht, including Hendrik te Brugghen and Jan van Bijlert in the mid-1620s. The painting “Saint Sebastian” was most likely painted shortly after Honthorst’s return to Utrecht from Rome in 1620.

Top Insert Image: Pieter de Jode II, “Gerrit (Gerard) van Honthorst”, Engraving, From Cornelis de Bie’s “Her Golden Cabinet”, Publisher Joannes Meyseens, Antwerp, 1661

Second Insert Image: Gerard van Honthorst, “Saint Peter Penitent”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 110.2 x 97.4 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Gerard van Honthorst, “Old Woman Examing a Coin”, 1623, Oil on Canvas, 75 x 60 cm, The Kremer Collection, Amsterdam

Bottom Insert Image: Gerard van Honthorst, “The Denial of St. Peter”, 1622, Oil on Canvas, 111 x 149 cm, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Teresa Oaxaca

Teresa Oaxaca, “Patrick”, 2012, Oil on Canvas, 70 x 40 Inches, Private Collection

Teresa Oaxaca is an American-born painter who is currently living and working in Washington DC. She graduated with a BA from the Angel Academy of Art located in Florence, Italy. Oaxaca did her graduate studies at the Florence Academy, with an apprenticeship with Swedish-born figurative painter Odd Nerdum in Norway. She continues her studies at the Art League of Alexandria, Virginia, training with realist artists Robert Liberace. Oaxaca currently teaches workshops in the United States and Europe.

With her studies in Italy, Teresa Oaxaca has mastered the mid-17th century Renaissance painting technique of chiaroscuro. The term ‘chiaroscuro’ originated as drawing on colored paper, where the artist worked from the paper’s base tone towards light using white gouache, and towards dark using ink or watercolor. This technique enables a painter or draftsman to increase the depth and solidity of an image, heightening realism through the use of strong contrasts between light and dark tones.

Teresa Oaxaca has participated with local groups including The Arts Club of Washington, The Art League School of Alexandria, and the National Education Association. She became a member in 2014 of the Young Partners Circle of The national Museum of Women in the Arts. Oaxaca’s work has been recognized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Posey Foundation, The American Museum of the Cowboy, The Portrait Society of America, and the Museu Europeu d’Art Modern located in Barcelona.

Current works by Teresa Oaxaca can be seen at her site: https://www.teresaoaxaca.com