Girolamo Negri known as Il Boccia

It may have been Girolamo Negri’s love of wine that earned him the nickname Il Boccia (or Pitcher), but at any rate the biographical information we have for him is very scant. According to a summary biography put together by the scholar Marcello Oretti, Negri initially joined the painter Domenico Maria Canuti’s workshop before moving to that of Lorenzo Pasinelli when Canuti left for Rome in 1672 (Bologna, Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio: M. Oretti, ms. B. 130, c. 1760–80, pp. 42-45). Ten years later Negri was in Faenza, decorating the vault of the Celestine fathers’ church (now destroyed). His other public commissions included work for the Jesuits in Modena and in Mirandola, namely a large Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew painted on the inner façade of the eponymous church in Modena in 1688, and an altarpiece depicting St. Liborius Adoring the Blessed Virgin in Mirandola (now in that city’s civic museum following the earthquake of 2012). In the wake of his success in the Modena area, Negri also painted religious works in Bologna: St. Peter and the Angel for the sacristy in the Cathedral of San Pietro, and two lost works for the Oratory of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in 1699. In parallel with his public works, however, the artist also produced a large number of ‘character heads’, a self-standing genre immensely popular in Bologna that consisted in depicting heads without any particular aspiration to portraiture. We have very little information regarding his life after 1699, the last mention of him occurring in 1721 when he delivered paintings to Pompeo Aldrovandi.