GIUSEPPE SPARROWS (Rome, 1654 - 1714) Scene of a Miracle Oil on canvas, 99X136.3 cm Provenance: Rome, private collection Giuseppe Passeri learnt his first lessons from his uncle, the painter and historiographer Giovanni Battista, but his real teacher was Carlo Maratti, who imposed on him the study of the most important artists of Renaissance classicism and the Baroque age, especially Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni and Nicolas Poussin. From the prince of painters, Passeri also acquired a penchant for the genre of portraiture, as Lyon Pascoli attests when speaking of an effigy of his father, now lost, 'that the most expert professors were astonished' (Pascoli, 1730-36, 1992, p. 302). Having said this, our author demonstrated the rare talent of maintaining his own and peculiar creative autonomy, which distanced him from an impersonal interpretation of Martagonism, arriving at a pre-eighteenth-century language that can be clearly observed in the frescoes painted in Palazzo Barberini in 1678. In these works, we perceive a fluid and fast drafting, an advanced pictorialism for his time, also capable of interpreting the teachings of Gaulli and the best Roman manner. Returning to the canvas under examination, we can well compare it for its creative and scenic tenor with the Christ Chasing Merchants from the Temple in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, which, datable between the first and second decade, offers a useful chronological clue (cf. F. Zeri, Italian Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore 1976, pp. 457-458, no. 332). Reference bibliography: M. B. Guerrieri Borsoi, Alcune opere di G. P. per i marchesi Patrizi, in Carlo Marchionni, edited by E. Debenedetti, Rome 1988, pp. 381-403 G. Sestieri, Repertorio della pittura romana della fine del Seicento e del Settecento, Turin 1994, pp. 143-145 A. M. Pedrocchi, Le Stanze del tesoriere. La Quadreria Patrizi..., Milan 2000, pp. 95-249