Footnote [2.2] The well-known painter Guido, born in 1575 and died in 1642. He early excited the envy of Annibale Caracci.
Footnote [2.3] Mattia Preti, known as Il Cavaliere Calabrese, from his having been born in Calabria. He was a painter of the Neapolitan school and a pupil of Lanfranco, and lived during the greater part of the seventeenth century. Owing to his many disputes and quarrels he was more than once compelled to flee for his life.
Footnote [2.4] The Accademia di San Luca, a school of art, founded at Rome about 1595, Federigo Zuccaro being its first director.
Footnote [2.5] Alessandro Tiarini (1577-1668) of Bologna, was a pupil of the Caracci.
Footnote [2.6] Giovanni Francesco Gessi (1588-1649), sometimes called "The second Guido," was a pupil of Guido.
Footnote [2.7] Sementi or Semenza (1580-1638), also a pupil of Guido.
Footnote [2.8] Giovanni Lanfranco (1581-1647), studied first under Agostino Caracci. He was the first to encourage the early genius of Salvator Rosa.
Footnote [2.9] Zampieri Domenichino (1581-1641) was a pupil of the Caracci. The work here referred to is a series of frescoes, which he did not live to quite finish, representing the events of the life of St. Januarius, in the chapel of the Tesoro of the cathedral at Naples, which he began in 1630.
The malicious spite which the text attributes to the rivals of Domenichino is not at all exaggerated. There did really exist a so-called "Cabal of Naples," consisting chiefly of the painters Corenzio, Ribera, and Caracciolo, who leagued together to shut out all competition from other artists; and their persecution of the Bolognese Domenichino is well known. Often on returning to his work in the morning he found that some one had obliterated what he had done on the previous day.
Not only have we a faithful picture of the Italian artist's life in the middle of the seventeenth century depicted in this tale, but the actual facts of the lives of Salvator Rosa, of Preti, of the Caracci, as well as the existence of Falcone's Compagnia della Morte, furnish ample materials and illustrations of the wild lives they did lead, of their jealousies and heartburnings, of their quarrelsomeness and revengefulness. They seem to have been ready on all occasions to exchange the brush for the sword. They were filled to overflowing with restless energy. The atmosphere of the age they lived in was highly charged with vigour of thought and an irrepressible vitality for artistic production. Under the conditions which these things suppose the artists of that age could not well have been otherwise than what they were.