An Allegory of Love

Angelo Caroselli, who died in 1658, was a self-taught artist who started his career as a restorer and copyist. Indeed, such was his skill that Poussin is reported by Bellori to have been unable to tell the difference between Caroselli’s copy of a Raphael Madonna and the original. Caroselli’s main source of inspiration in his earliest years as an artist was undoubtedly Caravaggio and the new possibilities his revolutionary idiom allowed, both in terms of form, through the powerful naturalism his paintings and chiaroscuro achieved, and content, by depicting the picturesque subjects and bohemian characters who must have lined many of the streets of contemporary Rome. Witchcraft, musicians, complex allegories, and an association with the occult also recur throughout Caroselli’s striking and fantastical oeuvre.

In recent years a corpus of paintings whose style comes very close to that of Caroselli has emerged. Little is known about this artist who has been called the Pseudo-Caroselli, who we prefer to designate ‘Amico di Caroselli’. He, or she, was especially drawn to theatrical subjects, sometimes amorous couples such as this and, in other cases, scenes of sorcery and necromancy. Such was the popularity of this style and these subjects that the Amico di Caroselli himself spawned copyists who paint similar subjects, although at a lower qualitative level, who have in recent years all been grouped under the name ‘Pseudo Caroselli’. Marta Rossetti, who is shortly to publish an article on this phenomenon, notes that there was a ‘Francesco orifice pigionante’ living in Angelo Caroselli’s house in 1642 and 1643. This may have been a French relation through marriage to the Parisian goldsmith Henri Cousin and he may be the mysterious ‘Amico’. However, this painting seems more likely to be a work from the 1620s which would make that identification unlikely. In any case, the author of this group was an artist who must have had direct access to Caroselli, for their styles are often indistinguishable, save for a slightly harder edge to the Pseudo-Caroselli’s forms, as well as an increased interest in the build-up of texture through an accentuated use of impasto. However, the qualitative difference between the two artists is barely distinguishable.