Pietro Bianchi

Who was Pietro Bianchi?

Pietro Bianchi was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, active in Genoa and Rome.

Pietro’s father, Giovanni Bianchi, had moved from Sarzana to Rome in 1682. His sister was married to an attendant to the household of the Marchese Marcello Sacchetti, who noted the boy Pietro’s affinity for drawing. As a boy he was place in the apprenticeship of a painter J. Triga, but then passed on to work in the school of the Genoese Giovanni Battista Gaulli. In 1707, at age 13, he won a drawing competition sponsored by the Accademia di San Luca. In 1709, when Gaulli died, and he entered the studio of Giuseppe Ghezzi then under Benedetto Luti. He painted both religious stories and still life pictures of animals, flowers, and fruits.

Bianchi died at 46 years of age. Giovanni Frossi was one of his pupils.

He painted a St. Clara at Gubbio, and a picture of the Conception for the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli at Rome, of which a mosaic copy is in a chapel of St. Peter's Basilica.