What did it take to become an artist in seventeenth-century Italy? How did you find a teacher or patron? How did you go about getting commissions? What happened if your patron died or was exiled? What if everybody made fun of your work? This lecture explores the daily reality of life as an artist in Baroque Rome, from the heights of the papal court, where Gian Lorenzo Bernini exchanged witticisms with cardinals and princes, to the dingy workshops where illiterate painters churned out cheap devotional works.

Speaker Jesse Locker is Associate Professor of Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art at Portland State University. He is the author of numerous works on early modern art including Artemisia Gentileschi: The Language of Painting (Yale University Press, 2015), and editor of Art and Reform in the Late Renaissance: After Trent (Routledge, 2018).