Fabrizio Chiari

"Fabritius Clarus" redirects here and is not to be confused with Carel Fabritius (1622–1654), a Dutch painter.

Fabrizio Chiari (c.1615–1695^{[1][2][n 1]}) was an Italian painter and engraver who spent his entire life in Rome.^[1]

Venus and Mercury with Children

Original by Nicolas Poussin	Etching by Fabrizio Chiari

Chiari's early etchings from Nicolas Poussin paintings are described by Michael Bryan as "executed in a scratchy but masterly style";^[4] among them are:^[1][4]

• Mars and Venus, in a landscape, signed "Fabritius Clarus" 1635.
• Venus and Mercury with Children, signed "Chlarus" 1636
• Venus and Adonis, signed "Nicolaus Pussinus"; This etching has been erroneously attributed to Poussin.

Chiari was enrolled in the Accademia di San Luca from 1635.^[1] In San Martino ai Monti in the 1640s he painted the altarpiece, St Martin Dividing his Cloak with the Beggar, and a fresco, The Baptism of Christ, which was overpainted in the 18th century by Antonio Cavallucci.^[5] To mark the 1658 canonization of Thomas of Villanova, he painted St. Thomas of Villanova Distributing Alms for Santa Maria del Popolo.^[6] His Assumption of the Virgin and Death of St Anne, commissioned in 1654 for the chapel of Regina Coeli convent, were misplaced when it became a prison in 1880;^[1][7] the latter turned up in 2012 and in 2019 sold for $30,000 at Sotheby's.^[1][8] Others of Chiari's works are no longer known, including church paintings mentioned by Filippo Titi and drawings listed by Nicola Pio [Wikidata].^[1] In 1675 Chiari decorated the Sala degli Specchi in the Palazzo Altieri, including a ceiling fresco, The Chariot of Apollo,^{[9][n 2]} in which the cornices, unusually, depict the four ages of man rather than the four seasons.^[10]

Footnotes

1. Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi gives 1621 as his birth year.^[3]
2. Not to be confused with the ceiling fresco of the same name in the Palazzo Barberini by Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari.^[9]