Simone Cantarini (1612–1648). A young master between Pesaro, Bologna and Rome

Last year, the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino held a highly successful exhibition devoted to one of the greatest Italian painters, Federico Barocci, a native of the city who left a great many masterpieces in the Marche region (see article).
This year, it is another artist from the same region — born in Pesaro and later than Barocci — who is in the spotlight [1]. Simone Cantarini had already been the subject of a major retrospective in 1997 in Pesaro, and again in 2012 in Pesaro, Fano and Rimini, on the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of his birth. The artist, who died young, is therefore no stranger.

Despite the organisers’ obvious desire to present him as a genius of painting, Cantarini probably does not deserve such an accolade — no more than he deserves to be labelled a secondary painter, as we have heard said here and there. He is unquestionably a good artist, and the exhibition features enough interesting works to justify a visit. One may nevertheless regret that his talent as a draughtsman — arguably greater than his talent as a painter — is completely overlooked, except in one of the catalogue essays. As for his activity as an engraver, which is just as significant, it is virtually absent from the catalogue and can only be discovered incidentally in the rooms housing the museum’s permanent collections.