A Caravaggesque Christ by Simon Vouet

On the face of it, toiling relentlessly to honor royal commissions, the First Painter to Louis XIII and the Cardinal Richelieu epitomized French art in the first third of the 17th century. But Simon Vouet had a many-faceted life before giving birth to classicism, and training many famous figures of the Grand Siècle like Charles Le Brun, Eustache Le Sueur, Michel Dorigny and Michel Corneille the Elder. On the other side of the coin, he always remained the young man thirsting for discovery, who had traveled to London, Constantinople and Venice and lived 15 years in Rome, where he married—and painted—one of the Baroque city’s most sensuous models, the artist Virginia Vezzi. Ten years after leaving Italy, his work still bore the mark of Caravaggism. Power and Fragility The…