Nicolas Poussin portrait from Vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti by G. P. Bellori, Rome 1672

Italian painter, antiquarian and art theoretician Giovanni Pietro Bellori studied painting in the workshop of Domenichino (whose work Poussin admired). He later held the position of curator of the collections of Pope Clement X. In the 1650s, he began to meet with Poussin, a fellow art theorist. Both preferred rationally-arranged classicism to Baroque dynamism. Bellori’s most important work Vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti, comprises 13 profiles of artists, including Poussin. Besides the artists’ biographies, Bellori’s Vite also describes their major artworks and records his own theoretical reflections.