Though he was born and died in
Venice, his paintings are distinctly Roman in style; he moved to
Rome in 1598, joining the
Accademia di San Luca in 1607. He never visited
France, though he spoke fluent French and had French followers and a French wardrobe. His painting, however, was influenced at first by the densely forested, luxuriantly enveloping landscape settings for human figures of
Adam Elsheimer, a German painter resident in Rome; "there are few landscapes by Saraceni which have not been attributed to Elsheimer," Malcolm Waddingham observed, and Anna Ottani Cavina has suggested the influences may have travelled both ways. and Elsheimer's small
cabinet paintings on copper offered a format that Saraceni employed in six landscape panels illustrating
The Flight of Icarus; in
Moses and the Daughters of Jethro, and
Mars and Venus. When Caravaggio's notorious
Death of the Virgin was rejected in 1606 as an altarpiece suitable for a chapel of
Santa Maria della Scala, it was Saraceni who provided the acceptable substitute, which remains
in situ, the only securely dated painting of his first decade in Rome. He was influenced by
Caravaggio's dramatic lighting, monumental figures, naturalistic detail, and momentary action, so that he is numbered among the first of the "
tenebrists" or "
Caravaggisti". Examples of this style can be seen in the candlelit
Judith with the Head of Holofernes. Saraceni's style matured rapidly between 1606 and 1610, and the next decade gave way to his fully mature works, synthesizing Caravaggio and the Venetians. In 1616–17 he collaborated on the frescoes for the
Sala Regia of the
Palazzo del Quirinale. In 1618 he received payment for two paintings in the church of
Santa Maria dell'Anima. The compositional details of his fresco of
The Birth of the Virgin in the Chapel of the Annunciation of the church of
Santa Maria in Aquiro are repeated in a panel on copper at the
Louvre. In 1620 he returned to Venice, where he died in the same year. ==Works==