Bellori was born in Rome on 15 January 1613, the purported son of Giacomo, a farmer. He was reared and educated by his mother's employer (and more probable biological father),
Francesco Angeloni, who was an
antiquarian, writer of
comedies, dialogues and operas, a
numismatist (
Historia Augusta, 1641) and collector of art, antiquities and natural history (he had
Correggio,
Bassano and
Titian among his paintings). Angeloni fostered in Bellori an interest in collecting and interpreting antiquities, and indeed his interest in the antique was pivotal to his whole career. In the spring of 1661 he accompanied the representative of
Louis XIV in Rome, M. Parisot on a long trip through Southern Italy. He became a member of the
French Academy in 1689. He was appointed Commissario delle Antichità by
Pope Clement X on 31 May 1670. Bellori was librarian and antiquarian to
Queen Christina of Sweden from 1677 to 1689. While serving Christina, he certainly met
Filippo Baldinucci, the Florentine writer on art, who visited Rome in 1681 on the occasion of the Queen's commission to him for a biography of
Gian Lorenzo Bernini. By 1695 Bellori was very ill, suffering especially in his lower legs, and had not left his house since mid 1694. He died on 19 February 1696, and was buried in the
Church of S. Isidoro. Bellori lived on the
Pincian Hill near S. Isidoro, where he rebuilt the dispersed collection of Angeloni. Travellers' diaries and guidebooks confirm that Bellori had assembled a small but well-chosen
gallery, with works attributed to Titian,
Tintoretto,
Van Dyck, Maratta and Annibale Carracci, amongst others. After his death, his collection was purchased by
Frederick I of Prussia and
Augustus III of Saxony. Bellori's collection of ancient gems and
medals found their way to
Dresden where they helped shape
J.J. Winckelmann's vision of antiquity. Bellori was one of the most important intellectuals of seventeenth-century Italy. He was the author of several learned
archeological treatises, widely respected by later antiquarians and reprinted in great part in the
Thesaurus of
Graevius and
Gronovius. His
Nota dei Musei (1664) catalogued private and ecclesiastical libraries and collections in Rome and included the first detailed study of ancient painting. His
poem 'On Painting' was published in 1642 to introduce
Baglione's '
Lives'. Bellori's own
Vite ('Lives', 1672) — a basic source for the history of 17th-century art — includes a selection of artists, on whom he had been collecting material from the 1640s. Some are Roman and others claimed for the Roman school, and the biographies are introduced by a scholarly apologia on idealization. His friend Carlo Maratta contributed funds for the posthumous publication of Bellori's ''Descrizzione delle imagini dipinte de Raffaelle d'Urbino'' (1696), which describes
Raphael Rooms in the
Apostolic Palace and the Loggia of Cupid and Psyche in the
Villa Farnesina. ==Works==