- NameGiovanni Battista Pace
- Activity/Titlepainter, draughtsman, engraver
- Sexmale
- Variant namesGiovanni Battista Pace
- Nationality/DatesItalian
- PlacesPlace of birth: Rom, Italien
BiographyGiovanni Battista Pace was the son of the noted
still-life painter Michele Pace, called Michelangelo
da Campidoglio (1610–1670). Although we
do not yet have sufficient information and cannot
ascertain the exact year, Pace was probably born
around 1640/45. Like his father, he entered the
service of the Chigi family quite early. This is
evidenced by documents which show that in 1664
he was commissioned to paint copies of Cavaliere
d’Arpino’s (1568–1640) frescoes in the Palazzo
dei Conservatori, Rome, copies which today are
still in the Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia. In 1665 Pace
received a commission from Cardinal Flavio
Chigi (1631–1693), nephew of Pope Alexander VII
(1599–1667), to paint two large canvases of the
Rest on the Flight into Egypt and the Dream of St
Joseph, now in private collections in Rome. The
documents concerning this commission are dated
9 December 1665, and state that Pace received
140 scudi. The two paintings were published by
Italo Faldi in 1966, and since then Richard Cocke
and Erich Schleier in particular have looked
more closely at the works of Pace and managed to
identify his style and oeuvre in relation to Mola’s.
In addition, some major works formerly attributed
to Mola have been identified as by Pace. Most
notably, Alistair Laing discovered in 1989 that
the St Jerome at Buscot Park, attributed to Mola,
was actually listed as a work of Pace in the 1686
Barberini inventory. This discovery led Cocke to
reappraise several works with uncertain attributions
to Mola, primarily from his late period, and
assign them instead to Pace.