Gregorio Sciltian (Nakhicevan 1900 - Rome 1985)

Gregor Sciltian (Nakhicevan, Armenia 1900 – Rome 1985) studied at the Saint Petersburg Academy and made his debut at a very early age with works influenced by the Russian avant-garde of the turn of the century. He emigrated from Russia to Austria, where the museums of Vienna turned him in the direction that would definitively mark his artistic career. He soon adopted the Italian Renaissance as his source of inspiration, and after a stay in Berlin in 1922 he arrived in Italy in 1923. After a stay in Belgium and a protracted period in Milan from 1934 to 1941, he lived and worked in Rome.
His orientation to Caravaggio and his followers translated into a kind of realism that combined immense technical and academic expertise with extreme attention to the most minute detail. He was a constant practitioner of trompe-l’oeil. The genres most characteristic of Sciltian’s opus are portraiture and sumptuous still lifes. His neo-Caravaggian approach led Roberto Longhi, who would in fact devote years of work to the study of Caravaggio, to offer him a critical acclaim that was confirmed abroad in shows in Belgium, Germany and Britain.