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Sammartino [San Martino], Marco
(b Naples or environs, fl second half of the 17th century). Italian painter and printmaker. He remains a little-known painter, but his vivid and spontaneous etchings are highly personal and innovative. After a period in Bologna he went to Venice where he became known as a painter of small landscapes with figures (untraced). These were praised for their realism and effects of light. His few known religious works include St Silvester Baptizing Constantine (Rimini, Mus. Com.) from the church of S Colomba in Rimini and St Vincent Preaching in the Desert (Venice, S Vincenzo). His small etchings, of mythological and sacred subjects, show the realism admired in his landscapes. His effective contrasts between dark foreground figures and light distances, with rocks, cottages and clumps of trees, derive from a tradition that runs from Antonio Tempesta to Filippo Napoletano (see 1981 exh. cat., p. 170).
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