Name by which the Italian painter and architect Pietro Berretini (Cortona 1596 – Rome 1669) is known. While still very young he became an apprentice (1609) of the Florentine painter Andrea Commodi, whom he then followed to Rome around year 1612. Here, more than the apprenticeship with Commodi and another Florentine painter, Andrea Ciardi, what contributed the most to his formation was the careful meditation he undertook on roman antiques, on the Renaissance artists, on Rubens, on Lafranco, on the frescoes left by Carracci and their collaborators on the Galleria Farnese; and more than one starting point where he could furthermore draw from the contacts with the painters of the neo-Venetian school that at the time was flourishing in Rome. The encounter with marquis Marcello Sacchetti, who belonged to a family tied to the Barberini, opened up for him the road to success: for Sacchetti he painted the Sacrificio di Polissena and Il trionfo di Bacco (both of these now in the Musei Capitolini) and built (1625-30) the Casaletto della Villa del Pigneto , that was then destroyed . When afterwards, through the Sacchetti, he obtained from Pope Urbano VIII Barberini the assignment to fresco the church of S. Bibiana , his extraordinary career as the official painter of the pontifical court begun. The decoration of Villa Sacchetti in Castelfusano ( 1626-30 ) and the completion of the frescoes in Plazzo Barberini's Chapel and Hall's vault (iter 3), afterwards ended in 1639 , date back to these years. The subject of the fresco is the Triumph of the Providence and the fulfillment of Its ends through the power of papacy : a theme suggested by Francesco Bracciolini, a poet from Pistoia , and that Berrettini developed by means of a complicated play of allegories and allegoric references. The result was the most sumptuous and eloquent work of the Roman baroque painting, “heroic”, as it has been said, and one that brought a renewal to “Rome's pagan and imperial flavor” (Briganti). True expression of the pompous taste of the learned and noble Society of the seventeenth century Pontifical Rome, Palazzo Barberini's decoration became the reference point and the model for all the following baroque painting, to which the scenery and perspective researches of Baciccia, P. Pozzo and Luca Giordano, will be related to. He then performed the frescoes of the Chiesa Nuova (1633-65) and those of Villa Pamphili (1651-54), both in Rome (iter 7) . In two successive sojourns in Florence , between 1637 and 1649, Pietro decorated the Sala della Stufa and the ceilings of the Halls of Venus, Jupiter and Mars in Palazzo Pitti, also in these revealing an inexhaustible fantastic vein, capable of drawing from history and myth great starting points for a joyous and magniloquent pictorial figuration. Of its many architectonic projects, only some were realized: the church of SS. Luca e Martina, erected (1635) for the Accademia di San Luca, of which he had been elected prince in 1634; the internal and external arrangement of S. Maria della Pace, 1656-57, (iter 6) ; the façade, with the courtyard and the superimposed loggia of S. Maria in Via Lata (1658-62); the cupola of S. Carlo al Corso, (1665) (iter 7) . In his activity as an architect, although expressing himself in baroque forms, he was able to maintain the Tuscan solidity and essential soberness; with the external arrangement of S. Maria della Pace he created one of the most lovely examples of urban environment of the Roman baroque, while anticipating Borromini himself by imprinting a rich curve and contra-curve play on the façade of the church of SS. Luca and Martina. Among other pupils of his, we find C. Ferri, C. Fancelli. G.B. Contini and A. Gherardi.