Bernhard Keil Biography
Eberhard or Bernhard Keilhau (Helsingør, 1624 – Rome, 3 February 1687) was a Danish painter. Eberhard Keilhau or simply Keil was a Danish painter, perhaps the most famous ancient painter of this nation, he was known in Italy with the pseudonym of Monsù Bernardo, he arrived in the Netherlands at eighteen and was in Rembrandt's workshop in Amsterdam, where he stayed between 1642 and 1644 although his first teacher was the Dane Morten van Steenwinkel in whose workshop he was placed by his father at the age of twelve. Besides the altarpieces, which were his first works, he was one of the most original genre painters and massively influenced the art of genre painters such as Salvator Rosa, Antonio Amorosi, (Ceruti was born in 1698 ) and other representatives of seventeenth-eighteenth-century Italian painting, with visionary and popular subjects. Monsù Bernardo's father was the painter Gaspard of German origin, much appreciated in the court of Christian IV of Denmark. Before his arrival in Italy he went through various vicissitudes and was commissioned to carry out his first works in various German cities such as Frankfurt, Cologne, Mainz and Augsburg. Having arrived in Italy in 1651, he was initially called upon to make portraits, frescoes and canvases of a sacred nature in the territory of the Republic of Venice. One of his canvases with the Virgin and Saint Elias is found in the Church of the Carmelites in Venice, also if most of his works in the territory of the Republic were painted by him in Bergamo (then a city under the control of the Serenissima) where he became friends with Evaristo Baschenis. But his most characteristic works were produced after his arrival in Rome on 31 March 1656 and his encounter with Caravaggism and the Bamboccianti School. He was famous for his allegories such as the Ages of Man, the Five Senses and the Four Elements. . But already at the Civic Museum of Padua there is a canvas of a popular character The players which anticipates his career as a genre painter, although on the long journey that took him from Venice to Rome he also stopped in Ravenna and Ferrarado where he was called to portray the queen Christina of Sweden, who became Catholic and was also traveling to Rome. In 1657, after a whole series of commissions for Roman churches, instead of moving to France, as was his plan, he decided to stay permanently in the eternal city. His paintings of folk subjects cannot be compared with any of his contemporary painters, given the various influences received in his travels from Dutch, German, Venetian to Roman art. But its influence was very important for multilingualism and for this reason it can be considered unique. Monsù Bernardo died in Rome on 3 February 1687 due to pleurisy. Monsù Bernardo was first identified by the art historian Roberto Longhi who in 1938 isolated most of his works from those of Antonio Amorosi, to whom they had until then been attributed.
