The Painter of Gentle Souls: The Life and Legacy of Gaetano Bellei Gaetano Bellei (1857–1922) remains one of the most evocative voices in late nineteenth-century Italian art, a painter whose brush captured not just the physical world, but the very pulse of human emotion. Born in Modena to Lorenzo and Vienna Molinari, Bellei was raised in a family of merchants, an upbringing that perhaps instilled in him the meticulous eye for detail a…