In several art forms, when everyday realism meets the classic canons of tragedy, the result is often a form of popular comedy influenced by sociohistorical factors.

When in the early 1950's the tragic and deeply factual Italian Neorealist cinematic movement went out of favor, it was replaced by the Commedia all'Italiana genre. "Comedy Italian-style", a charming, inoffensive and extremely popular genre which mixed bits of neo-realism and bits of traditional comedy.

Rooted in antique literature from Boccaccio to the Commedia dell'Arte, much of its humour was based on poking fun at poverty, hunger, sexual mores, misery, old age, sickness, and death.

Similarly, in the history of 17th century art, the harsh reality and objectivity that was characteristic of the Dutch painters opened the floodgates for picturesque souvenir paintings that sold well to tourists, a huge popular success in the form of small pictures of low-life and peasant scenes known as bambocciate.

On his deathbed, painter Michelangelo Cerquozzi (1602 - 1660) - known as Michelangelo delle battaglie ("Michelangelo of the Battles") because of his predilection for battle scenes - in a symbolic last minute return to the popular life he had so often depicted, ordered a couple of stuffed artichokes che io mi voglio saziare a modo mio ("for I want to enjoy myself my own way"). Cerquozzi never managed to finish his meal, for he was later buried with full pomp by the Accademia di San Luca, the very stronghold of classical idealism.

If we were to ask ourselves what exactly stuffed artichokes and classical idealism have in common, one available answer would be "popular art" as an offspring of this rare combination of comedy and tragedy.

Cerquozzi was the only Italian follower of Dutch painter Pieter Van Laer (1595-1642), the leader of a group of northern painters operating in Rome in the mid-17th century, and the originator of the bambocciate style, depicting relatively small, often anecdotal, paintings of everyday life.

The word "bambocciate" derives from the nickname Il Bamboccio ("Large Baby"), applied to the physically malformed Van Laer who arrived in Rome from Haarlem about 1625 and was soon well known for paintings in which his Netherlandish interest in the picturesque was combined with the pictorial cohesiveness of Caravaggio's dramatic tenebrist lighting.

Because Van Laer and his followers depicted scenes of the Roman lower classes in a humorous or even grotesque fashion, their works were condemned by both court critics and the leading painters of the classicist-idealist school as indecorous and ridiculous. The painter Salvator Rosa was particularly savage in his comments about the later followers of the style, whom he criticized for painting "baggy pants, beggars in rags, and abject filthy things."

The Bamboccianti (painters of Bambocciati) influenced such Dutch genre painters as Adriaen Brouwer and Adriaen van Ostade. Two of Pieter van Laer's main followers were Andries and Jan Both. They traveled to Rome from Utrecht where their father was a glass painter. They became linked to van Laer because of their close personal relationship with him, but also because of their choice of subject matter. They chose to depict the low life Roman genre scenes in which van Laer was a specialist. Andries Both is credited with helping van Laer define repertory traditions of the Bamboccianti.

Critics responded cruelly to Andries Both's low life genre scenes because they showed the harsh reality of the slums and the poor of Rome. These types of scenes were not what polite and refined society wished to see when visiting art galleries. In the painting "Hunting by Candlelight" (1630), one can see Andries' depiction of a ludicrous scene showing a peasant engrossed in the business of removing fleas from the body of a man kneeling half clothed in front of him. A third peasant holds a candle to illuminate the operation while a fourth watches with close attention.

Andries Both (1612-1641) was a very talented artist, but unfortunately he drowned in a Venetian canal in 1642, and it is not known whether or not it was suicide or a drunken stupor.