Christopher Bakke was born in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and studied art history in Paris at the Sorbonne and the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He worked in the curatorial department of the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples. He specializes in the history and technique of early seventeeth-century Italian painting.With Pauline Deschamps-Kahn, he has also lectured extensively on the birth of the interdisciplinary and scientific study of art in France during the nineteeth century. Bakke is also a photographer of art, as well as a technical art historian specializing in macro and infrared imagery. Moreover, as a photographer he emphasizes th importance of producing environmental portraits that capture the artist, the scholar, and the spectator in the presence of the art object.