Giovanni Battista Salvi was born at Sassoferrato in the Marches, from where he took his name. His work, which was consciously anachronistic in 17th-century Rome, looked back to the 15th-century manner of Perugino and Raphael. Sassoferrato's paintings consist for the most part of immaculately painted devotional images of the Virgin and Holy Family, usually repeated in several versions.

Sassoferrato was trained in Umbria by his father before moving to Rome, where he was not entirely unaffected by contemporary painters, including Domenichino and Reni. In his late years he was active again in Umbria and in Florence, where he would have known the work of Dolci, and where he may have died.