In his early works, Nicolas Tournier borrowed a style known as the Manfrediana Methodus. This style was named after the Italian painter Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582-1622), a disciple of Caravaggio. The painter and writer Joachim von Sandrart used it for the first time in 1675. The term defines the manner in which Manfredi reproduced the Caravaggio themes, translating them into simplified, standardised representations that were then handed down to French and Dutch painters present in Rome at that time. One of the most famous of these prototypes is Caravaggio's Vocation of Saint Matthew at the church of Saint-Louis-des-Français in Rome. It is a painting of exceptional modernity, later transformed by Manfredi and his disciples into an anecdotal scene of an inn frequented by bohemians, soldiery and young people of good stock mixing with the riffraff.
Bartolomeo Manfredi is believed to have met Caravaggio around 1605-1606. He played a crucial intermediary role (cf. The Denial of Saint Peter, Brunswick) between the master and painters arriving in Rome after 1620. Without this mediation Caravaggio's radicalism would not have been so well understood. The Manfrediana Methodus was not so much a method as an artistic style that gave rise to a sudden short-lived spurt of some splendid works before fading away after 1630, ten years after Manfredi died. Some of Tournier's works (Le Corps de garde) are so similar to those by Manfredi, that it is sometimes difficult to know who was the author.
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