Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti (October 13, 1698 – August 28, 1767) was an Italian late

Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...

painter, active in Northern Italy in Milan, Brescia, and

Venice Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 ...

. He acquired the nickname Pitocchetto (the little beggar) for his many paintings of peasants dressed in rags. He was born in Milan, but worked primarily in Brescia. He may have been influenced early by

Antonio Cifrondi Antonio Cifrondi (June 11, 1655 – October 30, 1730) was an Italian painter of the late Baroque, mainly of genre themes. He was active in Brescia and near Bergamo. He was born to a poor mason in Clusone. After some local training. Cifrondi moved ...

and/or

Giacomo Todesco Giacomo is an Italian name. It is the Italian version of the Hebrew name Jacob. People * Giacomo (name), including a list of people with the name Other uses * Giacomo (horse) Giacomo (foaled February 16, 2002 in Kentucky) is a champion Americ ...

(Todeschini), and received training from

Carlo Ceresa Carlo Ceresa (January 20, 1609 – January 29, 1679) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period active mainly around Bergamo. Biography Born in 1609 at San Giovanni Bianco, a town in the Brembana Valley in the province of Bergamo, Ceresa was ...

. While he also painted still-life paintings and religious scenes, Ceruti is best known for his

genre painting Genre painting (or petit genre), a form of genre art, depicts aspects of everyday life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities. One common definition of a genre scene is that it shows figures to whom no identity can be attached ...

s, especially of beggars and the poor, whom he painted realistically and endowed with unusual dignity and individuality. Ceruti gave particular attention to this subject matter during the period 1725 to 1740, and about 50 of his genre paintings from these years survive.Spike, 1986, pp. 66. Mira Pajes Merriman, in her essay titled ''Comedy, Reality, and the Development of Genre Painting in Italy'', observes that "Generally his figures do almost nothing—after all, they have nothing to do."Spike, 1986, pp. 66-67. She describes his paintings as confronting us with

the detritus of the community; the displaced and homeless poor; the old and the young with their ubiquitous spindles, eloquent signs of their situationless poverty and unwanted labor; orphans in their orderly, joyless asylums plying their unpaid toil; urchins of the streets eking out small coins as porters, and sating them in gambling; the diseased, palsied, and deformed; lonely vagabonds; even a stranger from Africa—and all in tatters and filthy rags, almost all with eyes that address us directly...

A characteristic painting is his ''Woman with a Dog'' which portrays a rather plain subject sympathetically and without idealization. Like most of his figures, she appears before an undifferentiated dark background; when Ceruti attempted to represent deep space, the results were frequently awkward. His landscape backgrounds resemble stage flats and are often copied from print sources, such as the engravings of Jacques Callot. The realism Ceruti brought to his genre paintings also distinguishes his portraits and

still life A still life (plural: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly wikt:inanimate, inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or artificiality, m ...

s, while it is less apparent in his somewhat conventional decorative paintings for churches, including frescoes for the Basilica Santa Maria Assunta of Gandino and an altarpiece for Santa Lucia in Padua. This limitation is not unique to Ceruti; the Brescian painter from the late 16th century, Giovanni Battista Moroni, was similarly known for expressive portraits, and drab religious paintings.

Gallery

Giacomo Ceruti - The Dwarf - WGA4665.jpg, ''Dwarf'' Giacomo Ceruti - Beggar Resting - WGA4661.jpg, ''Beggar Resting'' Giacomo Ceruti - The Spinner - WGA04676.jpg, ''Spinner Woman'', Museo di Santa Giulia, Brescia Giacomo Ceruti-Boy with a basket.jpg, ''Porter Boy Resting'' (1736), Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan Giacomo Ceruti - Encounter in the Wood - WGA04669.jpg, ''Encounter in Woods'' Giacomo Ceruti - Little Beggar Girl and Woman Spinning - WGA4670.jpg, ''Beggar Girl and Woman Spinning'' Giacomo Ceruti - Women Working on Pillow Lace (The Sewing School) - WGA4672.jpg, ''Women Sewing Lace'' Giacomo Ceruti - Sleeping Pilgrim - WGA04671.jpg, ''Sleeping Pilgrim'' Giacomo Ceruti - The Laundress - WGA04667.jpg, ''The Laundress'' (1735), Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, Brescia Giacomo Ceruti - Three Beggars - WGA04662.jpg, ''Three Beggars'' Giacomo Ceruti - Evening at the Piazza - WGA04666.jpg, ''Porters in Cardgame'' (also ''Evening at the Piazza'') (1730),

Palazzo Madama Palazzo Madama might refer to: * Palazzo Madama, Rome * Palazzo Madama, Turin Palazzo Madama e Casaforte degli Acaja is a palace in Turin, Piedmont. It was the first Senate of the Kingdom of Italy, and takes its traditional name from the embelli ...

, Turin Giacomo Ceruti - Boy with a Basket of Fish - WGA4664.jpg, ''Boy with Basket of Fish'' Giacomo Ceruti - Still-Life with Hen, Onion and Pot - WGA4678.jpg, ''Hen, Pot, and Onion'' Giacomo Ceruti - Still-Life - WGA04677.jpg, ''Lobster, Fish, & Shellfish'' Giacomo Ceruti - Still-Life - WGA4679.jpg, ''Bread and Pitcher'' Ceruti Giacomo Portrait of Donna Alba Regina del Ferro three quarter length in a black dress holding a book oil on canvas-huge.jpg, ''D. Alba Regina del Ferro'' Giacomo Ceruti - Portrait of a Man - WGA4674.jpg, ''Portrait'' Giacomo Ceruti - Portrait of a Woman - WGA4675.jpg, ''Portrait'' Giacomo Ceruti - Portrait of a Smoking Man in Oriental Habit - WGA4668.jpg, ''Smoking Man in Turban'' Madonna con S Giuseppe, Lorenzo e Antonio - Giacomo Ceruti detto Pitocchetto - Chiesa di S Antonio Abate - Rino di Sonico (Foto Luca Giarelli).jpg, ''Madonna & Saints, Altarpiece''

Notes

Resources

External links

Painters of reality: the legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy
an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Ceruti (see index) {{DEFAULTSORT:Ceruti, Giacomo 1698 births 1767 deaths 17th-century Italian painters Italian male painters 18th-century Italian painters Italian Baroque painters Italian genre painters Orientalist painters Artists from Milan 18th-century Italian male artists