Giuseppe Marchesi (1699–1771) was an Italian painter of the

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 ...

period, active mainly in

Bologna Bologna (, , ; egl, label= Emilian, Bulåggna ; lat, Bononia) is the capital and largest city of the Emilia-Romagna region in Northern Italy. It is the seventh most populous city in Italy with about 400,000 inhabitants and 150 different nat ...

. He was also known as ''il Sansone'' for his herculean build. He was first a pupil of the painter

Aureliano Milani Aureliano Milani (1675–1749) was an Italian painter of the late-Baroque period, active in Bologna and Rome. He was a pupil of Cesare Gennari and Lorenzo Pasinelli in Bologna, although he also adhered to a style derived from the Carracci. He to ...

and then of

Marcantonio Franceschini Marcantonio Franceschini (; 1648 – 24 December 1729) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, active mostly in his native Bologna. He was the father and teacher of Giacomo Franceschini.''The picture collector's manual'' by James R. Hobb ...

. Giuseppe Marchesi was born in Bologna on 19 July 1699. His first teacher was the bolognese painter Aureliano Milani until 1719, when Milani left Bologna for Rome. So, Marchesi entered the workshop of Marcantonio Franceschini, at the time the best exponent of the classicist style in Bologna, and maybe in Europe, at least until the affirmation of Donato Creti. From Aureliano Milani Giuseppe Marchesi borrowed Carracci's taste for some athletic male figures, and at the same time derived from Franceschini a wonderful lightness in representing images of women, children and angels, with a very personal style, that always maintained the ability of Franceschini to render clear complexions suffused with gentle redness and harmony in composition. At the moment, are not known works realized while he was a pupil of Franceschini who, being of a particularly moderate nature, ended up driving the young Marchesi from his ''atelier'' because of the excessive vivacity of the latter's character. "The Rape of Elena" is first work of sure dating was realised for the great hall of the Buratti house, in Bologna, in 1725, and so after the expulsion of Marchesi from Franceschini's workshop. A little previous are to be considered the paintings with the Four Seasons (National Art Gallery of Bologna). These paintings, interpreting in a very personal way the Franceschini style, maintain the taste for the arcadic ambientation, but with a chromatic range that is detached from that of the master and leads back, rather, to Lorenzo Pasinelli, to reach a more refined naturalism in the "Nocturnal Winter", in which Marchesi experiments realistic and unusual games of light and shadows, that demonstrate, as the others three works, a knowledge of the Northern European

Rococo painting Rococo (, also ), less commonly Roccoco or Late Baroque, is an exceptionally ornamental and theatrical style of architecture, art and decoration which combines asymmetry, scrolling curves, gilding, white and pastel colours, sculpted moulding, ...

. However, already "The rape of Elena" documents the start of the passage of Giuseppe Marchesi to what will be the second and central phase of his activity, in which, fascinated by the style of Vittorio Maria Bigari (Bologna 1692 - 1776), the "Sansone" will pass to very translucent colors, with slender figures, crystalline skyes and seas, and backgrounds of classic vertex architectures. At this phase belong "Achilles takes leave of the Centaur Chiron" (Hinton Ampner, Hampshire) and "Clement VIII returns the keys of the city of Bologna to the Elders" (1739-1740), of the Civic Collections of Ancient Art of Bologna. In the third and last period Giuseppe Marchesi, while remaining an excellent performer, will lose the compositional lightness that had characterized his youth and mature age, apparently due to a state of depression caused by the declining health of his wife. He died in Bologna on 16 February 1771. The Beccadelli House in Bologna has some ground floor rooms decorated by

Vittorio Bigari Vittorio Bigari (1692 – 1776) was an Italian painter of the late-Baroque period. Biography He was born in Bologna in 1692. His main biographer was Zanotti. He was initially trained in the art of stucco and sculpture, a pupil of Antonio D ...

(1692–1776) and Marchesi. The Zambeccari Library, formerly of the Jesuit order, was decorated by Nicola Bertuzzi and Marchesi as figure painters, Pietro Scandelari in

quadratura Illusionistic ceiling painting, which includes the techniques of perspective ''di sotto in sù'' and ''quadratura'', is the tradition in Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo art in which ''trompe-l'œil'', perspective tools such as foreshortening, an ...

and

Antonio Calegari Antonio Calegari (17 February 1757, in Padua – 22 or 28 July 1828) was an Italian classical composer. His oratorio An oratorio () is a large musical composition for orchestra, choir, and soloists. Like most operas, an oratorio includes the u ...

as stuccoist.La Biblioteca Zambeccari
/ref> Among his pupils was Antonio Peracchi.

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Marchesi, Giuseppe 1699 births 1771 deaths 18th-century Italian painters Italian male painters Italian Baroque painters Rococo painters 18th-century Italian male artists