Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti (October 13, 1698 – August 28, 1767) was an Italian late Baroque painter, active in Northern Italy in

Milan Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...

Brescia Brescia (, locally ; lmo, link=no, label= Lombard, Brèsa ; lat, Brixia; vec, Bressa) is a city and ''comune'' in the region of Lombardy, Northern Italy. It is situated at the foot of the Alps, a few kilometers from the lakes Garda and Iseo ...

, and

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

. 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 and/or Giacomo Todesco (Todeschini), and received training from Carlo Ceresa. While he also painted still-life paintings and religious scenes, Ceruti is best known for his genre paintings, 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

engraving Engraving is the practice of incising a design onto a hard, usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it with a burin. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an in ...

s of

Jacques Callot Jacques Callot (; – 1635) was a baroque printmaker and draftsman from the Duchy of Lorraine (an independent state on the north-eastern border of France, southwestern border of Germany and overlapping the southern Netherlands). He is an impor ...

. The realism Ceruti brought to his genre paintings also distinguishes his

portrait A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expressions are predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. For this r ...

s and still lifes, while it is less apparent in his somewhat conventional decorative paintings for churches, including frescoes for the Basilica Santa Maria Assunta of

Gandino Gandino ( Bergamasque: ) is a ''comune'' (municipality) in the Province of Bergamo in the Italian region of Lombardy, located about northeast of Milan and about northeast of Bergamo. Gandino borders the following municipalities: Casnigo, ...

and an altarpiece for Santa Lucia in

Padua Padua ( ; it, Padova ; vec, Pàdova) is a city and ''comune'' in Veneto, northern Italy. Padua is on the river Bacchiglione, west of Venice. It is the capital of the province of Padua. It is also the economic and communications hub of the ...

. This limitation is not unique to Ceruti; the Brescian painter from the late 16th century,

Giovanni Battista Moroni Giovanni Battista Moroni ( – 5 February 1579) was an Italian painter of the Late Renaissance period. He also is called Giambattista Moroni. Best known for his elegantly realistic portraits of the local nobility and clergy, he is conside ...

, 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 Museo may refer to: * Museo, 2018 Mexican drama heist film *Museo (Naples Metro) Museo is a station on line 1 of the Naples Metro. It was opened on 5 April 2001 as the eastern terminus of the section of the line between Vanvitelli and Museo. ...

Giacomo Ceruti-Boy with a basket.jpg, ''Porter Boy Resting'' (1736),

Pinacoteca di Brera The Pinacoteca di Brera ("Brera Art Gallery") is the main public gallery for paintings in Milan, Italy. It contains one of the foremost collections of Italian paintings from the 13th to the 20th century, an outgrowth of the cultural program of ...

, 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 The Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo is a public art museum in Brescia, Lombardy. Established in 1851, the museum exhibits mainly paintings by local artists dated from the Thirteenth through the Eighteenth century. The museum's current collection in ...

, 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, 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