Miseria & Nobiltà. Giacomo Ceruti nell'Europa del Settecento, a cura di R. D'Adda, F. Frangi, A. Morandotti, Milano, Skira 2023
Miseria & Nobiltà. Giacomo Ceruti nell'Europa del Settecento, a cura di R. D'Adda, F. Frangi, A. Morandotti, Milano, Skira 2023
2023
Catalogo della mostra allestita al Museo di Santa Giulia a Brescia
Related Papers
2023 •
2023 •
The paper focuses on Giacomo Ceruti's stay in the Veneto region, where he worked for prominent clients, including Johann Matthias von den Schulenburg, and at one of the primary painting sites in Northern Italy, the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua.
2023 •
The paper is divided in two different sections. Starting from the "Vecchia contadina" and the "Bravo" (Old peasant woman and Bravo) in the Sorlini collection, this study analyzes the stylistic evolution in the works of Giacomo Ceruti at the end of hi Brescian stay, with particular emphasis on the influence exerted by the legacy of the so called "pittura della realtà" in Lombardy between the 17th and 18th centuries. An undisputed protagonist of this situation has been Pietro Bellotti and for this reason this section is focused on revisit and reevaluate his work, highlighting the role played by Bellotti in this context. The second part, on the other hand, addresses a pivotal work from Giacomo Ceruti's mature period, "Diana and the Nymphs Surprised by Actaeon." Starting from this painting, the study provides an opportunity to revisit the artist's secular-themed works and the influences he encountered during his stay in the Veneto region, between Venice and Padua, from the mid-1730s to 1738. In this regard will be examined the cycle executed by Ceruti for Palazzo Calderara in Milan, from which the large Sorlini canvas originates, identifying the occasion for the commission in the marriage between Antonio Calderara Junior and Margherita Litta Visconti.
The Modern State in Naples and Bourbon Europe: Historiography and Sources
La Nobiltà nel Settecento: piccolo bilancio e spunti di riflessione2019 •
2018 •
The personalities and biographies of the young gentlemen both reflect and influence, at the same time, the variety and the dynamics of the Italian aristocratic world in the eighteenth century. According to a commonplace of the time, masterfully developed in the poem Il giorno (The Day) of Giuseppe Parini, the scions of aristocratic families are often lazy, narcissist and effeminate dandies. Many unpublished archival sources of different provenances allow to specify the reasons and the effective historical role of this social phenomenon. But above all, they help to clarify similarities and differences in attitudes and customs of the «giovin signori» (young noblemen) of the Peninsula and the major adjacent islands during the last century of the Old Regime. Thus, in light of their family relationships, their cultural background, their progressive integration into the «gran mondo» (high society), the young aristocrats are manifested in the concreteness of their experience and in the reality of their class membership.
After twenty-five years from the publishing of Mina Gregori's notorious biography of Giacomo Ceruti, painter from Brescia, his life and works need to be re-analysed in the light of new evidences which confirm his formal proximity to the Neerlandish Art. In particular, we found out new inspiration by investigating into the late production of the Artist, although this is the less considered. One of the key perspectives for reading Neerlandish Art is the tot lering en vermaak concept, i.e. "learning and enjoying" in its double function of both moral warning and visual pleasure. We applied this concept in reviewing Ceruti's late works and had confirmation of such a typical neerlandish influence: the use of well known and tested visual paradigms aimed at demonizing social evils and calling to a strict ethical and moral conduct. Our anaysis started from a formal comparison with graphical works of neerlandish origin that Mina Gregori already identified in the engravers Bloemaert, Nicoleas Berchem and his circle in Amterdam, and found out a further confirmation in Johann Heinrich Roos' engravings from which Ceruti had certainly taken inspiration confirming his personal interest for north european graphical art, in addition to ancient literature together with neo-illuminist books which he collected for sure. In the light of these clues, that were originated by Mina Gregori's studies, a new chapter is going to be written in order to completing Ceruti's profile as seen in closer contact with formal and iconological prototypes belonging to distant (both geographically and chronologically) artistic landscapes.