Giuseppe Crespi


Giuseppe Maria Crespi, nicknamed Lo Spagnuolo, was an Italian late Baroque painter of the Bolognese School. His eclectic output includes religious paintings and portraits, but he is now most famous for his genre paintings.

Biography

Crespi was born in Bologna to Girolamo Crespi and Isabella Cospi. His mother was a distant relative of the noble Cospi family, which had ties to the Florentine House of Medici. He was nicknamed "the Spanish One" because of his habit of wearing tight clothes characteristic of Spanish fashion at the time.
By age 12 years, he apprenticed with Angelo Michele Toni. From the age of 15–18 years, he worked under the Bolognese Domenico Maria Canuti. The Roman painter Carlo Maratti, on a visit to Bologna, is said to have invited Crespi to work in Rome, but Crespi declined. Maratti's friend, the Bolognese Carlo Cignani invited Crespi in 1681–82 to join an Accademia del Nudo for the purpose of studying drawing, and he remained in that studio until 1686, when Cignani relocated to Forlì and his studio was taken over by Canuti's most prominent pupil, Giovanni Antonio Burrini. From this time on, Crespi worked independently of other artists.
His main biographer, Giampietro Zanotti, said of Crespi: " never again wanted for money, and he would make the stories and caprices that came into his imagination. Very often, he also painted common things, representing the lowest occupations, and people who, born poor, must sustain themselves in serving the requirements of wealthy citizens". Thus it was for Crespi himself, as he began a career servicing wealthy patrons with artwork. He is said to have had a camera optica in his house for painting. By the 1690s he had completed various altarpieces, including a Temptation of Saint Anthony commissioned by Count Carlo Cesare Malvasia, now in San Niccolò degli Albari.
Image:Giuseppe Maria Crespi - Amore e Psiche - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|left|Cupid and Psyche
He journeyed to Venice, but surprisingly, never to Rome. Bearing his large religious canvas of Massacre of the Innocents and a note from Count Vincenzo Rannuzi Cospi as an introduction, Crespi fled in the middle of the night to Florence in 1708, and gained the patronage of the Grand Duke Ferdinando de' [Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany|Ferdinand III de' Medici]. He had been forced to flee Bologna with the canvas, which while intended for the Duke, had been fancied by a local priest, Don Carlo Silva for himself. The events surrounding this episode became the source of much litigation, in which Crespi, at least for the next five years, found the Duke a firm protector.
An eclectic artist, Crespi was a portrait painter and a brilliant caricaturist, and he was also known for his etchings after Rembrandt and Salvator Rosa. He could be said to have painted a number of masterpieces in different styles. He painted few frescoes, in part because he refused to paint for quadraturists, though in all likelihood, his style would not have matched the requirements of a medium then often used for grandiloquent scenography. He was not universally appreciated, Lanzi quotes Mengs as lamenting that the Bolognese school should close with the capricious Crespi. Lanzi himself describes Crespi as allowing his "turn for novelty at length to lead his fine genius astray". He found Crespi included caricature in even scriptural or heroic subjects, he cramped his figures, he "fell into mannerism", and painted with few colours and few brushstrokes, "employed indeed with judgement but too superficial and without strength of body".

The Seven Sacraments

One celebrated series of canvases, the Seven Sacraments, was painted around 1712, and is now in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. It was originally completed for Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in Rome, and upon his death, passed to the Elector of Saxony. These imposing works are painted with a loose brushstroke, but still maintain a sober piety. Making no use of hieratic symbols such as saints and putti, they utilize commonplace folk to illustrate sacramental activity.

Crespi and the genre style

Crespi is best known today as one of the main proponents of Baroque genre painting in Italy. Italians, until the 17th century, had paid little attention to such themes, concentrating mainly on grander images from religion, mythology, and history, as well as portraiture of the mighty. In this, they differed from Northern Europeans, specifically Dutch painters, who had a strong tradition in the depiction of everyday activities. There were exceptions: the Bolognese Baroque titan of fresco, Annibale Carracci, had painted pastoral landscapes and depictions of homely tradespeople, such as butchers. Before him, Bartolomeo Passerotti and the Cremonese Vincenzo Campi had dallied in genre subjects. In this tradition, Crespi also followed the precedents set forth by the Bamboccianti, mainly Dutch genre painters active in Rome. Subsequently, this tradition would also be upheld by Piazzetta, Pietro Longhi, Giacomo Ceruti and Giandomenico Tiepolo to name a few.
He painted many kitchen scenes and other domestic subjects. The painting of The Flea depicts a young woman readying for sleep and supposedly grooming for a nagging pest on her person. The environs are squalid—nearby is a vase with a few flowers and a cheap bead necklace dangling on the wall—but she is sheltered in a tender womb of light. She is not a Botticellian beauty, but a mortal, her lapdog asleep on the bedsheets.
In another genre scene, Crespi captures the anger of a woman at a man publicly urinating on a wall, with a picaresque cat also objecting to the man's indiscretion.

Later works and pupils

True to his eclecticism, is the naturalistic St John Nepomuk confessing the Queen of Swabia, made late in Crespi's life. In this painting, much is said by partially shielded faces. His Resurrection of Christ is a dramatic arrangement in dynamic perspectives, somewhat influenced by Annibale Carracci's altarpiece of the same subject.
While many came to work in the studio, Crespi's establishment after Cignani's departure, few became notable. Antonio Gionima was moderately successful. Others included Giovanni Francesco Braccioli; Giacomo Pavia; Giovanni Morini; Pier Guariente; Felice and his brother Jacopo Giusti; and Cristoforo Terzi. He may also have influenced Giovanni Domenico Ferretti. While the Venetian Giovanni Battista Piazzetta claimed to have studied under Crespi, the documentation for this is nonexistent.
Two of Crespi's sons, Antonio and Luigi became painters. According to their account, Crespi may have used a camera obscura to aid in the depiction of outdoor scenes in his later years. After his wife's death, he became reclusive, rarely leaving the house except to go to daily mass.

Partial anthology of works

The Marriage at Cana, Art Institute of ChicagoHoly Family, Parish Church of BergantinoMadonna del CarmineTemptation of St. Anthony, San Niccolò degli Albari, BolognaAeneas, The Sibyl and Charon, Kunsthistorisches Museum, ViennaHecuba blinding Polynestor, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, BrusselsTarquin and Lucretia, National Gallery, Washington D.C.The Triumph of Hercules, The Four Seasons, The Three Fates, Neptune and Diana, frescoes of Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande, BolognaThe Finding of Moses & David and Abigail, Museo di Palazzo Venezia, RomeLove triumphant (L'Ingegno), Musée des Beaux-Arts de StrasbourgChiron Teaches Achilles, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, AustriaThe Ecstasy of Saint Margaret of Cortona, Duomo, BolognaMassacre of the Innocents, Uffizi, Florence, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, and National Gallery, DublinThe Fair at Poggio a Caiano, UffiziThe Nurture of Jupiter, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort WorthSinger at Spinet with an Admirer, UffiziVillage Fair with dentist, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan