Giacomo Ceruti, detto il Pitocchetto (1698-1767). Attrib. - Pitocco

An important work attributed to the painter Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti, known as il Pitocchetto (Milan, October 13, 1698 – Milan, August 28, 1767), oil on canvas in good condition. The restoration of the work was carried out by the Campagnola Art Studio, Verona. The painting measures 116.5 cm by 81 cm. The marvelous, marbleized frame is original to the period. Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti, known as il Pitocchetto (Milan, October 13, 1698 – Milan, August 28, 1767), was an Italian painter, counted among the most important exponents of late Italian Baroque. He was born in Milan, probably the son of Fabiano Ceruti who was a pupil of Cristoforo Agricola; from the early 1720s he was active in Brescia, a city where he earned the nickname “Pitocchetto” for the painting genre whose main subjects were the poor, the outcasts, the wanderers, the peasants (the pitocchi, indeed), depicted in large-format canvases and rendered with a documentary style and a spirit of humane empathy. His artistic path is part of that strand of “realist painting,” which in Lombardy has a centuries-old tradition: before him great artists such as Vincenzo Foppa, the Brescia school around Moretto and Savoldo, Caravaggio, all had touched the subject, but none before Ceruti was able to probe daily truth with such ruthless lucidity. The Portrait of Count Giovanni Maria Fenaroli (1724, Fenaroli Collection, Corneto) is his first work whose attribution is certain. Among the works that made him famous are The Laundress (circa 1736), currently at the Tosio Martinengo Gallery in Brescia, and the many still lifes. Around 1765 he painted the Portrait of a Wayfarer, now preserved at the Museo Civico Amedeo Lia in La Spezia, and his cycle of paintings at the Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta in Gandino. The reevaluation of his figure is owed to Roberto Longhi. Provenance: Italian antique market The work is sold with a critical sheet and expertise Fast shipping with secure packaging

Estimate:£5,902.31

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