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 Giuseppe Maria Crespi, know as ‘Lo Spagnuolo’
was a painter, draughtsman and printer. His religious and mythological
works are distinguished by a free brushstroke and a painterly manner. He
also painted spirited genre scenes, which by their quality, content and
quantity distinguish him as one of the first Italian painters of high
standing to devote serious attention to the depiction of contemporary
life. Such paintings as Woman Laundering (1700–05; St Petersburg, Hermitage) or Woman Washing Dishes
(1720–25; Florence, Uffizi) offer straightforward glimpses of domestic
chores in images that are startlingly novel for the period and look
forward to the art of Jean-Siméon Chardin, Jean-François Millet and
Honoré Daumier.
Giuseppe Maria was the youngest of four children born to Girolamo
Crespi, a Bolognese miller, and Ippolita Cospi. His childhood was
relatively comfortable, and he lived his entire life in the house that
his mother’s dowry had provided. At around the age of 12 he learnt to
draw from the little-known painter Angelo Michele Toni (1640–1708). In
the early 1680s he studied with Domenico Maria Canuti and later (c.
1684–6) in the drawing academy headed by Carlo Cignani. In the late
1680s he attended the life drawing academy in the Palazzo Ghislieri.
Independently, he immersed himself in the late 16th-century works of the
founders of the Bolognese school and copied the Carracci frescoes (c.
1583/4) in the Palazzo Fava, those of Ludovico Carracci and his pupils
in the cloister of S Michele in Bosco (1592), and the early altarpieces
of Guercino. In these years his fellow students dubbed him ‘lo
Spagnuolo’ (‘the Spaniard’) because of his manner of dress.
He set up on
his own in 1686, renting a studio with Gian Antonio Burrini, nine years
his senior, who introduced him to the Bolognese merchant and amateur,
Giovanni Ricci. Financial support from the latter enabled Crespi to
further his artistic education: in 1688–90 he made trips in Emilia and
to Venice, following the itinerary taken earlier by the Carracci, to
study the great masters of north Italian tradition: Correggio, Titian
and Veronese. Like the young Carracci, too, he went to the Marches and
made many copies after Federico Barocci, which were said to have sold
later at high prices and in some cases even as originals. The unusually
liberal terms of Crespi’s contract with Ricci provided him with a ready
buyer for any of his uncommissioned works, and the first of these, the Wedding at Cana
(c. 1686–8; Chicago, Art Institute) reveals the results of his study of
Venetian painting and of Barocci. Its composition paraphrases the lower
left third of Paolo Veronese’s great canvas of the same subject
(1562/3; Paris, Louvre) and its luminous, high-keyed palette echoes that
of Barocci. Already evident are two elements that remained constants in
his oeuvre: the feathery brushwork, especially in the gauzy fabrics,
and the attention to genre detail, seen in his treatment of the lively
cat and dog.
The early sources attest that Crespi painted genre themes at the
beginning of his career, but none of these survive. He chose quotidian
subjects that had some precedent in the Carracci’s early works but were
ignored by contemporary Bolognese artists. In 1688 he exhibited pictures
of a butcher’s shop and of a wine cellar, with rough men squeezing
grapes in a large press. His first essay in printmaking—five prints from
an aborted project to portray the craftsmen of Bologna—dates to these
earliest years.
Two important events in 1690 signal the turning-point in Crespi’s
career from student to independent master: his election to the Compagnia
dei Pittori and the commission for his first major altarpiece in
Bologna, the Temptation of St Anthony (1690; Bologna, S Nicolò
degli Albari). According to Crespi’s son Luigi Crespi, this was
commissioned by Conte Carlo Cesare Malvasia, who was a director of the
Palazzo Ghislieri drawing academy. It openly imitates the forceful style
of Ludovico Carracci and thus must have pleased Malvasia, who had
accredited Ludovico with the founding of the Bolognese school. The
monumental figure of St Anthony, seen from below, looms up to fill the
foreground; his and Christ’s body are arranged along opposing diagonals.
Strong contrasts of lighting and emphatic gesture further dramatize the
saint’s triumph. Shortly after the altarpiece’s completion, Crespi
alienated his patron by caricaturing him as a dead chicken. The ensuing
scandal resulted in Crespi’s break with the Ghislieri academy in 1691.
Sometime during the mid-1690s Crespi was invited, along with three older
Bolognese painters (Burrini, Benedetto Gennari II and Giovanni Gioseffo
dal Sole) to decorate Prince Eugene of Savoy’s newly acquired (1694)
Winter Palace in Vienna with paintings on a theme from Greek mythology.
Recent research has established that Crespi’s part in this prestigious
commission, pendants depicting Chiron Teaching Achilles to Draw the Bow and Aeneas, Sibyl and Charon
(both 1695–1700; Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) hung as two of three
overdoors in an audience chamber. The interpretation of the themes is
on a human rather than a heroic scale and includes the novel conceit of
showing Chiron about to give his pupil a reproving kick: a feature that
was judged by some critics to have offended decorum but appears to have
pleased Prince Eugene as he proceeded to commission its pendant.
Crespi’s two pictures are similar in format, composition (reduced number
of figures) and dark tonality to those by his Bolognese colleagues,
which suggests that they all followed specific directives regarding form
as well as subject. Crespi was clearly experimenting with dramatic
lighting: his figures barely emerge from shadowy backgrounds, and their
arms, legs and torsos are illuminated as if by lightning flashes. Only
the tip of Aeneas’ nose and his cheek are lit in the second painting.
These effects are borrowed from Ludovico Carracci, as is the powerful
figure of Charon, who mirrors the latter’s St Jerome in the Madonna degli Scalzi (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nationale.).
Early in the 1690s Crespi made his first essays in fresco, a medium
he only employed early in his career. In collaboration with Marcantonio
Chiarini (1652–1730) he painted a ceiling fresco (1691; untraced) for S
Francesco di Paola, Pistoia. His only surviving frescoes, two ceilings
in the Palazzo Pepoli in Bologna, probably date to the end of the
decade. They consist of scenes aggrandizing Marchese Ercole Pepoli and
his family: the Triumph of Hercules, which shows Ercole’s
mythological namesake attaining immortality, borne in a chariot beyond
the mortal realm of the Four Seasons, and the Banquet of the Gods,
which implies (by its inclusion of the Pepoli arms in the scene) the
family’s place among the gods on Olympus and beyond the reach of the
Fates. Using the illusionistic devices of Baroque ceiling painting,
Crespi opened up the centre of each vault to show airborne figures in an
uninterrupted expanse, moving up and away from the steeply
foreshortened figures representing the Seasons and Fates, who seem to
stand bound to the edge of their respective ceilings. These female
personifications are among Crespi’s most memorable creations: Spring and
Summer are young peasant girls, their coarse features alive with
infectious good humour; similarly laughing girls improbably represent
the Fates. This irreverent approach to the gods and demi-gods of
Classical mythology sets these ceilings apart from the distinguished
tradition of Bolognese decorative painting upheld by his contemporaries.
Also unusual was Crespi’s refusal on this and subsequent occasions to
collaborate with a specialist in quadratura.
Crespi’s untraditional approach is further demonstrated in his
treatment of the pastoral themes that he began to explore in small easel
paintings of the 1690s. He took up the mode that had been formulated by
Francesco Albani earlier in the century and had gained popularity in
Bologna by the 1690s in the works of Cignani, Marcantonio Franceschini,
Lorenzo Pasinelli and dal Sole. His Sleeping Cupids Disarmed by Nymphs
(1695–1700; Bologna, Pinacoteca Nationale), in which the mythological
theme provides a pretext for painting pretty young nymphs and
innumerable cupids in idyllic landscapes, exemplifies the genre. He
subverted the tradition by producing a humorous inversion: mischievous
cupids discover and toy with sleeping nymphs (e.g. Cupid with Sleeping Nymphs,
1695–1700; Washington, National Gallery of Art). At least eight of his
variations on this theme survive, five from the 1690s and three from the
1730s.
By 1700 Crespi had become successful enough to open his own school
(which he closed in the 1720s), immediately attracting as many as 30
students. In 1707 he married Gioanna Cuppini, legitimizing the birth of
their first son, who had been born in 1703. In 1701 Grand Prince
Ferdinando de’ Medici’s Bolognese agent, as part of a project to remove
famous altarpieces from churches into the Prince’s collection, arranged
for Crespi to paint the replacement for Giovanni Lanfranco’s Ecstasy of St Margaret of Cortona (Florence, Palazzo Pitti), then in the church of S Maria Nuova in Cortona. Crespi’s Ecstasy of St Margaret of Cortona
(Cortona, Diocesan Museum ) was unveiled to public acclaim shortly
before 1 January 1702, which date provides a reference point for the
artist’s still uncertain chronology between 1695 and 1706. Crespi’s
altarpiece is not a copy of Lanfranco’s, although its composition,
predicated on a diagonal juxtaposition of Christ at upper left and the
saint at lower right, implies his familiarity with the original or a
copy of it. Significant differences, however, lie in conception and
handling. Crespi reinterprets the spiritual experience in quotidian
terms: Margaret kneels, not supported by angels, calmly acknowledging
the celestial vision. Nocturnal lighting, shadowy recesses that dissolve
form and a selective layering of transparent, luminous highlights
create a sense of the figures’ immateriality and confer mystic
overtones. Prince Ferdinando expressed his pleasure at the commission’s
successful completion.
Four years later Crespi hoped to attract the
Prince’s patronage again with the Massacre of the Innocents,
commissioned by Don Carlo Silva, a Florentine priest, as a present for
the Prince. This ambitious, multi-figured composition with over 100
figures marks the watershed in Crespi’s career. A tangled skein of
soldiers, mothers and babies fills the picture’s lower left quadrant,
while a pair of mothers lamenting over a child stand in isolation at the
lower right, their quiet, vertical forms providing a counterpoise to
and a dramatic commentary on the tumultuous violence. Crespi explored
the theme in successive versions throughout his career (e.g. 1735–40;
Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale.), varying the scale of the figures and
describing the setting in more detail.
Once the Massacre of the Innocents had been completed, Don
Carlo Silva proved reluctant to part with it, so in 1708 Crespi wrested
it from him and delivered it to the Prince personally, surprising the
Florentine court by his informality. The Grand Prince approved the
painting, delighted in the artist’s unconventional approach and invited
him to return to Florence on an extended visit. For a while Crespi
worked for Ferdinando from Bologna, sending him various works, including
the unusually informal and light-hearted Self-portrait with Family
(1708; Florence, Uffizi), in which his laughing wife watches as he
pulls his eight-month-old son, Luigi, in a wagon. In 1709 the Crespi
family moved to Florence, where they spent eight months living in rooms
in the Grand Prince’s villa at Pratolino and where their third son was
born. He was named Ferdinando after his royal godfather.
In Florence, Crespi, encouraged by Ferdinando (who called him his ‘pittore attuale’)
and inspired by the Prince’s collection of paintings by the
Bamboccianti, renewed his interest in depicting genre subjects, which he
had neglected since 1690. His most intense activity in this field dates
to his stay in Florence and to the period immediately afterwards. He
painted both directly observed subjects and scenes with implicit
narrative content, usually with satiric or comic implications. Two
important works from his stay in Florence are the Fair at Poggio a Caiano (1709; Florence, Uffizi) and the Flea Hunt (1709; Pisa). The Fair at Poggio a Caiano
represented the many colourful individuals and episodes at the annual
fair and market near the Medici country villa. Rich in incident, the
crowded scene includes portraits of courtiers: for example, Ferdinando
and his court would have recognized Antonio Morosini, the Prince’s
‘fool’, who at one fair had in fact impersonated a local charlatan, much
to everyone’s amusement, and who is shown acting out this practical
joke. Anonymous anecdotes also unfold: in the left foreground the
outcome of an encounter between two peasants is broadly hinted at by
bawdy gestures, while in the right foreground the upper classes,
represented by a young, well-dressed lady, mingle with the lower
classes, represented by a market woman offering wares.
The Accademia Clementina, the first official Bolognese academy of
art, was inaugurated in 1710, and Crespi became one of its first
directors. However, he disagreed with his fellow administrators over the
policy of admitting artisans and amateurs as well as professional
artists and ceased to attend after 1711.
Despite the death of Ferdinando in 1713, Crespi continued to explore
a variety of genre themes in this decade, picturing the working class
at their labour: pressing wine grapes, making silk, doing laundry. Soon
after his return from Florence, c. 1710, he began to make prints
illustrating Bertoldo e Bertoldino, a popular book of stories by
the Bolognese writer, Giulio Cesare Croce (c. 1550–1609). He pictured
the exploits of the shrewd but crude peasant Bertoldo and his son in
three separate sets of 20 episodes: etched (Bologna, Pinacoteca
Nazionale) in oil on copper (Rome, Galleria Doria-Pamphili) and in
watercolour on parchment (Bologna, Biblioteca Cassa di Risparmio). The
sequence and date of these sets remain controversial. Possibly Crespi
identified with the salty folk hero whose non-conformity found echoes in
his own often individualistic behaviour and dress.
Crespi must have lavished his most comic effects on the lost cycle
of paintings that reduced his biographer, Zanotti, to side-splitting
laughter, in which he illustrated the rise and fall of an opera singer.
Two extant paintings have been associated with the series: the Flea Hunt,
as known in three replicas (Pisa, Museo Civile; Paris, Louvre; Naples,
Capodimonte), probably represents the opening scene in the story, and
the Singer at the Spinet with an Admirer, known in two replicas
(Florence, Uffizi; Private Collection) may reflect a later episode. In
the first, a young woman performs her intimate morning ritual in a
humble room in which the unexpected presence of a spinet and printed
announcements of concerts allude to her musical talents, while tokens of
gallantries signal her route to future success. In the second an
elegantly dressed and coiffed woman interrupts her singing to receive
the admiring attentions of the aristocratic lover responsible for her
sudden prosperity. The dating of the project and of the surviving
versions of the Flea Hunt, as well as the chronological sequence
of the latter’s known variant compositions, has yet to be fully
resolved. According to Zanotti, the series was commissioned by an
Englishman, to judge from circumstantial evidence not earlier than 1716.
It seems likely that the Englishman requested a repetition of existing
works, as Crespi’s involvement with the theme began earlier with the Flea Hunt
painted in Florence in 1709. Apart from tracing its genesis and
establishing its place in the artist’s oeuvre, the dating of the cycle
would help to clarify Crespi’s contribution to the genre of narrative
satire, for thematic parallels exist that link the lost cycle to William
Hogarth’s series of engravings, the Harlot’s Progress (1731), in which he claimed to have invented the ‘modern moral subject’.
Probably in 1712 Crespi painted his most famous cycle, the Seven Sacraments
(Dresden, Gemäldegal Alte Meister), which originated as an exercise in
genre. Its remarkable novelty lies in the casting of the liturgical
theme in an everyday idiom. According to Zanotti, the inspiration for
the composition occurred in San Benedetto when Crespi observed a ray of
sunlight from a broken window falling across the head and shoulder of a
man in the confessional booth. Struck by the beauty of the lighting, he
returned to his studio to reproduce the effect in a drawing, and
subsequently in a painting, for which he borrowed the confessional,
re-created the same lighting and posed the original priest and a friend.
He sent the painting to the noted collector Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in
Rome, who was so impressed that he commissioned paintings of the other
sacraments to be done in the same manner. Crespi accordingly produced
six further canvases, usually dated to 1712, all, like the Confession,
genre-like in tone and featuring only a few, almost life-size figures.
Comments by Zanotti and Luigi Crespi indicate that contemporaries
admired the paintings but were nonplussed by the originality of
presenting religious subject-matter in terms of contemporary experience.
They found it hard to believe that Crespi, so often ready to depict the
comic and satirical, was being serious. Hence they interpreted the
works as examples of the genre of narrative satire and discovered comic
elements (particularly in the Matrimony) where a modern viewer can find none.
After his wife’s death (1722), Crespi rarely left his house except
to attend daily mass. He became increasingly reclusive and pious for the
last 20 years of his life. Altarpieces, which provide the few fixed
points in his later chronology, formed the main part of his work, though
he continued to paint genre scenes. The two altarpieces he painted for
the church of the Gesù in Ferrara (in situ) were done, like
several others, for a small sum in return for masses for the souls of
deceased friends. The earlier of the two, the Ecstasy of St Stanislaus Kostka
(1727), executed one year after the Polish saint’s canonization,
represents a mystic vision experienced by the young Jesuit novitiate.
Its balanced composition and relatively diminutive figures are
characteristic of his later religious paintings and in contrast to his
earlier preference for oblique, dynamic arrangements and figures that
fill the frame. His visualization of ecstasy is more mystical than in
the Ecstasy of St Margaret of Cortona. Vaporous clouds transport
the heavenly realm to earth and blur its separation from tangible
reality, while the saint, his eyes closed, leans back in the embrace of
angels.
In the 1720s Crespi returned to the pastoral mode that he had
practised in the first decade of the century. His earlier irreverent
treatment of Classical mythology yielded to a new seriousness, evident
in his choice and formulation of traditional subjects. A centralized and
symmetrically balanced grouping of figures structures Jupiter among the Corybantes.
Carefully choreographed poses and gestures, controlled by selective
accents of light, lead the viewer’s gaze into the painting from the
left, around the semicircle of nymphs, to the seated figure at lower
right.
From the 1730s Crespi’s religious themes become more violent,
focusing in particular on the sufferings of Christ and the saints at the
hands of their brutal tormentors, as for example in the Mocking of Christ
(1735–40; Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale.). At the end of the 1730s he
acquired a new and influential patron and friend in Cardinal Prospero
Lambertini, archbishop of Bologna in 1731, who referred to him as ‘suo
pittore della mensa arcivescovile’. Crespi prepared the Cardinal’s
portrait in a lively oil sketch that conveys the sitter’s intelligence
and forceful personality. The finished portrait (1740; Rome, Pinacoteca
Vaticana) has Lambertini, who had been elected as Pope Benedict XIV, in
appropriately altered vestments and papal tiara. The Pope conferred a
knighthood on the painter in 1741.
At the end of his career Crespi reinterpreted his earlier genre-like representation of confession in his St John of Nepomuk Confessing the Queen of Bohemia
(1743; Turin, Galleria Sabauda), a historic sacred subject commissioned
by Charles-Emanuel III, King of Sardinia and 17th Duke of Savoy. In
1745 Crespi suffered a stroke that left him blind for the last two years
of his life. He was buried in the church of the Confraternity of St
Mary Magdalene, Bologna.
Trained in the traditional workshop manner, Crespi was skilled in
the technique of both fresco and oil painting, though he received few
fresco commissions, possibly because he was unwilling to collaborate
with a quadratura specialist. Most of his oeuvre is executed in
oil on canvas and ranges in size from monumental altarpieces to
miniaturist cabinet pictures. Small oils on copper for private patrons
(e.g. Self-portrait with Family, 1708; 280×240 mm) account for some 15% of his production and are typically on devotional themes, pastoral or genre subjects.
From early in his career Crespi explored painterly devices derived
from Venetian pictorial tradition, such as layering coloured glazes to
achieve luminous effects. Contrary to contemporary practice he mixed his
media, blending water- and oil-based emulsions. For light landscape
passages and for flesh tints he even seems on occasion to have used
tempera covered with transparent glazes to achieve a porcelain-like
translucence. The poor condition of many of his works is due to
injudicious attempts at restoration in the past that have removed the
final glaze and thereby disturbed the tonal harmony. Works that have
escaped this fate (e.g. the two small oils on copper, Cupids at Play, 1695–1700; El Paso, Museum of Art.) are in excellent condition.
To achieve the extreme contrasts of light and shadow that he often
required in his compositions, Crespi built up impasto in the brightest
areas and applied pigment thinly in the shadows and half-tones,
sometimes exploiting the reddish ground. He veiled the resulting
transitions with a final transparent glaze. According to Luigi Crespi,
he made a daily practice of observing natural light and used aids,
including the camera obscura, for reproducing desired effects in the
studio. After his death Crespi was singled out by the Venetian critic
Francesco Algarotti (1764) for his pioneering use of this method, for
which he darkened a room in his house, inserted a lens into a hole in
the door leading outside and placed a canvas opposite the lens at the
focal point, so that he could study the effects of light projected from
outdoors on to the canvas. His familiarity with the camera obscura
probably dates to 1708–12, when scientific experimentation was
encouraged in Bologna by General Ferdinando Marsili, who introduced
artists, poets and scientists to the latest optical inventions following
his return from Holland in 1708. The direct impact on his painting can
be seen in Courtyard Scene (1710–15; Bologna, Pinacoteca
Nazionale) with its ‘almost photographic rendering of the crumbling
stones’. His fascination with singular lighting effects also led him to
set up an overhead light in his studio to reproduce the fall of sunlight
from high church windows.
As a young man Crespi attended drawing classes with Cignani and at
the Palazzo Ghislieri. According to Luigi Crespi, he continued to draw
from life models, and many 18th-century Bolognese collectors possessed
examples of his drawings. Few are known nowadays, however, which has
posed problems for scholars. Among the handful of sheets that may be
associated with paintings, several pen-and-wash drawings on brown ground
and roughed out in red chalk (sold London, Christie’s, 29 March 1966,
lot 164) are preparatory studies for the two frescoed ceilings in the
Palazzo Pepoli. The largest surviving group, more interesting for
content than for style, consists of nine red chalk studies for a set of
prints (c. 1710) to illustrate Croce’s Bertoldo e Bertoldino (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.; Stuttgart, Private Collection; Orléans, Musee Beaux Arts; Hamburg, Ksthalle).
With regard to prints, Crespi’s early portrayals of craftsmen of
Bologna are crudely handled. He returned to printmaking with more
success in 1710–15, and the 20 etchings for the Bertoldo e Bertoldino
series reveal greater mastery of the medium. His plates were later
re-etched in a second set by his friend Ludovico Mattioli for the 1736
republication of Croce’s book. Crespi’s total responsibility for the
original set of etchings, although attested to by the sources, has been
questioned by Merriman. More recently, the set has been reattributed to
Crespi’s hand alone and his use of the etching needle characterized as
delicate and feathery, reminiscent of contemporary Venetian artists.
Crespi’s workshop must have been small, and his assistants were
called on to imitate the master’s style as closely as possible. His most
talented student was Antonio Gionima, who worked in the studio from
1719 until his early death (1732). By c. 1730 Crespi’s chief pupils and
assistants were his two sons, Luigi and Antonio. Their faithful adoption
of their father’s figural types, repertory of gesture and classicizing
compositions obscures the certain attribution of Crespi’s later
altarpieces, although Luigi’s assistance betrays itself in mechanical
repetition, the dilution of expression and a hardening of forms.
Works by Crespi are held in the following collections: Hermitage, St
Petersburg; National Gallery, London; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los
Angeles; Uffizi, Florence; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Detroit
Institute of Arts, Michigan; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago;
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C; Vatican Museums, Vatican City;
Courtauld Institute; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, amongst others.
Source:
Sphinx Fine Art
http://www.sphinxfineart.com/Crespi-Giuseppe-Maria-
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