Giacomo Ceruti Biography
Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti, known as Pitocchetto (Milan, 13 October 1698 – Milan, 28 August 1767), was an Italian painter, counted among the most important exponents of the late Italian Baroque. He was born in Milan, probably to Fabiano Ceruti who was a pupil of Cristoforo Agricola; since the early 1720s he was active in Brescia, the city in which he earned the nickname "Pitocchetto" for the pictorial genre which had as its main subjects the poor, the outcasts, the vagabonds, the peasants (the pitocchi, precisely), depicted in large format paintings and shot with a documentary style and with a spirit of human empathy. His artistic career is part of that trend of "reality painting", which has a centuries-old tradition in Lombardy: before him, great artists such as Vincenzo Foppa, the Brescian school around Moretto and Savoldo, Caravaggio, all had touched on the topic , but no one before Ceruti was able to investigate the daily truth with such ruthless clarity. The Portrait of Count Giovanni Maria Fenaroli (1724, Fenaroli collection, Corneto) is his first work of certain attribution. Among the works that made him famous, the Washerwoman (circa 1736), currently in the Tosio Martinengo art gallery in Brescia, and his many still lifes. Around 1765 he painted the Portrait of a Wayfarer now preserved in the Amedeo Lia Civic Museum in La Spezia, and his pictorial cycle in the Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta in Gandino. The revaluation of his figure is due to Roberto Longhi.
