Matteo Ghidoni
By Matteo Ghidoni, Four Pitocchi

$12,192.84

£9,087.42

€10,400

CA$16,783.89

A$19,041.69

CHF 9,970.89

MX$234,923.49

NOK 123,636.94

SEK 118,296.83

DKK 79,125.72

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About the Item

Matteo Ghidoni (1626-1689) Four pythons (4) Oil on canvas, 26 x 18 cm Framed, 40 x 32 cm The seventeenth century is a century characterized by several crisis factors: the famines of the first decades, the disastrous Thirty Years' War, recurrent plagues, including the one that swept across the entire continent between 1661 and 1668, and the resulting population collapse. As a result of this, poverty scenes are a usual subject at that historical moment. Because poverty constituted a dramatically evident aspect of everyday life and the object of a new religious sensibility, "genre painting," which in Italy, as well as north of the Alps, became established during the seventeenth century, turned in particular to the depiction of the poor, the so-called "pitocchi" (from the Greek ptokós, "beggar," "destitute"). The pitocco is the poor beggar, living on the margins of the social fabric: the art depicting him marks a departure from traditional religious and mythological subjects and expresses an innovative and unprecedented focus on the social reality of the time, often accompanied by a pitying gaze and, in cases like this, a good dose of satire and irony. The depiction of poverty and destitution, before it spread to the arts, interested literature: we need only think of the picaresque novel El Lazarillo de Tormes-an anonymous Spanish text published in Burgos in 1554, the story of a street boy's terrible apprenticeship to a greedy and violent pitochos-or Cervantes' Ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha published in two installments, between 1605 and 1615, with the well-known events of a fallen Spanish nobleman reduced to hallucinatory wandering in search of a lost world, that of chivalry. The birth and extraordinary popularity that the Commedia dell'arte had, with its caricatured and excessive characters staging the vices, virtues and attitudes of members of the lowest strata of society, certainly contributed to the phenomenon. Literature gave this theme an unprecedented nobility of representation, which thus catalyzed the interest of artists of the time. Between the evidence of everyday reality and literary elaborations, Italian painters approached Pythian icons as characters worthy of representation. Their action developed in the direction of genre painting, in the confrontation with the Flemings, and in the pictorial exploration of poverty carried out by Jusepe de Ribera, who probably stayed not only in Naples but also in Emilia and Lombardy in 1611. Meanwhile, from France came first the suggestions of Callot - decisive were his picaresque engravings, as part of the spread of the genre - and later those arising from the works of the Le Nain brothers. Within the field of genre painting, we can identify two different strands of expression: the first, within which are channeled the works of a large contingent of artists active between Veneto and Lombardy, which turns out to be connected to the literature of the time and which presents itself as a free interpretation of the furbesque actions of the poor and vagabonds, characterized by a certain grotesque deformation - one thinks, in the Lombard area, of the action carried out by Giacomo Francesco Cipper known as the Todeschini (Feldkirch, Austria 1664 - Milan 1736) and by the Bergamasque Antonio Cifrondi (1656-1730) -; the second strand, with which the concept of reality painting matured, is represented in a sublime way by the works of the Milanese Giacomo Ceruti known as Pitocchetto, who worked for a long time between Brescia and the Veneto region: Ceruti read the vicissitudes of the poor in the direction of a narrative that took into account the new charitable instances, assigning to the subjects a profound dignity, as evidenced by, among others, the extraordinary paintings currently preserved at the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo in Brescia. Certainly belonging to the more grotesque and burlesque strand of Pitocchi depiction are these four small canvases attributable to the brush of the Venetian Matteo Ghidoni, better known as Matteo dei Pitocchi. Probably born in Florence (as recalled by Mina Gregori in 1961, there is no literary source that allows us to reconstruct his biography with certainty) but active mainly in Padua, the artist looked to the models provided by Callot's prints or the genre scenes of the Flemish artists operating around the middle of the 17th century in Italy. The artist's works are distinguished by intense, earthy colors and a rapid, cursive technique. The color register is poor and bituminous, and the material is full-bodied. The four paintings in question, because of the similarities with some of the early pieces in the artist's production, with particular reference to the Beggar Warming His Hands in the Pinacoteca Querini Stampalia in Venice (at the same institution, by the same artist is also preserved La rivolta dei contadini, a painting that can fully show Ghidoni's ability to handle even choral scenes), could be dated between the late 1740s and the 1750s. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century inventories of private Venetian collections, as Francesco Frangi records (in Da Caravaggio a Ceruti. La scena di genere e l'immaginario dei Pitocchi nella pittura italiana, 1998), reference is in fact often made to the presence of several paintings by Ghidoni depicting individual figures of Pitocchi, whose iconographies turn out to be traceable to the models of Bellotti and Monsù Bernardo; in particular, Monsù Bernardo, a Danish pupil of Rembrandt active mainly between Venice and Bergamo, constitutes a fundamental point of reference for the artist's work. Also of special interest are the frames of the paintings, which are certainly contemporary and of great artistic value. These feature a box silhouette and a band decorated with flowers and abstract patterns in relief. These turn out to have been executed in the Veneto area in the first half of the 17th century (F. Sabatelli, La cornice italiana dal Rinascimento al Neoclassico, 1992, pp. 194-195): this seems entirely consistent with the attribution of the paintings to Matteo Ghidoni, who was active almost exclusively in the Veneto region.

Creator:
Matteo Ghidoni (1626 - 1700, Italian)
Dimensions:
Height: 10.24 in (26 cm)Width: 5.91 in (15 cm)
More Editions & Sizes:
26x18Price: $12,193
Medium:
Canvas,Oil
Period:
Late 17th Century
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Milan, IT
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU2639215496662

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