The Artist: For a biography of Giacomo Ceruti, see the Catalogue Entry for
A Woman with a Dog (
30.15)
The Picture: A bearded man with tussled black hair and white beard is shown quarter-length, his head turned toward the viewer as he displays a pug, whose paw he holds affectionately in his hand. The picture is painted with a meticulous attention to such textural details as the beard and salt-and-pepper eyebrows, the short fur of the dog, and the fabric of the cloak, with its velvet-lined collar. As suggested in correspondence with Francesco Frangi and Alessandro Morandotti—two scholars who, together with Mina Gregori, have contributed so much to advance our knowledge on the artist—this wonderfully sympathetic portrayal of an aging man and his pet belongs to an advanced phase of Ceruti’s career.
Date and Theme: Following his move to Venice in 1736, Ceruti’s art took on a more sophisticated character marked by a movement away from the realistic premise of his earlier work in Brescia—the Lombard city where he had first established his reputation—and, in particular, of the great series of impoverished people and beggars that he painted in Bergamo for the Avogadro family (more generally known as the Padernello cycle from their discovery there in the twentieth century (see fig. 1 above). The pictures that form that cycle have the arresting effect of frank, unembellished depictions of reality and, as such, constitute a landmark of European painting. Beginning in the mid-1730s, Ceruti’s work shows a tendency toward a less raw and more picturesque naturalism, with the sitters often wearing exotic or foreign costumes. For example, we know of a picture of a young woman in Armenian dress that Ceruti painted for the French minister of Parma, Guillaume du Tillot, and of another with a man in Turkish dress. Ceruti also depicted himself as a pilgrim in a painting now in Abano Terme (near Padua). This portrayal is in keeping with the increased interest throughout Europe in exotic dress and non-European cultures, found also in literature and theater—especially opera. Concerning this shift in Ceruti’s work, Morandotti has observed, “In his Paduan and Venetian period starting in the mid-1730s, the painter tried his hand at fantasy half-figures, creating a rich repertoire freely inspired by the series of character heads that Giovan Battista Piazzetta had established as a true artistic genre.” The compositional norms thus became more formal and the style more elegant as Ceruti competed for a place in the sophisticated market of Venice. The quality of unadorned directness that is such a conspicuous feature of the artist’s early, Brescian painting is subordinated to a different intention. Yet, as Morandotti has also remarked, “Bearing in mind the stylistic differences and the deeply Lombard character of Ceruti’s works, we can understand how the painter, following the fashions of his time, created a repertoire of human types that was never too generic, but always reliably recorded the expressive and sentimental particulars of faces—no ‘deviation,’ therefore, from his talent as a painter of reality but simply an adaptation to international styles.”[1]
In composition, figure type, and style The Met’s picture bears close comparison with two paintings inventoried in 1802 in the Milanese collection of Giacomo Melzi (1720–1802) and dated by Frangi and Morandotti to about 1740–45.[2] This was following the artist’s stay in Venice, where he painted for Field Marshal Johann von der Schulenburg (1661–1747), who had retired to Venice following his battles against the Ottomans and formed an outstanding collection in Palazzo Loredan on the Grand Canal. Ceruti is documented in Milan between 1742 and 1744 and in Piacenza between 1744 and 1746. He then returned to Milan. The Melzi pictures form pendants, with, in each case, a bearded man. In one the sitter wears a richly decorated red coat and fur hat and holds a pug. In the other the sitter belongs to a lower social strata, is simply dressed with a cape and cap, and holds a cat. The Met’s painting of a female domestic servant holding a dog (
30.15) also has a pendant in which a maidservant holds a cat. Whether this picture had a pendant is not known. Dominic Ferrante (in an email) has noted that the same figure with his dog appears in a painting of a card game in the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh (fig. 2). That work, too, has been dated around 1740 and unquestionably reflects Ceruti's familiarity with the lowlife scenes of Pietro Longhi.
Keith Christiansen 2019
[1] Francesco Frangi and Alessandro Morandotti,
Giacomo Ceruti: Popolo e Nobiltà alla vigilia dell’età dei Lumi, exh. cat., Robilant + Voena, Milan, 2013, p. 56 (English supplement pp. 15–16).
[2] Frangi and Morandotti 2013, pp. 54–56, nos. 13–14.
