CESARI, Giuseppe

A narrative scene painted on a wall as a framed picture was referred to as a “quadro riportato,” which to seventeenth-century thinking suggested that a framed panel painting had been translated into the medium of fresco. The simulated tapestry, first employed in monumental wall pictures by Raphael and his pupils in the painting of the Sala di Constantino in the Vatican, can be thought of as a variant of the quadro riportato. The wall pictures in the great hall of Rome’s Palazzo dei Conservatori were inspired by the Sala di Constantino, presenting events from the founding of Rome as imaginary wall tapestries. Given the appearance of tapestry, the wall painting took on added richness.

Christ Taken Prisoner is one of Cesari’s most important works, its popularity attested by the existence of a somewhat smaller version in the Galleria Borghese and of numerous copies. Cesari bathes the scene in a pale moonlight that gives the colours an almost metallic coolness. His rendering of the form of the moon, and of the stars shining with varying degrees of brightness, testifies to a growing interest in the realistic representation of the night sky. The picture must have been painted in Rome in ¹⁵⁹⁶⁄₉₇, when Cesari was working on one of his most important commissions, the fresco cycle for the Palazzo dei Conservatori.

Ovid describes at length (Met. 3:138-253) how the young prince Actaeon, hunting in the forest, stumbled accidentally upon the grotto where Diana and her companion were bathing. To punish him for the glimpse of divine nudity, the goddess turned him into a stag. He was pursued and torn to pieces by his own hounds. The painting depicts when Actaeon has sprouted antlers. He staggers backwards as his own dogs spring at him.

The painting is signed below on stone, in front of Actaeon’s leg: IOSEPH(US) ARPINA(S) F(ECIT).

Cavaliere d’Arpino’s (Giulio Cesari’s) Judith with the Head of Holofernes symbolically alludes to the violent decapitation of the Assyrian general without showing the gruesome moment that both Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi chose to depict. Instead a beautiful, almost demure, Judith raises Holofernes’ head by his locks as her maidservant Abra looks on in puzzled reverence. Cavaliere d’Arpino’s Judith is the embodiment of female virtue and moral perfection, an ideal heroine who has redeemed her people. Yet, at the same time, she seems capable of exercising her seductive powers directly upon the viewer, as if the beholder were Holofernes. She is in possession of two dangerous weapons, her sword and her sexual allure.

In 1602-03 Cavaliere d’Arpino had frescoed a series of Old Testament heroines in the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati. There he depicted Judith as a full-length figure striding across the plain in front of the enemy encampment while Abra follows behind stuffing Holofernes’ head into a sack. Topologically the figures are very similar, but in the easel painting Cavaliere d’Arpino condensed the composition so that the picture essentially becomes an idealised ‘portrait’ of Judith. In this sense it is very close to his Diana (Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome), in which the huntress is also reduced to a half-length idealised figure. In both these ‘portraits’ there is an emphasis on the decorative effects of colour and design. The brilliant reds, blues and whites of Judith’s costume serve as a foil for the carefully delineated jewels and golden sword hilt. Baglione emphasised that Cavaliere d’Arpino was capable of working in two different styles, one of which was far more superficial than the other. It is likely that the more superficial pictures, such as Judith and Diana, were destined for the open art market and not painted on commission.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 17 minutes):

Alessandro Scarlatti: La Giuditta, oratorio, Part I (excerpts)

Cavaliere d’Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari) was an artist specializing in decorative cycles (especially fresco painting) for high-ranking ecclesiastics and Roman princes. He was a favourite of Pope Clement VIII. In Rome his commissions include decoration for the Loggia Orsini, the vault of the Contarelli chapel (San Luigi de’Francesi), the Cappella Olgiati (Santa Prassede), and the Palazzo dei Conservatori. He is also noted for designing the mosaics for the dome of St. Peter’s. He is typically considered a Late Mannerist artist and his style is sober and clear. His early work is more vigorous and colourful than his later work which is more repetitious.

This painting is a fragment, originally conceived as a large scale altarpiece with full length figures. It is a work from Cesari’s early maturity.

This painting is a copy, somewhat smaller in size, of a mosaic designed by the painter in 1608-09 for the Portone di Bronzo, the official entrance to the Vatican Palace. It is thought that the painter himself gave the painting to the Borghese pope, Paul V.

Giuseppe Cesari worked in the choir of the church in the charterhouse in two phases (1589 and 1595), and after he painted the ceiling of the sacristy with Passion scenes, virtues, and putti with the Arma Christi (Instruments of the Passion).

The Greek hero Perseus, traveling home after slaying Medusa, spotted the princess Andromeda chained to a rock. He rescued her from being sacrificed to a sea monster and won her hand in marriage. This painting depicts a version of the ancient myth popularized in sixteenth-century Italy, in which Perseus arrives astride Pegasus, the winged horse born from Medusa’s blood. Small mythological scenes like this made Cesari one of Rome’s most fashionable painters among sophisticated connoisseurs.

Prospero Farinaccio was the lawyer of the painter. Cesari rarely executed portraits, this portrait was painted in recognition of the part that the lawyer had played in securing the painter’s release from imprisonment after the sequestration of his property and collection of pictures in 1607 by Cardinal Scipione Borghese.

This portrait depicts an unidentified pope. It is a historicizing depiction of an earlier pontiff; the pope’s beardless face indicates that he lived centuries before the execution of the painting, as the habit of wearing a beard did not enter into papal tradition until circa 1500. It was suggested that the sitter could be Innocent III (1198-1216), one of the most famous popes of the Middle Ages.

The facial type of the Virgin appears in other paintings by the artist.

The face of the Virgin, with her delicately pointed nose, small, pert mouth, and large hooded eyes recalls that of the same figure in the artist’s frescoes in the Aldobrandini chapel at the church of Santa Maria in Via, Rome.

This charming and characteristic picture has direct stylistic affinities with a number of other early works by the artist that can be securely placed between 1593 and 1595.

The biblical theme of Susanna and the Elders enjoyed a great success from the sixteenth century because it allowed the painters to depict the female nude at leisure.

Giovan Pietro Bellori, in a marginal note to Giovanni Baglione, called this work Cavaliere d’Arpino’s most beautiful painting. Like so many of his works from this period, it is carefully executed - as befits a relatively small work on copper - and subtle in colour. Most exceptional is the handling of the two light sources, the moon and the artificial light that illuminates the figures. It is likely that the composition and the prominence given to the episode of St Peter cutting off the ear of Malchus were influenced by D�rer’s 1510 woodcut of the same subject from The Large Passion. Despite obvious differences, it is likely that Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ was inspired in part by Cavaliere d’Arpino’s example. Caravaggio also used two different light sources in his half-length composition, the unseen moon and a lantern held by a figure thought to be a self-portrait of the artist. Furthermore, it has been suggested that Caravaggio took Cavaliere d’Arpino’s lead in utilising D�rer prints for elements of his composition.

The importance of Cavaliere d’Arpino’s Betrayal can also be measured by the fact that the Utrecht Caravaggesque painter Dirck van Baburen seems to have followed it rather than Caravaggio’s painting in the canvas of the same subject that he painted in his early years in Rome. Interestingly, when the young Dutchman painted his second Taking of Christ around 1619, for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, he emulated Caravaggio’s composition rather than that of Cavaliere d’Arpino. For the next generation of artists like Baburen and his contemporaries in Rome, Cavaliere d’Arpino’s picture, despite its obvious skill and beauty, soon lost its appeal. These young painters, fighting for recognition towards the end of the second decade of the seventeenth century, quickly turned directly to Caravaggio and Bartolomeo Manfredi. Nevertheless, Caravaggio himself continued to value Cavaliere d’Arpino as an artist and to study works like the Betrayal, although his results are quite different.

Numerous artists, such as for example the Giuseppe Cesari (Cavaliere d’Arpino), author of the lunette above the altar and the pendentives of the dome, and Guido Reni, who painted the vaults, contributed to the embellishment of the Pauline Chapel of the Santa Maria Maggiore, which in opulence and splendour was meant to exceed every other decoration of the basilica’s interior.

The landscape in this painting is heavily indebted to the early easel paintings of Bril, both in its composition, which is framed by a large tree on the right, and in its unnatural, strong contrasts of light and shade on the vegetation.

Today Cavaliere d’Arpino’s (Cesari’s) Mocking of Christ is virtually forgotten, but in the mid-seventeenth century the biographer Giovanni Baglione considered it to be one of the artist’s very finest pictures. Considering Cavaliere d’Arpino’s tremendous output, this was not faint praise. When Baglione saw the painting, it was already in the sacristy of the church, where it had been bequeathed by Antonio della Valle along with three other pictures. Hung high on the wall then, as now, the figure of Christ has a commanding presence. A sharp, intense light falls across his powerfully modelled body, while his three tormentors are pushed into the dark recesses of the corners. Christ, suffering at the hands of three assailants who are given highly individual features, can be linked to a well-known iconographic tradition. In this case, however, the compression of the figures towards the picture plane creates a devotional image that evokes both torment and compassion without overt reference to time or space. The truthful descriptiveness of Christ’s body superficially recalls the naturalism of Caravaggio, but Cavaliere d’Arpino’s clarity of form and classic beauty is, in truth, more allied to the work of Annibale Carracci. In works such as The Mocking of Christ Cavaliere d’Arpino, like Annibale Carracci, moves the High Renaissance style of Raphael towards a baroque eloquence that will ultimately find its true fruition in Guido Reni.

In the studio of Cavaliere d’Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari), one of the most influential artist in Rome during the pontificate of Clement VIII, painters from northern Europe were numerous. From this Cavaliere d’Arpino probably derived his inclination for painting religious scenes in a landscape. He produced delicate devotional paintings on copper or panel on a very small scale. In them, his lives of the saints or biblical episodes were enriched by imaginative additions. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt depicts the moment when a palm tree bends down at the request of the Christ Child so that Joseph can pick the dates that Mary has asked for. This miraculous event adds a touch of familiarity and intimacy to the well-known story of the Holy Family’s flight.

This boldly coloured and highly sensual Venus and Cupid belongs to a group of easel pictures with specifically “eroto-mythological” subject matter, which the artist produced early in his career, from circa 1600.

The subject of Venus and Cupid is one of the most often repeated in Italian painting, though despite its established place in pictorial iconography, the sexually explicit overtones of this picture belie the commonality of the subject. Despite its firmly established place in the tradition of mythological imagery, Cesari takes the sexual nature of the scene to an unprecedented level.