CRETI, Donato

The painting is one of a series of four telling the stories of Achilles.

In his youth Achilles, the son of Thetis, a sea-nymph, was handed over to Chiron, a wise and learned centaur who taught him many arts. The painting shows Achilles as an infant being handed over by his mother into the arms of Chiron.

In 1710 Donato Creti was commissioned together with the architectural painter Marcantonio Chiarini (1652-1730) to paint the Sala d’Alessandro in the Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande, the room adjacent to the Sala dell’Olimpo, frescoed by Giuseppe Maria Crespi. The subject of Creti’s centre picture is an episode related in biographies of Alexander the Great that took place in the spring of 333. B.C. in the Phrygian city of Gordium. The daredevil deed of the intrepid young hero could be related to the painter’s patron, Alessandro Pepoli.

This canvas is one of the artist’s most famous pictures.

The subject of this monumental, larger than life-sized canvas was taken from Homer’s Iliad. It was painted in the 1710s as a pendant to the Hermes Bringing the Head of Argos to Hera (Palazzo Comunale, Bologna). The image of the young and classically handsome Greek shepherd is one of the eighteenth century’s most sublime scholarly syntheses of ancient and modern figurative culture. It is the successful crossbreeding of two great masters of seventeenth century Bolognese art: Annibale Carracci and Guido Reni, in two masterpieces Creti had long admired. He took up the same spatial arrangement of the figures and the representation of Mercury in flight in the mythological scene Annibale frescoed at the gallery of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century; at the same time he drew on the frontal pose of Reni’s Triumph of Samson, a heroic and brazen virile nude painted in the second decade of the seventeenth century.

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This representation of the penitent St Peter is typical of Creti’s work. It is ultimately indebted to the example set a generation before by Guido Reni.

This painting belonging to the Bolognese Classicism shows a triangular composition formed by Andromeda (at left), Pegasus and his winged white horse (at the top) and the monster (in the lower foreground).

The painting probably depicts the Cumaean Sibyl. The Latin words on the sheet unrolled by the standing Cupid mean “He will be born of a Virgin” and, according to certain Christian exegetes, refer to the advent of the Redeemer. As a result, the Cumaean figure is one of the most commonly portrayed Sibyls in the art of the modern age.

This relatively early work by Creti depicts the figure of a Sibyl, an archetype that has deep roots in Bolognese art, perhaps most famously in the works of Reni, Guercino and Domenichino. As in the versions of these older masters, Creti has painted his Sibyl wearing a turban (practically an iconographic shorthand for an exotic, oracular figure), and holding up a book. He has chosen to paint her in profile, one of his favourite compositional devices, and one which allowed him to create idealized portraits of women of extreme elegance and originality.

The painting probably depicts the Cumaean Sibyl. The Latin words on the sheet unrolled by the standing Cupid mean “He will be born of a Virgin” and, according to certain Christian exegetes, refer to the advent of the Redeemer. As a result, the Cumaean figure is one of the most commonly portrayed Sibyls in the art of the modern age.

Creti was one of the important painters in Bologna in the first half of the 18th century. This painting, part of a series representing the four Virtues, shows his refined classicism.