Matteo Ghidoni

Matteo Ghidoni (1626-1689) Four Beggars (4) Oil on canvas, cm 26 x 18 Framed, cm 40 x 32 The 17th century was a century characterized by various crisis factors: the famines of the early decades, the disastrous Thirty Years' War, the recurrent plagues, including the one that struck the entire continent between 1661 and 1668, and the resulting demographic collapse. As a result, scenes of poverty were a common subject in that historical moment. Since poverty was a dramatically evident aspect of daily life and the object of a new religious sensitivity, "genre painting," which in Italy, as well as north of the Alps, became established during the 17th century, turned in particular to the representation of the poor, the so-called "pitocchi" (from the Greek ptokós, "beggar," "indigent"). The 'pitocco' is the poor mendicant, who lives on the margins of the social fabric: the art that portrays him marks a detachment from traditional religious and mythological subjects and expresses an innovative and unprecedented attention to the social reality of the time, often accompanied by a merciful look and, in cases like this, by a good dose of satire and irony. The representation of poverty and indigence, before spreading in the artistic field, interested literature: suffice it to think of the picaresque novel El Lazarillo de Tormes - an anonymous Spanish text published in Burgos in 1554, the story of the terrible apprenticeship of a street boy with an avid and violent beggar - or the Ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha by Cervantes published in two parts, between 1605 and 1615, with the well-known events of a decayed Spanish nobleman, reduced to a hallucinated wandering, in search of a lost world, that of chivalry. The birth and extraordinary spread of the Commedia dell'arte also contributed to the phenomenon, with its caricatured and excessive characters who staged vices, virtues, and attitudes of members of the lower strata of society. Literature gave this theme an unprecedented nobility of representation, which thus catalyzed the interest of artists of the time. Between the evidence of daily reality and literary elaborations, Italian painters approached the icons of beggars as characters worthy of representation. Their action developed in the direction of genre painting, in comparison with the Flemish, 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 - his picaresque engravings were decisive, in the context of the spread of the genre - and subsequently those deriving from the works of the Le Nain brothers. Within the scope of genre painting, we can identify two different expressive strands: the first, into which the works of a vast contingent of artists active between Veneto and Lombardy are channeled, which is linked to the literature of the time and which appears as a free interpretation of the cunning actions of the poor and vagabonds, characterized by a certain grotesque deformation - think, in the Lombard area, of the action carried out by Giacomo Francesco Cipper called Todeschini (Feldkirch, Austria 1664 - Milan 1736) and by Antonio Cifrondi from Bergamo (1656-1730) -; the second strand, with which the concept of reality painting matures, is represented in an excellent way by the works of Giacomo Ceruti from Milan called Pitocchetto, who worked for a long time between Brescia and Veneto: Ceruti read the events of the poor towards a story that took into account the new charitable requests, assigning a profound dignity to the subjects, as demonstrated, among others, by the extraordinary paintings currently preserved at the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo in Brescia. Belonging certainly to the more grotesque and burlesque strand of the representation of beggars are these four small canvases attributable to the brush of the Venetian Matteo Ghidoni, better known as Matteo dei Pitocchi. Born probably in Florence (as Mina Gregori recalls in 1961, there is no literary source that allows us to reconstruct his biography with certainty) but active mainly in Padua, the artist looks to the models provided by Callot's prints or the genre scenes of the Flemish operating around the mid-seventeenth century in Italy. The artist's works are distinguished by intense and earthy colors and by a rapid and cursive technique. The chromatic register is poor and bituminous and the material is full-bodied. The four paintings in question, due to the analogies with some of the early passages of the artist's production, with particular reference to the Beggar warming his hands of the Pinacoteca Querini Stampalia in Venice (at the same institution, the same artist also preserved The revolt of the peasants, a painting able to fully show Ghidoni's ability to also manage choral scenes), could be dated between the late 40s and the 50s of the '600. In the seventeenth and eighteenth-century inventories of Venetian private collections, as Francesco Frangi recalls (in From Caravaggio to Ceruti. The genre scene and the imaginary of the Pitocchi in Italian painting, 1998), frequent reference is made to the presence of several paintings by Ghidoni depicting single figures of beggars, whose iconographies can be traced back to the models of Bellotti and Monsù Bernardo; in particular, Monsù Bernardo, a Danish Rembrandt's pupil active mainly between Venice and Bergamo, is a fundamental point of reference for the artist's work. Of particular interest are also the frames of the paintings, certainly coeval and of great artistic value. These present a box shape and a band decorated with flowers and abstract motifs in relief. These are executed in the Veneto area in the first half of the seventeenth century (F. Sabatelli, The Italian frame from the Renaissance to the Neoclassical, 1992, pp. 194-195): this appears absolutely consistent with the attribution of the paintings to Matteo Ghidoni, active almost exclusively in Veneto.