See How The Painter Giacomo Ceruti Gave A Face To Poverty In This Fascinating Getty Exhibit

31.08.2023 - 11:43 / forbes.com

Poverty was a popular subject for artists in 18th century Italy. Wealthy patrons sought genre paintings of the lower classes to decorate their lavish palaces. So the discovery of thirteen large-scale canvases depicting beggars and tradesmen stashed in a Northern Italian castle wasn't especially surprising to the art historian who found them in the late 1920s. What confounded him was their style. They were painted with as much attention to individual personality as was seen in portraits of nobility.

The circumstances of their creation remain mysterious today, and provide the backdrop for a compelling new exhibition dedicated to their creator, Giacomo Ceruti, currently on view at the Getty Center.

Nearly forgotten after he died, Ceruti was acclaimed in his time. In addition to historical paintings and altarpieces, he made portraits of the rich and powerful, who valued the sensitivity with which he captured their elite demeanor. These people were also natural patrons for genre paintings because genre scenes helped to illustrate their nobility.

It worked in several ways. The destitute were typically divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The good poor were people who were deemed genuinely in need of charity because of age or widowhood or disability. Their role in life, according to the rich, was to be recipients of alms, offering the wealthy a convenient means to exercise Christian virtue and eventually ascend to the luxury of Heaven. On the other hand, impoverished people who could work but didn’t were deemed bad or false, a label liberally applied to tradesmen whose earnings were meager. The false poor were despised and spurned, giving the rich a boost of moral superiority.

Both categories were further exploited in paintings of the time. Depictions of the good poor idealized their misery, representing them as admirable and holy. The bad poor were depicted as mischievous or worse, the alleged falsehood of their destitution satirically represented as depravity. In other words, the poor were cast as characters in allegories that served the interests of the rich and validated their disproportionate wealth. The seamstress and beggar were types, not people, rendered harmlessly generic by obsequious painters who knew their patrons all too well: Genre paintings of the poor were intended to flatter the pre-modern one percent.

What, then, to make of the paintings by Ceruti? Although they were stored together in the castle of Padernello near the city of Brescia, and have been dubbed the Padernello Cycle, art historians are uncertain that they were intended to be shown as a group or even commissioned by the same patron. What is clear is that they break the stereotypes of their day. The faces and postures of seamstresses