Matteo Ghidoni (1626-1689), Four Beggars

Matthew Ghidoni (1626-1689)

Four beggars

(4) Oil on canvas, 26 x 18 cm

With frame, 40 x 32 cm

The seventeenth century was characterized by several crisis factors: the famines of the first decades, the disastrous Thirty Years' War, the recurring plagues, including the one that hit the entire continent between 1661 and 1668, and the consequent demographic collapse. As a result, scenes of poverty were a common subject at that time in history. Since poverty was a dramatically evident aspect of everyday life and the object of a new religious sensibility, “genre painting”, which in Italy, as well as north of the Alps, became established during the seventeenth century, was aimed in particular at the representation of the poor, the so-called “pitocchi” (from the Greek ptokós, “beggar”, “indigent”). The pitocco is the poor beggar, 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 pitying 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: just 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 to a greedy and violent beggar – or of the Ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha by Cervantes published in two parts, between 1605 and 1615, with the well-known adventures of a decadent Spanish nobleman, reduced to a hallucinatory wandering, in search of a lost world, that of chivalry. The birth and extraordinary diffusion of the Commedia dell'arte certainly contributed to this phenomenon, with its caricatural and excessive characters who staged the vices, virtues and attitudes of members of the lower classes of society. Literature gave this theme an unprecedented nobility of representation, which thus catalysed the interest of the artists of the time. Between the evidence of everyday reality and literary elaborations, Italian painters approached the icons of the 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, Callot's suggestions first arrived from France – his picaresque engravings were crucial in the diffusion of the genre – and subsequently those deriving from the works of the Le Nain brothers.

Certainly belonging to the more grotesque and burlesque genre of representation of pitocchi are these four small canvases attributable to the brush of the Venetian Matteo Ghidoni, better known as Matteo dei Pitocchi. Probably born in Florence (as Mina Gregori recalls in 1961, there is no literary source that allows us to reconstruct his biography with certainty) but mainly active in Padua, the artist looks to the models provided by Callot's prints or by the genre scenes of the Flemish artists operating around the middle of the 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 artist's early works, with particular reference to the Beggar Warming His Hands in the Pinacoteca Querini Stampalia in Venice (the same institution also houses The Peasants' Revolt by the same artist, a painting that fully demonstrates Ghidoni's ability to handle choral scenes), could be dated between the end of the 40s and the 50s. In the 600th and 1998th century inventories of private Venetian collections, as Francesco Frangi recalls (in Da Caravaggio a Ceruti. La scena di genere e l'immaginario dei Pitocchi nella pittura italiana, XNUMX), reference is often made to the presence of several paintings by Ghidoni depicting single figures of beggars, whose iconographies appear to be attributable to the models of Bellotti and Monsù Bernardo; in particular, Monsù Bernardo, a Danish pupil of Rembrandt who was active mainly between Venice and Bergamo, constitutes a fundamental point of reference for the artist's work.

Of particular interest are also the frames of the paintings, certainly contemporary and of great artistic value. These have a box shape and a band decorated with flowers and abstract motifs in relief. These were made in the Veneto area in the first half of the 1992th century (F. Sabatelli, La cornice italiana dal Rinascimento al Neoclassico, 194, pp. 195-XNUMX): this appears absolutely consistent with the attribution of the paintings to Matteo Ghidoni, active almost exclusively in the Veneto.