An important acquisition for the Uffizi Galleries: in fact, a masterpiece by Giacomo Ceruti (Milan, 1698 - 1767), the Moorish Beggar, enters the collection of the Florentine museum. The artist, famous for his depictions of the poor and humble, created this painting in the first half of the 18th century. The new acquisition, in addition to endowing the museum with an additional masterpiece, is very relevant for the completeness of the collection, because until now the Uffizi possessed only one other painting by Ceruti, namely the Ragazzo con cesta di pesci e granseole (Boy with basket of fish and spider crabs), made about ten years after the Moor and belonging to the last phase of his career. The newly arrived work is an important testimony of Ceruti at the height of his qualities.
The protagonist of the canvas is a man who, dressed in ragged clothes and caught begging for alms, is nevertheless represented by Ceruti with the same solemnity and stylistic regard intended at the time for noble portraits, in the antique for togati. The physiognomy is investigated with extreme realism; the masterpiece and central focus of the work are the eyes, very black pupils contrasting with snow-white sclera, suffering and tired, but at the same time alive.
During the Renaissance and Baroque, subjects of African descent appear in Italian art with some frequency, from magi to pages and dark-skinned handmaids. The most common sculptural form to depict them in the 18th century was the statuary of "Moors," found in the decorative arts and architecture. Holding a plate, urn or vase, and often dressed in Moorish or Turkish costumes, these figures referred back to the servants who worked as pages, valets and chambermaids and in fact wore the feathered headdresses and turbans in vogue at the time, always reduced to Orientalist taste, to anecdotal domestic detail and devoid of individual dignity, relegated to a symbol of the patron’s opulence. Ceruti’s beggar, dressed in rags, stands in stark contrast to this approach, which was in the majority at the time.
Indeed, the reputation of the painter, active in northern Italy in the 18th century, is centered on his paintings of only seemingly humble individuals. His paintings of beggars are milestones in the history of art on the continent, notable for their directness and for the great human dignity the artist conferred on the underlings of a feudalism on the wane.
Of the Moor there is no known collecting history, but the painting is well known to scholars for being included in the Longinian exhibition devoted to the Painters of Reality (Milan, 1953). Since then it has enjoyed an excellent bibliography, appearing in catalogs and monographs and finally coming back to prominence even recently, on the occasion of the recent exhibition Giacomo Ceruti nell’Europa del Settecento, curated by Roberta D’Adda, Francesco Frangi and Alessandro Morandotti, held in Brescia in the spring of 2023.
"After the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine de’ Ricci by Subleyras," says Simone Verde, director of the Uffizi, “the Uffizi’s collections of 18th-century painting are enriched by another masterpiece, Giacomo Ceruti’s Moorish Beggar. An absolute unicum, this portrait full of classical monumentality disrupts the iconographic conventions of its time and expands the cultural boundaries of a century in which modernity was making its way and the values of equality were being affirmed.”
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| The Uffizi acquires a masterpiece by Giacomo Ceruti, the Moorish Beggar |
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