Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti (October 13, 1698 – August 28, 1767) was an Italian late Baroque painter, active in Northern Italy in Milan, Brescia, and Venice. He acquired the nickname Pitocchetto (the Tiny beggar) for his many paintings of peasants dressed in rags.
He was born in Milan, but worked primarily in Brescia. He may have been influenced in advance by Antonio Cifrondi and/or Giacomo Todesco (Todeschini), and acknowledged training from Carlo Ceresa. While he plus painted still-life paintings and religious scenes, Ceruti is best known for his genre paintings, especially of beggars and the poor, whom he painted realistically and endowed with Strange dignity and individuality.
Ceruti gave particular attention to this subject issue during the grow old 1725 to 1740, and just about 50 of his genre paintings from these years survive. Mira Pajes Merriman, in her essay titled Comedy, Reality, and the Development of Genre Painting in Italy, observes that “Generally his figures do as regards nothing—after all, they have nothing to do.” She describes his paintings as confronting us with
A characteristic painting is his Woman later than a Dog which portrays a rather plain subject sympathetically and without idealization. Like most of his figures, she appears before an undifferentiated dark background; when Ceruti attempted to represent deep space, the results were frequently awkward. His landscape backgrounds resemble stage flats and are often copied from print sources, such as the engravings of Jacques Callot. The certainty Ceruti brought to his genre paintings along with distinguishes his portraits and nevertheless lifes, while it is less apparent in his somewhat suitable decorative paintings for churches, including frescoes for the Basilica Santa Maria Assunta of Gandino and an altarpiece for Santa Lucia in Padua. This limitation is not unique to Ceruti; the Brescian painter from the late 16th century, Giovanni Battista Moroni, was similarly known for expressive portraits, and drab religious paintings.
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