Details

Name

Giuseppe Cesari

Brief Biography

1568–1640, Italian

Occupation

Painter

Description

Cesari, always known by his papal title of 'Cavaliere d’Arpino', arrived in Rome in his early teens, and by 1585 had already embarked on his long career as a large-scale decorator in the service of successive popes. For a period in the 1590s and early 1600s he was the dominant painter in Rome, until his late Mannerist style – albeit one animated by a new energy of form and colour – was made to look old-fashioned by the much more radically innovative art of Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio (qv). Although principally active as a painter of monumental frescoes for Roman palaces and churches, involving the collaboration of a team of assistants, the Cavaliere also developed a sideline in small-scale cabinet pictures on panel, slate and copper, which he executed with an extraordinary brilliance and delicacy.