Michelangelo Cerquozzi
When he died on 29 March 1660 in Rome in his house located near the Spanish Steps he had become a very wealthy artist with important financial and property holdings.
[8] Cerquozzi executed only one public commission in Rome, a lunette depicting the Miracle of Saint Francis of Paolo in the cloister of the Church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, which has been lost.
[9] Cerquozzi’s religious works are generally cabinet-sized pictures and feature, like his genre paintings, small, unidealized figures in naturalistic landscape settings.
These feature a close-up viewpoint of a battle dominated by an intense cavalry conflict, complete with horses and men unbridled in whirling movement.
"[11] In his early genre works Cerquozzi showed his mastery of the style of Pieter van Laer and Jan Miel in their compact scale, anti-heroic subject-matter and dramatic chiaroscuro effects.
[3] Cerquozzi was not a slavish follower of these Flemish and Dutch models and differed from them in his emphasis on contemporary narrative and anecdotal elements.
[2][12] Cerquozzi's Party in a garden with Roman artists (Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister) displays typical bambocciata characteristics in its naturalism and small format.
They thus stand in a long tradition of paradox in which low or vulgar subjects were the vehicle for conveying important philosophical meanings.
The dislike of other artists for the Bamboccianti has been explained by the fact that they produced paintings which were often cheaper and thus constituted strong competition for 'serious' painters, particularly at the end of the 1640s and during the 1650s when the economy was depressed.
The somewhat contorted expression of the young man, his naked torso and the open white shirt bring to mind the memory of certain early works of Caravaggio.
The superb rendering of the vine leaves and grapes in the Prado piece evoke Caravaggio's Basket of fruit in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana.
However, the opulence of the pumpkins, the open pomegranate and the presence of a landscape barely visible in the background point to a more advanced phase in the evolution of the genre and show full Baroque influences.
The erotic meaning of the composition is indicated by the fact that the fruit offered is about to burst and by the loving glance that the woman casts towards the man.
As Codazzi's compositions typically depicted Antique ruins and monuments, the collaboration likely made Cerquozzi move away from the representation of anecdotes of rural life to more elevated and exotic subjects.
[15] This work deals with the anti-Spanish rebellion that took place on 7 July 1647 in the Piazza del Mercato in Naples with the support of France.
[2] He depicted a lively historical fresco in miniature, in which the town square, angry populace, petty thieves and animals are all enclosed by the wide view of the city which opens onto the Vesuvius.
Masaniello is represented not so much as a hero, or even a comic anti-hero, whether pro- or anti-Spanish, but as a kind of prodigy who rose above the ordinary fate of his class to accomplish fabulous deeds.
Cerquozzi's composition can thus be regarded as falling in the genre of painted marvels, which travellers brought back from the East or the New World to document rarities of nature or peculiarities of human behaviour for the interest of European collectors.
[16] In 1647, Cerquozzi collaborated with Jan Miel, Giacomo Borgognone, and others on illustrations for he second volume of Famiano Strada's De Bello Belgico, which celebrated the campaigns waged by Alessandro Farnese in the Netherlands for the Spanish emperor.
