Guido Cagnacci

Variant namesauktoriserad namnform: Guido Cagnacci

DatesBiographical dates: 1601 - 1663 Dead: dead 1663 Born: born 1601-01-19 Born: född 1601-01-13 eller 1601-01-19

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BiographyBiography: Cagnacci, Guido (b Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna, 19 Jan 1601; d Vienna, 1663). Italian painter. He studied in Bologna in 1618–21 with an unidentified teacher, went to Rome in 1621 and finished an apprenticeship with Guercino in 1622. His earliest documented work, the Procession of the Holy Sacrament (1627; Saludecio, parish church), was to have been part of a larger decorative cycle that was never completed. At about the same time he painted an altarpiece depicting St Sixtus II (Saludecio, parish church). In 1628, at which time he was living in Rimini with his family, he attempted to elope with a widowed noblewoman, Teodora Stivivi, intending to force her family to consent to their marriage. The attempt was a failure but had long-lasting repercussions that affected the course of his career. He was obliged to leave Rimini for a while but returned in 1631 and painted some important works, characterized by a dramatic chiaroscuro that suggests direct contact with the followers of Caravaggio in Rome. Particularly noteworthy are his altarpieces of the Virgin and Child with Three Carmelite Saints (c. 1631; Rimini, S Giovanni Battista), the Calling of St Matthew (Rimini, Pin. Com. & Mus. Civ.) and Christ with SS Joseph and Eloi (1635; Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna, Collegiata). Guido Cagnacci was born in Santarcangelo di Romagna. Cagnacci’s father sent him to Bologna to study painting and there he lived for four years (1617–21) with the nobleman Girolamo Leoni. A contemporary source, Francesco Scanelli, names Ludovico Carracci as his teacher during this time. Cagnacci took two trips to Rome in 1621–22. On the second of these he stayed with Guercino, and while there became closely acquainted with the work of Caravaggio and his followers. Guido Reni’s work also came to play a major part in Cagnacci’s artistic development, though filtered through the lens of his Caravaggesque influences. For the following two decades he relocated to Rimini and painted devotional works for churches, convents and confraternities in the town and its environs. Cagnacci’s successive commissions clearly show his differing influences: from the Caravaggism of the Vision of the Carmelite Saints in the church of San Giovanni Battista, Rimini, to the influence of Reni in the Penitent Magdalen painted for the Benedictine church of Santa Maria Maddalena in Urbania in 1637, and to that of Correggio in the large canvases of St Valerian and St Mercurialis painted for the dome of the chapel of the Madonna del Fuoco in Forlì Cathedral. After a sojourn in Forlì in 1642–43, he was in contact with Florence and Venice concerning possible commissions and travelled to those cities in 1648–49. In Venice, Cagnacci developed a successful synthesis of an idiosyncratic naturalism with Venetian- inspired colour and composition, evident in paintings such as Natura Morta con fantesca che batte due cani (Milan, Collezione Borromeo). He stayed in Venice until 1658, when he was invited by Emperor Leopold I to become court painter in Vienna. In this last artistic period, Cagnacci admirably merged his Caravaggesque influences with an innate sensuality, in paintings such as the Morte di Cleopatra (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum). Soon there was a great demand for Cagnacci’s paintings, the most popular of them being sensual half-length renderings of allegorical figures such as Cleopatra and Lucretia. So great was the popularity of these pictures that there were soon many imitations and copies on the market. Cagnacci himself employed copyists in his studio.

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