Collection: Giacomo Ceruti
Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti (1698–1767), called Il Pitocchetto, was an Italian late Baroque painter active in Northern Italy, particularly in Milan, Brescia, and Venice. He trained in the late Baroque tradition and worked across genres, including portraits, religious and mythological scenes, and still lifes. His early commissions included decorative projects for the parish of Rino di Sonico and the Palazzo Broletto in Brescia, as well as portraits of Brescian civic figures.
Ceruti painted large-scale genre scenes of beggars, paupers, pilgrims, and laborers with unidealized realism and quiet dignity. These works, often executed in a restrained palette and with precise attention to costume and gesture, avoided the allegorical or moralizing conventions of contemporary genre painting.
His treatment of marginalized subjects, such as in "Giacomo Feeding a Dog" (1738/39), showed an empathetic engagement with the rural and urban poor, a rarity in Italian Baroque art.
Ceruti’s reputation declined in the 19th century, but his focus on social realism anticipated later developments in European genre painting. His works are held in collections such as the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, where his depictions of ordinary life have been reappraised as precursors to 18th- and 19th-century naturalism.
