The Uffizi acquires the Dark Beggar by Giacomo Ceruti, a portrait that challenges conventions – Florence – Arte.it

Florence – A man dressed in torn clothes, depicted in the gesture of asking for alms, his bright pupils, in contrast to his very white sclera, examine the spectator with the same solemnity as a nobleman or a man in cloak.
The dark-haired beggar by Giacomo Ceruti, the painter of the latter, who brings to canvas a subject of African origin that regularly returns in Italian art during the Renaissance and Baroque, from the magicians to the dark-skinned maids, is the latest acquisition of the Uffizi Gallery.
Yet the painting clashes with the canonical representation of the 18th century, which tended to reproduce the images of Moors holding a plate, an urn or a vase, wrapped in Moorish or Turkish costumes, and which reduced these figures to the rank of servants working as pages and servants of the chamber, with their feathered headdresses relegated to a symbol of the client’s opulence.
On the contrary, Ceruti explores physiognomy with extreme realism, borrowing the face from a real subject. The Lombard painter, known for his avant-garde and realistic depictions of people belonging to the most modest social groups, shows no superficial curiosity about the Moro for a picturesque exotic. This canvas captures the viewer with the extraordinary human participation and individuality of this real person, presented with great psychological depth.Ceruti’s beggar, dressed in rags, therefore stands in stark contrast to the representations of his time. The painter, active in northern Italy in the 18th century, focuses on the humble, immortalized not as comical and dehumanized figures, but as a worthy part of that industrious people from which the great European bourgeoisie would soon emerge.

“After the mystical wedding of Santa Caterina de’ Ricci by Subleyras – explains the director of the Uffizi Galleries Simone Verde – the Uffizi’s collections of 18th century painting are enriched by another masterpiece, the Moro Mendicant by Giacomo Ceruti. An absolutely unique, this portrait full of classical monumentality that overthrows the iconographic conventions of its time and broadens the cultural boundaries of a century in which modernity is making its way and values of equality are affirmed.”

Del Moro, which accompanies another painting by Pitocchetto kept in the Uffizi, entitled Boy with basket of fish and crabsabout ten years after the Moro originated, the collection history is unknown. Yet the work is known to scholars because it was included in the Longhi exhibition dedicated to the painters of reality (Milan, 1953), which came back to the fore on the occasion of the recent exhibition. Giacomo Ceruti in eighteenth-century Europe, curated by Roberta D’Adda, Francesco Frangi and Alessandro Morandotti, held in Brescia in spring 2023.