Giuseppe Maria Crespi

(Bologna, 1665 - 1747)

After Ludovico Carracci, Giuseppe Maria Crespi drew on the same popular roots in his painting and was equally adept at portraying everyday life.

"Giuseppe Maria Crespi was a religious man as well, and for him too, ‘sentiment’ was an important condition of his art. However as a free and non-conformist man, even more important than his religious feeling was his attitude towards life... Over the centuries, Bologna had accumulated the means for a civilised way of life, far from wars or major historical events. Even more than Ludovico, the artist transposed into ‘sentiment’ the powerful ancient physicality of the times that lasted until Aspertini’s day. But this was not a facile sentimentality or indiscriminate sweetness; on the contrary, it was a warm embrace of the heart and senses.

It seems to me that, after a long time, I have correctly understood the meaning of that brown halo, of the nocturnal or shadowy backgrounds from which Crespi’s creatures emerge into the light. Compared to the conditions established by humanism and its late results, Caravaggio’s powerful genius alone had restored a new primal physicality to things. Neither Ludovico first nor Crespi later reconceived the idea of living so radically; however, without obliterating it (in this sense, Emilia’s remote heritage never disappeared), they twisted the ancient idea of nature into the more modern aspect of the ordinariness of existence, and from this came a new pathos. Their sentiment seems to be the ‘expressive’ outcome, almost by direct transudation, of that physicality. Therefore, the halo that almost always surrounds Crespi’s humanity is like the serious, deep, enveloping breath of a substance that comes alive in the vitality of feeling. His tone is very distinctive; one that could already be called ‘proto-Romantic’.