Giuseppe Marchesi

Giuseppe Marchesi (1699–1771) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, active mainly in Bologna. He was also known as il Sansone for his herculean build.

Biography

Giuseppe Marchesi first trained under the Bolognese painter Aureliano Milani, until Milani left Bologna for Rome in 1719.

Marchesi then joined the workshop of Marcantonio Franceschini, an early and masterful exponent of the classicist style in Italy, at least until the affirmation of Donato Creti. From Milani, Marchesi had gained his first teacher's appetite for athletic male figures, in the style of the Carracci; while from Franceschini, Marchesi acquired a wonderful lightness in representing images of women, children and angels, and he always maintained the skill that Franceschini showed to render clear complexions suffused with gentle redness and harmony in composition. We do not know of works completed while he was a pupil of Franceschini who, being of a particularly sober nature, ended up driving the young Marchesi from his atelier because of the excessive vivacity of the latter's character.

Marchesi's first reliably dated work, The Rape of Elena (1725) was completed for the great hall of the Buratti house in Bologna, after the expulsion of Marchesi from Franceschini's workshop. Perhaps his canvases depicting the Four Seasons (National Art Gallery of Bologna) predate this work. These paintings depict nature in an arcadian spirit, but with a greater chromatic range than Franceschini, recalling works of Lorenzo Pasinelli. For example, he displays a more refined naturalism in the "Nocturnal Winter", in which Marchesi experiments with realistic and unusual effects of light and shadows, that demonstrate, as do the other three works, a knowledge of Northern European Rococo painting.