Guiseppe Cades
Italian, 1750 - 1799
Italian painter and draughtsman. He was an important history painter and decorator, whose paintings and drawings vary in manner from the Baroque to Neo-classical, and who anticipated Romantic historicism. His subjects are taken from Greek and Roman literature, 16th- and 17th-century religious history and Italian literature of the early and High Renaissance; his many drawings include preparatory studies, caricatures, genre scenes and portraits. He trained under Domenico Corvi at the Accademia di S Luca, where he won prizes with drawings such as the mannered and brilliant Tobias Healing his Blind Father (1766; Rome, Accad. N. S Luca). However, Cades had to leave Corvi’s studio c. 1766, as Corvi apparently resented his pupil’s excessive independence (Lanzi).
In the early 1770s Cades started to receive important commissions. His first large canvases were the Martyrdom of St Benignus (1774; San Benigno Canavese, Fruttuaria Abbey), which continues the classical tradition of late 17th-century Italian painting, and the Ecstasy of St Joseph of Copertino (1777; Rome, SS Apostoli), influenced by Venetian painting. Between 1774 and 1781, however, Cades’s style as a draughtsman was deeply influenced by the circle of northern artists who gathered in Rome around Johann Heinrich Füseli and Johan Tobias Sergel. He broke with the Late Baroque formulae, deriving from Carlo Maratti, to create a Romantic style, influenced both by the Antique and by Mannerist and Renaissance painting, in rich and powerful drawings such as Ulysses, Achilles and Patroclus (Paris, Louvre), Achilles and Briseis (1776; Montpellier, Mus. Fabre) and Mars and Venus (Florence, Mus. Horne, on dep. Florence, Uffizi). (Sergel kept a sketchbook of Cades’s drawings after the Antique and after Roman painting; Stockholm, Nmus..) Four canvases from these years take subjects from ancient history: Ulysses, Achilles and Patroclus, Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi (both Paris, Louvre), Lucretia, Tarquin and Collatinus (France, priv. col., see Caracciolo, 1984, fig.) and Pontifex Maximus among the Vestals (untraced). These were acquired before 1789 by the Toulouse collector Nicolas Joseph Marcassus, Baron de Puymaurin. They suggest an interest in the achievements of contemporary Neo-classical painters, both from France and northern Europe.
Between 1776 and 1779 Cades began working with the architect Giacomo Quarenghi, painting a Deposition for the altar of the chapel at Wardour Castle (now Cranbourne Chase School), Wilts, on a commission from Henry, 8th Baron Arundell of Wardour. In 1779 they completed the new music room, commissioned by Don Abbondio Rezzonico, for the Palazzo Senatorio in Rome. In the same year Cades also made a portrait drawing of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, which Piranesi’s son, Francesco (1758–1810), later engraved.
In the 1780s Cades consolidated his position in the official art world of Rome. His St Peter Appearing to SS Lucy and Agatha (Ascoli Piceno, Pin. Civ.) dates from 1781, and in 1782 he painted a ceiling in the Palazzo Ruspoli, Rome, with Venus Weeping over the Body of Adonis (in situ). He also responded to the new interest of contemporary French painters in costume pieces, as in his etching, the Death of Leonardo da Vinci in the Arms of Francis I (1783; plate, Rome, Calcografia N.; preparatory drawings, Oxford, Ashmolean, and Lisbon, Mus. N. A. Ant.), which was inspired by Vasari’s Vite and shows figures sumptuously clad in Renaissance dress. In 1784 Cades was commissioned, through Quarenghi, who was working in Russia, to paint four canvases with the theme of Ceres for Empress Catherine II, to decorate the music pavilion in the park at Tsarskoye Selo. Also in 1784 he worked on the Neo-classical decoration of the Sala delle Muse in the Palazzo Chigi, Rome (destr.); in 1785 there followed the vast and richly ornamented Neo-classical Birth of the Virgin (Genoa, S Maria delle Vigne). Cades was elected an academician at the Accademia di S Luca in 1786; a Self-portrait (Rome, Accad. N. S Luca), dated 1786, but probably painted at an earlier date, was given to the Accademia by the artist’s wife after his death.
Cades made a study tour of northern Italy c. 1785, visiting Florence, Bologna, Cento, Ferrara and Venice. A volume of drawings which belonged to Bertel Thorvaldsen (Copenhagen, Thorvaldsens Mus.) contains sketches that reveal Cades’s great admiration for late 16th- and 17th-century Venetian and Bolognese painters, particularly Veronese and Guercino. He was extremely busy in the late 1780s on decorative schemes. The most important of these were the decoration of the Neo-classical apartments in the Palazzo Altieri, Rome (1787 and 1791); the ceiling of a small room on the second floor of the Villa Borghese, Rome, with a scene (1787) from Boccaccio’s Decameron, the Recognition of Count Gautier of Angers; and the decoration of the Sala dell’Ariosto in the Palazzo Chigi at Ariccia, commissioned by Prince Sigismondo Chigi, with scenes (1788–90) from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso . These paintings epitomize his mature style: the colours are light and fresh, the compositions classically balanced, yet enriched by a dramatic, neo-Mannerist quality that is most evident in the preparatory drawings (Budapest, Mus. F.A.; copies of the drawings, Archv Chigi, Rome, Vatican, Bib. Apostolica).
Religious paintings largely occupied Cades from the late 1780s onwards, often with subjects from 16th- and 17th-century religious history. He executed five large paintings (1790) for the convent of S Francesco at Fabriano: St Lucy and St Apollonia, St Anthony of Padua and St Joseph of Copertino (all Fabriano, S Agostino) and the Virgin Appearing to Five Saints and the Blessed F. Venimbeni (Fabriano, S Caterina). Other subjects include a Virgin with the Blessed G. De Bono and N. da Longobardi (1791; Rome, S Andrea delle Fratte); SS Francis and Bonaventure (1796; Bagnoregio, S Francesco); and the Blessed Angelina of Marsciano (1798; Foligno, S Francesco), for which there is a drawing dated 1795 (Lisbon, Mus. N. A. Ant.). In his late works Cades’s interest in Romantic historicism, and in the elegant cavaliers of Anthony van Dyck and the women of Rubens, is increasingly marked, as in the drawing St Elizabeth of Portugal Reconciling her Son and her Husband (Lisbon, Mus. N. A. Ant.), made for an altarpiece for S Antonio dei Portoghesi in Rome (in situ), which was finished after Cades’s death by Luigi Agricola (b 1750). Important collections of drawings by Cades are in the Lisbon Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (a volume formerly owned by Domingos António de Sequeira); Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett (originally in the collection of Vincenzo Pacetti); and in the Hermitage, St Petersburg.
Maria Teresa Caracciolo. "Cades, Giuseppe." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T012938 (accessed March 22, 2012).
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