Giancinto Calandrucci
Italian, 1646 - 1707
Italian painter and draughtsman. He was trained in Rome, where he was first a pupil of the painter and engraver Pietro del Pò (1610–92), who also came from Palermo. At an unknown date he moved to the studio of Carlo Maratti and, with Giuseppe Passeri, became a favourite pupil. He was clearly linked to Maratti’s workshop for a long period and perfectly assimilated his teacher’s idiom, though without attaining his elegance and precision. In the 1680s Calandrucci executed various decorative frescoes in Roman palazzi: the Four Seasons in the Palazzo Lante; mythological frescoes in the gallery of the Palazzo Muti–Papazzurri; the decoration (untraced) of the gallery of the Palazzo Strozzi–Besso; and a ceiling fresco, the Sacrifice of Ceres, in the Villa Falconieri at Frascati. He also painted idyllic pastoral scenes, among them two pictures at Burghley House, Stamford, England. His secular decorations are more successful than the sometimes clumsy and banal altarpieces and ceiling frescoes that he executed in Roman churches. These include the high altar, the Virgin and Child with Saints, a Baptism and ceiling frescoes, all in the Cimini Chapel of S Antonio del Portoghesi (from 1682), a Virgin and Child with St Anne and Saints in frescoes and canvases in S Bonaventura (before 1686), a Holy Family with St Anne and St Anthony of Padua, both in S Paolo della Regola (c. 1700), and frescoes in S Maria dell’Orto (c. 1700–05). In 1705 he returned to Palermo, where he began the decoration of the oratory of S Lorenzo. Of over 1500 surviving drawings by Calandrucci, the great majority are in the Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf, and in the Cabinet des Dessins of the Louvre. Many of his sketches record paintings that the artist planned and probably executed, though these have not yet been traced.
Dieter Graf. "Calandrucci, Giacinto." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T013103 (accessed March 22, 2012).
Person TypeIndividual
Italian, 1692 - 1770