Giuseppe Cesari (Il Cavaliere d'Arpino)

Italian, 1568 - 1640

BiographyItalian painter, the favourite artist of Pope Clement VIII, who dominated the official art world in Rome in the years around 1600. Born in Arpino, the son of an inferior painter of ex-votos, he came to Rome as a young boy, and almost immediately entered the team of fresco painters working in the Vatican Loggias, where he was acclaimed as a prodigy. There followed swift success as a fashionable painter of elegant frescoes; his small, highly finished cabinet paintings of erotic mythological subjects were also much in demand. In the 1590s commissions poured into his busy studio, where he employed many specialist artists, among them Caravaggio, who there painted flowers and fruit. His frescoed decoration of the Olgiati chapel in S. Prassede (1593–5) brought a new sense of brilliant colour and decorative opulence to Roman art. From 1599 to 1601 he directed the decoration of the transept of S. John Lateran, and here attempted to restore the grandeur and clarity of Raphael. These years marked the summit of his success, and later, melancholy and dissatisfied, he stood apart from the developing Baroque. His brother Bernardino (1571–1622) worked in his studio, but was better known as a draughtsman.

Langdon, Helen. "Cavaliere d'Arpino." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e501 (accessed April 10, 2012).

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