Gaetano Gandolfi

Born S Matteo della Decima, nr Bologna, 31 Aug 1734; died Bologna, 20 June 1802.

Painter, draughtsman, sculptor and etcher, brother of Ubaldo Gandolfi. He was a successful artist, whose oeuvre includes about 220 paintings, terracotta sculptures, etchings and a huge number of drawings. He was enrolled at the Accademia Clementina in Bologna by the age of 17 and claimed Felice Torelli and Ercole Lelli as his teachers. He had a distinguished academic career and between 1751 and 1756 won two medals for sculpture and four for drawing. His first documented commission was for drawings: between 1756 and 1760 he produced for private patrons a series of large finished red chalk copies (Bologna, Bib. Cassa di Risparmio; Windsor Castle, Berks, Royal Col.) of the classics of 17th-century painting. These and other early works are documented and dated in his manuscript autobiography, which, however, does not extend past c. 1769. His earliest known painting is the Calling of St James the Greater (1753; Piumazzo, nr Modena, parish church). The painting is close in style to the early work of his brother Ubaldo: highly finished, smooth and static, with low-key, muted colours. The figure types are the stereotyped ones of the Bolognese tradition. A surge of self-confidence is evident in the next datable paintings, the large St Jerome (1756) and St Mary Magdalene (1757; both Bazzano, oratory of the Suffraggio).

A major turning point in Gaetano’s career came in 1760 when, with the financial support of the Bolognese merchant Antonio Buratti (1736–1806), he studied in Venice for a year. The contact with Venetian 18th-century painting was immediately evident in his work, and faint echoes of Venice continued to reverberate until the 1780s. In 1763 he married Giovanna Spisani and celebrated the occasion with his Self-portrait and Portrait of Giovanna Spisani (both Bologna, priv. col., see Biagi-Maino, figs 83 and 82), rare examples of his accomplished work as a portrait painter. The virtuoso brushwork, indistinct contours and rainbow palette of such works as Circe and Ulysses (1766; Piacenza, Mus. Civ.) and St Peter in Prison (c. 1766; Stuttgart, Staatsgal.) reveal the influence of Venetian art, although he still used the face and figure types pioneered by his brother Ubaldo. It was during these years that their styles reached the closest point of convergence.

In the 1770s Gaetano received a series of important commissions, both religious and secular. From this decade, too, come the Old Beggar Man and Old Woman (both 1771; Bologna, Cassa di Risparmio), genre subjects that remain isolated. His major canvas of the decade is the Marriage at Cana (1776; Bologna, Pin. N.), painted for the refectory of the wealthy Lateran convent of S Salvatore, Bologna.

Gaetano’s major decorative projects were executed during these successful middle years of his career. Of the ten documented projects, only six still exist (all in Bologna) and some of these only fragmentarily. These are The Four Elements (late 1760s) for the Palazzo Odorici (now Zani–Odorici), Aurora (1770) for the Palazzo Guidotti (now Guidotti–Senni), Venus and Bacchus and Ariadne (1772) for the Palazzo Gini (now Gini–Veronese), Faith and Abundance (1774) for the Palazzo Bianconcini, the Sacrifice of Iphigeneia (1780) and various grisaille figures (1780) for the Palazzo Scagliarini and the splendid Rape of Deianeira (1782) for the Palazzo Monari (now Calzoni). There were also some minor decorative projects for religious institutions, such as the grisaille wall fresco St Proculus and Time (1770), with quadratura by Flaminio Minozzi (1735–1817), for the Dormitorio of the Benedettini of S Procolo, of which only the figure of Time remains.

In 1779 Gaetano completed the major religious commission of his career, the cupola fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin with Old Testament Figures (1776–9), in S Maria della Vita in Bologna, for which two bozzetti exist (Notre Dame, IN, Snite Mus. A.; Kansas City, MO, Nelson–Atkins Mus. A.). Three preparatory compositional drawings and a number of black chalk single-figure studies (e.g. Noah, New York, Pierpont Morgan Lib.) for the latter bozzetto survive (see 1993 exh. cat., nos 77–87).

In the 1780s the patronage for major projects fell off sharply, yet Gaetano’s style continued to develop. The large Death of Socrates (1782; Bologna, priv. col.) heralds his explorations in the freer use of bright primary colours and Neo-classical subject-matter, innovations that were carried further with energy and vitality in the large Continence of Scipio and Coriolanus and his Mother (both 1784; Bologna, Pin. N.). The composition of the Scipio is based on the painting by Gavin Hamilton, the Anger of Achilles at the Departure of Briseis, which Gaetano probably knew from the engraving by Domenico Cunego, and indicates the artist’s new interest in English Neo-classical prototypes. His remarkable Self-portrait (c. 1785; Bologna, Pin. N.), in a more realistic and robustly informal style, shows the artist at work, dressed in a rather shabby hunting-coat, with his pipe stuck in his tricorne and some freshly killed birds hanging from the easel. Many informal chalk drawings of children also date from the 1780s. Among the most enchanting and picturesque, reminiscent of Piazzetta, is the Portrait of a Boy and a Girl (Bologna, Pin. N.).

In 1787 Gaetano was invited by Richard Dalton, librarian to George III of England, for a visit of six months to London, passing through Paris en route. No work was produced on this trip, but the exposure to the broader European scene had a distinct effect on his subsequent style. Immediately on his return he executed the enormous painting for Pisa Cathedral, the Inauguration of the Foundling Hospital by the Beato Bernagalli (in situ), and for the first time fully integrated the simplified forms and static compositions of Neo-classicism into his robust figurative style. Other stylistic characteristics of the Pisa painting, which remained for the rest of his career, were a narrowing of his palette to a set of subtle neutral tonalities, with the dramatic emphasis gained by sharp contrasts in light and dark rather than through colour, and a studied stylization of face and gesture.

In the last years of his life Gaetano continued to execute paintings of religious and mythological subjects. Christ the Judge with the Virgin and Saints (1791; Ferrara, S Dominic), Communion of the Apostles and the Martyrdom of St Lawrence (both 1795–6; Budrio, S Lorenzo) are successful examples of his attempts to graft Neo-classical compositions and colour schemes on to traditional religious compositions. Four paintings evidently conceived as a group, which demonstrate his fully mature Neo-classicism as well as his personal late style, are Alexander Presenting Campaspe to Apelles, the Rape of the Sabine Women (both Liechtenstein, priv. col.), Tullia Driving over the Body of her Father, Servius Tullius and Mourning the Body of Hector (both London, priv. col.). The paintings are datable to 1797–9 by inscriptions on four preparatory compositional drawings. The compositions are rigorously Neo-classical, with the subjects that signify obedience to decorum on a vertical-horizontal grid, those dealing with violation on a diagonal grid (a convention that Gaetano also applied to his late religious paintings). His late palette is limited to a range of neutrals enlivened by brilliant primary colours sparsely applied.

Gaetano died suddenly in the summer of 1802 while playing bocce in the field of the church of S Emidio, just outside the gate of S Donato near his house. The funeral oration by Vincenzo Martinelli clearly describes a death from cardiac arrest, not, as some of the literature whimsically has it, from being hit on the head by a bocce ball.

Mimi Cazort. "Gandolfi." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T030596pg2 (accessed April 10, 2012).