A new masterpiece at the Uffizi Galleries: "Mendicante moro" by Giacomo Ceruti
The painting by the original 18th-century artist known for his avant-garde, realistic depictions of people belonging to the humblest social classes, has just been purchased by the Uffizi Galleries
Monumentality, emotion, humanity.
The gaze of the Mendicante moro (“The Moorish beggar”) by Giacomo Ceruti – the 18th-century painter famed for his avant-garde works that, with an already bourgeois eye, observe the common folk, endowing even the humblest of them with individuality – is a unique distillate of a composed intensity of form and substance. This unique painting, done by the Milanese artist in the first half of the 18th century, has just joined the Uffizi Galleries: in addition to giving the museum yet another masterpiece, a new icon destined to become part of the collective imagery, the new acquisition is particularly significant from the standpoint of making the collection more complete. Until now, the Galleries owned only one other painting – albeit one of relative substance – by this original artist: The Boy with a Basket of Fish, done about ten years after the Moor.
Giacomo Ceruti, Il mendicante moro (“The Moorish beggar”), Oil on canvas, 1725-30
The painting features a man who, aside from the rags he wears and his gesture of begging for alms, is depicted by Ceruti with the same solemnity and stylistic respect reserved for aristocratic portraits in that era, and for toga-clad magistrates in antiquity. The facial features are explored with extreme realism; the masterpiece and central focus of this work is in the eyes: deep black pupils contrasting with the bright whites, suffering and tired yet lively at the same time. The painting’s enormous emotional value lies both in the face clearly drawn from a live subject, and in the gaze. In the Moor, then, Ceruti expresses not superficial curiosity for the exotic and picturesque, but full, human participation for the individuality of this real person, presenting him with great psychological depth.
During the Renaissance and the Baroque period, subjects of African origin appeared with a certain frequency in Italian art, from magicians to pages and dark-skinned maidservants. In the 18th century, the most common sculptural form for depicting them was in statuary featuring "Moors," a presence in both architecture and the decorative arts. Holding a plate, urn, or vase, and often clad in Moorish or Turkish costumes, these figures were those of servants who worked as pages, valets, and manservants. Wearing the plumed headwear and turbans in vogue at the time, they were often reduced to orientalist taste, to anecdotal, domestic detail, deprived of individual dignity and relegated to being symbols of the client’s wealth.
Clad in rags, Ceruti’s beggar stands in clear contrast with this manner of depiction – one that was adhered to by the majority at that time.
Active in northern Italy in the 18th century, the painter had a reputation centred upon his paintings of subjects who were only apparently humble. He depicted them not as comic, dehumanized figures, but as individuals, as a worthy part of that hardworking populace from which the great European bourgeoisie would soon emerge. His paintings of beggars are milestones in the continent’s art history, remarkable for their honesty and for the great human dignity that the artist conferred to the subjects of a feudalism that was on its way out.
While the Moor’s collection history is unknown, scholars are quite familiar with the painting for its having been included in Longhi’s exhibition dedicated to the Painters of reality (Milan, 1953). Since then, it has enjoyed an excellent bibliography, appearing in catalogues and monographs. Lastly, it also made a recent return to the spotlight on the occasion of the recent show Giacomo Ceruti nell'Europa del Settecento (“Giacomo Ceruti in 18th-century Europe”) curated by Roberta D'Adda, Francesco Frangi, and Alessandro Morandotti, and held in Brescia in the spring of 2023.
According to Simone Verde, Director of the Uffizi Galleries: “After Subleyras’s Mystical Marriage of St. Caterina de’ Ricci, the Uffizi’s 18th-century painting collections are enriched by another masterpiece – The Moorish Beggar by Giacomo Ceruti. An absolutely unique piece, this portrait, full of classical monumentality, overturns the iconographic conventions of his time and expands the cultural boundaries of a century in which modernity was making headway and the values of equality were being affirmed.”
