Guido Cagnacci

Guido Cagnacci (January 19, 1601 – 1663) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, who produced many works characterized by their use of chiaroscuro and their sensual subjects. He was influenced by the masters of the Bolognese School.

Cagnacci was born in Santarcangelo di Romagna, near Rimini. He worked in Rimini from 1627 to 1642. After that, he moved to work in Forlì, where he would have been able to observe the paintings of Melozzo.

Prior to living in Forlì he had been in Rome, where he had come in contact with Guercino, Guido Reni and Simon Vouet. He may have had an apprenticeship with the elderly Ludovico Carracci in Bologna. His initial output includes many devotional subjects. But moving to Venice under the name of Guido or Guidobaldo Canlassi da Bologna, he renewed a friendship with Nicolas Regnier, and dedicated himself to private salon paintings, often depicting sensuous naked women from thigh upwards, including Lucretia, Cleopatra, and Mary Magdalene. This allies him to a strand of courtly painting, epitomized in Florence by Francesco Furini, Simone Pignoni and others. In 1650, he moved to Venice. In 1658, he traveled to Vienna, where he remained under patronage of the Emperor Leopold I.

His life was often tempestuous, as can be characterized by the 1628 episode of a failed elopement with an aristocratic widow. Some contemporaries describe him as eccentric, unreliable and of doubtful morality. He is said to have enjoyed the company of cross-dressing models. He died in Vienna in 1663.

Cagnacci's work was, in one view, "entirely unappreciated by his contemporaries," but reassessed by modern critics; his painting is "warm with the heightened tones of grazing light, rich in the play of shadows and colors."

Guido Cagnacci was one of the most eccentric painters of seventeenth-century Italy. His art, mostly religious in subject, is known for its unabashed, often unsettling eroticism, and his life was equally and notoriously unconventional.

Born in 1601, in the small village of Santarcangelo, Cagnacci spent his early life in Romagna, a region in northeastern Italy between the Apennine Mountains and the Adriatic Sea. By 1618, he was studying painting in Bologna and in the early 1620s is documented as living in Rome. He was back in Romagna by the mid-1620s, producing idiosyncratic pictures for religious and aristocratic patrons in the principal cities of the region — Rimini, Forlì, and Faenza — and in smaller centers, such as Montegridolfo, Saludecio, and his birthplace of Santarcangelo. For almost ten years, in the 1650s, Cagnacci was based in Venice, before moving in 1658 to Vienna, the imperial capital, where he died in 1663.

Cagnacci was infamous in his day; most of the surviving documents that enable us to reconstruct his biography are legal and criminal records. In 1628, he unlawfully eloped with Teodora Arianna Stivivi, an aristocratic widow, but avoided arrest by abandoning her and fleeing from Rimini. He was later rumored to be living illegally with attractive young women who were disguised as male apprentices. He succeeded in convincing a woman to bequeath him all of her property, and, on occasion, he was known to travel from city to city under a false name.

While Cagnacci’s pictorial language was influenced by some of the greatest Italian Baroque painters — the Carracci, Guercino, and Guido Reni — his figurative style remained individual and highly recognizable, particularly after the late 1630s, with a distinctive manner influenced by Reni’s languid late works. In large part because of its originality, Cagnacci’s work was almost entirely forgotten during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The rediscovery of his oeuvre took place in Italy in the 1950s, but he remains little known outside of Italy.

In 1952, the Italian art historian Cesare Gnudi wrote about two of Cagnacci’s canvases that were made for the Cathedral of Forlì. Gnudi’s lyrical description could as well apply to most of Cagnacci’s paintings:

[They possess] a sensuous beauty, an exuberant life that expands into a spectacular vision, a magnificent and joyful ballet; a world that delights itself in an enchanted game of brilliant colors, of dazzling lights, of sounds, and at the same time discovers a reality which is closer and more earthly, a new, much abbreviated, relationship with nature: all of these, we have seen, are typical seventeenth-century notes, but expressed in such singular form that it can be easily said that they add a new accent to the history of Italian painting.

Selected works:
Saint Sisto pope (1627), Museo di Saludecio e del Beato Amato, Saludecio, Rimini - Italy
Procession of the Holy Sacrament (1628) Museo di Saludecio e del Beato Amato, Salucedio, Rimini - Italy
Christ with Saints Joseph and Eligius (1635)
Madonna with saints Andre Corsini Teresa and Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi (1640, Santarcangelo di Romagna)
Frescoes in Cappella della Madonna del Fuoco (Duomo, Forlì)
Allegory of spheral Astrology (Pinacoteca civica, Forlì)
Glory of Saints Valerian and Mercurial (Faenza)
Leopold I portrait (Vienna)
Calling of Saint Matthew (Museo della Città - Rimini)
Allegorical Naked Figure (private)
The Death of Cleopatra (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan)
Death of Cleopatra (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna)
Death of Lucretia
The Repentant Magdalene (Norton Simon Museum)
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