Giuseppe Maria Crespi, known as “Lo Spagnuolo”

Giuseppe Maria Crespi owes his nickname “Lo Spagnolo” (sometimes “Spagnuolo”) or even “Lo Spagnoletto” (“The Little Spaniard”) to the style of clothing he favoured when, as children, he and his companions played at imagining how foreigners dressed. Young Crespi’s penchant for rather loose, dark clothing earned him the nickname “Lo Spagnolo” (“The Spaniard”).

Looking back at the numerous self-portraits that this Bolognese artist painted of himself in his maturity and then again at the end of his life, the style of the cloaks on his shoulders and their sober, dark colour do indeed recall the clothing in which certain 17^th century Spanish painters such as Murillo and Zurbarán clad their figures.

Crespi trained in Bologna, initially at the Accademia del nudo (Academy of the Nude) held in Casa Ghisilieri, then in the studio of Domenico Maria Canuti (Bologna, 1626-1684) and finally in the workshop of Carlo Cignani (Bologna, 1628-Forlì, 1719), two of the most brilliant fresco artists of the entire seventeenth century in Bologna and to a certain extent also in Italy. This goes a long way towards explaining the success of the frescoes he painted later on in his artistic career on the ceilings of two rooms in the Pepoli Campogrande palace in Bologna (Hercules on the Chariot drawn by the Hours, and the Banquet of the Gods), which Giampietro Zanotti, his first and most important biographer, dates to the beginning of the eighteenth century¹.

For an artist who, according to his biographer, was not only averse to travelling, or even to simply moving from his native Bologna – in fact, he almost never left his own house – his great good fortune lay in his encounter with the man who was to become his most important patron, Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici of Tuscany.

Zanotti tells us that Crespi had been commissioned to paint a large canvas depicting the Massacre of the Innocents, the patron who ordered the painting explaining to him that he wished to make a gift of it to the Grand Prince of Tuscany. When the painting was finished, however, the client invented a thousand excuses to postpone payment. Since Crespi refused to deliver the work without being paid, the client hired two henchmen to take the canvas by force. Crespi promptly rolled up the canvas and lowered himself with it from the window of his workshop. Once on the street, he decided to take the painting to the Grand Prince himself, and so he set off for Florence.

To cut a long story short, he finally managed to give the painting to Ferdinando de’ Medici, who not only greatly appreciated the painter’s gesture and generosity but also greatly admired the painting itself.

From that moment on, the powerful prince and the Bolognese painter forged a genuine bond of friendship, the prince commissioning numerous works from the artist and the artist, in his turn, dispatching numerous gifts to Florence. This partnership gave the painter a certain financial security and also allowed him to benefit from the Tuscan ruler’s network of contacts to receive commissions from abroad.

Theirs was a sincere friendship. Suffice it to say that Crespi’s third son, Ferdinando, also a painter and engraver who «fece miniature bellissime e disegnò assai bene sotto la disciplina del padre» («made beautiful miniatures and drew very well under his father’s discipline», Zanotti tells us), was born while the family was staying at the Medici villa in Pratolino, near Florence, in 1709, and his godfather was none other than Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici, after whom he was, in fact, named².

Meanwhile, in Bologna, Crespi obtained the position of director of the painting courses at the newly founded Accademia Clementina, the first academy of fine arts in Bologna and one of the first in Italy, in 1712 and again in 1714.

His most prestigious commissions include a series of the Seven Sacraments, commissioned by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (Venice, 1667 – Rome, 1740) and now in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden.

Around 1715 he painted another Massacre of the Innocents for the Elector Palatine Johann William (Düsseldorf, 1658-1716) now in Munich (Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen), and the following year he was working for Vittorio Amedeo Francesco of Savoy (Turin, 1666 – Moncalieri, 1732), without forgetting the numerous altarpieces he painted in many different towns. These prestigious commissions were paralleled by a series of small canvases of a humorous and worldly nature, a series of paintings «comperati dal Principe Panfili» («bought by Prince Panfili», and still in Palazzo Doria Pamphili in Rome) and, above all, twenty prints from the 1710s depicting Stories of Bertoldo, Bertoldino and Cacasenno, inspired by the literary texts of Giulio Cesare Croce and Camillo Scaligeri della Fratta.

In recognition of the widespread fame he had achieved, Crespi, now seventy-five years old, received a golden cross and the title of knight at the hands of Pope Benedict XIV in the course of a solemn ceremony in the Cathedral of Bologna on Christmas Day 1740.