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©
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, on loan with Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)
Giacomo Ceruti (known as "Il Pittocchetto")

Group of Beggars

ca. 1737
Oil on canvas.
130.5 x 95 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, on deposit with Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)
Inv. no.
86
(
1975.43
)
Not on display
  • Level 2 Permanent Collection
  • Level 1 Permanent Collection
  • Level 0 Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
  • Level -1 Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Level 2
Permanent Collection
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 15 16 17 18 22 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Recommended start of the visitClassical rooms
1 14th Century. Early Italian Painting 2 15th Century. German and Spanish Painting 3 15th Century. Early Netherlandish Painting 4 15th Century. Italian Painting 5 15th and 16th Centuries. Renaissance Portraiture 6 16th Century. Villahermosa Gallery 7 16th Century. Italian Painting 8 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 9 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 10 16th Century. Netherlandish Painting 11 Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassano and  El Greco 12 17th Century. Caravaggio and Baroque Painting 13 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 14 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 15 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 16 18th Century. Italian Painting 17 18th Century. Italian Painting 18 18th Century. Italian Painting 19 Classical rooms 20 Classical rooms 21 Classical rooms 22 18th Century. Italian Painting 23 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 24 18th Century. French and English Painting 25 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Scenes of Daily Life and Interiors 26 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 27 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Portrait 28 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 29 19th Century. European Painting. Goya and Romanticism  
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Level 0
Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
A B C D E F G H I J Hall Temporary exhibition rooms Access to Permanent Collection Entrance Access to Carmen Thyssen Collection Paseo del Prado Garden
A 17th and 18th Centuries. Old Masters B 19th Century. North American Landscape C 19th Century. French Naturalist Landscape D 19th Century. Impressionism E 19th Century. Monet and North American Impressionism F 19th Century. Gauguin and Postimpressionism G 19th and 20th Centuries. Neo Impressionism and its Wake H 20th Century. Early Avant-gardes I 20th Century. Between the Wars Painting. Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism J 20th Century. North American Painting and Others • HALL
Level -1
Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Temporary exhibition rooms Conference room EducaThyssen Workshop

The work of Giacomo Ceruti was largely forgotten over the centuries and was only rediscovered from the 1920s onwards as a result of three exhibitions. The first, held in Florence in 1922, was devoted to 17th- and 18th-century Italian art and included one of the artist’s masterpieces, The Washerwoman, from the Pinacoteca in Brescia, a work that aroused the curiosity of both the public and experts. Roberto Longhi subsequently investigated the life and work of Ceruti and other artists of his circle in an exhibition held in Milan in 1953 entitled Painters of Reality in Lombardy. Eight years later Ceruti occupied a central position in an exhibition held in Paris that focused on 18th-century Italian painting.

Ceruti produced religious paintings and portraits, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection has a pair of busts by the artist previously in the Martinengo collection in Brescia. Perhaps most notable within his oeuvre, however, is the sizeable series of canvases, many of them of large format, that depict the least favoured members of society (beggars, peasants, dwarves, tramps, etc) as well as the humblest trades, all depicted with enormous dignity and realism and with a complete disregard for convention. Ceruti was able to reveal fragments of his poor sitters’ everyday lives without the need for any sort of anecdotal approach, always maintaining a humane vision. As Mina Gregori emphasised, the note of social critique that has been detected in his works contains a moral aspect in its denunciation of poverty as a condition and way of life. It has also been suggested in this regard that the artist included possible literary references and that some of these canvases have hidden meanings that are lost to us today.

Specialist authors have analysed the influences and forerunners of these compositions by Ceruti in which he depicted a world highly different to those painted by other artists of his day. Among artists to whom he may have looked are the Danish painter Bernhard Keil, the Italians Antonio Cifronti and Pietro Bellotti and above all the French painter Jacques Callot, whose prints Ceruti used for some of his compositions.

An interesting issue with regard to these works is the nature of the clients for whom Ceruti was painting. In the case of the present canvas we know that it was acquired in Venice by a German collector, Marshal Matthias von Schulenburg. From the inventories of the Marshal, whose large collection included around twenty works by Ceruti, we know that they were recorded under the heading “Illustrious modern paintings”. This fact has led to the suggestion that they were specifically commissioned by the Marshal from Ceruti, which could also be the case with the series painted for the Avogadro family. The present canvas was taken from the Marshal’s house in Venice to his Berlin residence, the Schulenberg palace. It was subsequently auctioned in London in 1775. Prior to its acquisition for the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection in 1975 it was in two UK collections, that of Malcolm Waddingham and that of Vincent Korda, between which time it was in France where it was catalogued as by Louis Le Nain.

In the present canvas, which was published by Volpe in 1963, Ceruti reflects the unstable lives of the two male figures through their precarious poses, with both men leaning on crutches. In contrast to some of his other paintings, he replaced the use of an urban or rural view in the background with a simple, almost monochrome one that is more appropriate to the ragged figures. The narrow colour range with its emphasis on browns, greys and ochre tones makes this presentation of the beggars even more realistic. The canvas, which is one of the artist’s masterpieces and one of the great works in the Collection, is a magnificent example of the humanity with which Ceruti painted his subjects. These three old people, whose poses reflect both resignation and lassitude, have in Rosenbaum’s words, “a heroic bearing characteristic of a stoic dignity”, a quality that perhaps reveals something of Ceruti’s attitude towards this desperately impoverished sector of society.

Mar Borobia

18th Century18th Century - Italian paintingPaintingOilcanvas
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Group of Beggars

Group of Beggars

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Group of Beggars. Grupo de mendigos, c. 1737
Group of Beggars
Giacomo Ceruti (known as "Il Pittocchetto")

©

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, on loan with Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)

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Group of Beggars. Grupo de mendigos, c. 1737
Group of Beggars
Giacomo Ceruti (known as "Il Pittocchetto")

©

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, on loan with Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)

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