Domenico Fetti
(c. 1589 - 1623) |
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fresco, secular parables Art Work
| Name: |
Domenico Fetti |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Rome, Italy |
| Nationality: |
Italian |
| Birth: |
c. 1589 |
| Death: |
1623 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
fresco, secular parables |
| Medium: |
fresco |
| Method: |
fresco |
| Style: |
Baroque |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painter
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Biography
An Italian Baroque painter, Domenico Fetti was known for his lushly painted diminutive narratives. This has given him a unique place in the history of art. A pupil of Ludovico Cardi II Cigoli and Andrea Commodi in Rome, Fetti also responded to the influences of Rubens, Elsheimer, Caravaggio, Orazio Borgianni, and the Carracci.
A protege of Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga in Rome, Fetti was called to Mantua in 1614 when the latter became Duke. Appointed court painter to Ferdinando, Fetti was also superintendent of his art collection. Fetti served Ferdinando for nearly a decade and had ample opportunity to study the Duke's Veroneses, Titians, and Bassanos. A trip to Ferrara can be inferred because of Fetti's still extant copy of Titian's Tribute Money, which was then in the Gonzaga collection in Ferrara. In 1621, Fetti made his first documented trip to Venice on a buying trip for the Duke. A later altercation with a nobleman prompted Fetti's permanent relocation in Venice, where he died from a fever in 1623.
Despite his brief career and youthful demise, Fetti left behind an important artistic legacy which had a considerable impact on the future development of Venetian painting. Very little is known about Fetti's early artistic activity while he was still in Rome. Only one work from the Roman period (an altarpiece now in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore) has been identified with certainty. It reflects Fetti's understanding of Roman artistic currents. Upon his arrival in Mantua, Fetti undertook various kinds of commissions but these are unevenly preserved. Little of his activities as a fresco artist survive, and those that do, are still the subject of debate among scholars with respect to their authorship. More easel paintings have come down to us but these also present problems. Besides the difficulty of isolating documented works, few signed paintings by Fetti are known. The most famous example is Christ before Pilate (signed, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi). Here as well as in other works his absorption of Venetian painting is evident.
The Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes (Mantua, Galleria e Museo di Palazzo Ducale), of his extant easel pictures, his many small paintings illustrating subjects based on the biblical parables are the best known and most extensively admired. They are undoubtedly Fetti's most important accomplishments. Unusual for their number (he treated some twelve different parables from the Bible), his parable paintings are also fascinating for their genre like treatment of the narrative. The parable paintings must also have been popular because he or his shop replicated the scenes a number of times. The lack of documentation and dates for much of his work, particularly the parables, has created disagreement among scholars as to the chronology of their execution, but it is now thought that the bulk of them must have been produced before Fetti left Mantua for Venice permanently and that, on the basis of style, a large group of the parable paintings must date before his buying trip to Venice in 1621. Documentary evidence suggests at least some of the paintings were executed for the grotto of the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua and that he must have conceived of some of them as a series, to which he added on occasion. It is also possible that these small works decorated more than one room, and that some of the duplicates can be accounted for by their inclusion in various series for different rooms. Regardless of the answer to these questions, Fetti's parables are exceptional for their conflation of Netherlandish and Italian traditions into something new. Always limited to one or two figures within a simple setting, they convey their meaning with brilliant economy.
Besides his small-scale parables, Fetti produced other biblical subjects often in various versions in diminutive sizes. A particularly enchanting example is his Fligfit into Egypt (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) in which Fetti made his point more strongly by showing the family passing by two martyred infants. He also occasionally painted wonderfully poetic mythologies. His Hero and Leander Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, with its evocative sky and lushly painted surfaces, ranks him as one of the true masters of a decorative lyricism that had numerous exponents but no equals later in the century.
Fetti's knack for visual anecdote, his sensuous and rich use of paint, is important for later Italian painting. His meaning is conveyed not so much through facial expression as through body gesture and setting in many cases landscape settings. The onlooker becomes a voyeur, witnessing a scene which the characters in the pictures are unselfconsciously engaged. The art of Johann Liss, Valerio Castello, Sebastiano Mazzoni,Francesco Furini cannot be understood without him. His charming, decorative approach to painting marks him as a forerunner to the delicate sensibility of the eighteenth century. |
Samples of Work
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