0324 Giuseppe Pesci: New Findings on a Little-Known Eighteenth-Century Painter and Draughtsman

  • Augusto Russo (Author)
    https://orcid.org/0009-0002-3774-134X

    Augusto Russo received his PhD from the University of Naples Federico II (2017) and won a scholarship at the Fondazione 1563 per l’Arte e la Cultura della Compagnia di San Paolo in Turin (2018). His research interests focus on painting and sculpture in Italy in the Baroque Age, with particular attention to the Neapolitan context. He has written essays on, among other themes and artists, Giacomo del Po, the Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Francesco De Mura, Neapolitan funerary portraiture between the 17th and 18th centuries, and Francesco Solimena. He has collaborated on the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani of the Enciclopedia Treccani and contributed to the catalogue of the works of the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples (2020). He is currently a researcher in the History of Modern Art at the University of Naples Federico II, and as part of this role, he was a visiting scholar at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2023–2024.

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Abstract

The essay presents new material on the little-known 18th century Roman painter Giuseppe Pesci (or Pesce; b. 1710), almost certainly the son of the more famous Girolamo, who was a pupil of Carlo Maratti and Francesco Trevisani. As from the 1750s, Giuseppe worked in Naples and in 1757 painted a Madonna and Child in wax technique for Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero, a work that is now in the Sansevero Chapel Museum. His early activity is almost entirely unknown, with the exception of a few paintings destined for patrons in the Marche region and in particular for San Severino Marche. This study reveals the painter's unexpected expertise in anatomical illustration, as evidenced by the commission from the physician Gaetano Petrioli, who used Pesci's drawings in 1748 and 1750 for his publications dedicated to Bartolomeo Eustachio's famous anatomical plates. In addition, attention is drawn to two autograph drawings by Pesci, now in London, which reveal his skill as a copyist of ancient and modern statues.

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Language
en
Keywords
Pesci/Pesce Girolamo, Pesci/Pesce Giuseppe, Di Sangro Raimondo, Petrioli Gaetano, Eustachio Bartolomeo, anatomical illustration