Gaetano Gandolfi
1734-1802
Gaetano Gandolfi was late Italian Baroque painter, draughtsman, sculptor and etcher, from an Italian family of artists of Bolognese school.
The work of the brothers Ubaldo Gandolfi and Gaetano Gandolfi and of the latter’s son, Mauro Gandolfi, reflects the transition from late Bolognese Baroque through Neo-classicism and into early Italian Romanticism. Their drawings made an outstanding contribution to the great figurative tradition of Bolognese school that had begun with the Carracci. Their prolific output and their activity as teachers gave them considerable influence throughout northern Italy, except in Venice.
Gaetano was born on a Po Valley estate which his father managed for a landowner. He followed the example of his older brother, Ubaldo, and enrolled at the Accademia Clementina in Bologna. There he was the recipient of several prizes for both figure drawing and sculpture. Later, in a laconic autobiography, Gaetano claimed Felice Torelli (1667-1748) as his master. Other sources mention that he was also taught by Ercole Graziani II (1688-1765) and Ercole Lelli (1702-1766), a gunsmith turned instructor of anatomy to artists. Whatever the case, Ubaldo’s highly original style must have been his brother’s primary exemplar.
In a time of diminishing patronage for artists in Bologna, Gaetano flourished for almost five decades. He supplied private devotional pictures, monumental altarpieces and wall paintings for churches, frescoed decorations for palazzi, some portraits and allegorical and historical paintings that were dispatched as far as Moscow. He also made sculpture (about which we know little) and was an inveterate draughtsman.
From its beginnings, Gaetano’s art was brilliant and individual, as can be seen in the Vision of St. Jerome (London, Private Collection), a sketch of 1756 for the altarpiece in Bazzano, Oratorio del Suffragio. In the 1760s the impact of Venice and Tiepolo in particular, is particularly noticeable in his frescoes such as those in the church of San Rocco, Bologna, where there is an emphasis on bravura effect in contrast to the firm design of Bolognese painting. Gaetano’s art perhaps reached its apex in 1775-80 in the huge canvas of The Marriage of Cana (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale) and the cupola frescoes for Santa Maria della Vita, Bologna. Here, he successfully achieved a complexity of design combined with a splendour of execution that in Settecento Italy was surpassed only by G.B.Tiepolo. He is rightly now considered one of the greatest Italian artists of the century.
In later years, even before he visited London in 1788, Gaetano’s art became increasingly neo-classical. By this time, both stylistically and thematically he seems to have been well aware of Giaquinto as well as artistic currents in France in the 1760s. Gaetano died playing bowls in the church field of S. Egidio, probably of a heart attack, although there is an alternative tradition that he was knocked on the head by a ball.
