Giuseppe Marchesi

Giuseppe Marchesi (1699–1771) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, active mainly in Bologna. He was also known as il Sansone for his herculean build. He was first a pupil of the painter Aureliano Milani and then of Marcantonio Franceschini. Giuseppe Marchesi was born in Bologna on 19 July 1699. His first teacher was the bolognese painter Aureliano Milani until 1719, when Milani left Bologna for Rome. So, Marchesi entered the workshop of Marcantonio Franceschini, at the time the best exponent of the classicist style in Bologna, and maybe in Europe, at least until the affirmation of Donato Creti. From Aureliano Milani Giuseppe Marchesi borrowed Carracci's taste for some athletic male figures, and at the same time derived from Franceschini a wonderful lightness in representing images of women, children and angels, with a very personal style, that always maintained the ability of Franceschini to render clear complexions suffused with gentle redness and harmony in composition. At the moment, are not known works realized while he was a pupil of Franceschini who, being of a particularly moderate nature, ended up driving the young Marchesi from his atelier because of the excessive vivacity of the latter's character. "The Rape of Elena" is first work of sure dating was realised for the great hall of the Buratti house, in Bologna, in 1725, and so after the expulsion of Marchesi from Franceschini's workshop. A little previous are to be considered the paintings with the Four Seasons (National Art Gallery of Bologna). These paintings, interpreting in a very personal way the Franceschini style, maintain the taste for the arcadic ambientation, but with a chromatic range that is detached from that of the master and leads back, rather, to Lorenzo Pasinelli, to reach a more refined naturalism in the "Nocturnal Winter", in which Marchesi experiments realistic and unusual games of light and shadows, that demonstrate, as the others three works, a knowledge of the Northern Europ