Special Offer

Artist: After Giuseppe Cesari (Italian 1568-1640)
Engraver: Jan de Bisschop (Dutch 1628-1671)
Title: Winged male nude looking down with curly hair
Medium: Copperplate Engraving on Laid Watermarked Paper
Image Size: Height 16.5 cm x Width 22.3 cm. (Note: this item is supplied loose).
Condition: Good, has been cleaned, small blemish to RHS edge paper repair to top right corner.

About: This months Special Offer copper plate engraving by Jan de Bisschop (Dutch 1628-1671) is after a drawing by Giuseppe Cesari (Italian 1568-1640) known as Arpino. The original drawing is in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Giuseppe Cesari, called Cavaliere d’Arpino (1568 - 1640) was an Italian Mannerist painter, active mainly in Rome. He had an enormous reputation in the first two decades of the 17th century when he gained some of the most prestigious commissions of the day, most notably the designing of the mosaics for the dome of St Peter’s (1603–12). His work remained largely untouched by the innovations of Caravaggio (who was briefly his assistant) or that of Annibale Carracci.

He was primarily a fresco painter, but he also did numerous cabinet pictures of religious or mythological scenes. Cesari’s alternative name, Cavaliere d’Arpino (Knight of Arpino), refers to the title he was awarded by Pope Clement VIII and to his place of birth, between Rome and Naples. The inscription 252 pertains to a 17th-century collector cataloguing details.