Donato Creti. I disegni della raccolta Certani alla Fondazione Giorgio Cini
Donato Creti
The Drawings in the Giorgio Cini Foundation Certani Collection
19 April – 17 June 2012
From Monday to Friday:
9.00 – 16.30
For the Nuova Manica Lunga users
Saturday and Sunday:
10.00 – 16.00
Entrance allowed just through the guided visits
The Donato Creti section in the Certani Collection belonging to Giorgio Cini Foundation documents the brilliant career of the most prolific and indefatigable 18th-century Emilian draughtsman through the presence of many significant examples of his work. Hundreds of drawings ascribed to Creti are scattered in collections worldwide but the largest groups are in the Uffizi Drawings and Prints Cabinet and the Certani Collection, now in the Cini Foundation, with its around sixty autographs drawings of various kinds from different periods in Creti’s long creative development. In technical terms these works range from the sharp, spare lines of the drawings in red lead, a medium inherited from the Emilian tradition, to pen and brown ink on white paper with precise, detached lines and dense parallel hatching that tends to criss-cross where darker shadows are required. Some of the best examples of the use of this technique, which made Creti’s reputation, are in the Certani Collection: works such as the Girl with Flower, St Francis in Prayer, and the Young Woman with Cupid in a Landscape. In all of these drawings the penwork appears marked and sharp, almost incised. Since his childhood, Creti had devoted himself to the exercise of copying, using red or black chalk. He was a very creative copyist, however, fond of taking individual elements from other artists’ works which he then completed, recomposed or freely combined. He found considerable inspiration for this constant study activity on the many journeys that he undertook in the company of his mentor and protector Count Pietro Ercole Fava. A contemporary, the academician Giovanni Battista Zanotti, describes how Creti and the aristocratic poet "went to see the celebrated gallery of the Duke of Modena and stayed some time there drawing". Almost inevitably there was also a journey to Venice which, as revealed by an inscription on one of the Certani drawings, took place around 1693. According to Zanotti, the two visitors had an exciting and prolonged stay in the lagoon: "He [Fava] went to Venice and took Creti with him. It was no short sojourn, so since both were enamoured of the marvellous works of the illustrious [Venetian] School." The artist that caught Creti’s attention most in those Venetian months was Veronese, whose works he copied and reinterpreted voraciously, especially The Wedding at Cana, the masterpiece in the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore.
