Beggar with a Dog

Cerquozzi is known to have entertained close bonds of friendship with poets, musicians, and cultivated collectors in the Rome of his day, as can be seen from such items as a small oil on copper with a double portrait depicting the artist alongside the poet Sebastiano Baldini (figs. 1a and 1b). The most important members of this circle, who fueled the art market in Rome included Baldini himself, a celebrated poet and one of the key players at the court of Cardinal Flavio Chigi.[1] Baldini’s many manuscripts unearthed by historians are a rich source of information that allows us to reconstruct his ties with leading artists, to whom he addressed letters either praising their work or asking them for drawings or engravings to illustrate, or to use as frontispieces for, the manuscripts he wished to give to his patrons.[2] Baldini wrote numerous compositions in the context of the Accademia dei Disinvolti di Pesaro, although only ten sonnets and two odes published in a volume entitled Poesie de Signori Accademici Disinvolti di Pesaro in 1649 and dedicated to artists or to works of art are known today. This book, which comprises numerous poems by the Accademia’s members, also contains works by Antonio Abati and Diego Gera, both men of letters and Baldini’s friends.[3] Gera, a count from Novara and a member of the Accademia degli Humoristi, in his capacity as a poet, playwright, and shrewd connoisseur and collector of art, was the recipient of four sonnets of picaresque inspiration composed by Baldini, all of them dedicated to the same painting by Cerquozzi. The painting, portraying a blind beggar, cap in hand and accompanied by his dog, is undoubtedly the ‘small picture one palm in height of a Blind man with a black frame shot with gold’[4] mentioned in Baldini’s inventory dated 1685, even though no mention is made of the artist’s name. One of the four sonnets, included in the aforementioned Poesie de Signori Accademici Disinvolti di Pesaro, is introduced thus: ‘To Master Diego Gera | Urging him to praise a painting by Michel’Angelo | Cerquozzi, known as delle Battaglie, An excellent pain-| ter, in which he painted a Poor Blind Man | guided by a dog’.[5] A similar sonnet in the Baldini manuscripts in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, probably a draft of the sonnet published for the Accademia dei Disinvolti di Pesaro, has a different title which suggests that the painting was a gift from Cerquozzi himself: ‘For a painting which portrays a Blind Man | and a Dog shitting gifted to the Author | by Michel’Angelo Cerquozzi Painter | To the most Illustrious Diego Gera’.[6]

The painting, which attracted enormous praise from Baldini and which the painter gave to his friend as a mark of affection, appears in an inventory drafted in 1685, after Baldini’s death, where it is described as a ‘small picture one palm in height of a Blind man with a black frame shot with gold one palm in height’.[7] A similar painting, described as ‘a small picture with a poor man and a dog by the hand of Sig. Michel Angelo one palm in height’[8] was listed in an inventory of Cerquozzi’s property, thus testifying not only to the deep bond of friendship between the two, who constantly rubbed shoulders in a cultural environment enamored of satirical poetry, paintings depicting everyday life, music, and theatre, but also to Cerquozzi’s habit of producing replicas and variants of the same subject.[9]

The small tondo portraying a Beggar with a Dog may be the picture that appears in an inventory of the collection belonging to Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Nini (fig. 2), a native of Siena, upon his death in 1680. There it is described as: ‘a small picture with an old man with a crutch, cap in hand, and a dog, by the hand of Michelangelo delle Battaglie gilt frame and studs’.[10] The painting in the Nini collection may be a second version or a copy of the paintingthat Cerquozzi gave to Baldini and whose praises the poet sang in several sonnets. A friend of the Chigi family and Pope Alexander VII’s Master of the Chamber, Nini was an enthusiastic member of the Accademia degli Humoristi e degli Intrecciati and a patron of the Accademia dei Virtuosi del Pantheon. Favoring the middle of the century’s leading artists such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Bernardino Mei, Pier Francesco Mola, and Giovan Paolo Schor, the cardinal put together an important collection of paintings in his palazzo on the Corso. Celebrated by Giovan Pietro Bellori, the collection also included numerous works by Salvator Rosa, Pier Giovanni Battista Gaulli, and Michelangelo Cerquozzi.