Background
Giuseppe Maria Crespi was born in Bologna on March 16, 1665 to Girolamo Crespi and Isabella Cospi. His mother was a distant relation of the noble Cospi family, which had ties to the Florentine House of Medici.
Giuseppe Maria Crespi was born in Bologna on March 16, 1665 to Girolamo Crespi and Isabella Cospi. His mother was a distant relation of the noble Cospi family, which had ties to the Florentine House of Medici.
Giuseppe received his early training from the late academicians of the Bolognese School.
Having traveled in northern Italy to study the works of the High Renaissance, chiefly the Venetian colorists, he developed a more purely pictorial approach which, with his peculiarly sensitive interpretation of subject matter, distinguishes him from the tradition of academic classicism. Crespi's style marks the transition from High Baroque to Rococo. In his impressionistic technique, with its feverishly rapid brushstrokes, freedom of handling, loaded white highlights, and silvery tonality, there is a coloristic and linear lyricism which anticipates 18th-century Venetian painting. Crespi's pictures are, for the most part, half humorous, half poetical renderings of scenes from everyday life. The undercurrent of light humor touches religious as well as mythological subjects, as may be seen in the Seven Sacraments at Dresden, Chiron Teaching Achilles to Shoot in the Hofmuseum at Vienna, and the Assembly of the Gods, ceiling frescoes in the Palazzo Pepoli at Bologna. He died at Bologna, July 16, 1747.
Giuseppe Crespi had two children: Antonio and Luigi.