CORTESE, GUGLIELMO (1628-1679)

"Scena De Battaglia" (c.1650)
Brown ink
17 x 37cm
Details on verso
*private collection, Sydney
 
Guglielmo Cortese was an important French-Italian Baroque Painter, Draughtsman & Printmaker. He settled in Rome by 1638 where he entered the studio of Pietro da Cortona. Here he is supposed to have supplemented his training by drawing from life and copying works of Giovanni Lanfranco and Andrea Sacchi. He studied also the Bolognese painters and Guercino, and formed for himself a classicizing style with very little express mannerism, partly resembling that of Carlo Maratta. He was mainly a history painter of Christian religious and mythological scenes. He is sometimes referred to as a battle painter because of his involvement in the decorative project in the chapel of the Congregation of the Jesuits, a small oratory housed in a room of the Collegio Romano adjacent to the Sant'Ignazio Church, Rome. His first major public commissions were frescoes for the San Marco, Rome. Pietro da Cortona recommended him to Niccolò Sagredo, the Venetian ambassador in Rome who wished to have the church decorated. He painted the Battle of Joshua for the Gallery of Alexander VII in the Quirinal Palace and the Martyrdom of St Andrew for the high altar of the Sant'Andrea al Quirinale. Cortese was also a very skilled draughtsman as is testified by the many preparatory studies he left behind and which can be found, amongst others, in the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica. Preparatory drawings are generally in chalk, whereas compositional designs tend to be in pen and ink and wash.