Donato Creti

1671 – 1749

Italian painter and draughtsman. His individual and poetic art represents, with that of Marcantonio Franceschini, the last significant expression of the classical-idealist strain in Bolognese painting. His activity was almost wholly confined to Bologna, where he painted decorative frescoes, altarpieces and easel pictures for private collectors. Two qualities are paramount: a perfected finesse of handling and poetic suggestiveness of situation and mood. He sought the ideal beauty of the individual figure and was thus at his best in meditative pictures with few figures; his subjects combine grace of form and precision of contour with flesh that attains the surface delicacy of porcelain and colours that have a mineral-like refulgence. He was a prolific draughtsman with a distinct personal manner, who drew for pleasure as well as to prepare his compositions, usually using a quill-pen and producing shadowing by hatching. In Bologna he was a pupil of Lorenzo Pasinelli. Among his followers were Aureliano Milani, Francesco Monti, and Ercole Graziani the Younger.

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