Daniele Crespi

Counted among the most important painters of seventeenth century Lombardy, few biographical details of the life of Daniele Crespi are known: he was likely born between 1597 and 1598, and he died of the plague in 1630. Coming from a family of painters, which included the famous artist Giovanni Battista Crespi, known as il Cerano, he was precocious and talented from an early age. 

He received his first commission in 1619: three paintings for the chapel of San Antonio and the pendentives for the dome of the church of San Vittore al Corpo in Milan. These early works show the influence of Procaccini and Morazzone, especially in his compositions and use of light. By contrast, his Beheading of St John the Baptist, painted in the same year, exhibits a different reinterpretation of Morazzone's style. Sudden transitions in artistic approach came to be characteristic of Crespi's career, drawing on different schools and styles, reinventing them in a personal manner and incorporating them into his works.

The arrival of Giuseppe Vermiglio in Lombardy had a profound impact on Crespi. Starting in 1622, Crespi demonstrated a spare style, focused on strong realism and investigation of the psychological dimension, while incorporating strong contrasts in light and shadow. The evolution of Crespi's style is by no means linear, but rather appears as a continuous reaction to different stimuli that he had in his career. From 1628, works such as the Prado Pietà exemplify a stylistic maturity with Crespi abandoning Caravaggesque influences for details of Emilian painting with greater compositional balance and brighter hues.

His last commission, which remained unfinished at his death, was begun in 1629: a monumental work comprising the frescoes of the Carthusian monastery of Garegnano. Here was the last deviation in Crespi's style, consisting of a careful exploration of the figures' gestural rhetoric.

Alongside his religious subjects, contemporary accounts record Crespi as an excellent portrait painter. Although there is little evidence of his portrait commissions, his self-portrait in the Uffizi remains notable. Crespi died during the Manzonian plague in 1630.