One of Cantarini’s most significant works, the Cerruti Lot and His Daughters exemplifies the terms of his adoption of Guido Reni’s mature style aroud 1635.

Simone Cantarini was born in Pesaro in 1612 and served his apprenticeship in the workshop of Claudio Ridolfi. His artistic culture was also shaped by close attention to the works of other painters, such as Federico Barocci, Orazio Gentileschi and Giovan Francesco Guerrieri da Fossombrone, whose most significant stylistic aspects he assimilated and reinterpreted with great personality.

The true turning point in his career did not come, however, until his contact with Guido Reni, first through the master’s works that entered the Marche region, like the Madonna and Child with St Thomas and St Jerome in the cathedral of Pesaro (Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana), and then by joining his workshop in the 1630s. While Cantarini’s apprenticeship there proved fruitful for his grasp of Reni’s late style, it ended abruptly due to his prickly character. He was indeed described by Malvasia as “very haughty and sarcastic, both by his own nature and instinct and through the instigation of flatterers, who praised him excessively for their own interests, seeking only to please him, and thereby exacerbated this characteristic of his, causing him to fall irreparably at times into excesses of presumption and backbiting”.¹

Bitter quarrels forced him to leave Bologna, where he did not return until after Reni’s death in 1642. He then set up his own workshop and trained artists like Lorenzo Pasinelli and Donato Creti. One of Cantarini’s most significant works, the Cerruti Lot and His Daughters exemplifies the terms of his adoption of Guido Reni’s mature style aroud 1635. As Raffaella Morselli observes,² he reinterprets the subject “in a very personal fashion, combining the streaky brushwork of Reni’s late manner with Barocci’s application in large expanses, all built up on a geometric framework of diagonals that make the work a masterpiece of absolute surprise”.

The work was indeed initially attributed to Reni by virtue of its great similarity to his style and of its quality, as attested by the opinion of Luciano Cuppini³ and its inclusion in the Reni exhibition of 1954.⁴ The hallmarks of Cantarini’s personality were identified by Roberto Longhi, Hermann Voss,⁵ Hugh Honour⁶ and Daniele Benati,⁷ who points out the “subtle divergence” between Cantarini’s “substantially naturalistic” leanings and Reni’s “idealised style”. As mentioned also in the ancient sources, Cantarini addressed this episode from the Old Testament repeatedly in drawings and paintings in constant, anxious pursuit of formal perfection.⁸

[Simone Mattiello]

¹ M. Cellini, “La biografia di Simone Cantarini nei documenti e nelle fonti”, in Bologna 1997-98, p. 397.

² Morselli 1997, pp. 114-115, cat. I.23.

³ Cuppini 1952, p. 267, pl. 14.

⁴ Bologna 1954, p. 123, cat. 66.

⁵ M. Ferretti, “Da Guido Reni a Guercino: Le mostre bolognesi dal 1954 al 1968”, in Di Macco, Dardanello 2019, pp. 186-187.

⁶ Honour 1954, pp. 268-269.

⁷ D. Benati, “Cantarini Simone”, in Gregori, Schleier 1989, vol. II, p. 665.

⁸ A. Mazza, in Bologna-Washington-New York 1986-87, pp. 402-403, cat. 133.