page_title: Vincenzo Campi
section_title: Northern Italian genre painting
hierarchical_section_title: Vincenzo Campi / Style / Northern Italian genre painting
context_page_description: Vincenzo Campi was a 16th-century Italian painter working in Cremona during the Late Renaissance. Campi is best known as one of the first northern Italian artists to work in the Flemish style of realist genre painting.
context_section_description: Campi is best known for his significant contribution to the birth of northern Italian genre painting. The style appeared quite suddenly between 1580 and 1585 in Cremona and Bologna, and its development was heavily influenced by similar genre paintings by Flemish artists Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer. Access to these works was made possible by the import of Flemish genre paintings, in particular those of Beuckelaer, from Antwerp to Cremona by wealthy merchants including the Affaitati banking family who had holdings in both cities. It is highly likely that Campi had access to these imported paintings through his time painting for the House of Farnese in Piacenza where the family held significant collections of these imported Flemish genre scenes. Campi was a key figure in the birth of genre painting in northern Italy as he was the first to paint a series of paintings depicting butchers, fish vendors and poultry sellers as a commission for the wealthy Fugger family of Augsburg.
  This development saw a move away from Mannerism towards an “Anti-Mannerist” naturalism described by Art Historian Walter Friedlaender, as, 'A healthy down-to-earth spirit (coming) into existence, paralleling a vigorous treatment of form achieved through purposeful work and renewed contact with living reality.'
  Campi's depictions of the villano, or peasant illustrated and reinforced a contemporary northern Italian discourse that argued certain foods were only appropriate for high-born citizens and others for low-born. Campi's Fishmongers depicts its subjects eating beans, dark bread, and scallions, which were the exact foods listed as only suitable for the working classes in Bartolomeo Pisanelli's influential Trattato della natura de’ cibi et del bere published in 1585. Cheese was also seen to be suitable nourishment for the lower classes, '(who) do not have the means to provide themselves with other more healthy foods’. Campi illustrates the low standing of cheese in his work, The Ricotta Eaters, which rather unflatteringly depicts "gluttonous peasants" laughing and spooning fresh cheese into their gaping mouths.
  Despite Campi's choice to depict the lower working classes, his treatment of these subjects was neither sympathetic nor romanticised. With the heavy use of food metaphors and established character tropes, Campi often depicts his subjects as crude, dim-witted, and sexually available. Art Historian Barry Wind sees these works as a contemporary extension of the classical idea of pitture ridicole, or comic painting, where the painting served as a ‘”sustained bawdy joke” for an educated man with a low sense of humour.’
caption: Vincenzo Campi, Fishmongers, c. 1580, oil on canvas, 145 x 215 cm, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan
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