Despite Giacomo Ceruti's proven use of engravings as a model for his paintings, adequate space has never been given to this fascinating, yet singular, Cerutian chapter. Defining the role played by prints in the creative laboratory of the painter of the "pitocchi", as this exhibition does, is instead crucial for understanding the extent to which the inseparable relationship between painting and reality went in Ceruti's production.

The exhibition intends to open a window on Giacomo Ceruti's little-known workshop. The exhibition therefore illustrates how the artist, throughout his career, drew more or less punctual suggestions from the infinite chalcographic repertoire, following up on a recurring practice among genre painters, but always exercising it in an unprecedented and exclusive way, even revolutionary when compared to the seventeenth-century tradition or to the pictorial work of his contemporaries. To understand the reasons that prompted a "painter of reality" like Ceruti to draw so frequently on pre-existing figurative sources, the exhibition will display engravings from inventions by Tiziano Vecellio, Paolo Caliari known as il Veronese, Pietro Testa and Nicolaes Pietersz. Berchem, whose d'après are mentioned in the post-mortem inventory of the painter's possessions. The exhibition will also examine Ceruti's borrowings from the engravings by Jacques Callot and Johann Heinrich Ross, used by the Milanese artist as a model for buildings and caricatures in scenes of popular life. In closing, a particular focus will be reserved for the engravings on religious, mythological and literary themes, or rather the prints by Boucher, Lancret and Piazzetta, used by Ceruti in the cycles commissioned by Calderara and Busseti.