Finding Little of Donato Creti in His Own Paintings

Donato Creti (1671-1749), a once-fashionable, now-obscure 18th century Italian painter, worked mostly in the bustling city of Bologna making decorations for the local oligarchs. A small traveling exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art struggles valiantly to rescue the Rococo dauber from the Land of Nod, but alas to no avail. Creti is a snooze.

A sometimes odd and technically gifted snooze, but a snooze nonetheless. This is an artist whose experience of the world is almost utterly absent from his art, crowded out by his baleful experience of other art. Creti’s pictures tend to be like highly refined cut-and-paste jobs, in which fragments of other paintings and other artist’s painterly aspirations are stitched together and given an excruciatingly idealized gloss. They leave you gasping for air.

“Donato Creti: Melancholy and Perfection” is composed of just 17 pictures, all painted for his most admiring patron, Marcantonio Collina Sbaraglia, in the eight-year span before the painter’s 50th birthday. Born in Cremona, the son of an architectural scene painter, Creti is said to have been a child prodigy who drew like a dream but suffered from a nervous disposition. Hence, “Melancholy and Perfection.”

The succinct presentation includes four paintings recounting the story of Achilles, hero of Homer’s “Illiad”; two about the messenger Mercury, Roman god of commerce, eloquence and thievery; six of eight known decorations painted in something like imitation of sculptural relief and meant to be hung over palatial doorways; a canvas of two cherubic children at play; and--most notably--four circular paintings on copper, representing the virtues of humility, prudence, temperance and charity.

The large “Mercury Giving the Golden Apple to Paris” is quintessential Creti--which is to say, Creti as wannabe. Straining to one-up his hometown hero, the lugubrious Bolognese stylist Guido Reni (1575-1642), Creti paints the Greek troublemaker, Paris, with that same watery-eyes-toward-heaven swoon for which Reni would have registered a patent if he could. Paris, dressed (or half-undressed) as a classical shepherd, reaches up to receive the gilded apple from winged Mercury, who is decoratively framed by a billowing green cloth that gives him all the bodily presence of a decal stuck to the surface of the sky.

The life-size Mercury is nude, but the poor fellow has no genitals. (A similar deficiency afflicts the nude males represented in four of the over-door canvases.) There’s a difference between modesty and castration. Assuming this was Creti’s idea, and not some contemporaneous edict from the Vatican or later elision by censorious souls with only our best moral interests at heart, it speaks of a bloodless ideal of chaste, unearthly beauty that can best be described as pedantic.

(Incidentally, for a pretty good comparison between Creti and Reni, stop in at LACMA’s European paintings collection upstairs in the Ahmanson Building. Creti’s version of Paris in 1721 is, more or less, an almost mathematical equation derived from adding the figures of him and her in Reni’s “Bacchus and Ariadne” from 101 years before. As for the sexless Mercury--well, Reni is said after all to have died a virgin.)

The four tondi personifying assorted human virtues are the most charming paintings in the small and tidy show. Perhaps it’s a matter of size. Based on the Achilles and Mercury pictures, Creti can’t seem to orchestrate the complex space and multitude of forms required in a big picture. The circular focus of these smallish works (each about 2 1/2 feet in diameter) appears to have concentrated his dyspeptic mind.

Forsaking Reni in these exhortations of virtuous conduct, Creti instead looks directly to Venetian Renaissance painting and other more naturalistic sources--to salutary effect. These feminine personifications are described in the exhibition’s (generally fine) catalog as being essentially about the tour de force representation of drapery; at least they revel in the sensuous stuff of worldly experience, rather than attempt to flee from it into neurasthenic fancy.

Bolognese Baroque painting has faced an uphill climb ever since Victorian British critic John Ruskin demolished Guido Reni’s inflated reputation a little more than a century ago. (Before Ruskin, Reni had been known for 200 years as “the Divine Guido”; after, it was “Guido who?”) Italian Baroque art had its genesis in Bologna, in the academy founded there by Lodovico, Agostino and Annibale Carracci in 1585. But it’s what other artists elsewhere made of their theatricalized revival of the canons of classical art--including what Annibale made of it himself when he went to Rome 10 years later--that proved to be the most impressive and lasting legacy.

Creti’s art feels principally geared toward grandiloquent display of academic training. As that tired but dutiful showiness is an unfortunate feature of a good deal of contemporary art encountered in galleries and museums today, this nominally pleasant exhibition is worth visiting mostly for its value as a cautionary lesson.

* “Donato Creti: Melancholy and Perfection,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through April 12. Closed Wednesdays.