BEINASCHI, Giovan Battista
Italian painter, engraver and draughtsman. He studied with Esprit Grandjean (active 1642-1655), a painter working at the court of Savoy in Turin from 1642, and won the protection of Christina, Duchess of Savoy (1606-1663). By 1652 Beinaschi had settled in Rome. This date appears on the engraving he made of Giovanni Domenico Cerrini’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt (untraced). As a pupil of the engraver Pietro del Pò (1610-1692), Beinaschi made copies after Annibale Carracci’s frescoes in the Galleria Farnese, Rome, after Giovanni Lanfranco’s frescoes in Sant’Andrea della Valle and San Carlo ai Catinari, and after the Classical sculptures in the Belvedere in the Vatican.
Beinaschi was deeply attracted by Lanfranco’s illusionism, and it seems likely that he made a journey to Parma to study the frescoed domes executed by Correggio. His earliest works, the St John the Baptist Preaching in the Desert (private collection) and the Holy Family (private collection), are indebted to the classicising tendencies of his training with del Pò, yet touched with Baroque vigour. From Cerrini, whose friend and engraver he was, Beinaschi learnt an energetic style of modelling, the rendering of shadowed faces in the background and the handling of light in landscape. He shared an interest in Lanfranco with Giacinto Brandi, and their styles became so close that their works have at times been confused.
Beinaschi’s art combines a number of different influences drawn from Rome, where he sojourned from 1660, and Naples, where he settled permanently in 1664 (except for a year spent in Rome in 1687). The Neapolitan artistic milieu offered him an opportunity to carry out grand fresco projects and paint in a composite style, midway between the rigorous classicism he had been able to observe in the works of Giovanni Lanfranco and the accentuated but delicate chiaroscuro of Mattia Preti. In Naples, he painted several ceilings and frescoes, for example at the Chiesa di Santa Maria in Portico, and the cupola of Santi Apostoli.
