Gaspare Traversi

Gasparo Traversi
Self-portrait
Born	1722 Naples
Died	1770 Rome
Nationality	Italian
Education	Francesco Solimena
Known for	Painting Genre works

Gaspare Traversi (c. 1722 – 1 November 1770) was an Italian Rococo painter best known for his genre works. Active mostly in his native city of Naples, he also painted throughout Italy, including a stay in Parma.

Gaspare appears to have been born to a Genoese merchant living in Naples.^[1] He appears to have been baptized on February 15, 1722, in the church of Santa Maria dell'Incoronatella in Naples under the name Gasparro Giovanni Battista Pascale Traversa. He trained under Francesco Solimena. He was a contemporary of other Solimena pupils, Giuseppe Bonito (1707–1789), also a genre painter, and Francesco de Mura (1696–1784). He was active mainly between 1732 and 1769.

Traversi can be described as a Neapolitan Hogarth, Steen or Longhi, working in a Caravaggist style. Traversi's satirical paintings typically depict animated groups of bourgeois protagonists that seem compressed physically into an indoor pictorial space that can barely contain them.^[2] Even his religious canvases have foreshortened crowding. Facial expressions are lively and varied; some of the characters, often children, stare at the viewer. Women are often situated in either a foolish or ironic situation, or engage in a pulchritudinous talent, while men leer or participate with other intentions in mind. One could view these as elaborations of moralistic tales, such as Caravaggio's The Fortune Teller, a topic which Traversi also depicted, but Traversi's living rooms are more densely populated, and the emotions, as well as the situations, teeter awkwardly with imbalance.

Although he had no pupils, his influence was significant, and can be seen in the works of Lorenzo de Caro, Giuseppe Bonito and Orazio Solimena.^[2]

Traversi was a focus of a monograph by Roberto Longhi.

• 
  Fortune-teller & Pickpocket
• 
  Surgeon inspects Wound
• 
  The Concert
• 
  The Drawing Lesson
• 
  Sitting for Portrait
• 
  Reading a Letter
• 
  Old beggar with Urchin
• 
  Job mocked by his Wife
• 
  Absalom murders Amnon
• 
  St Margaret of Cortona
• 
  Portrait of Fra Raffaello da Lugagnano
• 
  Portrait of Gian Lorenzo Berti
• 
  Judith with Head of Holofernes

• Francis P. Smyth and John P. O'Neill (Editors in Chief) (1986). National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (ed.). The Age of Correggio and the Carracci: Emilian Painting of the 16th and 17th Centuries. pp. 373–378. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)
• Wittkower, Rudolf (1980). Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600-1750. Pelican History of Art (Penguin Books Ltd). pp. 494–495.
• Naples Exhibition in 2005 was titled Gaspare Traversi. Napolitans of the 1700s between Misery and Nobility [19]
• Stuttgart Exhibition: Gaspare Traversi Amusement in the Shade [20]
• Parma Exhibition:Luminary of the 1700s: Gaspare Traversi and his painting in Emilia,[21].

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