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Beinaschi, Giovan Battista
(b Fossano, nr Turin, 1636; d Naples, 28 Sept 1688). Italian painter, engraver and draughtsman. He studied with Esprit Grandjean ( fl 1642–55), a painter working at the court of Savoy in Turin from 1642, and won the protection of Christina, Duchess of Savoy (1606–63). By 1652 Beinaschi had settled in Rome. This date appears on the engraving he made (B. 20) of Giovanni Domenico Cerrini’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt (untraced). As a pupil of the engraver Pietro del Pò (1610–92), Beinaschi made copies after Annibale Carracci’s frescoes in the Galleria Farnese, Rome, after Giovanni Lanfranco’s frescoes in S Andrea della Valle and S 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 (de Dominici). His earliest works, the St John the Baptist Preaching in the Desert (sold Vienna, Dorotheum, 22–25 May 1973) and the Holy Family (sold London, Sotheby’s, 11 Dec 1974), are indebted to the classicizing 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.
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