Giuseppe Cesari (c. 1568 - 1640), Italian painter, called Il Cavalière d'Arpino, because he was created a Cavalière di Cristo by Pope Clement VIII, also named Il Giuseppino. He was much encouraged at Rome and munificently rewarded.

His father had been a native of Arpino, but Giuseppe himself was born in Rome. Cesari is stigmatized by Lanzi as not less the corrupter of taste in painting than Marino was in poetry; indeed, another of the nicknames of Cesari is "Il Marino de Pittori" (the pictorial Marino).

There was spirit in Cesari's heads of men and horses, and his frescoes in the Capitol (story of Romulus and Remus, etc.), which occupied him at intervals during forty years, are well coloured; but he drew the human form ill. His perspective is faulty, his extremities monotonous, and his chiaroscuro defective. He died in 1640, at the age of seventy-two, or perhaps of eighty, at Rome.

Cesari ranks as the head of the Idealists of his period, as opposed to the Naturalists, of whom Michelangelo da Caravaggio was the leading champion, the so-called idealism consisting more in reckless facility, and disregard of the common facts and common-sense of nature, than in anything to which so lofty a name could be properly accorded. He was a man of touchy and irascible character, and rose from penury to the height of opulence. His brother Bernardino assisted in many of his works.

This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.