Antonio Mancini, Dopo il duello, 1872, Oil on canvas, 162 × 105 cm, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
At first glance, Antonio Mancini’s Dopo il duello (1872) and Édouard Manet’s Dead Toreador (c. 1864; exhibited independently as L’Homme mort in 1867) appear to belong to quite different pictorial worlds. Mancini’s painting centres on the frightened reaction of a child confronted with the aftermath of a duel, while Manet’s image presents the body of a fallen matador isolated from the spectacle of the bullfight. The two works might therefore seem to address entirely different artistic concerns. Yet there is something to be gained by placing them side by side. Both paintings engage with forms of violence that were socially sanctioned within nineteenth-century culture: the duel and the bullfight. Each belonged to elaborate codes of honour or spectacle that combined ceremony with brutality and persisted within societies that increasingly regarded such traditions with ambivalence.
Édouard Manet, L’homme mort (The Dead Toreador), 1864, Oil on canvas, 75.9 × 153.3 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(Credit: Wikipedia).
During the nineteenth century such practices often attracted artists for their dramatic content, but perhaps also because they appeared to preserve forms of behaviour that lay outside the increasingly regulated structures of modern society. Rituals such as duelling or bullfighting seemed to belong to an older world of honour, instinct and personal impulse, one that had not yet been entirely absorbed into the disciplined rhythms of bourgeois and industrial life. For artists and writers alike, these traditions could appear to offer authenticity. They offered the opportunity to portray scenes in which individual passion or courage was expressed in its most immediate form. Yet this attraction was inseparable from a corresponding unease. The same actions that promised a more authentic human experience also exposed the persistence of violence beneath the surface of modern civilisation.
What is striking here, however, is that neither artist represents the act itself. In both works the violence lies outside the frame. Mancini shows only the traces of the duel and the shocked reaction of a witness, while Manet presents the still body of the torero after the spectacle has ended. The two paintings therefore approach violence not through action but through its consequences.
The apparent composure of Manet’s fallen bullfighter, whose sobriety of line and colour gives the figure an almost classical stillness, belies the troubled history of its creation. The figure originates in a larger composition exhibited at the Salon of 1864 under the title Episode d’une course de taureaux, painted at the same time as The Dead Christ with Angels. The bullfight scene provoked ridicule from critics and the public, who objected to its awkward perspective and the disproportionate scale of its figures, declaring that it was evident Manet had never witnessed a bullfight. In fact, he did not see one until travelling to Spain in 1865, and bullfighting itself was prohibited in Paris under the Second Empire; the scene therefore appears to have been constructed largely from written descriptions and visual sources, including prints such as Francisco de Goya’s Tauromaquia (a set of thirty-three prints created between 1815 and 1816).
Dissatisfied with the reception of the painting, Manet subsequently cut the canvas apart. Two principal fragments survive: the figure he referred to as L’Homme mort, now known as Dead Toreador, and another section of the corrida now in the Frick Collection in New York. Technical examination and X-radiography have confirmed that both fragments once formed part of the same canvas and that the composition underwent numerous revisions even before it was exhibited. From an original narrative composition of about 126 × 168 cm, Manet isolated the fallen torero and reworked it into a canvas of roughly 76 × 150 cm, thereby transforming an anecdotal bullfight scene into a far more concentrated and monumental image. At his independent exhibition of 1867 he emphasised its broader significance by giving it the title L’Homme mort.
Édouard Manet, The Bullfight (La Corrida), 1864–1865, Oil on canvas, 47.9 × 108.9 cm, New York, The Frick Collection
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
The pose of the fallen bullfighter has long been associated with a painting then attributed to Diego Velázquez representing a dead soldier, formerly in the Pourtalès collection in Paris and now in the National Gallery, London (A Dead Soldier). The critic Théophile Thoré first suggested that Manet had borrowed the figure from this work, a suggestion vigorously rejected by Charles Baudelaire. The attribution of the painting to Velázquez has since been abandoned, and it is now generally regarded as the work of an unknown Italian artist of the seventeenth century, possibly of the Neapolitan school. Its stark naturalism, sombre tonality, and vanitas imagery belong to the Caravaggesque tradition of the Baroque.
The compositional relationship between the two works is nevertheless striking. In both, the body lies diagonally across the picture surface in a strongly foreshortened pose, the limbs loosely extended and the figure presented in isolation against a relatively neutral ground. Whether known from the original painting or from a widely circulated photograph, the image may well have provided a visual precedent for Manet. Other comparisons have been proposed, including Gérôme’s The Death of Caesar, which offers a visual analogue in its treatment of the fallen figure, albeit within a fully articulated historical scene, or one of Jean Gigoux’s illustrations for Gil Blas de Santillane. The fallen torero, however, ultimately belongs to a broader tradition of the dead warrior.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, La Mort de César (The Death of Caesar), 1859–67, Oil on canvas, 85.5 × 145.5 cm, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD, USA.
(Credit: Wikipedia).
Stripped of the spectacle of the corrida and presented in isolation, Manet’s fragment transforms the torero into a stark and archetypal image of the fallen combatant. His treatment also recalls a pictorial device associated with Velázquez himself: the placement of figures within an indeterminate spatial field that resists precise narrative definition. In Dead Toreador, the absence of the arena, the crowd and the bull produces a similar effect. The figure lies in a suspended pictorial space from which the original narrative context has disappeared. The spectacle of the corrida collapses into a single visual fact: the presence of the body.
More broadly, the painting retains something of the tonal gravity and restraint associated with seventeenth-century Spanish and Italian painting. The dark ground, the controlled palette, and the isolation of the figure recall a Seicento tradition in which the human body is presented with a sober and unembellished intensity. Yet in Manet this inheritance is transformed. The metaphysical and religious frameworks that once sustained such imagery have receded, leaving behind a form of pictorial seriousness detached from its original explanatory structures. What remains is an austere presentation of the body, at once historically inflected and unmistakably modern.
Anne Coffin Hanson, in her study of Manet’s engagement with the modern tradition, notes the frequent juxtaposition of The Dead Toreador with Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834, Honoré Daumier’s lithograph of the aftermath of a massacre carried out by government troops in Paris in April 1834, in which political violence is embedded in a precisely defined circumstance. She concludes, however, that the comparison ultimately fails, above all because of Manet’s suppression of narrative particularity. The figure is no longer anchored to an identifiable circumstance, nor does it function, as it would in academic painting, as part of a larger historical sequence.
Honoré Daumier (French, Marseilles 1808–1879 Valmondois) Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1834, August–September 1834 French, Lithograph; image: 11 1/4 x 17 3/8 in. (28.6 x 44.1 cm) sheet: 14 5/16 x 21 11/16 in. (36.4 x 55.1 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1920 (20.23) http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/365806
As Linda Nochlin observed, this isolation removes Manet’s work from any larger metaphysical structure. Death is presented simply as a visual fact. The painting functions almost like a still life: the term nature morte might apply as readily to the fallen matador as to one of his contemporary studies of dead fish. In both cases the subject simply stands alone: the ‘torero is defined by his costume and a discreet patch of blood, as is the salmon by his scales and his parsley.’
A remark made by Charles Baudelaire in his essay on Eugène Delacroix can be used to illuminate the figure of the Dead Toreador from another angle. Baudelaire observed that a well-drawn figure may inspire a pleasure entirely independent of the subject it represents. ‘The limbs of a martyr being flayed alive or the body of a nymph in a swoon,’ he wrote, ‘provided they are skilfully drawn, offer a species of pleasure in which the nature of the subject counts for nothing.’ What gives the figure its power is the pattern it traces in space. In Manet’s painting, the fallen torero possesses precisely this kind of formal clarity. The compositional elegance of the figure and his exquisitely rendered costume seem almost detached from the violence it implies. At the same time the calmness of the image deflates the theatrical heroism of the bullfight. The pageantry of courage and ritual ends not in dramatic triumph but in an austere silence.
Édouard Manet, Still Life with Salmon, c. 1866–67, Oil on canvas, 72 × 92 cm, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont, USA.
(Credit: WikiArt).
Emily Beeny, in her article “Christ and the Angels, Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting?”, sharpens this shift by situating Manet’s work within the conditions of modern spectatorship. In the mid-1860s, when Manet exhibited both Christ and the Angels and the Dead Toreador, the Salon and the Paris morgue existed in uneasy proximity as sites of public display. The industrial age, combined with the Haussmannisation of Paris, attracted labour in from the rural regions and saw an increase in the number of accidental deaths.
After death by drowning, there was a long list of ways in which the vulnerable and hapless could meet their end: ‘crushing by carriages, falls from high places, collapses, scaldings, machine explosions, and railway accidents, suffocations by smoke, harmful effects of gas, smotherings in crowds, lightning, poisoning, drunkenness, and cold.’ Beyond this, ‘of the 2,851 adults received at the morgue between 1853 and 1863, almost half were suicides.’ The clean line of modernity had a brutal edge.
Mortality on an industrial scale required a state-of-the-art response. It was not merely a question of dealing with the number of corpses but of establishing their identity; this was difficult, as many were strangers to the city. So the Paris morgue, as it rose, ‘was modern, ample, well lit, and well ventilated. It included autopsy rooms, sanitation facilities, administrative offices and accommodation for twenty-four-hour surveillance personnel.’ With a theatrical twist, there were also enormous green curtains, which would be drawn across the display room’s window every time a fresh display of bodies was being installed.
Of course, many of those who visited were not there to identify someone lost. There were the curious, who found themselves subject to other types of seeing, including, as Dickens wrote in 1863, ‘a much more general, purposeless, vacant staring … like looking at a waxwork, without a catalogue, and not knowing what to make of it.’
With all this in mind, we can see how contemporary Manet’s toreador would have appeared. Against the academic tradition, which treated the body as a rhetorical vehicle of moral and narrative meaning, Manet presents his figure as a stark, material presence, stripped of expressive agency. This also ran parallel with Émile Zola’s emerging naturalism—most notably in Thérèse Raquin (1867), where human behaviour is conceived in terms of physical and nervous response rather than moral interiority—producing a form of vision uninflected by moral meaning, in which the viewer confronts the body as sheer “there-ness”—intensely visible yet resistant to interpretation.
In Mancini’s Dopo il duello, the focus shifts from the body itself to the reaction it provokes. Mancini abandons the quiet domestic atmosphere of many of his child subjects and instead depicts the model Luigi Gianchetti, known as Luigiello, petrified with fear at the edge of an unnamed drama. A blood-stained white shirt and the emerging point of a sword indicate the tragic aftermath of a duel. The scene is presented with the boy’s trauma at its heart, and it is all the more harrowing for that. His innocence and lack of agency elicit more sympathy than the more expected depiction of an adult facing the consequences of their actions. The adult victim, however, remains unseen. An ominous shadow falls across the wall, but who casts it—and whether it signifies consolation or menace—remains unclear.
The boy’s formal dress plays a crucial role in this configuration. The elegant black suit and lace-trimmed collar place him uneasily within the ceremonial world of adult honour, the very sphere to which the duel belongs. The sober costume, which recurs in other works for which Luigiello served as model, does not belong to the child’s real-life poverty, but to the staged space of the studio.
The formal clothing might suggest that he had been prepared—encouraged, even—to witness the unfolding of the duel, as if he were dressed smartly for the event, only to be exposed to the bloodiness of an adult world that should have sheltered him. There is also the fact that he has one gloved hand and one left bare, a small detail that nonetheless draws our attention. This motif appears elsewhere in Mancini’s work and may simply function as a device of contrast. In this case, however, it clarifies the hand nearest the wall: the fingers begin to curl, as if the boy were testing the surface for support, his nails just beginning to find purchase in a small, searching gesture.
In portraits of adults, gloves often serve as accessories that convey urban or courtly sophistication. Édouard Manet’s Antonin Proust (1880) and Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of the Infante Don Carlos (c. 1626–27) offer familiar examples, although in both cases the removed glove is held with studied nonchalance.
Édouard Manet, Antonin Proust, 1880, Oil on canvas, 192.5 × 96 cm, Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio.Diego Velázquez, Portrait of the Infante Don Carlos, c. 1626–1627, Oil on canvas, 209 × 125 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid.
(Credits: Wikimedia Commons).
Luigiello’s missing glove is nowhere to be seen; in any case, he is too young to be fashioning a persona through dress or, for that matter, to be laying down a gauntlet. Whether intentional or not, the detail allows for a more poignant reading: a trace of childlike emulation, an aspiration towards the adult world—one that will meet with cruel disillusionment.
The emotional tenor of the painting recalls the expressive world of the Neapolitan Seicento. The event unfolds within a shallow interior space and is organised around a restrained but expressive palette. The boy’s black suit, echoed by the dark tonality of a chair and by areas of shadow, contrasts sharply with the blood-stained white shirt draped over its back. The silver blade of the sword provides a narrow linear accent. Behind the figure rises an amber-coloured wall bordered to the right by a celadon-toned vertical plaster band. The strong shadow cast upon the wall suggests the presence of an unseen adult figure beyond the frame, intensifying the emotional tension of the scene. The identity of this off-stage presence remains ambiguous, just as the precise circumstances of the duel are left undefined.
The stark contrasts of black and white, the use of amber and red, and the dramatic deployment of shadow evoke a pictorial language in which affect is intensified through colour and light. We have a sensibility of Seicento gravity, combined with the setting and mood of a nineteenth-century melodrama. There is something of the Neapolitan tradition here, but Mancini does not attempt to reproduce the complex narrative structures of seventeenth-century painting; instead, he isolates and condenses its emotional charge.
This sensibility is not confined to Dopo il duello alone, but also appears in a work of the preceding year, Vestire gli ignudi (1871). This drawing was executed as a prize-winning academic exercise at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli and, arguably, it encapsulates the same tension between inherited pictorial gravity and modern immediacy. Like Dopo il duello, it occupies a fascinating but elusive position between historical modes of representation and contemporary experience. It retains something of the moral seriousness and intensity of the seventeenth century while translating these into a modern moment.
Antonio Mancini, Vestire gli ignudi, 1871, Charcoal on paper, Naples, Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons (Il Sistemone)).
Manuel Carrera has suggested a connection between Mancini’s Vestire gli ignudi and Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy. Such a connection is persuasive, provided it is understood in ethical and emotional terms, rather than a statement about artistic form. Of course, Mancini does not engage directly with Caravaggio’s complex multi-figure construction, but he does isolate a single act of charity and renders it with a directness closer to nineteenth-century social observation. The affinity lies in a shared moral premise: the insistence that poverty and exposure demand recognition.
In this respect, Vestire gli ignudi translates a theological act of mercy into a contemporary human encounter, focused on the immediacy of a child in need. For Mancini, such subject matter would also have been personally immediate; he grew up in conditions of hardship. The act of charity, though framed within an academic exercise, also carries experiential urgency. This aspect of Mancini’s formation is discussed in more detail elsewhere on Inner Surfaces, in Antonio Mancini – Hunger and Fame (La fame e la fama).
Carrera also notes the existence of Caravaggio’s legendary status in Naples beyond the field of painting. He refers to the staging in the early 1850s, at the Teatro San Ferdinando, of a drama entitled Michelangelo da Caravaggio by Luigi Marta. This suggests a broader Neapolitan context in which Caravaggio could be reimagined in explicitly dramatic terms. Such forms of popular theatre would have been shaped by melodrama, a mixture of seriousness and sensationalism: a world very close to Dopo il duello.
In The Melodramatic Imagination, a study of French melodramatic traditions, Peter Brooks describes melodrama as a post-Revolutionary mode in which gesture, posture, and tableau serve to make moral and emotional truth immediately visible. Against the classical theatre of the seventeenth century, in which meaning was primarily articulated through speech, melodrama shifts emphasis toward the visual and the physical. The stage becomes a space in which action is repeatedly arrested in composed configurations, conveying emotional participation with an immediacy that transcends language.
This emphasis on tableau points to a broader nineteenth-century visual logic shared with academic history painting, in which figures are arranged into expressive groupings designed to communicate narrative and affect with force. In part, melodrama emerges from a growing mistrust of language, already articulated by Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. At moments of intense passion, language falters: what moves us are cries, broken phrases and the visible signs of the body in action.
Melodrama is thus structured by a paradox. It seeks to make meaning explicit, yet repeatedly stages situations in which meaning cannot be fully articulated. This tension is embodied through the inclusion of mute characters in some melodramatic plays, whose inability to speak might be emblematic of innocence unable to defend itself. Thus meaning exists as an urgent presence, yet is blocked from expression.
Seen in this light, Dopo il duello may be understood as a kind of mute image. The boy’s fear and shock are intensely present, yet resist narrative clarification or verbal articulation. The figure appears theatrically staged within a confined but solitary domestic space, producing a compressed, almost unreal tableau in which emotion is concentrated rather than resolved.
If, as Peter Brooks suggests, melodrama fixes meaning in moments of arrested gesture, this logic—already apparent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—extends into a wider nineteenth-century visual culture encompassing theatre, print, and painting. Scenes of crisis are repeatedly rendered as immediately graspable arrangements of bodies, in which gesture carries the burden of meaning, and narrative is condensed into a single instant. Gérôme’s Suite d’un bal masqué (The Duel After the Masquerade) offers one instance: the duel itself is withheld, and the aftermath is presented through the disposition of figures. In this aftermath of violence, we see a wounded Pierrot who, presumably in a lovelorn state, has entered an arena for which he is wholly unsuited. We witness the consequences: Pierrot, supported, seems gravely wounded, while, after an easy victory, his adversary withdraws indifferently, already engaged in conversation about something else.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Suite d’un bal masqué (The Duel After the Masquerade), 1857, Oil on canvas, 50 × 72 cm, Chantilly, Musée Condé
(Credit: Wikipedia).
Mancini’s image, though stripped of overt theatrical framing, operates within the same economy of expression. The body is the primary vehicle of sense, and the scene is felt at once in its intensity, even as its full meaning remains even more remote than that of Gérôme’s Pierrot.
Children were, of course, essential to nineteenth-century literary melodrama. This theme is explored in Martha Vicinus’ study ‘“Helpless and Unfriended”: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Melodrama’. Vicinus observes that, while the uncertainty of industrial and social change could be counterbalanced by life in the domestic sphere, this refuge could also become a place of instability. When the struggle between good and evil, stability and instability, enters the home, it is naturally the children who are most vulnerable to neglect and exploitation. At the same time, in literary narratives, they represent both fragility and endurance. Their suffering exposes moral failure and, in itself, condemns the guilty. What is more, in the Manichaean world of literary melodrama, the child’s suffering reveals an indestructible example of virtue. In this genre, they are ‘preternaturally wise and innocent’: they know and suffer beyond their years, but become emotional and moral saviours within the narrative.
Manet’s and Mancini’s paintings share a peculiar modernity in their tragic atmosphere. Both evoke the emotional intensity traditionally associated with tragedy, but there is no firm anagnorisis, either for the subject or for the viewer. In both cases, the meaning expected by tradition is absent. We are left in a moment of silent suspense; we are given a cropped frame and a frozen narrative. We may not need an Aristotelian term for the uncanny silence, the mysterious voicelessness that follows devastation or error. It is perhaps the most articulate message available.
[Producing these essays requires care, time, research, and resources. Contributions to help sustain this exploration would be greatly appreciated.]
Any errors are mine. The sources for this essay are as follows.
Baudelaire, Charles, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet, London, 1972.
Beeny, Emily A., ‘Christ and the Angels: Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting?’, Representations, 122.1 (2013), 51–82.
Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination, New Haven and London, 1976 (1995 edn).
Cachin, Françoise, Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Manet 1832–1883, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1983.
Carrera, Manuel, ‘La pittura di Antonio Mancini e il collezionismo internazionale con nuovi documenti e un’opera ritrovata’, in Antonio Mancini, Vincenzo Gemito, ed. Manuel Carrera, Fernando Mazzocca, Carlo Sisi and Isabella Valente, Milan, 2023.
Cecchi, Dario, Mancini, Turin, 1966.
Davis, John A., Italy in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford, 2000.
Eagleton, Terry, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Oxford, 2003.
Hanson, Anne Coffin, Monet and the Modern Tradition, New Haven and London, 1977.
Hiesinger, Ulrich W., Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master, Philadelphia, 2007.
Nochlin, Linda, Realism, London, 1971.
Nochlin, Linda, Misère: The Visual Representation of Misery in the Nineteenth Century, London, 2018.
Antonio Mancini, Vincenzo Gemito, ed. Manuel Carrera, Fernando Mazzocca, Carlo Sisi and Isabella Valente, Milan, 2023.
Virno, Cinzia, Antonio Mancini, Catalogo ragionato dell’opera: La pittura a olio, 2 vols, Rome, 2019.
Vicinus, Martha, ‘“Helpless and Unfriended”: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Melodrama’, New Literary History, 13.1 (Autumn 1981), 127–143.
“Anyone, however, who considered only his lengthy contemplation of things might easily have judged him to be slow and lacking a natural gift, but when he was resolved in his mind and his art, then, with the muses leading him by the hand, he ascended to the sublime heights of laurels and of Parnassus.”
Giovan Pietro Bellori.
Domenico Zampieri, known as Il Domenichino (1581–1641), was born in Bologna and trained there, first with Denis Calvaert, before leaving his studio to enter the Accademia degli Incamminati under Ludovico Carracci. Within this environment, shaped by the Carracci’s reform of painting, which sought to unite disegno and colour through the study of nature and the example of the High Renaissance, he emerged as one of its most intellectually rigorous exponents.
By the early seventeenth century he had moved to Rome, where he worked alongside Annibale Carracci; he was within Annibale’s circle in the period following the decoration of the Palazzo Farnese. His Roman career brought him significant ecclesiastical commissions, among them The Last Communion of Saint Jerome (1612–14) for San Girolamo della Carità, which established his reputation as a painter of grave and concentrated devotional scenes.
His art is distinguished by clarity of composition, measured expression, and a sustained engagement with classical models—qualities admired by contemporaries such as Poussin and later codified by Bellori. Alongside altarpieces and fresco cycles, including the decoration of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome, he also produced mythological works of refined lyricism, such as The Hunt of Diana (1616–17), in which the same principles of order and expressive restraint are applied to secular subject matter.
In the later phase of his career he worked in Naples, where he was engaged on the decoration of the Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. His final years there were marked by difficulty and rivalry, and he died in 1641.
The following pages approach Domenichino’s work through a deliberately limited selection, focusing on two of his most celebrated paintings, one sacred and one secular. The Last Communion of Saint Jerome, conceived for the high altar of San Girolamo della Carità, is shaped by a context of institutional devotion and doctrinal affirmation. The Hunt of Diana, by contrast, belongs to a more courtly and pastoral sphere, associated with the patronage of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini and later acquired—under pressure—by Scipione Borghese, who recognised in it a work essential to his collection.
Despite this contrast in subject and setting, the two paintings reveal a consistent artistic method: a scrupulous process of preparation, a clarity of compositional design, a refined use of colour, and a close attention to the relationships between figures. In both, Domenichino reshapes established models into unified and highly concentrated forms, in which narrative is ordered around a single governing idea.
The Last Rites of Saint Jerome: Domenichino’s Last Communion
The scene of Jerome’s final communion rests not on secure biography but on a later accretion of legend. A set of spurious letters, circulating from the early fourteenth century and attributed to figures within his circle, elaborated the circumstances of his death, presenting him as an extreme ascetic whose body had been reduced by privation and who summoned his remaining strength to receive the sacrament. Although their unreliability was exposed by scholars such as Desiderius Erasmus and Cesare Baronio, these apocryphal accounts—circulating in letters attributed to Eusebius and others—proved pictorially decisive, fixing the image of the aged saint, emaciated and supported by his followers, at the threshold between life and death.
At the same time, more familiar elements of Jerome’s legend—most notably the lion—persist within the scene, so that different narrative traditions are held together within a single, concentrated moment. The subject had already been treated by artists including Sandro Botticelli and, more pointedly, Agostino Carracci in his Last Communion of Saint Jerome (c. 1592, originally for the Certosa di San Girolamo, Bologna, now Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna), whose formulation of the dying saint surrounded by attendants provides a clear precedent. Domenichino’s painting emerges from this context not as an invention ex nihilo, but as a reorganisation of an already established image.
During a return to Bologna in 1612, Domenichino studied Carracci’s painting in the Certosa and resolved to adopt it as a model. This decision can be understood in light of a classical theory of imitation, articulated by Quintilian, according to which artistic practice depends not only on invention but on the emulation of successful precedents. His engagement with Carracci thus reflects both homage to his Bolognese masters—renowned for their union of colour and disegno—and an intention to refine that example within a disciplined and creative conception of imitation.
Domenichino’s Last Communion of Saint Jerome (San Girolamo della Carità, Rome, 1612–14) was commissioned for the high altar of the church closely associated with Filippo Neri, where he lived and first gathered the community that became the Oratory. The programme formed part of a renewal of the church in anticipation of Neri’s beatification in 1615, and Domenichino was asked to represent a relatively rare episode derived from texts attributed to the so-called pseudo-Eusebius of Cremona, describing Jerome receiving communion shortly before death. Begun in 1612 and preceded by an extensive series of preparatory drawings—more than forty survive—the painting was completed and signed two years later.
In reworking Carracci’s composition, Domenichino reduces the number of narrative episodes and produces a more unified structure. The figure of Eusebius recording Jerome’s final words disappears, and the varied reactions of the companions to the angels are suppressed; instead, all the figures are drawn into a shared concentration on the central, earthly event. This clarity of temporal focus distinguishes his treatment from the more episodic structure of Carracci’s composition, in which multiple strands of narrative unfold simultaneously.
Agostino Carracci, The Last Communion of Saint Jerome, c. 1592, oil on canvas, 376 × 258 cm, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, BolognaDomenico Zampieri (Il Domenichino), The Last Communion of Saint Jerome, 1612–1614, oil on canvas, 419 × 256 cm, Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City
(Credits: Wikipedia).
The most immediate transformation is the reversal of the composition, from which many further adjustments follow. The movement of the eye now runs from the more agitated figures at the left toward the stillness of the clergy at the right, concentrating attention on the act of administering communion. A clearer separation is established between the space of the ritual and that of the putti, whose presence is set apart by the increased height and verticality of the architecture.
This reorganisation is reinforced by the perspectival structure. In Carracci’s painting, the space remains relatively compressed, and attention gathers around the Host through gesture and proximity. In Domenichino’s reworking, by contrast, the recession of the pavement and entablature helps to clarify the composition and draw the eye toward the priest, whose illuminated head is set against the darker ground beyond. Without substantially altering his position, Domenichino isolates and defines the priest’s role within the scene. Set against a landscape suffused with the light of the setting sun, he comes to dominate the central space. His gesture marks a precise moment in the rite, holding the wafer between thumb and forefinger while the other hand extends in a measured, suspended motion.
At the same time, Jerome remains the emotional centre. Supported by an attendant, his weakened body is carefully framed; his arms fall inert, and only his lips remain active in receiving the sacrament. The surrounding figures are more clearly grouped and reduced in number, allowing the eye to rest on him without distraction. Light plays a central role in this concentration, isolating Jerome’s body, articulating the expressions of the attendants, and binding the composition as a whole. His red and white robes stand out against the richer tones of the surrounding figures, while details such as the trailing drapery of a winged putto above introduce a more fluid handling of colour.
To the right, three ecclesiastics—a priest, a deacon, and a subdeacon—turn toward Jerome, while at the left he is accompanied by his lion and surrounded by six lay figures. Their responses are varied but contained. Some are absorbed in private grief: a man wipes his eyes with a cloth, reworking a motif from Carracci, while a turbaned figure behind him gazes forward in a more withdrawn state. Nearby, an older man looks down at a kneeling woman who kisses the saint’s hand. Only two younger attendants exchange glances, creating a small circuit of shared emotion that binds the group more closely to the saint.
The composition is carefully balanced. The richly vested clergy occupy the right, while Jerome’s extended body is framed at the left by a cluster of expressive heads. His attendants are enclosed within their own network of gestures, and only the priest crosses the central axis, linking the two halves of the painting. Around this axis, Domenichino establishes a measured equilibrium between the ordered space of the church and the more intimate space of the dying man and his companions.
The scene is suspended at a precisely defined instant, poised between anticipation and fulfilment: Jerome kneels at the step of the altar, gazing toward the Host, his mouth already open as he prepares to receive it. The next moment leads directly to communion and death.
The theological emphasis of the painting is equally clear. The priest offers the unleavened Host of the Western Church, a detail noted by Giovan Battista Passeri and consistent with post-Tridentine emphasis on the doctrine of the real presence.
In the seventeenth century, San Girolamo della Carità was believed to stand on the site of the house of Paula of Rome, the Roman noblewoman who had sheltered Jerome. The confraternity associated with the church was devoted to charitable works, including the care of the poor, the sick, and the dying, and its membership included both men and women. This context helps to explain the prominence of the lay figures, whose varied responses—grief, devotion, attentive care—reflect a shared ethos of piety and charity.
As Elizabeth Cropper has suggested, some of these figures may be understood in relation to the confraternity itself. The kneeling woman has been associated with Paula, while also standing more generally for female participation within the community. Other figures may similarly occupy a double role, functioning both within the narrative and as reflections of the group for whom the painting was made. By contrast, the clergy at the right belong to the officiants of the ritual; their vestments and hierarchical arrangement correspond to the structure of a high mass, lending the scene a heightened ceremonial gravity.
Domenichino studied individual figures in a series of preparatory drawings, exploring variations in posture, gesture, and drapery, while further studies examined different ways of representing Jerome himself—collapsed, supported, or more upright—before arriving at the final configuration.
Giovan Pietro Bellori particularly admired the subtle use of light that sustains the emotional tenor of the scene, from the compassion of the clergy to the pathos of the saint’s hollowed and yearning face.
When unveiled on the feast of Saint Jerome, 30 September 1614, the painting was immediately praised, as recorded in an avviso written the following day. It was soon regarded by artists such as Nicolas Poussin and Andrea Sacchi, and by Giovanni Pietro Bellori, as comparable only to Raphael’s Transfiguration.
Not all responses were favourable. In the 1620s, Giovanni Lanfranco—who was in direct competition with Domenichino for major Roman commissions, notably at Sant’Andrea della Valle—circulated an engraving of Carracci’s composition in Rome, seeking to demonstrate that Domenichino had appropriated its design. The resulting charge of plagiarism became one of the most noted episodes in seventeenth-century art criticism.
Yet the debate also helped to define a theory of imitation. Poussin, drawing on Torquato Tasso, argued that novelty lies less in new subjects than in new arrangements and expressions; Bellori likewise maintained that Domenichino’s figures differ so markedly in action and emotion that any shared idea should be understood not as theft, but as legitimate imitation.
The painting’s standing rests less on such controversies than on the clarity with which Domenichino unites close observation of human expression with a sustained engagement with established artistic models.
Arcadia in Motion: The Hunt of Diana by Domenichino
Domenico Zampieri (Il Domenichino), The Hunt of Diana, 1616–1617, oil on canvas, 225 × 320 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
According to Giovan Battista Passeri (1610–1679), The Hunt of Diana was originally commissioned by Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini. At the time Domenichino was working extensively for the cardinal, executing the fresco cycle at the Aldobrandini Villa Belvedere in Frascati (1616–1618) and undertaking other important Roman commissions, including the coffered ceiling with the Assunzione della Vergine in Santa Maria in Trastevere, also commissioned by Aldobrandini and completed in 1617. Passeri recounts that Cardinal Scipione Borghese, having heard of the painting, requested that it be given to him. When Domenichino refused on the grounds that the work had been made for Aldobrandini, Borghese had it forcibly removed from the painter’s house and even ordered that the artist be detained in prison for several days.
Domenico Zampieri (Il Domenichino), Assumption of the Virgin, c. 1617, oil on canvas (coffered ceiling), Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome
(Credit: Slices of Light (flickr.com)).
The circumstances of the acquisition are reflected in the unusually low payment associated with the work. A payment of 150 scudi to Domenichino in April 1617 is documented for two paintings, The Hunt of Diana and the Cumaean Sibyl.
Domenico Zampieri (Il Domenichino), Cumaean Sibyl, c. 1616–1617, oil on canvas, 99 × 73 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Passeri nevertheless records that the painter himself later claimed to have received only forty scudi for the large Diana canvas. Even the documented sum appears modest by contemporary standards: only a few years earlier Domenichino had received about 240 scudi for the altarpiece The Last Communion of St Jerome (1614, Pinacoteca Vaticana). Borghese’s intervention therefore not only deprived the Aldobrandini of a major commission but also removed the painting from the context for which it had been conceived. As Anne Sutherland Harris has observed, the Aldobrandini collection already included celebrated mythological paintings by Giovanni Bellini, Titian and Dosso Dossi brought from Ferrara after the devolution of the Este duchy in 1598. Domenichino’s canvas may thus have been intended as a modern poesia that would complement this distinguished group and evoke, in a Roman key, the mythological splendour of the Camerino d’Alabastro created by Alfonso I d’Este in Ferrara.
The principal narrative episode represented in The Hunt of Diana derives from the Aeneid, Book V (vv. 485–518), where Virgil recounts an archery contest among the companions of Aeneas. In this episode the competitors attempt to strike a dove tied to the mast of a ship: the first arrow hits the mast, the second severs the cords that bind the bird’s foot, and the third pierces the dove as it flies free, while a fourth, shot into the sky, flares into a miraculous sign. Domenichino adapts this sequence with remarkable fidelity in its principal actions, showing the competitors in the act of drawing arrows from their quivers. At the same time, the painter transforms the scene in a decisive way by transferring the contest from Trojan warriors to the mythological sphere of Diana and her virgin nymphs. This transposition, perhaps suggested by Giovanni Battista Agucchi, allowed the episode to be integrated into a broader Arcadian vision centred on the goddess, the celebrated archer and twin sister of Apollo. By 1620 the painting was already known under the title Il trionfo delle ninfe (The Triumph of the Nymphs). In her analysis of the painting, Kristina Herrmann Fiore situates the work within a revived antique genre described by Pliny the Elder, who attributed to the Augustan painter Ludius the invention of landscapes animated by small figures engaged in rural activities such as hunting, fishing, walking or travelling by boat. Domenichino transforms this decorative landscape tradition by introducing the goddess Diana and her nymphs, thereby elevating scenes of rustic activity into an Arcadian vision of ideal beauty consistent with the artistic theory of Agucchi, who urged painters to move beyond the simple imitation of nature toward the contemplation of ideal form.
Although The Hunt of Diana has often been interpreted as a neo-Venetian mythological scene, the question of its colouristic sources remains open to debate. The painting has frequently been associated with the Venetian tradition of mythological poesia, not least because Domenichino’s patron Pietro Aldobrandini owned celebrated mythological works by Giovanni Bellini and Titian brought from Ferrara after the devolution of the Este duchy in 1598. Within this context the painting has sometimes been understood as a modern response to that Venetian tradition. Yet Domenichino does not pursue a direct imitation of Venetian painterly handling. The brushwork is comparatively smooth and controlled, and the palette more uniform than the exploratory surfaces typically associated with Venetian painting.
At the same time, comparisons have been drawn with the colouring of ancient Roman painting. The fresco known as the Aldobrandini Wedding (late 1st century BC, Vatican Museums), discovered on the Esquiline Hill in Rome in 1601 and long preserved in the Aldobrandini collection, quickly became one of the most celebrated surviving examples of antique painting. Its pale tonality and delicate modelling offered early modern artists a rare glimpse of classical pictorial practice. The luminous atmosphere and pale bluish tonalities of The Hunt of Diana have sometimes been compared with those of this ancient fresco, particularly in the way light entering the scene casts shadows that articulate the relief of the figures.
Roman artist, The Aldobrandini Wedding, late 1st century BC, fresco, c. 120 × 180 cm, Vatican Museums, Rome
(Credit: Wikipedia).
The overall effect of Domenichino’s painting is one of notable luminosity and atmospheric clarity. Fiore has proposed that this quality should be understood less as a borrowing from Venetian colourism than as part of a broader engagement with contemporary Roman discussions of aerial perspective. She relates Domenichino’s treatment of colour and atmosphere to the theories of the Theatine scholar Matteo Zaccolini, whose writings developed a distinctive account of colour perspective based upon ideas derived from Leonardo da Vinci.
In this interpretation the painting’s silvery luminosity arises from a systematic gradation of colour and density across the pictorial field. The canvas was prepared with pale grounds and built up in successive stages—background, vegetation and finally figures—so that the modelling of the figures could be calibrated against the surrounding atmosphere. The density of paint diminishes progressively with distance: foreground figures are rendered with rich, dense brushwork, while distant forms dissolve into thin, translucent layers. This progressive attenuation corresponds to Zaccolini’s theory of turchino, the bluish tone produced when light and shadow mingle in the atmosphere and colours lose intensity through distance.
Fiore also stresses the importance of Domenichino’s sustained engagement with classical sculpture. The figure of Diana echoes ancient statues of the goddess formerly in the Borghese Collection, although it is not in the range of this introduction to attempt a reconstruction of sources. Broadly, we can see that Domenichino drew upon antique prototypes such as statues of Aphrodite, figures that recall antique types of running female figures, conventionally identified as Atalanta, and reliefs depicting hunters with dogs. These models were not copied mechanically but served as points of departure for new inventions suited to the narrative rhythm of the composition. In this way Domenichino synthesised a range of antiquarian sources into a pictorial language that appears at once classical and vividly animated.
Atalanta (after the antique) French sculptor, Atalanta (after the antique), 1703–1705, marble, copy of a Roman sculpture after a Hellenistic original formerly in the Mazarin collection, Musée du Louvre, ParisSarcophagus with the Calydonian Hunt (MC 917) Roman artist, Sarcophagus with the Calydonian Hunt (MC 917), 2nd century AD, marble relief, Musei Capitolini, Palazzo dei Conservatori, RomeLudovisi Throne central relief panel Greek artist, Central relief panel of the Ludovisi Throne (Aphrodite emerging from the sea), c. 460–450 BC, marble relief, Museo Nazionale Romano (Palazzo Altemps), Rome
(Credits: Wikimedia Commons).
The painting reveals the exceptional care with which Domenichino constructed his compositions. Fiore notes that twenty-six preparatory drawings for The Hunt of Diana survive, many now preserved in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid and the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts. These studies demonstrate the artist’s methodical experimentation with poses, gestures and expressions.
Technical examination of the painting has also revealed numerous pentimenti, showing that Domenichino continued refining the composition directly on the canvas. Arms, legs and draperies were repeatedly adjusted in order to achieve a harmonious relation among the figures. In one case the arm of a seated nymph was altered to avoid an overly rigid alignment of vertical forms, while the leg of a bathing nymph was modified so that the curve of her body would better connect the foreground figures with the surrounding landscape.
The structure of the composition itself is organised through a carefully balanced geometric arrangement of the figures. At its centre one may discern a clearly defined rhomboidal quadrilateral formed by the principal actors of the scene, whose collective movement presses toward the right. This dynamic grouping is stabilised by figures placed at the outer angles of the configuration: two women at the obtuse angles turn outward, while another at the acute angle looks toward the left, guiding the circulation of the viewer’s gaze.
The painting is also structured around acts of looking. Two women at the left observe the contest, while figures concealed among the bushes at the right watch the scene from hiding. These onlookers—sometimes identified with Actaeon, though perhaps more plausibly understood as shepherds—participate in a triangulation of gazes across the image that culminates in the foreground bather. The bathing nymph and her companion function as visual “hooks”, recalling Alberti’s notion of paired figures that first attract and hold the spectator’s attention before directing it toward the deeper meaning of the scene. Domenichino treats this device with a touch of humour and irony. The bathing nymph appears largely indifferent to the agitated signals of her companion.
Giovan Pietro Bellori admired the vivid contrast between the impetuous molossian hound and the dog quietly drinking from the spring. The composition ultimately achieves what has been described as an arte ritmica, in which gestures and draperies echo one another across the painting. Domenichino, who was himself known to be a skilled musician, appears to organise the figures with something akin to a musical sensibility, allowing movements to repeat and vary across the pictorial field. Even the distribution of open spaces—the reflective pool in the foreground, the clear air at the centre of the composition and the distant landscape—functions like pauses within a musical structure.
A further question concerns the original format of the painting. In Virgil’s account of the archery contest one of the arrows flies upward and disappears into a cloud, an ominous sign interpreted as a portent of future misfortune. Some scholars, including Fiore, have suggested that Domenichino may originally have included this episode in the composition. In the engraving by Giovanni Francesco Venturini, the scene appears slightly wider at the right edge and includes a fourth arrow corresponding to Virgil’s narrative. Although Giovan Pietro Bellori does not mention such a detail in his description of the painting, faint traces observed during restoration have led some historians to speculate that the canvas may once have extended further to the right. If so, the lost portion would have introduced an additional narrative element drawn from Virgil, subtly suggesting the fragility of the Arcadian harmony celebrated in the scene.
In this way Domenichino transformed Virgil’s episode of competitive archery into a richly layered Arcadian allegory. Classical sculpture, literary invention, rhetorical metaphor and optical theory converge within a composition whose rhythms of gesture and colour celebrate the harmonious triumph of Diana’s nymphs while carrying traces of the traditions from which the image itself emerged.
La fine
Domenichino, Diana and Actaeon, c. 1609–10, fresco, Camerino di Diana, Palazzo Giustiniani, Bassano Romano. From the Camerino di Diana, Bassano Romano.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
[Producing these essays requires care, time, research, and resources. Contributions to help sustain this exploration would be greatly appreciated.]
Any errors in this introduction are mine alone: the texts consulted are listed below.
Bellori, Giovan Pietro, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Cambridge, 2005. Brown, Beverly Louise (ed.), The Genius of Rome 1592–1623, exh. cat., London, Royal Academy of Arts, 2001. Coliva, Anna (ed.), Domenichino 1581–1641, exh. cat., Milan, 1996. Fiore, Kristina Herrmann, “La caccia di Diana: genesi del dipinto, la questione dell’antico e del colore in rapporto alla teoria di padre Matteo Zaccolini”, in Anna Coliva (ed.), Domenichino 1581–1641, Milan, 1996. Negro, Emilio and Massimo Pirondini (eds.), La scuola dei Carracci e i seguaci di Annibale e Agostino, Modena, 1993. Puglisi, Catherine R., Francesco Albani, New Haven and London, 1999. Spear, Richard E., Domenichino, New Haven and London, 1982. Spear, Richard E., cat. no. 26, in Anna Coliva (ed.), Domenichino 1581–1641, Milan, 1996. Turner, Nicholas and Beverly Louise Brown (eds.), The Age of Correggio and the Carracci: Emilian Painting of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, exh. cat., Washington, National Gallery of Art, 1986. Wittkower, Rudolf, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600–1750, vol. I: The Early Baroque, New Haven and London, 1999. Zaccolini, Matteo, Prospettiva di colore e altre scritture sulla pittura, Rome, 1992.
Francesco Lojacono (1838–1915), Palermo e il Monte Pellegrino da un terrazzo, 1874, oil on canvas, Novosibirsk State Fine Arts Museum.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Francesco Lojacono (Palermo, 1838–1915) occupies a central place in the history of nineteenth-century Italian landscape painting. Working for more than half a century, he transformed the representation of the Sicilian countryside from the structured naturalism of the mid-nineteenth century into a more atmospheric and introspective vision that anticipates the sensibilities of the fin-de-siècle. His work charts a gradual shift from careful descriptive realism toward a more reflective and emotional understanding of landscape.
Early Formation
Lojacono’s first training took place in Palermo under his father, Luigi Lojacono, a painter of historical subjects whose sacred works have recently been the subject of research by Maurizio Vitella and Sergio Alcamo. He later continued his studies in the studio of Salvatore Lo Forte, a painter of portraits and religious subjects.
Luigi Lojacono (Palermo 1810 – 1880), Battaglia di Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1866, oil on canvas, Museo di Casa Professa, Palermo.Luigi Lojacono (Palermo 1810 – 1880), La Trinità con le anime purganti, 1843, oil on canvas, Chiesa Madre, Campobello di Mazara (Trapani).Luigi Lojacono (Palermo 1810 – 1880), L’adorazione dei pastori, 1843, oil on canvas, Chiesa Madre, Campobello di Mazara (Trapani).
(Credits: Wikipedia/ Unipa).
Like many young painters of his generation he initially worked within a Romantic tradition of historical painting, but by the mid-1850s his attention had begun to shift toward landscape.
Even before leaving Sicily he had absorbed elements of the local landscape tradition through artists such as Francesco Zerilli and Tommaso Riolo. Zerilli’s panoramic views of Sicilian towns and countryside offered models of spatial clarity and atmospheric order, while Riolo’s landscapes often incorporated small figures and episodes of rural life that helped structure the pictorial field and humanise the terrain.
Tommaso Riolo (Palermo, 1815–1906), nephew and pupil of the Neoclassical painter Vincenzo Riolo, belongs to the generation that sustained the Palermitan tradition of topographical landscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Later influenced by the Neapolitan landscape painter Giacinto Gigante, he produced small coastal and suburban views of Palermo that retain the compositional structure of the late veduta tradition—foregrounds of houses and boats seen from the shore—while introducing a more direct observation of everyday urban life and natural light.
Tommaso Riolo, Veduta di Santa Lucia al Borgo -1870 ca, Olio su tela 40×60 cm, Civica Galleria d’arte Moderna Empedocle Restivo, Palermo.Tommaso Riolo, Veduta di Palermo (Ponte Ammiraglio), oil on canvas, 1868, 69 × 98 cm, private collection.
(Credits: Sicily in Painting).
Francesco Zerilli (1797–1837) specialised in small tempera landscapes depicting Sicilian cities, coastal sites, ruins, and rural outskirts marked by convents and aristocratic villas. Executed with meticulous graphic precision and illuminated by a clear, Hackert-derived light, these works often function as near-topographical records, though the views are organised within carefully balanced compositions. His preference for real coastal viewpoints and his attention to natural light and atmosphere reveal a loose affinity with the landscape sensibility associated with the Neapolitan School of Posillipo. His landscapes were widely appreciated by European collectors.
Francesco Zerilli, Veduta della Marina di Palermo, 1824, Collezione d’Arte della Banca Carige, Genoa.Francesco Zerilli, The Temples of Agrigento, gouache with white heightening, 1826, 10 × 16 cm.
(Credits: Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia).
A decisive moment came in 1856, when Lojacono obtained a scholarship that allowed him to study in Naples. There he encountered the circle of the Palizzi brothers and the painters associated with the School of Resina. Naples in these years was an important meeting point for different currents in European landscape painting, where Italian artists could engage with ideas circulating between Paris and the Barbizon school.
From this environment Lojacono absorbed a disciplined practice of painting from life and a close observational approach to nature. Painters associated with the School of Resina, including figures such as Marco De Gregorio (1829–1876), Federico Rossano (1835–1912) and Giuseppe De Nittis (1846–1884), were developing a landscape language grounded in direct observation of nature and a sensitive response to tonal and atmospheric effects, as well as an attentive study of humble rural motifs. In some early works the sky and horizon are simplified into broad planes of colour set against carefully described foreground vegetation, producing a contrast between enamel-like atmospheric zones and precise natural detail.
Giuseppe De Nittis, Casale nei dintorni di Napoli (Farmhouse near Naples), oil on canvas, 1866, 43 × 76 cm, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples. Marco De Gregorio, Strada di Capri, oil on canvas, 1867, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.Federico Rossano, View of Vesuvius from Portici, oil on panel, c.1860s, 14.4 × 23.5 cm, private collection.
(Credits: Wikimedia Commons/ Artvee (Rossano)).
Works such as Monte Catalfano and Veduta dell’Acquasanta reveal this early synthesis of structural clarity and attentive observation.
Francesco Lojacono (1838-1915), Veduta di Monte Catalfano, c. 1865–1870, oil on canvas, 45 × 109 cm, Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna Empedocle Restivo, Palermo.
(Credit: Google Arts and Culture).
The Veduta di Monte Catalfano adopts a pronounced panoramic format and reflects Lojacono’s growing commitment to realist observation, supported by his assured technical handling of light and by the careful description of small details such as the ox cart and the crumbling walls. The clear, crystalline atmosphere of the morning scene recalls, in the sharp division between sky and mountain, the tempera views of the early nineteenth-century vedutisti, while also signalling the artist’s engagement with the spatial and luminous concerns of the painters of the Scuola di Resina. The bright, even light, the balanced and almost motionless composition, and the fluid linearity defining the architecture of Villa San Marco—together with the simplified treatment of the figures—suggest, as Diana Grasso has noted, close affinities with the manner of Marco De Gregorio.
Francesco Lojacono (1838–1915), Veduta dell’Acquasanta, c. 1865–1870, oil on canvas, 48 × 17 cm, Palermo, Fondazione Banco di Sicilia.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
In Veduta dell’Acquasanta the landscape is rendered with almost photographic clarity. Clear, crystalline sunlight shapes the scene, defining the sharply cut volumes of the buildings and the foreground rocks in subtle gradations of ochre and brown, while vivid streaks of emerald green cross the still surface of the water. In the foreground, a breakwater of large rectangular stone blocks, their flat surfaces scattered with dry grass, is described with close attention to texture and to the play of light and shade across the stone. Small incidents of daily life lend animation to the tranquil setting: leisurely boaters beneath a parasol and in broad-brimmed hats drift across the water, while a thin plume of smoke rising from a distant house hints at quiet domestic activity. The dark recesses of the window bays sharpen the impression of intense sunlight, reinforcing the scene’s prevailing elegance, smoothness and delicacy.
Landscape and Realism
During the 1860s and 1870s Lojacono developed the language that would establish his reputation. His landscapes present Sicily as a real and inhabited environment rather than an idealised setting. Peasants, shepherds and travellers appear within the countryside not as picturesque ornaments but as integral elements of the scene.
In this respect his work parallels the literary realism of Giovanni Verga. Just as Verga sought to efface the author’s presence so that reality might appear with documentary clarity, Lojacono’s landscapes give the impression of direct observation even when carefully composed.
Paintings such as Vento in Montagna (1872) and the large Veduta di Palermo (1875) exemplify this approach. In the latter, peasants occupy the foreground while the city appears in the distance beneath the silhouette of Monte Pellegrino. Vegetation typical of the Mediterranean landscape—agaves, prickly pears and olive trees—anchors the scene firmly in its Sicilian setting.
A characteristic feature of these works is the balance between meticulous description and broader pictorial synthesis. Foreground rocks and plants are rendered with careful attention to natural detail, while distance and atmosphere are organised through comparatively simpler tonal planes.
Vento di montagna, 1872. Oil on canvas, 106 × 134.5 cm. Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna Empedocle Restivo, Palermo.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Dated 1872, Vento di Montagna belongs to Lojacono’s early landscapes and still reflects the influence of the Palizzi school. The scene opens across a broad prospect divided almost equally between sky and earth, its gusty, unsettled atmosphere quite unlike the calm Sicilian countryside that would later become the painter’s preferred subject. In the foreground, rocks, shrubs, agaves and prickly pear are described with firm detail and warm colour, while the more distant slopes dissolve into cooler tones. The composition unfolds in distinct zones, from the sharply defined foreground to the misty middle ground, where a shepherd and his flock emerge through gusts of wind, the sheep crouching and struggling forward as the shrubs bend. The slightly improbable presence of Mediterranean plants in this windswept mountain setting suggests that the picture may represent not a single observed place but a synthesis of motifs, reflecting Lojacono’s early experiments with atmosphere and light.
Veduta di Palermo, 1875. Oil on canvas, 78 × 156 cm. Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna Empedocle Restivo, Palermo.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Veduta di Palermo is one of Lojacono’s most celebrated paintings, this panoramic view looks out from the hills above Palermo across the city towards the gulf. The sea defines the skyline, while Monte Pellegrino forms the focal point of the perspective, structured around the country road that runs through the centre of the composition. The human presence is minimal but integral to the scene: a small cluster of figures at a crossroads and a flock of sheep returning to the fold, raising a cloud of dust. The landscape is suffused with the heavy atmosphere of a Sicilian summer: heat, light and drifting dust soften contours, veil the distant houses and dissolve the forms of figures and trees. Through rapid touches, transparent layers of colour and pearly washes in the sky, Lojacono evokes with remarkable immediacy the stillness and oppressive warmth of the countryside.
During these years Lojacono exhibited widely in Italy and abroad, including in Naples, Vienna and Paris. These exhibitions brought him into contact with younger painters exploring similar concerns of observation and light. Artists such as Giuseppe De Nittis were experimenting with a clearer tonal structure and a more modern treatment of atmosphere, reflecting the increasingly international character of Italian painting.
Sunlight and Reputation
By the early 1880s Lojacono had achieved national recognition. Royal acquisitions and official honours confirmed his standing, and his paintings began to circulate widely among collectors.
Many works of the late 1870s and 1880s depict luminous coastal scenes and rural life under intense Mediterranean light. Subjects capturing a view towards Monte Pellegrino or children fishing for clams on the seashore offer examples of the characteristic mood of this period.
Francesco Lojacono (1838–1915), View to Monte Pellegrino, 1896. Oil on canvas. Private collection.Francesco Lojacono (1838–1915), Bassa marea (Pescatorelli tra gli scogli in cerca di telline), c. 1895. Oil on canvas. Private collection.
(Credits: Wikimedia Commons/ Mutual Art).
These paintings helped establish the celebrated image of Lojacono as the painter who had “stolen the sun.” At the same time, the popularity of these motifs encouraged repetition, and critics occasionally noted a tendency toward formulaic compositions designed to satisfy bourgeois taste.
The success of these subjects also encouraged a degree of studio production. Like many successful landscape painters of the period, Lojacono worked with assistants who helped prepare or repeat certain compositions destined for the expanding market of private collectors. Some versions were subsequently revised or simply signed by the artist, a practice that reflects the commercial success of his imagery rather than any fundamental change in his artistic intentions.
A Moment of Transition
By the end of the 1880s signs of change began to appear in Lojacono’s work. Critics occasionally remarked on a certain monotony in the repetition of familiar themes, yet the works he exhibited at the National Exhibition of Palermo in 1891 reveal an artist beginning to move beyond established formulas, experimenting with new ways of rendering light, atmosphere and the expressive possibilities of the landscape.
One compelling painting that anticipates this turning point is Monte San Giuliano. In this work the horizon is pushed very high while the viewpoint is dramatically lowered, so that the mountain dominates almost the entire surface of the canvas. The foreground earth is built up through countless small strokes of colour, while the sky appears as a thin and almost immaterial veil.
Francesco Lojacono (1838–1915), Monte San Giuliano, c. 1870–1880. Oil on canvas, 36 × 61 cm. Agrigento, Museo Civico, Collezione Sinatra.
The effect is both monumental and strangely suspended, transforming the Sicilian landscape into something timeless and almost mythical. Paintings of this kind suggest a gradual shift away from descriptive realism toward a more expressive pictorial language. Lojacono moves away from the conventions of the classical veduta that characterised much of his work in the 1870s, adopting instead a language of striking formal simplicity and a decidedly anti-academic touch. The bold composition and the colour, laid down in swift patches, recall the verist tendencies of the Scuola di Resina, particularly the work of Federico Rossano. Although the picture has been generically titled Bozzetto paesaggistico, it appears to evoke an austere stretch of the Sicilian countryside at the height of summer. A road cuts diagonally across the landscape with a strong graphic accent, while pale, weathered rock formations and sparse vegetation suggest the arid terrain of western Sicily, especially the Agrigentino.
Late Landscapes and Atmospheric Studies
In the final decades of his life Lojacono’s approach to landscape became increasingly reflective. The clear panoramic vision of the 1860s and 1870s gradually gave way to more fragmentary compositions in which particular details, atmospheric conditions, or fleeting effects of light became central. Landscape was no longer simply observed and recorded; it became a vehicle for mood and meditation.
This transformation was encouraged in part by his friendship with the collector Giuseppe Sinatra. During extended stays in Agrigento the two men undertook photographic excursions through the surrounding countryside and the Valley of the Temples. These photographic explorations encouraged unusual viewpoints and close observation of seemingly incidental natural details — clusters of vegetation, oblique perspectives, or glimpses of landscape framed through successive planes.
Francesco Camarda (1886–1962), Ritratto di Giuseppe Sinatra, c. 1930. Agrigento, Museo Civico, Collezione Sinatra.
(Credit: Agrigento Ieri e Oggi).
A similar sensibility appears in Lojacono’s mature painting from the late nineteenth century onward. The frontal and all-encompassing clarity of his earlier landscapes is replaced by a more exploratory language. Sometimes the scene is constructed from loosely handled foreground motifs; at other times it is rendered with a startling immediacy, as though seized in a single moment of dazzling sunlight.
The brushwork itself becomes increasingly expressive. Dense touches of pigment and heavy applications of paint create surfaces that seem to pulse with light, while in other works the material appears almost to dissolve, producing softer and more atmospheric effects. Many of the works focus on small and anonymous studies which emphasise fleeting states of light and atmosphere. Landscape becomes a way of expressing moods or states of mind: solitude, calm, or the uneasy tension of approaching storms.
Francesco Lojacono (1838–1915), Autunno, c. 1907. Oil on canvas, 138 × 238 cm. Palermo, Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna Empedocle Restivo.Francesco Lojacono (1838–1915), Vasca con capelvenere e alocasia, c. 1895–1905. Oil on canvas, 70.5 × 40.7 cm. Palermo, Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna Empedocle Restivo.Francesco Lojacono (1838–1915), The Marshes, 1900–1910. Oil on canvas, 66.2 × 100 cm. Milano, Gallerie d’Italia.
(Credits: Wikimedia Commons/ Google Arts and Culture).
Among the most striking works of this late period are a number of small studies of turbulent seas, now preserved in Palermo and Agrigento. These paintings, built from rapid strokes and agitated gestures, approach a kind of pictorial abstraction and reveal a remarkably modern sensibility. Yet they should be understood not as a departure from Lojacono’s lifelong subject but as one expression of his increasingly emotional response to nature.
In these late landscapes the Sicilian countryside and coastline are no longer simply luminous settings but mirrors of inner feeling. Their atmosphere recalls the neo-Romantic sensibility that also appears in the landscapes of Antonio Fontanesi, where nature becomes a place of reflection rather than description
A similar cultural shift can be seen in Italian literature around the turn of the century. The outward realism associated with Giovanni Verga gradually gave way to a more introspective sensibility in the poetry of Giovanni Pascoli. In collections such as Myricae, Pascoli explored the mystery of existence through heightened attention to the smallest impressions of everyday life.
Lojacono’s late landscapes evoke something comparable. Stormy seas, heavy skies, or fading light become symbols of an uncertain emotional condition. In works such as a winter marine study, waves crash against dark rocks beneath a sky swollen with rain, overturning the familiar image of the painter of Mediterranean sunlight. Here nature becomes psychological landscape — a space in which the drama of weather reflects an inner drama of feeling.
Francesco Lojacono (1841–1915), Marina. Oil on canvas, 194.5 × 103 cm. Galleria Pananti, private collection.
(Credit: Galleria Pananti).
Francesco Lojacono died in Palermo on 25 February 1915 after more than fifty years of artistic activity. Despite the compromises sometimes demanded by success, his work reveals a sustained search for new ways of seeing the Sicilian landscape. From the disciplined realism of his early years to the atmospheric freedom of his late paintings, he remains one of the most subtle interpreters of Mediterranean light and nature.
Four Exhibition Works
Strade di campagna (Un giorno caldo in Sicilia!), 1877 — Naples, Esposizione nazionale di belle arti, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Via Toledo, 1877.
Francesco Lojacono (Palermo 1838 – 1915), Strade di campagna (Un giorno di caldo in Sicilia!), 1877, oil on canvas, 109 × 231 cm, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples.
(Credit: Museo di Capodimonte).
Contemporary accounts reveal that the apparently tranquil landscape conceals a small narrative episode. Two hired carriages have halted on the dusty road before the closed gate of a farmhouse, where officers and civilians gather with sabres discreetly wrapped in cloth, suggesting an impending duel—perhaps the result of tempers inflamed by the oppressive heat of a Sicilian summer day. The anecdote, however, serves chiefly as a pretext for the expansive landscape itself, animated by prickly pear and silvery olive trees beneath a shimmering sky. The drama is presented with striking restraint, its quiet tension recalling perhaps the harsh codes of honour that haunt the Sicilian world of Cavalleria rusticana (1890) by Pietro Mascagni, drawn from the novella by Giovanni Verga.
L’arrivo inatteso (Il ritorno del coscritto), 1883 — Rome, Esposizione internazionale di belle arti, 1883.
Francesco Lojacono (Palermo 1838 – 1915), L’arrivo inatteso (Il ritorno del coscritto), 1883, oil on canvas, 119.5 × 239.5 cm, Segreteria Generale della Presidenza della Repubblica, Rome.
(Credit: Google Arts and Culture).
L’arrivo inatteso (Il ritorno del coscritto), exhibited in Rome in 1883, belongs to a group of works in which Lojacono introduces a modest narrative motif into a landscape that remains fundamentally atmospheric in character. As in the previous painting discussed, the anecdotal soggetto serves primarily as a point of entry for the viewer rather than as the true focus of the composition. Here the title refers to the return of a young conscript from military service, a subject readily understood in the rural society of post-unification Italy.
Contemporary descriptions emphasised above all the blazing atmosphere of the scene. One critic evoked the “golden Sicilian May” triumphing in a fiery flowering of rosemary, ferula (giant fennel), sorrel, thistles and poppies, the figures themselves enveloped in sunlight beneath an immense expanse of blue sky. The poetry of the painting, he suggested, lay above all in the contrast between warm golden light and the pure ultramarine of the heavens. In this sense the episode of the returning conscript functions largely as a pretext for the evocation of a vast summer landscape animated by Mediterranean vegetation and saturated with heat and light.
The work achieved considerable success at the exhibition and was later acquired for the royal collections, today forming part of the holdings of the Quirinal Palace in Rome. The modest narrative element embedded within the landscape also reflects the broader naturalist climate of the 1880s, not entirely remote from the rural scenes of painters such as Francesco Paolo Michetti (1851–1929) or Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884). In Lojacono’s case, however, the human episode remains deliberately understated, absorbed into a landscape whose true subject is the luminous immensity of the Sicilian countryside.
Dall’Ospizio marino, 1891 — Palermo, Esposizione nazionale di Palermo, 1891–92.
Francesco Lojacono (Palermo 1838 – 1915), Dall’Ospizio Marino, 1891, oil on canvas, 119 × 241 cm, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome.
(Credit: Solo Arte).
Dall’Ospizio marino revisits a motif that appears elsewhere in Lojacono’s work: small groups of children engaged in simple activities along the shoreline. In this instance they are shown gathering crustaceans, an anecdotal episode set within a coastal landscape. The scene is located on the northern shore of Palermo near the children’s hospital founded by the surgeon Enrico Albanese and known as the Ospizio Marino. As in other works of the period, the narrative element remains secondary to the landscape itself, which unfolds in broad and tranquil tonalities, the distant horizon dissolving into a soft, vaporous violet.
Exhibited at the Esposizione nazionale di Palermo of 1891–92, the painting formed part of a notably successful moment in Lojacono’s career. At the same exhibition L’estate in Sicilia was purchased by King Umberto I for the royal villa at Monza, while Dall’Ospizio marino was acquired by the Giunta permanente di belle arti of the Ministry of Public Instruction, presided over by Domenico Morelli, for the Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna in Rome at the price of 7,000 lire.
L’estate in Sicilia (Palermo, via Romagnolo), 1891 — Palermo, Esposizione nazionale di Palermo, 1891–92.
Francesco Lojacono, L’estate in Sicilia (Palermo, via Romagnolo), 1891, olio su tela, 62,5 × 91,5 cm, Palermo, Fondazione Banco di Sicilia.
L’estate in Sicilia (Palermo, via Romagnolo), exhibited in the Fine Arts section of the Esposizione nazionale di Palermo of 1891–92, was one of the most admired works in Lojacono’s display and was purchased by King Umberto I and Queen Margherita for the royal villa at Monza. The painting was long thought to have been lost, known only through an engraving made from a photograph by Giuseppe Incorpora and reproduced in the Treves exhibition publications, before unexpectedly reappearing on the art market in recent years.
The composition centres on the motif of the sun-struck road, a subject that had acquired a particular prominence within landscape painting of the period and that invites comparison with works by Giuseppe De Nittis (1846–1884). In Lojacono’s painting, however, the scene is organised through a particularly concise structure of broad horizontal bands, animated by a long diagonal recession that carries the eye from foreground to distance. The vertical trunks that cut across the surface reinforce the sense of spatial extension from a notably low vantage point, a device characteristic of Lojacono’s work of these years.
Equally striking is the artist’s deliberate departure from the conventional iconography of the Gulf of Palermo. Instead of the celebrated prospect dominated by Monte Pellegrino—repeated for more than a century in the views of vedutisti and Grand Tour painters—Lojacono turns towards a less familiar stretch of coastline near Romagnolo. The result is a landscape both luminous and austere, where the blazing Sicilian summer is conveyed through a crystalline sky and the stark textures of rock and shadow.
[Producing these essays requires care, time, research, and resources. Contributions to help sustain this exploration would be greatly appreciated.]
The author is indebted to the catalogue entries in Francesco Lojacono (1838–1915) (Milano, 2005), particularly those by Fabio Speranza, Anna Villari, Pierfrancesco Palazzotto, Luigi Giacobbe, and Maria Viveros, and to internet sources posted by Sergio Alcamo concerning the activity of Luigi Lojacono in Trapani. I am equally indebted to Davide Lacagnina’s book Francesco Lojacono. Le ragioni del paesaggio (Palermo, 2005) which provides an excellent introduction to the painter. The book is accessible and affordable, yet richly detailed and well supplied with references and illustrations. For a fuller treatment, the exhibition catalogue Francesco Lojacono (1838–1915) (Milano, 2005) contains a number of excellent essays as well as an extensive catalogue and critical apparatus.
Dosso Dossi, Apollo (c. 1524–1525), oil on canvas, 191 × 116 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome.
“Dosso also knew how to add to his interpretations a certain wit, a sense of contrast, a boldness, that has led him to be associated with Ariosto and the Orlando Furioso. But his visions—enchanted and mysterious, dense with necromantic smoke—’are less a parallel than an Ariostesque reverberation’: absorbed into a fantasia kindled by colour within an Edenic geography already sublimated through the senses, in a manner that anticipates the later Guercino. His inclination toward enchantment, toward the magical and the marvellous, constantly tends to transform reality into an irreversible mystery, the setting into a place without boundaries.”
Jadranka Bentini.
Peter Humfrey, in a catalogue entry for Dosso Dossi’s Apollo, notes that “with the exception of the Borghese inventory of 1693, inventories of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries persistently call the subject of this picture Orpheus, a perfectly understandable identification,” an observation that we shall consider in due course. Humfrey also observes that the work was, somewhat curiously, attributed to Caravaggio for most of the 19th century, until Giovanni Morelli correctly assigned it to Dosso in 1875.
While the attribution of Apollo to Caravaggio would indeed be a curious error, especially for a curator or expert, the misattribution is revealing. It suggests that elements of Dosso’s painting anticipate innovations later associated with Caravaggio, particularly in compositional inventiveness, dramatic effect, and the engagement of the viewer. When Apollo is set beside Rest on the Flight into Egypt, for example, affinities emerge beneath their obvious differences. Both works are unconventional and exploratory, marked by a sophisticated and inventive handling of composition. Like Caravaggio, Dosso often worked directly on the canvas, revising and adapting his design as the painting evolved; this process lends the work a palpable sense of invention rather than predetermined order. Each picture displays a subtle yet surprising ingenuity that resists singular interpretation, inviting the viewer into an experience that remains suggestive rather than resolved.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c. 1597), oil on canvas, 135.5 × 166.5 cm, Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome.Dosso Dossi, Apollo (c. 1524–1525), oil on canvas, 191 × 116 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
In the case of Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Vodret observes that “The Rest is a highly complex conceptual and compositional elaboration, which departs from the simpler scenes painted up to that moment.” She adds, “It may be the result of an initial contact with more demanding stimuli and requests, and perhaps with a more refined circle of patrons.” Seen beside Apollo, these remarks underline how, in both cases, the sophisticated expectations of patrons encouraged inventive and elusive compositions capable of surprising and engaging the viewer. In Dosso’s painting, this context is certain: he was working for the highly cultivated tastes of Alfonso I d’Este in the context of the Ferrarese court. In Caravaggio’s case, the influence of a refined patron is less certain, though plausible. Across both works, however, the pressures of discerning patronage seem to have fostered a sensitivity to experimentation and a refusal of easy resolution.
Staying with the comparison to Caravaggio, Peter Humfrey observes that Dosso’s late works display Caravaggesque qualities in the sharply lit still-life objects. For example, the brightly illuminated objects on the foreground parapet of the Allegory of Hercules (c. 1540–1542) and the cornucopia of fruit and grain in the Allegory of Fortune (c. 1535–1538) appear to prefigure early works by Caravaggio, such as The Boy with a Basket of Fruit (c. 1593, Galleria Borghese, Rome) and Bacchus (c. 1596, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence). Humfrey further notes that these elements in Dosso’s work may also be seen as suggestive of developments in 17th-century Spanish still-life painting.
Dosso Dossi, Allegory of Hercules (also known as Witchcraft; c. 1535–1540), oil on canvas, 144.5 × 142.8 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence.Dosso Dossi, Allegory of Fortune (c. 1530), oil on canvas, 179.1 × 217.2 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
(Credits: Wikipedia and Mag Arte).
The comparison with Caravaggio functions in an oblique way to highlight Dosso’s originality, as seen in his Apollo. In a sense, it offers an indirect means of affirming the painting’s striking inventiveness and its resistance to rhetorical closure. The work sustains a mood of indeterminacy and delights in the staging of sensation, inviting comparison not only with its contemporaries but also with later moments of artistic innovation. Even a viewer attuned to a Baroque aesthetic—and predisposed against the geometric serenity often stereotypically ascribed to early Renaissance art—may find themselves unexpectedly engaged. Dosso proves at once theatrical, imaginative, and poetic; yet these qualities are disciplined within a composition that remains graceful, if unconventional.
For many art lovers, Dosso remains a marginal and secondary figure. However, Andrea Bayer offers a convincing and lucid corrective. She notes that Alfonso I d’Este, Dosso’s principal patron, had “secured the promise of a painting from Michelangelo, received gifts of drawings and cartoons from Raphael, and enjoyed the sustained attention of Titian for an entire decade.” Bayer emphasizes that this same Alfonso d’Este “recognized Dosso’s imaginative powers, his canny understanding of the innovations of his great contemporaries, and his gifts as a painter of nature.” She also underscores the rich artistic heritage Dosso inherited by quoting an exuberant passage by Roberto Longhi at length. This elevated prose refers to Dosso and some of his North Italian contemporaries and describes artists who “seemed to rise in a great smoke from the violet ashes of Giorgione’s funeral, ready to mix with the damp fog of the Po valley, which, so often churned up by the north wind blowing from the expressionists north of the Alps, grew clear under the lucid rays of that ancient rhythmic classicism of central Italy that shone fixedly off to the south.”
Dosso’s stature as an artist has also been reconsidered after research suggested that the Costabili Altarpiece (Ferrara, Pinacoteca Nazionale), a work of Dosso with the collaboration of Garofalo, was most likely completed as early as 1513–14. The altarpiece is a bold work that shows the influence of Giorgione in its mastery of nocturnal lighting and atmospheric landscape. Quite how significant this development was is summarised by Penny and Mancini in the National Gallery of London Catalogue, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings. They argue that if the dating of 1513–14 is accepted, it reveals something extraordinary about Dosso: “This conclusion, if accepted, reveals something curious, indeed extraordinary, about Dosso. He was not an artist of the stature of Titian, and yet the bravura handling of The Costabili Altarpiece precedes any equivalent boldness in Titian. He may indeed have influenced Titian, as well as being influenced by him. This may be difficult to believe, but it is no less remarkable that Raphael must have been so impressed by Dosso’s new style of landscape painting that he either let Dosso paint the background of The Madonna di Foligno (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome) or chose to imitate Dosso’s style himself in that part of the picture.”
Dosso Dossi (1486?–1542), Costabili Altarpiece (c. 1513–1514), oil on panel, 315 × 237 cm, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara, Ferrara.Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, 1483-1520), Madonna di Foligno (c. 1511–1512), oil on panel transferred to canvas, 194 × 320 cm, Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican Museums, Vatican City.Madonna di Foligno – detail with landscape in Dosso’s style.
(Credits: Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia).
Influences from the Venetian tradition, German art, local Ferrarese artists, and Rome all converge in Dosso’s work, and these currents are evident in his Apollo. The painting presents a subjective, mysterious landscape, marked by a restricted yet expressive palette that conveys both richness and luminosity, and a heroic, monumental figure whose mass and plasticity are gracefully balanced by the poetic setting.
The most immediately apparent influences in the painting are the Apollo in Raphael’s Parnassus in the Stanza della Segnatura in Rome and the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican Museums. As Kathleen Wren Christian has observed, the Torso became “a supreme demonstration of the body in motion” and was “endlessly reinventable”; as such, its influence is inseparable from Michelangelo’s engagement with antique sculpture. In more subtle terms, Peter Humfrey discerns in Apollo “a new refinement in handling, which is particularly evident in the treatment of the god’s hair.” In such refinement and in the contrasts of light and shade, he sees the influence of late Raphael and, as suggested by Ballarin, of Raphael’s former pupil Giulio Romano. We should add that the fine attention Dosso paid to Apollo’s hair is essential to the representation of the god, as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses the god says: “As I, with my hair that is never cut, am eternally youthful, so you, with your evergreen leaves, are for glory and praise everlasting.”
Raphael, Parnassus (1509–1511), fresco, c. 670 cm wide, Vatican Museums, Vatican City.Torso Belvedere, Ancient Greek/Roman sculpture, Vatican Museums, Vatican City.Giulio Romano (1499–1546), St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness (c. 1520s), oil on panel, 178 × 154 cm, Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna, Austria.St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness – detail.
(Credits: Wikipedia and Web Gallery of Art).
Dosso’s juxtaposition of two separate elements of a narrative in Apollo—the transformation of Daphne set beside Apollo finishing a song—finds a parallel in Raphael’s realisation of dramatic scenes made more intense through narrative compression. In the Transfiguration (1516–1520), Raphael unites the revelation on Mount Tabor with the desperate scene of the possessed boy below, collapsing sequential events into a single heightened pictorial moment. Even earlier, in the Oddi Altarpiece (c. 1502–1504), he combined the earthly gathering at the Virgin’s empty tomb with her heavenly coronation, presenting distinct phases of a sacred narrative simultaneously within one carefully structured composition. Yet whereas Raphael organises such compression through clear hierarchical division and theological clarity, Dosso’s fusion is more atmospheric and elusive. Raphael sought to conceal the join between registers, through such elements as colour and gesture, but Dosso emphasises difference and contrast. The narrative elements in Apollo do not occupy separate vertical registers but coexist within a landscape charged with tonal contrast and movement. Their simultaneity generates a poetic tension that resists definitive resolution.
Lighting plays an important role in the narrative of Dosso’s Apollo. At the centre of a rich but restricted tonal range, a brightly lit triangular section breaks through brooding cloud and shadow, illuminating the incline down which Daphne is fleeing. The light reflects from her back and heightens the sense of motion in the scene, assisted by the downward trajectory of her movement and by the trees, which bend under the influence of a wind that aids her flight. The composition organises its variety into diagonal and triangular sections. The diagonal within which Apollo resides produces an effect redolent of Giorgione. As Tom Nichols has noted, Giorgione used foreground detail to partially occlude the distant landscape—in works such as the Tramonto and the Three Philosophers—creating a type of anti-landscape and a contre-jour effect. A similar technique adds a dramatic and theatrical element to Dosso’s Apollo.
Giorgione Il Tramonto (The Sunset) 1506-10 Oil on canvas, 73.3 x 91.4 cm Bought, 1961 NG6307 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/NG6307Giorgione, The Three Philosophers (c. 1508–1509), oil on canvas, 144.5 × 123.8 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.
(Credits: NG London and Wikipedia).
That Dosso’s figure of Apollo was often mistaken for Orpheus can be easily explained. Orpheus, like Apollo, was a musician whose wife Eurydice was lost to the Underworld, even after he had rescued her. In this painting, it is easy to mistake Daphne for Eurydice: her figure is small, and the evidence of her transformation into a laurel tree is subtle. The river near her could be interpreted as the Styx, and the glow over the city in the background might suggest Hades. Moreover, Apollo is not in active pursuit of the fleeing nymph. Whether by intention or accident, the composition presents an unstable amalgamation of two mythic characters—one an Olympian god, the other a heroic human.
It is tempting to think that Dosso deliberately permitted such a double reading. Orpheus’s music had the power to charm animals and wild creatures, move human beings and stir emotion, affect inanimate nature, and soften the hearts of the rulers of the underworld. His music enabled him to bridge worlds, exerting a persuasive and transformative force over both living and non-living things. This sense of enchantment accords closely with Dosso’s pictorial world. As Kristina Hermann Fiore has suggested, the painting may also be understood in relation to a Venetian precedent, the lost self-portrait of Giorgione as Orpheus, known through later copies, including the engraving by Lucas Vorstermann for the Theatrum Pictoricum and a painted version by David Teniers the Younger. In that work, Giorgione adopts a diagonal compositional scheme and sets his figure against a distant, infernal city in flames, evoking the fate of Eurydice. Dosso’s Apollo, likewise poised between lyric absorption and visionary distance, seems to inherit something of this Orphic model, extending the idea of music as a force that traverses boundaries between worlds.
David Teniers the Younger (after Giorgione), Orpheus, c. 1650s, Oil on panel, New York, Suida-Manning Collection.Lucas Vorsterman II (after Giorgione, via David Teniers the Younger), Orpheus (from the Theatrum Pictoricum), c. 1658–60, Etching, London, British Museum.
Dosso’s Apollo is in a state of suspension. He appears to have just finished a song; his bow is raised in a flourish, his face thoughtful, his gaze fixed into the distance, and his lips slightly parted. The fingers of his left hand remain on the fingerboard of his instrument. The raised bow is cropped by the picture frame, a compositional choice that emphasizes the figure’s heroic scale and proximity to the viewer. Like Raphael’s Apollo, Dosso’s figure gazes upwards, and his instrument is a lira da braccio rather than an antique lyre. The choice of instrument may carry a personal association, as Alfonso I d’Este was an accomplished player of the lira da braccio, suggesting a subtle connection between the god and the cultivated prince. The court of Ferrara, before, during, and after Alfonso’s reign, was renowned for its patronage of music and musicians, attracting performers and composers from across Italy and beyond. While we know little of the instrumental repertoire for Alfonso’s reign, it formed part of a broader, cosmopolitan musical culture in which choral polyphony, madrigals, and frottole coexisted.
Within this milieu, music was understood not merely as entertainment but as a refined intellectual art, aligned with humanist and Neoplatonic ideas of harmony. Dosso’s evocation of Apollo Musagetes as a figure of musical concord expressed through colour has been linked to such currents at the Ferrarese court, particularly to the circle of Celio Calcagnini, for whom musical intervals mirrored the ordered sounds of the cosmos. Learned traditions drawn from ancient authorities, including Ptolemy and Pliny, reinforced this conception of a universe structured by harmony. In this light, Apollo’s arrested gesture may register not only the close of a song but a moment of attunement to a larger, celestial order—music conceived, in contemporary terms, as nourishment of the soul and as something that descends from the very fabric of the heavens.
The figure of Apollo is both monumental and lyrical, a mixture of gravity and vulnerability. The emerald-green drapery with a gold-threaded border that covers his lap adds intensity of colour and connects with the green of his laurel crown and the surrounding vegetation, linking the god to a magical pastoral landscape, as well as to the symbol of intellectual and military virtue. As Fiore has shown, this chromatic harmony is built from a reduced range of dominant tones—emerald green, blue, and a reddish orange—tempered by shadowy, earthy hues. The reddish orange animates the fiery sky and reappears in flickering touches along the gilded edge of the garment, while the blue of the clouds finds an echo in the distant chains of mountains. The green of the laurel and the meadow returns in the foreground in the modulated folds of Apollo’s mantle, binding figure and landscape into a single tonal system. A soft, lateral light from the right casts gentle shadows across the flesh, and a few precisely placed highlights—on the strings of the instrument, the drapery, and the blades of grass—are sufficient to articulate form within the darker passages.
At the same time, the laurel may carry a more personal resonance: by 1524, a few years after the death of Alfonso I’s wife Lucrezia Borgia in 1519, the duke was involved with his long-term mistress Laura Dianti. In this light, the crown could subtly allude to Laura herself, entwining the classical language of triumph and poetic inspiration with the realities of Alfonso’s courtly and private life. More broadly, the motif participates in a cultivated system of imprese and emblems at the Ferrarese court, where Laura adopted the device of laurel branches encircling a radiant sun, a conceit that binds her name to the solar and poetic attributes of Apollo. The recurrence of laurel within the painting thus operates on multiple registers, at once mythological, personal, and emblematic, and suggests a work attuned to the layered codes of courtly representation.
In Alfonso I d’Este’s Ferrara, the boundary between imagined nature and cultivated gardens was not sharply defined. As made clear in Giancarlo Fiorenza’s study, the management of the estate ran parallel to the idea of creating an earthly paradise, an Arcadia made manifest. Alfonso oversaw the cultivation of the Belvedere gardens, their wooded groves, feats of topiary, and orchards of fruit trees. In reshaping the landscape, taming the wild and suffusing it with myth and antiquity, princely governance and classical imagination converged.
In the opening lines of Scipione Balbo’s Calliopsis, the river Po—the principal river of the Este territories—is invoked by its ancient name, Eridanus, explicitly linking it to mythic origins. According to the ancient story, Phaeton, unable to control the chariot of the sun, was struck down by Jupiter and plunged into the river long associated with the Po. His sisters, overcome with grief, were transformed into poplar trees and wept tears of amber along its shores. In parallel, in the myth of our painting, Daphne becomes a laurel tree. Such mythic transformations arguably elevated the status of the palace grounds, marking them as a cultivated and culturally charged environment. In Apollo, mythology and Alfonso’s landscape appear to merge. Perhaps the song of Apollo could be discerned there, and perhaps Daphne’s beating heart could be felt through one of the trees.
Landscapes were central to the poetry of Ariosto. For instance, in the Orlando Furioso, the sorcerer Atlante’s enchanted castle is set within a forested and gardened landscape that both conceals and protects it, creating magical obstacles for heroes such as Orlando and Rinaldo. The landscape here is simultaneously a site of adventure, a mirror of inner trials, and a space of aesthetic delight—a cultivated, ordered, and imagined world. In Alfonso I’s Ferrara, the Belvedere gardens and groves could operate in a similar way, reflecting not only classical myth but also the chivalric imagination that pervades Ariosto’s verse. If we want to see a work by Dosso in which an enchanting landscape dominates the scene and envelopes his figures, we can view his Three Ages of Man (c. 1515). Here the trees, whose trunks divide into tight upward forks supporting compact foliage clusters, create a subtle Danubian echo.
Dosso Dossi, Three Ages of Man (c. 1515), oil on canvas, 77.5 × 111.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Given the singular character of Dosso’s approach, it is not surprising that both contemporary and modern critics have offered divergent assessments of his style. Ludovico Dolce and Giorgio Vasari disparaged what they perceived as the clumsy, and unpraiseworthy qualities of some of his work. Equally, the elusive, magical, and idiosyncratic world of Dosso continues to divide opinion.
A related field of judgment concerns the management of apparent artifice. As Castiglione observed in The Book of the Courtier, “True art is what does not seem to be art.” By this measure, some viewers might perceive Dosso as trying too hard in his application of wit and invention. However, Renaissance theorists, from Alberti to Vasari, equally argued that qualities most prized in poetry—intellectual invention (invenzione), imaginative vivacity (fantasia), and poetic production (poesis)—could also be exercised in painting. In the context of the Paragone debate exploring the relative merits of painting and poetry, demonstrating these shared qualities served to elevate the status of painting, showing it capable of the same intellectual and imaginative achievements as a literate art.
In Dosso’s Apollo, the heroic figure anchoring the composition, the inventive staging of gesture, and the dramatic interplay of light exemplify a painter fully embodying these humanist ideals, producing a work that is at once intellectually compelling and visually imaginative. Yet, despite his richly inventive style, Dosso also demonstrates compositional restraint and visual clarity. In Apollo, the painting’s underlying structure provides a particularly compelling example, as Apollo’s statuesque figure dominates and simplifies the foreground, even as a storm of invention and fantasia swirls around and plays across it.
Around a decade later, Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, in his Mary Magdalene (1535–1540), also places the principal figure prominently in the foreground, with light playing decisively across her satin robes. Unlike Dosso, however, Savoldo reduces the space devoted to landscape: the Venetian lagoon is suggested only minimally, partially enclosed by a walled boundary—a study of still life and texture in itself. The composition relies on colour that is paradoxically rich and cool: the palette is desaturated, yet the modulation of tones offers a restrained sumptuousness, in contrast to the luxuriant effects found in Dosso. While the connection to Dosso is subtle, Savoldo’s work demonstrates a refined, virtuosic handling of colour and light, producing an intimate, focused atmosphere—poetic in its mood and softly echoing Dosso, particularly in the prominence of the large foregrounded figure and the careful orchestration of light and colour.
On the topics of balance and restraint, it is worth returning to the unusual representation of Apollo. As noted, Dosso compresses two elements of a narrative scene. One way of reading his approach is to see the god’s representation as asynchronous with Daphne’s transformation into a tree: the chase has been omitted, and we do not see Apollo pursuing her. Instead, he is engaged in a later, more dignified activity—having just completed a song, likely reflecting on the preceding events.
By editing out the chase, the composition focuses on a more sober aspect of Apollo, also described in Ovid: one who holds mastery over the oracles of Delphi, Claros, Tenedos, and Patara, and, by implication, mastery over past, present, and future. In this way, Apollo’s freedom from immediate compulsion becomes legible: Daphne is still transforming, while he has already sung. The scene signals both the successful sublimation of desire and the possibility for a new state of balance to hold sway.
Representing Apollo in reflective composure, Dosso moves closer to an image of princely virtue. In the mirror-of-princes tradition, authority rested upon mastery of the emotions and measured comportment. In Ovid’s account, Apollo most memorably succumbs to desire and the ‘healer of all’ has no herb to cure the illness of his love: his flaw lies in the private realm of desire—hardly a domain worthy of a stoic ruler. Here, he appears self-possessed. The mythological figure is transformed from one driven by passion into a model of disciplined mastery, reflecting ideals expected of a prince.
Apollo’s reflective stillness avoids any disapprobation. The close alliance between affect and bodily movement made such matters particularly sensitive within Renaissance concepts of beauty. Sharon Fermor explains why:
“The system of thinking about the body derived from Plato shared with the Aristotelian tradition the idea that movement was the index of the soul and of moral and social stature. As such, movement was seen as something to be rigorously controlled and scrupulously observed. While almost all writers on movement stressed that rigidity in the body should be avoided, an excess of movement was considered to be far more problematic. Depending on its nature, excessive and uncontrolled movement could indicate a range of different vices, including anger, effeminacy, lack of self-restraint, sycophancy, servility, licentiousness, affectation, untrustworthiness, or deceitfulness.”
Of course, this did not mean that dramatic action could not be represented with dignity, even in the literal pursuit of love. Rather, it required careful calibration. The redeeming concept in such cases is leggiadrìa—movement imbued with lightness, harmony, posture, and grace. We see leggiadrìa in an Apollo and Daphne from about fifty years earlier, as well as in one from roughly a century later. In the works of Piero del Pollaiuolo and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the very moment of Apollo’s embrace and Daphne’s transformation is rendered with consummate mastery of grace and movement.
Piero del Pollaiuolo, Apollo and Daphne (c. 1470–1480), oil on wood, 29.5 × 20 cm, National Gallery, London.Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne (1622–1625), marble sculpture, Galleria Borghese, Rome.
(Credits: NG London and Wikipedia).
Coda
Ovid’s Legacy
“Now I have finished my work, which nothing can ever destroy, not Jupiter’s wrath, nor fire or sword, nor devouring time. That day which has power over nothing except this body of mine may come when it will and end the uncertain span of my life. But the finer part of myself shall sweep me into eternity, higher than all the stars. My name shall never be forgotten.”
—Ovid, Metamorphoses, Epilogue, translated by David Raeburn.
Any errors or infelicities are mine alone. Those wishing to research further can begin with the bibliography below.
Bibliography
Beck, James, Raphael: The Stanza della Segnatura, New York, 1993.
Bentini, Jadranka, “Fra sentimento e favola. La pittura a Ferrara dal Cinquecento al Seicento,” in Un Rinascimento singolare: La corte degli Este a Ferrara, Ferrara, 2004, pp. 235–278.
Bentini, Jadranka and Sergio Guarino (eds.), Il museo senza confini: dipinti ferraresi del Rinascimento nelle raccolte romane, Milan, 2002.
Bentini, Jadranka & Grazia Agostini (eds.), Un Rinascimento singolare: La corte degli Este a Ferrara, Ferrara, 2004.
Christian, Kathleen Wren, Empire Without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350–1527, New Haven & London, 2010.
Fabbri, Paolo, “Gli Este e la musica,” in Un Rinascimento singolare: La corte degli Este a Ferrara, Ferrara, 2004, pp. 59–71.
Fermor, Sharon, “Poetry in Motion: Beauty in Movement and the Renaissance Conception of Leggiadrìa,” in Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art, Aldershot, 1998, pp. 124–133.
Fiorenza, Giancarlo, Dosso Dossi: Paintings of Myth, Magic, and the Antique, University Park, PA, 2008.
Freedberg, S. J., Painting in Italy, 1500 to 1600, New Haven & London, 1993.
Henry, Tom & Paul Joannides (eds.), Late Raphael, London, 2013.
Hermann Fiore, Kristina, “Dosso Dossi, Apollo e Daphne, c. 1522,” in Bentini, Jadranka and Sergio Guarino (eds.), Il museo senza confini: dipinti ferraresi del Rinascimento nelle raccolte romane, Milan, 2002, cat. 12.
Humfrey, Peter, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice, New Haven & London, 1993.
Humfrey, Peter & Mauro Lucco (eds.), Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara, New York, 1998.
Mancini, Giorgia & Nicholas Penny (eds.), National Gallery Catalogues: The 16th Century Italian Paintings, Volume III: Bologna and Ferrara, London, 2016.
Marlow, Tim (ed.), In the Age of Giorgione, London, 2016.
Nichols, Tom, Giorgione’s Ambiguity, London, 2020.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn, London, 2004.
Rogers, Mary & Frances Ames-Lewis (eds.), Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art, Aldershot, 1998.
Turner, Richard, The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy, Princeton & London, 1974.
Portrait of Giacinto Gigante, Domenico Morelli (1826–1901), oil on canvas, Museo Nazionale di San Martino, Naples.
Born in Naples in July 1806 to Gaetano Gigante and Anna Maria Fatati, Giacinto Gigante grew up in an artistic household. Around 1801, his parents had married and had eight children, four of whom died young. The surviving children were Giacinto, Ercole, Achille, and Emilia (born 1809), all of whom became painters like their father. Gaetano died in Mergellina, where he had always lived, on 23 September 1840, aged seventy.
Ercole Gigante (1815-1860) Vessels before Vesuvius at night. Sotheby’s.
Around 1818, Giacinto received his first painting lessons from his father, producing landscapes and portraits. Among these is the oil Vecchio pescatore seduto (Talamo collection, Cava dei Tirreni), which bears his signature and the inscription, “This sailor was the first figure I painted from life in 1818.”
Gaetano Gigante (Naples, c. 1770–1840) was trained at the Reale Accademia del Disegno under Giacinto Diano (1731–1803). Diano, a pupil of Francesco de Mura, merged Roman classicism with the Neapolitan decorative tradition. Gaetano’s formation placed him firmly within the late Neapolitan academic tradition, still marked by Baroque narrative habits and an interest in classical clarity and staged composition. The earliest works securely attributed to him belong to his maturity and are largely frescoes and religious commissions executed between the late 1810s and early 1820s. These works display ordered figure alignment, theatrical space, and long, receding perspectives leading to distant vanishing points, in line with eighteenth-century vedutismo.
Giacinto Diano (Italian, 1731 – 1803), The Dedication of the Temple at Jerusalem, oil on canvas, 77 × 142 cm. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
In his mature production, Gaetano devoted increasing attention to genre scenes and popular festivals, usually in small or medium format for exhibition and sale. Figures, streets, and architecture were carefully arranged to structure the scene, whether in lateral compositions, as in La festa della Vergine di Loreto a Napoli (oil on canvas, 104 × 270 cm, Palais Fesch, Ajaccio), or in deep, receding perspective, as in Via Toledo dalla Piazza dello Spirito Santo (1837). Gaetano’s work bridged religious decoration and early nineteenth-century genre painting, marking him as a transitional figure whose professional and pictorial environment provided a platform from which Giacinto could cultivate his emerging modern sensibility.
Gaetano Gigante (1770 – 1840), Fête de la Vierge de Loreto à Naples (Feast of the Madonna of Loreto in Naples), 1811, oil on canvas, 104 × 270 cm. Musée Fesch, Ajaccio, Corsica.Gaetano Gigante (1770 – 1840), Largo dello Spirito Santo with Via Toledo, 1837, oil on canvas. Museo Nazionale di San Martino, Naples, Italy.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Giacinto studied privately with the German painter J.W. Hüber (1787–1871), who specialised in conventional academic landscapes. After Hüber left Naples, he trained under Anton Sminck van Pitloo (1790-1837) at Vico del Vasto in Chiaia. Pitloo’s poetic approach to landscape painting, shaped by British influence and painters such as Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857), as well as lessons absorbed from Corot (1796–1875), was central to Giacinto’s early development. Here he explored the Neapolitan and Campanian countryside directly from nature and met Achille Vianelli (1803–1894), whose sister Eloisa he married in 1831.
Achille Vianelli (1803 – 1894), Piazza San Gaetano e San Lorenzo Maggiore, c. 1845, watercolor/drawing.
(Credit: Wikipedia).
In the 1820s, Gigante gained experience at the Royal Printing Office, learning engraving techniques and the use of the camera lucida to depict reality precisely. He often traced outlines on paper, then transferred these drawings onto watercolour paper to apply washes. Works from this period include Naples from the Grotto of Posillipo (1820) and Views of Ischia and Capri (1822 to 1823).
In 1824, under Pitloo’s guidance, he painted his first oil, Lago Lucrino (Naples, Museo di San Martino). The work is characterised by a rich, dense touch, sometimes broad, sometimes fine and compact, and reflects a northern taste for capturing the immediate impression of reality rather than the seventeenth-century Neapolitan landscape tradition or eighteenth-century vedutismo. Although not officially enrolled, he was awarded a second-class prize in the landscapes category by the Royal Institution of Fine Arts that year. Around 1826 to 1827, he registered at the Royal Institute of Fine Arts to compete for the first-class prize and obtain exemption from military service. Between April and May 1826, he worked in Rome for the painter and dealer Johann Jakob Wolfensberger (1797–1850), and in the same year participated in the Exhibition of Fine Arts at the Bourbon Museum with four watercolours, now lost.
By the late 1820s and early 1830s, Gigante was producing illustrations for major publications. Between 1829 and 1830, he worked on Viaggio pittorico nel Regno delle Due Sicilie, collaborating with Vianelli, Carelli, Fergola, and Marinoni, contributing original lithographs including Lake Lucrino and The Remains of the Temple of Venus at Baia, along with views of Pompeii, Posillipo, and Santa Chiara.
Salvatore Fergola (1796–1874), Tempesta nel golfo di Napoli con naufragio (Bufera vicina), 1867, oil on canvas, 107 x 160 cm, Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli.
For the second and third volumes (1831 to 1832), he provided further views and subjects for lithography. In 1832, he contributed 100 drawings to Esquisses pittoresques et descriptives de la ville et environs de Naples, many based on Pompeii, and produced numerous watercolours of Capri and Pompeii, including Grotta Azzurra (1832), Capri dalla salita di Anacapri, Il Portico dei Teatri, and La Casa dei Capitelli Colorati (1835), in which intensified perspectival arrangements enhance contrasts of light and shadow.
His career gained momentum around his marriage to Eloisa Vianelli in 1831. From 1835, he received commissions from Russian aristocrats in Naples, some now held at the Museum of Capodimonte, including views of villas, San Martino, and the Bay of Naples. After 1835, he increasingly revised seventeenth-century Neapolitan landscape painting and assimilated features of Pompeian frescoes, informed by repeated excursions to Pompeii. His study of earlier Neapolitan masters included works such as Variations, a deliberate copy of a painting by Micco Spadaro in the Correale Museum in Sorrento. Between 1844 and 1850, his landscape painting was strongly influenced by Turner.
Connections through Schedrin at the Russian embassy brought him commissions in Naples and beyond. Some of these works are now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, including Landscape (1839), Sorrento (1842), and Monastery in the Mountains (1862). In 1846, he accompanied the Tsarina to Palermo, producing an album of Sicilian views and the oil painting The Amphitheatre of Taormina.
Giacinto Gigante, The Capuchin Monastery at Amalfi, with pupil additions, wartercolour on paper.
(Credit: Meister Drucke).
From 1850, he received commissions from the Bourbon court, producing drawings of Gaeta for Archduchess Maria Teresa in Vienna. In 1851, he gave drawing lessons to the young princes, and in 1852 he accompanied the royal family to Caserta, Ischia, and Gaeta.
After Pitloo’s death from cholera in 1837, Gigante became the leading figure of the Posillipo School. In the same year, he moved into his teacher’s house at Vicoletto del Vasto. Thanks to Russian commissions, in 1844 he purchased an estate on the Vomero slopes, Villa Salute, where from 1846 he brought together his large family.
Between 1855 and 1860, he returned to one of his early themes, Pompeii, producing watercolours and sepia studies in which he attempted to capture the encaustic colours of Roman painting, as seen in Via dei Sepolcri and Casa di Castore e Polluce .
Giacinto Gigante (1806 – 1876), Via dei Sepolcri in Pompeii, 1861, watercolor on paper, 36 × 53 cm. Private collection (watercolour and tempera on paper).Giacinto Gigante (1806 – 1876), The House of Castor and Pollux in Pompeii (with additions by a Borbone pupil), watercolour on paper, mid‑19th century (c. 1850s).
After the unification of Italy in 1860, his focus shifted from open landscapes to church interiors and figure studies. He painted monastic views such as S. Maria Donnaregina and worked on episodes of a more romantic character, including a sketch for L’ingresso di Garibaldi a Napoli. In the same year, Victor Emmanuel II commissioned him to paint the interior of the Duomo of Naples, Cappella di S. Gennaro al Duomo durante il miracolo del sangue, completed in 1863 (Museo di Capodimonte). He exhibited this work at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867, travelling there in person, and returned in 1869. The painting was praised for its complex perspective, with commentators praising Gigante as a watercolourist without equal in Italy. Also, around 1860, he began organising earlier material, enriching previous drawings with notes and additional graphic or painted details.
Gigante died in Naples on 29 November 1876.
Giacinto Gigante – selected works
The Temple of Neptune at Paestum (ca. 1844)/ Tempio di Nettuno a Paestum.
Tempio di Nettuno a Paestum (ca.1844), oil on canvas, 25 x 18.5 cm, Museo di Capodimonte, Napoli.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
The Temple of Neptune at Paestum(ca. 1844) is rendered with rapid, lively brushstrokes, dappled with touches of light that lighten the architectural mass. This vitality, however, is grounded in careful study, as evidenced by the preparatory drawing of the same dimensions, inscribed: “the Temple of Neptune seen at about midday.”
The viewpoint is shifted slightly to the left, creating an asymmetrical rhythm in the composition. On the left, the columns are closely aligned, producing a sense of mass and slightly darker shadow, while on the right they are more open, allowing light and space to emerge. Through and between the architectural forms, glimpses of southern blue sky and drifting clouds appear, and the earth below is rendered in warm golden tones where the sun breaks through, contrasting with the cooler brown of the shaded areas.
Cascade in a Gorge / Acqua di Forra (1844).
Acqua di Forra (1844), oil on paper mounted on panel, 22 × 28.5 cm, Museo di Capodimonte.
(Credit: Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali).
Following Sergio Ortolani’s gloss, in Acqua di Forra Gigante captures the vivacity of a flowing scene with rapid, incisive brushwork, conveying movement, freshness, and the cool, watery quality of the landscape. The atmospheric colour palette, recalling the shadowed tones of the Neapolitan Seicento, is freed from strict form and distilled into a single, fluid, sonorous play that emphasizes the rhythm and life of water in nature. The painted forms come alive independently of narrative content, experienced and transformed through the artist’s own lyrical perception. The work anticipates a study of nature in which form and colour take precedence over narrative, foreshadowing approaches soon to emerge across Europe.
Villa Minutolo (post 1852).
Villa Minutolo (ca. 1850), watercolour on paper, 37.5 x 46 cm, Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli.
(Credit: Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli).
In Villa Minutolo, on the promontory of Posillipo, amid luxuriant vegetation, gardens and vineyards, the noble villas of the Neoclassical period rose in profusion. Not far from the spot where this watercolour was made, near Villa Graven, Gigante had already worked on his celebrated view of the Gulf of Naples, commissioned by Count Potocki, the Russian ambassador to Naples, in 1845. The View of Villa Minutolo can therefore be plausibly dated to the years between 1845 and 1850. The prospect itself was already well established: the view was popular with foreign artists of the previous century and had long been a favoured location, not just for Gigante but for visiting painters more generally.
Two distinct planes of light and colour give the painting both its charm and its sense of depth. The distant town is rendered in more transparent tones, pale blues and soft yellows, while the foreground is built from a denser mixture of greens that partially merge the forms of the trees. Gigante was particularly adept at conveying the sensation of light through contrasts in the delicacy of colour, together with subtle steps in tone.
In this view the handling of colour feels strikingly modern, even as the composition retains something of the traditional. The prospect over the Gulf is, in itself, a conventional motif, one Gigante painted many times; yet the silhouettes of the figures walking along the roadside are here suggested with the lightest touch of the brush. These small figures introduce flashes of colour and light that contrast with the darker bulk of the hillside and foliage, and they also serve to articulate and delimit the near foreground.
Il Giardino inglese a Caserta (ca.1854).
Il Giardino inglese a Caserta (ca.1854), pencil, watercolor, and tempera on paper, 33 × 44 cm, Naples, Gallerie dell’Accademia di Belle Arti.
(Credit: author’s photograph).
In The English Garden at Caserta, Gigante sets aside the precise, realist approach in favour of a more Romantic and lyrical vision. The landscape is not recorded as it exists in nature, but transformed through the artist’s own perception, expressed with a keenly personal sensibility. Atmosphere, colour, and light dominate the composition, and the rapid, incisive technique, often combining watercolour with tempera, reflects the immediacy of his creative response, giving shape to the scene as it unfolds within his own consciousness.
Sunset in the countryside around Caserta/ Tramonto di Caserta (1857).
Giacinto Gigante (1806–1876), Paesaggio al tramonto nei dintorni di Caserta (also cited as Tramonto di Caserta), 18 May 1857, watercolour on paper, 52 × 66 cm, Museo Nazionale di San Martino, Naples, Italy.
(Credit: Meister Drucke).
In a similar spirit to the preceding work, Gigante here moves beyond realistic representation, transforming the Caserta landscape into a visionary scene. Light and colour assume primacy, with the watercolour itself becoming an act of creation, where forms and atmosphere emerge from the artist’s expressive perception rather than merely from objective observation.
La marinella (ca.1857)
La marinella (ca.1857), pencil and watercolour on paper, 34.8 x 53cm, Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli.
(Credit: Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli).
What is immediately striking about Gigante’s view of La Marinella is its refusal of the conventional. This is not a prospect chosen from the standard repertory of Grand Tour viewpoints, nor one of the commercially codified angles favoured by earlier illuminist landscape painters working in gouache. Instead, Gigante adopts a distinctly modern position, organised around a central perspective that draws the eye back towards Vomero Hill, with Castel Sant’Elmo anchoring the distance.
The conception of the Chiaia district is correspondingly romantic rather than topographical. Buildings are bathed in a soft rose-coloured light, but many are only partially realised. Figures in the foreground and centre are sketched rather than finished: calligraphic pencil lines remain visible, and some forms seem on the point of dissolving back into the atmosphere from which they emerge. On the left, beneath a tree, a small group is touched with colour in brief, almost casual splashes, while elsewhere definition gives way to suggestion.
The most fully articulated passages are held together chromatically: the trees on the left, which establish depth, and the stepped recession of rooftops to the right, where colour is used sparingly to mark spatial intervals. Sea, hill and cloud are handled in a restrained range of grey, violet and grey-blue, rising into cloudscapes brushed with pale rose. At the centre of the composition there is an expanse that is scarcely more than breathed onto the paper: a zone of light, atmosphere and hesitation.
The result is a work with strong underlying structure but an elusive surface. Shape is present, but it is constantly threatened by dissolution. La Marinella feels less like a finished “view” than a mysterious and poetic encounter with place.
Cave with Bathers (1858)/ Grotta con Bagnanti
Grotta con Bagnanti (1858), tempera on paper, 21 x 27cm, Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli.
Grotta con Bagnanti (1858), tempera on paper, 21 x 27cm, Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli.
Giacinto Gigante’s Cave with Bathers takes as its subject the cave beneath Palazzo Donna Anna, associated with Donna Anna Carafa of Stigliano. The painting is a Romantic transposition of the site rather than an accurate, topographical depiction. There is little descriptive attention to the actual cave entrance of the palazzo itself. Instead, Gigante imagines the space from within, transforming the physical location into a visionary interior.
Seen from inside the cave, the light entering from outside alters the appearance of the rock. The calcareous walls become white in the illumination and, using white lead, Gigante turns patches of them into something resembling marble. A figure on the left and another in the background appear to have almost lost their material substance; they are phantom-like, mysterious presences rather than solid bodies. The atmosphere is distinctly unreal.
This mood is likely influenced by the legends attached to the place, which was traditionally believed to be inhabited by the spirits of those killed by Queen Giovanna d’Angiò. The work dates from around 1858, within the period 1856–1860, and represents one of the high points in Gigante’s interpretation of landscape, moving beyond his earlier, more juvenile studies.
Technically, the painting makes strong use of white lead (biacca), contributing to the luminous abstraction of the cave interior and creating the transformation of rock into light, and vision.
Napoli vista dalla Conocchia (c. 1840–1860)
Napoli vista dalla Conocchia (c. 1840–1860), oil on canvas, 71 × 100 cm, Museo Nazionale di San Martino.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Following Rosanna Muzii’s interpretation, View of Naples from the Conocchia, concentrates all the qualities of Gigante’s mature work: his gift for framing landscape, his mastery of the pictorial medium, and his capacity for poetic and emotional suggestion. The result is a work of exceptional visual beauty, in which technical means are never displayed for their own sake but absorbed into a language of high expressive intensity.
As noted by Domenico Morelli:
“It is a healthy, sincere painting, without artifice, and vivid like enamel. A fine sky at sunset, barely furrowed by a few clouds, stretches over the tranquil sea, while the distant mountains and houses turn pink against cobalt half-tones. A curtain of arboreal masses rises, crowned by bold crests of pines. In the foreground, as if modelled by the declining sun against the turquoise sky, a slope animated by various, almost indistinct figures rises from the valley below, while the first grey-bluish waves of the vapours of the imminent evening begin to climb.”
Muzii also points to Gigante’s refined sense of tonality across his work: the delicate colour harmonies of the watercolour of the Caracciolo Chapel, the robust tonal structure of the interior of San Giovanni a Carbonara, and the masterful play of light in the Pompeian Baths. Together, these works reveal an artist capable of uniting close observation with lyrical transformation.
Giacinto Gigante (1806–1876), La Cappella Caracciolo del Sole nella Chiesa di San Giovanni a Carbonara, Napoli, 1863, tempera and watercolor on paper, 72 × 50.5 cm, private collection.Giacinto Gigante (1806–1876), Interior of San Giovanni a Carbonara Church, watercolour on paper, Museo Nazionale di San Martino.Giacinto Gigante (1806–1876), Le terme di Pompei (The Baths of Pompeii), watercolour on paper, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, Italy.
La cappella del tesoro di San Gennaro (1863).
La cappella del tesoro di San Gennaro (1863), watercolour, tempera and white lead on paper, 72 × 52 cm, Museo di Capodimonte.
La cappella del tesoro di San Gennaro (1863), watercolour, tempera and white lead on paper, 72 × 52 cm, Museo di Capodimonte.
Following the interpretation of Mariaserena Mormone, the vitality and spatial dynamism of the Chapel of the Treasury of San Gennaro mark a high point in Gigante’s late manner. The miracle of the liquefaction of the saint’s blood, so central to Neapolitan religious life, remains an event of intense popular engagement, and likely motivated Gigante’s choice of this distinctly local subject, perhaps also as a gesture of homage to the recently installed Savoy monarchy.
Now elderly and increasingly devoted to interior scenes rather than plein-air observation, Gigante constructs a strongly asymmetrical composition, emphasized by the oblique line of the balustrade that draws the eye toward the high altar on the left. The congregation is densely packed and rendered in rapid touches of colour, while the rich decorative setting, stuccoes, gilded frames, paintings, silver and bronze sculptures, and candelabra, creates a vibrant, animated surface. These many elements are unified into a choral yet dynamic vision through the integration of light and colour.
As Mormone notes, an echo of seventeenth-century Neapolitan painting can be sensed, particularly of Micco Spadaro’s Procession for the Eruption of Vesuvius, in the animated movement of the crowd, where individual figures dissolve into collective energy. The asymmetry of the space mirrors the emotional tension of the faithful, transforming the scene into a charged, theatrical moment of shared devotion.
Domenico Gargiulo (Micco Spadaro) (c.1610–1675), Procession with the Relics of San Gennaro during the Eruption of Vesuvius in 1631, c.1656–60, oil on canvas, 126 × 177 cm, Museo di San Martino, Naples.
The Maidservant’s House (Casa delle Ancelle) at Donnaregina (c.1865).
Vecchia Napoli: the Maidservant’s House (Casa delle Ancelle) at Donnaregina (c.1865), watercolour and tempera on paper, 46 x 33.5 cm, Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli.
(Credit: Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli).
Giacinto Gigante’s The Maidservant’s House at Donna Regina dates from around 1865. From about 1861 onwards, Gigante largely ceased producing landscapes painted directly in the open air, apart from a few studio works in pencil, pen, or pencil and wash. After 1860 his studies increasingly focus on praying figures, monks, genuflecting attitudes, and the ecclesiastical surroundings of San Lorenzo and Donnaregina.
In this work, the maidservant’s house is not presented within an expansive architectural landscape with open perspective. Instead, the scene is seen from close range and in an enclosed way. It feels less like a city view and more like an intimate architectural fragment, almost like the corner of a small courtyard, where space is compressed and attention is drawn to surfaces and edges rather than to distant buildings.
Attention is focused on a few distinctively Baroque details: the balconies and a visible shutter, which punctuate the flat planes of the architecture. Depth is conveyed through the dark accents that mark the doorways and recesses of the house.
Gigante creates strong effects of light through flashes of white on the sunlit terrace and along the wall, whose colour has faded in places. Although the composition is nearly monochrome overall, the paint handling is rich and subtle. The mixed technique of watercolour with tempera reveals itself only in carefully judged contrasts: the blue of the sky set against the pinkish tones of the buildings, and the touches of green foliage on the right-hand balcony.
The figures of the women introduce bright notes of colour and movement, absorbed in their everyday work in the sunlight. The economy of means in this painting is matched by a high level of technical confidence. Gigante allows the underlying drawing to remain visible without any sense of incompletion, demonstrating a rare mastery of watercolour as both a descriptive and expressive medium. The work is closely related to an analogous subject in the Correale Museum in Sorrento.
Having explored a confined corner of a courtyard, we can look at Gigante capturing an even more fragmentary subject: a tabernacle. There is something strikingly modern about this quietly encountered scene; though seemingly modest, it demonstrates a masterful handling of light, shade, and texture, imbuing the uninhabited space with a quietly observed, evocative presence.
Giacinto Gigante (1806–1876), Tabernacolo, oil on paper, ca. 1840, Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia “Leonardo da Vinci”, Milan, Italy.
(Credit: Lombardia Beni Culturali).
Commentaries on Giacinto Gigante from Causa and Ortolani.
[These extracts are translated from primary texts in: Capobianco, F., et al. I colori della Campania: Omaggio a Giacinto Gigante. Naples, 2006 and Martorelli, Luisa, ed. Giacinto Gigante e la scuola di Posillipo. Naples, 1993.]
Sergio Ortolani – speaking of Gigante’s work of around 1845 and 1850.
The vibration of light is rendered so unstable that it seems to decompose and recompose reality in its own way, perpetually; and I do not know what strange, hallucinatory aspect the images acquire, their enchantment all the more piercing for being precarious, mutable, and truly fleeting. It is a dream: a fleeting blink of the eye, and the world has changed its face. Yet there is no greater magician than Don Giacinto. Even when the image is more true to life, it remains fabulously unreal. So it is in this Cena a Pompei, [Una notte nella casa di Sallustio a Pompei] where night shadows and moonlight transform the genre scene into one of those landscapes one has glimpsed in a dream. And even in the loving, solar vision of Casarlano near Sorrento, from 1850, the whole georgic essence of summer and of these Virgilian lands is there: under a relentless wash of sun, the force of trees, and what seems like the very rasping song of cicadas, emerges that wild southern air, where enthusiasm borders on dismay at so much eruption and natural joy. And sometimes, blind dismay takes over.
Giacinto Gigante (1806–1876), Una notte nella casa di Sallustio a Pompei, watercolour on paper, Museo Correale di Terranova, Sorrento.Giacinto Gigante, Casarlano near Sorrento (1850).
Tragic is the macchia of the Anfiteatro di Pozzuoli, with its possessed ruin and the immense elemental darkness of the oak, or the vast 1865 watercolour of the secluded Giardino delle Monache di Donnaregina: truly deserted landscapes, emptied of human presence. Even more irregular and strange is the ascent of houses and caves in Cava dei Tirreni, as if a drunken god had laid hands upon them. Better than man, in his ordinary gestures or in the rhythm with which he measures an imagined world, only he [Gigante] has been able to sing this ecstatic and painful emptiness of humanity in its imagining, these great strokes of nature, this fantastical madness of the Phlegraean land.
Raffaello Causa – describing Gigante’s work from the period 1845-1850.
They come into being now, in the years around 1845–50. The newest and most admirable works, happy pages of a deeply felt, wholly inward intensity, authentic high points of nineteenth-century art in Naples, still carry within them a lurking danger, that of an all too easy decorative mode, poised between the scenic and the sentimental. But Gigante reacts with sudden flights of genius, through dazzling syntheses and incisive abbreviations.
Yet he will soon abandon this state of fully achieved expressive happiness and become sombre and brooding, drawn into a process of interiorisation that excludes any appeal to external elements, just as it refuses every concession to pleasing effects of colour or of layout. The ties of blood with the veduta, with his veduta, which had already begun to blur and were then reduced to simple points of reference, are broken for ever: vision must be regenerated from within, a simple spiritual moment to be translated into an expressive form. Light must be conquered each time anew, through a precise qualification of space and atmosphere. In this final phase, watercolour and mixed technique reach a completeness of astonishing effectiveness, handled with the audacity of oil painting, renouncing all delicacy of transparency and all elegance of touch.
Late-Romantic crisis pours itself out in a sudden liberation of line and of the “macchia”. Many sheets reveal a brusque, defiant non-finito, with a colouring without complacency, at times dissonant, yet entirely inward-turned, like a painful confession, a hopeless autobiographical testimony, results of great modernity, difficult to set against the contemporary experience of landscape painting in Italy, including even the only apparently more up-to-date experiments of the School of Resina and of the Macchiaioli.
Raffaello Causa on the final phase of Gigante’s work.
The discontent and dark humour of the old Gigante are concentrated in moments of rare expressive candour, introspective analyses that first seek to come to terms with the subject depicted, the painterly material, and the narrative of his latest compositions. In anticipation and often unrecognizable, by this point we are beyond the history of The Posillipo School. The landscape alone, this happy fable, is no longer sufficient to express the new imperatives of Romanticism. New paths must be explored, and here Gigante engages in an experience entirely novel for him.
Perhaps under the influence of analogous experiments attempted by painters in other Italian centres, he turns to interior painting: the interiors of churches, where nature no longer intrudes with the aggression of atmospheric light or the colours of the rainbow. Everything appears more controlled, framed within the perspectival schema that must establish the rule, a rule from which there can be no deviation.
Thus is born the major series of his late works, accompanied by a large production of figure studies, as if for the first time Gigante truly observes a humanity no longer included merely to complete the composition, anonymous extras for pastoral idylls or crowded city scenes. These are figures of worshippers in prayer, officiating priests, prostrate nuns. Few brushstrokes suffice to capture, with utmost clarity, the problems of humanity, of solitude, and of old age. Yet within these church interiors, Gigante produces works of prodigious technical skill, extraordinarily complex, which seem to reveal the ambition of an unequal struggle with the historical precedents of Panini.
[Producing these essays requires care, time, research, and resources. Contributions to help sustain this exploration would be greatly appreciated.]
For the glosses on individual pictures, I have relied most on the Bank of Naples catalogue of 1985 and the work of Mariaserena Mormone and Rossana Muzii in Capobianco, F., et al. I colori della Campania: Omaggio a Giacinto Gigante. Naples, 2006.
Any errors in this introduction are mine alone: the secondary sources used are listed below.
Briganti, G., et al. In the Shadow of Vesuvius: Views of Naples from Baroque to Romanticism, 1631 to 1830. Naples, 1990.
Capobianco, F., et al. I colori della Campania: Omaggio a Giacinto Gigante. Naples, 2006.
Caputo, Rosario. La pittura napoletana del primo Ottocento. Naples, 2021.
Causa, Raffaello. La scuola di Posillipo. Naples, 1967.
Causa, R., et al. The Golden Age of Naples: Art and Civilization under the Bourbons, vol. 1. Detroit (Detroit Institute of Arts), 1981.
De Rosa, E., ed. L’Ottocento negato. Naples, 1991.
Martorelli, Luisa, ed. Giacinto Gigante e la scuola di Posillipo. Naples, 1993.
Olson, R., ed. Ottocento: Romanticism and Revolution in 19th-Century Italian Painting. Philadelphia.
Picone Petrusa, M., Dal Vero: Il paesaggismo Napoletano da Gigante a De Nittis (Torino, 2002).
Sisi, Carlo, ed. La pittura di paesaggio in Italia: L’Ottocento. Milan, 2003.
Spinosa, N., ed. Art Treasures of the Banco di Napoli. Naples, 1985.
Pitloo, portrait by Pieter van Hanselaere (c. 1814). Source: Wikipedia.
Even if one were to grant Pitloo only what is evident in his redemption of landscape from the servitude of mannerism and convention, the arts, newly guided toward a beauty drawn from the true, would owe him immense gratitude. But there is more. Pitloo took on the role of an almost creative force rather than merely a reformer of the arts among us.
Pasquale Mattei, Cenni Biografici del Cav. Antonio Pitloo, in “Poliorama Pittoresco” (1860).
On 1 March 1803, Pitloo began his formal education in Arnhem under Hendrik Jan van Amerom (1777–1833). While a member of the local Society of Art Scholars, he progressed rapidly, and in 1807 he was awarded both a first prize and a silver medal for drawing. On 22 July 1808, he received the pensionato di Parigi from Louis Napoleon, King of Holland and brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, a royal scholarship that enabled him to continue his studies in Paris under official patronage.
Self-Portrait of Van Amerom with Wife and Young Son (1804)
(Credit: Wikipedia.)
Pitloo trained and gained experience from other European centres before settling in Naples: from 1808, he spent three years in Paris, where, thanks to the grant from Louis Bonaparte, he briefly studied with the architect Charles Percier before turning decisively towards landscape painting. By 1811 he was in Rome, moving within Dutch artistic circles and knowing painters such as Abraham Teerlink, Hendrik Voogd, and Martin Verstappen. His talent had thus brought him notable patrons, including the aforementioned Louis Bonaparte and the Duke of Berwick.
View of a Monastery in the Roman Countryside (1819), Martin Verstappen, Private collection.
(Credit: Web Gallery of Art.)
By 1815, Pitloo had definitively moved to Naples. He had travelled there with the Russian diplomat Count Grigory Vladimirovich Orlov (1777–1826), an art connoisseur and writer, and remained in the city for the rest of his life, dying of cholera in 1837 at the age of forty-seven. Naples, of course, was a major stop on the Grand Tour and a magnet for European artists. From the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, painters from across Europe worked there in large numbers. Notable examples include Joseph Wright of Derby, Hackert, and Vernet in the later eighteenth century, and Catel, Michallon, Corot, Turner, Dahl, Rebell, Huber, and Carus in the early nineteenth.
While Pitloo resided in Naples from 1815, he made return visits to Rome, and we also know that he travelled to Sicily and Switzerland. This is documented by a series of drawings held in the Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe e Disegni in Rome. The workshop of Verstappen in Rome was certainly a point of inspiration and orientation for him; its importance is suggested by a letter he sent to his mother on 8 December 1813 (or possibly 1814). In this letter, he states, in italics, that Rome is a useful city for painters.
In 1820, Pitloo married Giuliana Mori, sister of the engraver Ferdinando Mori, in Rome. That same year, he opened a private academy in his house in the Chiaia district, which quickly became a gathering place for young Neapolitan painters, including Achille Vianelli, Giacinto Gigante, Gabriele Smargiassi, and Teodoro Duclère. From this nucleus emerged what became known as the School of Posillipo, grounded in the landscape tradition but oriented toward plein-air practice and a more poetic artistic sensibility. Between roughly 1815 and 1830, this group played a decisive role in modern Neapolitan painting, with Pitloo as its central figure.
He was appointed professor of landscape painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples on 15 September 1824. The work that won him the post, Boschetto di Francavilla, was also a stylistic landmark in his artistic development. He went on to exhibit at the Real Museo Borbonico in 1826 and 1830, confirming his position within the city’s artistic institutions. In 1836 Pitloo wrote to his brother and sister from Naples, reporting a decline in tourism owing to fears of cholera. He also described his own illness during the preceding winter:
“Around mid-January, I came down with a nervous illness that made my work impossible for me throughout the winter, a kind of hypochondria that made me see everything in dark colours.”
We know that on 30 May 1837 he had three works in the exhibition of the Real Museo Borbonico, Veduta dei Ponti Rossi, Veduta con Molino and Veduta della Cava. On 22 June he died in Naples of cholera.
Pitloo: Style and Development
In the introduction to the catalogue for the 2004-2005 Pitloo exhibition at the Museo Pignatelli in Naples, Nicola Spinosa made the following comment on the inclusion therein of Raffaello Causa’s 1956 monograph on Pitloo: he referred to “a text now reprinted without further annotation, since no update is required.” The depth of first-hand knowledge that underpinned that monograph, together with the vitality of its prose, has made it an important source for this introduction.
At the same time, the relative lack of documentation on the artist, together with the strong market for Pitloo’s works, has made the instincts of connoisseurs and astute art-historical judgment essential in reconstructing his legacy. Those wishing to pursue the debate over the legacy in finer detail can refer to the 2004 catalogue. Beyond this, Stefano Causa’s book Ritorno a Pitloo revisits and reassesses both the work of the Dutch artist and the contexts that surrounded the 1956 monograph. The purpose of this article is simply to inform and enthuse an English-reading audience: as such, it is, unashamedly, the work of “a friend of Pitloo” and is expressed with unlaboured, indicative simplicity.
Francis Napier, 10th Lord Napier (1819–1898), wrote of Pitloo, “for his manner is not very careful or scholastic, but full of sensibility.” It is precisely this shift towards sensibility, and away from contrived academic landscapes, or merely artisanal tourist souvenirs, that makes Pitloo’s art so compelling. Raffaello Causa asserted that it was between Rome and Naples, and most significantly in Naples, that the artist’s talent suddenly flourished.
This is not to say that earlier influences were unimportant in Pitloo’s development. In Paris, he studied with Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld (1743–1813) and Jean-Victor Bertin (1767–1842), the latter known as the teacher of Camille Corot. Behind these figures lay the culture of Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819). The great French landscape tradition embodied in such teachers emphasized both the careful study of formal composition and direct observation of nature. This tradition sought to “catch nature in the act” through plein-air studies, although for Bidauld, authenticity required extended outdoor observation and large preparatory canvases. As Désiré Raoul-Rochette noted in his Notice historique: “[Bidauld] went to live for months in front of a view, with a canvas of three or four feet, to paint on the spot all day long … in spite of accidents of weather, and did not leave his post until he had finished his picture.”
One of Bertin’s other notable pupils, Achille-Etna Michallon (1796–1822), also made his way to Naples, entering what Causa described as an “international crucible of artistic languages and aspirations.” Michallon, celebrated for his luminous Italianate landscapes, exemplified the fusion of French compositional rigor with direct observation in the plein-air manner, a sensibility that would have been closely aligned with the emerging Neapolitan landscape milieu that Pitloo encountered.
The Fallen Branch, Fontainebleau (c. 1816), Achille Etna Michallon, Minneapolis Institute of Art.Study of a Fallen Dead Tree (c. 1820-1830), Anton Sminck Pitloo, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris.
(Credits: MIA and Fondation Custodia.)
If we look further back into his education, it seems likely that Pitloo’s training in Arnhem provided him with a solid grounding in the work of Dutch masters such as Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) and Jan van Goyen (1596–1656). The latter is cited here as representative of the Dutch tonalist landscape tradition more broadly, which tended toward descriptive fidelity. In addition, the Italianate landscape tradition, particularly through reproductions of artists like Claude Lorrain (born Claude Gellée, 1600-1682), would also have been part of the artistic culture in Arnhem, giving him early exposure to tonal subtlety, compositional balance, and a disciplined approach to observing and representing nature.
An Estuary (after 1643), Goyen, Jan Josephsz. Van, Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge.A Seaport (1644), Claude Lorrain, National Gallery London.Landscape with a Stone Bridge (c. 1638), Rembrandt van Rijn, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.
(Credits: Fitzwilliam Museum/ National Gallery of London/ Wikimedia Commons.)
While we have already highlighted the significance of Rome for Pitloo, we can deepen this observation by considering the influence of François‑Marius Granet (1775–1849). Granet was a French painter born in Aix‑en‑Provence. He received his early training from the landscape painter Jean‑Antoine Constantin and also spent some time in Jacques‑Louis David’s studio in Paris. Granet moved to Rome in 1802 and remained there until 1824, developing his art. Departing from David’s academic culture, his work began to display novel framings and a Romantic sensibility, combining plein‑air studies with subtle atmospheric effects that emphasized mood and light over narrative or academic convention. The relevance of Raffaello Causa’s suggested affinity between Pitloo and Granet is evident in a single work in The National Gallery, London. Tivoli Roofs, as it is labelled, is a small work (20 × 24 cm) that exhibits all the hallmarks of a progressive outdoor study. Rather than dramatising its subject, the painting celebrates mood and moment over narrative or posed composition.
This is a painting which, in an act of sincerity, captures homogeneity, warmth, wear, decay and luminosity. As the National Gallery gloss states:
“Here [Granet] has depicted a tightly packed cluster of houses, roofs and arches. Using dilute paint with a degree of transparency, he has created a homogenous surface of warm browns and greys, punctuated with darker windows and doors. The expressive brushstrokes in the thin paint lend a sense of wear and decay to the buildings. By contrast, the luminous sky is painted smoothly.”
If Pitloo’s reorientation began in Rome, his time in Naples was dynamic and intense, a phase of evolution and experimentation. As Causa defines it, this period is characterised by “a critical restlessness that remains constantly alive through a succession of different phases, each reached and then suddenly rejected and surpassed.”
The pictorial culture that inspired Pitloo’s energetic course of exploration is both too wide and too rich to do full justice to here. However, we can look at some key figures who would have helped to facilitate his journey towards an art that brought studies dal vero into the realm of emotion.
While Joseph Rebell (1787–1828) and Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy (1757–1841) worked firmly within the paysage classique tradition, their landscapes in Naples, city views, coastal panoramas, and countryside scenes, demonstrated a keen sensitivity to light, air, and atmospheric effect. Their careful study of natural illumination and their engagement with on-site observation offered models of tonal subtlety and luminosity that Pitloo could draw upon. Yet, unlike these predecessors, Pitloo went beyond the structured compositions and staged motifs of classical landscape, transforming direct observation into works of expressive immediacy. In this way, Rebell and Dunouy provided technical and perceptual lessons, even as Pitloo’s art transcended the representational habits of the paysage classique, moving toward the freedom and vitality that defined his most innovative and accomplished works, which were largely completed after 1830.
Romantic Italianate landscape with figures, sheep and cattle (1810), Alexandre Hyacinthe Dunouy, Sotheby’s.Sunset over the Campi Flegrei looking towards the Islands Prócida and Ischia (1819), Joseph Rebell. The Belvedere Museum, Vienna.
(Credits: Sotheby’s/ Apollo Magazine.)
During his stay in Naples from the autumn of 1820 to the early months of 1821, the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl, a pupil of Caspar David Friedrich, brought with him a sensibility and approach that anticipated some of the qualities later central to Pitloo’s mature work. His landscapes combined direct observation of light and atmosphere with a Romantic attentiveness to mood, producing scenes suffused a palpable current of emotion. At the same time, Dahl’s compositions reveal a careful orchestration of space: he often placed dramatic volcanic or rocky elements in the foreground to frame the view, opening onto expansive bays or distant mountains in the background, creating a sense of depth while guiding the viewer’s eye across the scene. In Naples, his combination of luminous, expressive light, chromatic subtlety, and thoughtfully arranged space would have provided a visual model for the emerging modern landscape tradition, showing how Romantic sensibility and plein-air observation could coexist with a coherence of composition and setting.
View of Vesuvius from Castellammare (1820), Johan Christian Dahl, Private collection.A View of Vesuvius from Capodimonte (1821), Johan Christian Clausen Dahl, Private collection.
Pervasive influences from Britain must also have played a significant role in shaping Pitloo’s development as a painter. This, Causa carefully notes, should be defined with some caution. He observes that, in his mature phase, “Pitloo makes a sudden leap toward aims akin to those of the great English landscape tradition… not through derivation, but solely through consonance of spiritual attitude in the same historical moment.”
Thomas Jones (1742–1803), during his Italian sojourn from 1782 to 1784, demonstrated how a seemingly spontaneous view could be elevated to the level of poetry, experimenting with unconventional framing and a sensitive integration of natural and architectural elements. John Robert Cozens (1752–1797), working from sketches made in Italy, completed most of his commissions in the studio, often reworking remembered scenes into simplified and tonally unified compositions in which nature is less described than felt. John Constable (1776–1837) further advanced this sensibility in England, engaging deeply with the study of sky, cloud, and changing weather as expressive agents. Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828), trained within the French school, brought a luminous tonal subtlety and refined colouristic technique, while J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) expanded the expressive and chromatic possibilities of landscape through visionary handling of light and atmosphere. Taken together, these developments disseminated models of technical skill, perceptual sensitivity, and imaginative engagement with nature, which Pitloo would later adapt within the Neapolitan context to form his own distinctive vision.
The Hill of Vomero and the Dome of S. Caterina, Naples (1782), Thomas Jones, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.The Bay of Naples from Capodimonte (1790), John Robert Cozens, Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven.Cloud Study, Hampstead, Tree at Right (11 September 1821), John Constable, Royal Academy of Arts, London.Lerici with Baron Charles Rivet sketching in the foreground (ca. 1828), Richard Parkes Bonington, Richard L. Feigen, New York.Coast Scene near Naples (1828), J. M. W. Turner, Tate Britain, London.
(Credits: Birmingham Museums/ Yale Centre for British Art/ Royal Academy of Arts, London/ Sotheby’s/ Tate Britain.)
In 1828, Naples and Rome became focal points for contemporary European landscape painting. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) visited Naples, while J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) exhibited in Rome, provoking critical debate among viewers. Corot famously observed that “the real is one part of art; feeling completes it,” emphasizing the fusion of observation and sensibility, while Turner transformed the idealised light of Claude Lorrain into a visionary, almost elemental force, one that often dissolved form and place. According to Raffaello Causa, Pitloo assimilated lessons from Turner in his rendering of air, creating atmospheres rich in chromatic depth, yet retaining the clarity of form and place. At the same time, he also suggests, Corot’s small Italian sketches, or pochades d’Italie, provided a model for translating the cooler, northern qualities of Pitloo’s handling of light into the warmer, more luminous tones of the southern Italian landscape, enabling him to achieve the distinctive immediacy and tonal richness that characterise his mature work.
The Roman Campagna, with the Claudian Aqueduct (1826), Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, National Gallery, London.
(Credit: National Gallery, London.)
The variety and complexity of cultural exchange within the landscape tradition during the last decades of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth was the theme of an excellent exhibition held in Washington, Paris, and Cambridge between 2020 and 2021. The exhibition, True to Nature: Open Air Painting in Europe 1780 to 1870, aimed to convey the “euphoria” experienced by artists of this period as they were “sitting before their motif, moved to record their perceptions in idiosyncratic and inventive ways.” The dizzying level of change and exchange in both Europe as a whole, and in Naples in particular, is salutary when considering a figure like Pitloo. Given the scarcity of documentary evidence available to define the precise details of his development and production, a consideration of some of his more securely attributed works provides a useful grounding.
Pitloo: selected works.
La caccia agli Astroni di Ferdinando I
( La caccia agli Astroni di Ferdinando I / The Hunt at the Astroni by Ferdinand I (c.1820), oil on canvas, 110 x 91 cm, Sorrento, Museo Correale di Terranova. Author’s photograph.)
In commenting on La caccia agli Astroni di Ferdinando I (c.1820), Raffaello Causa’s observations remain singularly illuminating. He highlights the way Pitloo combines elements of an older, commemorative pictorial tradition with a new urgency of nature, revealed as mysteriously alive and autonomous in its expressive force. Although here Pitloo still bears traces of half a century of courtly imagery of hunts and royal pastimes, little remains of the old celebratory taste. Instead, air and light dominate the scene. The strong backlighting and the luxuriant woodland threaten to engulf the hunting party altogether, granting nature an ancient primacy over human activity.
In this sense, Pitloo’s realism is not merely descriptive but is a step on the path to a radical depiction of wild, unpopulated natural scenes. An interesting parallel can be found in Dominique de Font-Réaulx’s comments on Courbet’s landscapes in the catalogue Courbet e la Natura (2018), where she describes a world that seems to open and close before the viewer, alive on the surface, yet rooted in something primordial and unfathomable.
Landscape (1873-75), Gustave Courbet, Washington County Museum of Fine Arts.
(Credit: Washington Museum of Fine Arts.)
Although Courbet and Pitloo differ in working methods and historical context, both convey a sense of nature as a force that exceeds human narrative and, in Courbet’s case, human presence. Pitloo does not bend colour and light to the service of spectacle. He allows them to assert their own authority. The result is a pictorial language that resists courtly celebration and moves toward something more modern in spirit, where nature is not a backdrop but a presence. In that respect, the painting is innovative in handling and genuinely subversive in conception.
Pitloo: Vedute di Castel dell’Ovo
Veduta di Castel dell’Ovo da Santa Lucia/ View of the Castel dell’Ovo from Santa Lucia (c.1820), oil on canvas, 76 x 103 cm, Roma, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna.Veduta di Castel dell’Ovo da Santa Lucia (c.1820), oil on canvas, 76 x 103 cm, Torre del Greco, collezione Banco di Credito Populare.
(Credits: Wikimedia commons.)
Both paintings of the Castel dell’Ovo from Santa Lucia appear to date from around 1820 and both seem to originate in direct observation from life. They share the same vantage point and underlying perspective, with the castle anchoring the composition and a scatter of sailing vessels and small fishing boats moving behind and in front of it. Yet despite this shared structure, the two works articulate the scene in different atmospheric and emotional keys, belonging to different times of day.
Making a very tentative observation on colour, based solely on the juxtaposition of reproductions in the 2004 Pitloo monograph, the Roman painting seems to adopt a marginally cooler palette and a slightly more contemplative mood. (It needs to be stated that the images here do not make such a clear distinction, hence my reservation.)
In all events, an air of serenity and languor in this rendering is arguably reinforced by the tree trunk in the left foreground, which leans inward towards the centre of the composition. In the two versions, the human activity varies: in the Roman version there is a small group of people talking in the central foreground, while fishermen are seated, tending their nets and guiding a sailing boat to shore. Distant hills appear to the left of the Castel dell’Ovo, emerging through a relatively open and restrained cloudscape.
By contrast, the Torre del Greco painting seems warmer and more radiant in colour. The dominant tones shift toward oranges and golds, and the light effects are more poetic. The trees at the left are strongly backlit. Their fronts fall into deep shadow, while the deeper trees have filigree-like tracings of golden light around the leaves. Here the foreground is animated differently. Two fishermen are shown hauling a small boat up onto the shore, their coordinated labour giving the scene a sense of physical effort and narrative immediacy. The brilliant whites of the other fishermen’s clothing punctuate the shadowy foreground with sharp highlights.
Atmospherically, the Torre del Greco version is more active, rather than simply serene. A larger cloud mass gathers on the right, and the cloudscape overall is more extensive. As a result, the hills visible in the Roman painting are obscured here, overlaid by shifting vapour and light. Mount Vesuvius appears slightly larger and displaced marginally to the left, and it merges more fully with the surrounding cloud formations, blurring the boundary between landform and atmosphere.
The Roman work (completed for the Jacobite peer and collector James FitzJames Stuart, Duke of Berwick) feels slightly more self-contained and reflective. The Torre del Greco painting, with its different time setting, transforms the same viewpoint into a warmer, more animated and theatrical experience of Naples, shaped as much by light and weather as by topography.
While both works show Pitloo’s growing command of plein air study and convey emotion through their depiction of colour and atmosphere, the composition in each retains a more traditional and formal shape.
Il boschetto di Francavilla al Chiatamone (1824)
Il boschetto di Francavilla al Chiatamone/ The Grove of Francavilla at Chiatamone (1824), oil on canvas, 44.5 x 75 cm.
(Credit: Gallerie d’Italia.)
In Il boschetto di Francavilla al Chiatamone (1824), Pitloo departs decisively from the classical landscape tradition of idealised structure. Rather than presenting a staged vista, he situates the viewer within the scene, using dense foreground vegetation and an oblique, unprivileged viewpoint to create a sense of participation rather than organisation. Light and atmosphere are treated not as descriptive accessories but as primary agents of form, softening contours and dissolving rigid spatial hierarchies. Architecture is absorbed into the natural environment rather than imposed upon it, reinforcing a vision of landscape as experienced rather than constructed and ideal. The integration of landscape and architecture from a spontaneous viewpoint is something visible in the work of both Thomas Jones and François Marius Granet.
Fabrique près de Saint-Bonaventure à Rome (before 1849), François Marius Granet, Musee Granet, Aix-en-Provence.
(Credit: Solo Arte.)
Pitloo’s painting marks a shift from landscape as intellectual composition to landscape as perceptual encounter, one of the defining innovations of Pitloo’s Neapolitan practice.
Il boschetto di Francavilla al Chiatamone signals a turning point both in Pitloo’s career and his style, establishing his move beyond the illustrative conventions of earlier foreign landscape painting in Naples. The work won him the chair of landscape painting at the Royal Academy, allowing him to succeed Giuseppe Cammarano. It depicts a section of the Villa Reale’s little wood, the no longer extant Casino di Francavilla, situated between the Castel dell’Ovo and a small pool formed by the Chiatamone spring. While the composition retains some affinities with classical landscape, it decisively asserts a more immersive and perceptual approach to nature.
Pitloo, drawing perhaps on Corot as well as on his Parisian training under Bidauld and Bertin and his familiarity with the post-Hackert Neapolitan school, renders the humid, dense foliage of the foreground with fluid, expressive strokes, while distant mist rises to articulate layers of space, framing buildings against a luminous sky. As Raffaello Causa observes, these atmospheric effects reveal a sensitivity to light, air, and depth that was largely unprecedented in Naples, reviving subtle perceptual nuances that had been almost forgotten. By integrating architecture into the natural setting and using light and tone to guide perception, Pitloo transforms the landscape into an absorbing, subjective experience, consolidating Il boschetto as one of the defining works of his early Neapolitan practice.
Paesaggio al tramonto (1830)
Paesaggio al tramonto/ Landscape at Sunset (1830), oil on paper, laid down on canvas, 35.5 x 52 cm, Gallerie d’Italia, Naples.
(Credit: Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli.)
In Paesaggio al tramonto (1830), Pitloo positions the setting sun at the centre of the composition, allowing its last rays to bathe the deeper landscape in a golden, fleeting light. The hillside is painted in autumnal reds and golds, the burnt earth punctuated by white stones at the centre of the slope, which catch the light and draw the eye. As the landscape recedes, colours cool and the air seems to grow cooler, so that depth is conveyed as much through the changing sensation of light and temperature as through spatial recession. Pitloo does not anchor the scene to a precise location; rather, he captures a moment of emotional engagement with nature, where the interplay of sun, colour, and atmosphere evokes both the visual beauty and the ephemeral feeling of the landscape at sunset.
Le torri del Corpo di Cava/ The Towers of the Corpo di Cava (1831)
Le torri del Corpo di Cava/ The Towers of the Corpo di Cava (1831), oil on canvas, 33.5 x 46.5 cm, Gallerie d’Italia, Naples.
(Credit: Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli.)
In Le Torri del Corpo di Cava (1831), Pitloo captures the austere landscape between Cava dei Tirreni and Vietri sul Mare. Amber light suffuses the valley, bridge, trees, and distant herd, creating a tonal harmony that conveys both depth and atmosphere. The central tower, deliberately placed, provides a compositional pause, anchoring the eye without dominating the scene. While the work retains a sense of eighteenth-century order, it gestures toward a more Romantic sensibility, perhaps informed by Turner’s exhibition in Rome in 1828. The painting marks a transitional moment in Pitloo’s work, where classical perspective and formal structure begin to yield to the expressive possibilities of light and atmosphere.
Il ponte e la chiesa di San Francesco a Cava dei Tirreni/ The Bridge and the Church of San Francesco at Cava dei Tirreni (1836)
Il ponte e la chiesa di San Francesco a Cava dei Tirreni/ The Bridge and the Church of San Francesco at Cava dei Tirreni (1836), oil on canvas, 23 x 34 cm, Gallerie d’Italia, Naples.
(Credit: Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli.)
In Il ponte della chiesa di San Francesco a Cava dei Tirreni (c. 1836), Pitloo revisits a well-known view, producing a smaller canvas with thicker paint and rapid, broken brushstrokes. The light no longer relies on the pinkish glow of sunset; instead, it is observed directly from nature, translated into the handling of paint itself. Amber tones and natural colours are rendered with immediacy, creating a concrete sense of the landscape while moving beyond the subtle lyricism of his earlier works. The view of Cava dei Tirreni was popular with patrons, and Pitloo’s repeated engagement with it contributed to its role as a model for other artists of the School of Posillipo. In the view of Raffaello Causa, this and some other late landscapes of the region represent Pitloo’s most intense explorations of expressive effect: a heightened restlessness, dramatic accentuation, and dense, energetic paint application that convey tension and force rarely achieved in Neapolitan landscape painting. While Causa’s assessment emphasises extremes, it highlights the painting’s place in a transitional moment where direct observation, material engagement, and expressive intensity converge in a modern, personal vision of the local terrain.
Pitloo: skies
His pencil is always true to general effects, whether his canvas represents the prospect basking in the midday brightness of the Italian sky, the waves flashing in the train of the level sun, or the fields refreshed and steaming in the dawn; every colour finds its counterpart on his palette, and no aerial magic is so evanescent as to elude his subtle imagination.
Francis Napier, Notes on modern painting at Naples (London, 1855).
Sunrise in a Landscape, c. 1811-1819, Oil on paper, mounted on canvas, 21.1 × 27.8 cm, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt. Sunset in a Landscape, c. 1811-1819, Oil on paper, mounted on canvas, 21.1 × 27.8 cm, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt.Sunlit evening cloudscape over the sea, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 16 x 31.5 cm, Private collection.
(Credits: Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt/ Antonacci Piccirella Fine Art.)
These three small works by Pitloo illustrate his plein-air capture of light and atmosphere. They include a pendant pair, Sunrise and Sunset, from the Frits Lugt Collection at the Fondation Custodia, and a Sunlit evening cloudscape from a private collection.
In Sunrise, to paraphrase Ger Luijten from the True to Nature exhibition catalogue, the thinly applied greens and dark browns in the foreground reveal the width of the brush, while scratches in the wet paint hint at the use of the pointed wooden end. The sky shifts from pale rose and clear blue to a saturated light blue at the top, with clouds reflecting the darker tones beneath them. Nearer clouds float just within reach, while those farther away are hidden in a pinkish glow. A left-to-right blue stroke marks the sea, and the slightly uneven horizon suggests rapid, on-the-spot execution. The overall effect breathes the cool, promising atmosphere of a summer morning.
In the Sunset pendant, the horizon seems to be on fire, and the reddish-orange is reflected in the sky. Pitloo placed a group of trees in the foreground to create depth. A strip of clear blue suggests the sea, and the sky is built up with a richness under which the sun goes down with a touch of drama, while a crescent moon has taken its place. The two signed pictures are a rarity in the artist’s oeuvre. As Luijten observes, they show how Pitloo had a remarkable sensitivity to light and colorito, and how he could value the spontaneity of his brushwork as an end in itself.
The same scholar also comments that there is ‘even more exaltation’ in the more stretched Sunlit evening cloudscape that is the final illustration in our series here. This work, also signed, appeared on the private market relatively recently and entered a private collection.
[Producing these essays requires care, time, research, and resources. Contributions to help sustain this exploration would be greatly appreciated.]
As ever, any errors and infelicities in this article are mine. Readers who wish to deepen their knowledge can refer to these books.
Cassani, S., In the Shadow of Vesuvius (Napoli, 1990).
Causa Picone, M. and Causa, S. (eds.) Pitloo: Luci e colori del paesaggio napoletano (exhib. cat., Museo Pignatelli, Naples 2004).
Causa, R., Pitloo (Napoli, 1956).
Causa, R., La Scuola di Posillipo (Milano, 1967).
Causa, S., Ritorno a Pitloo (Napoli, 2004).
Herring, S. and Mazzotta, A., Corot to Monet: French landscape painting (New Haven and London, 2009).
Luijten, G., Morton, M. and Munro, J. et al. True to Nature: Open-air Painting in Europe 1780-1870 (London, 2020).
di Majo, E., Anton Sminck Van Pitloo (1791-1837). Un paesaggista olandese a Napoli: ventisette opere ritrovate. Prefazione di M. Causa Picone (Rome, 1985).
Middione, R., and Daprà, B., Reality and Imagination in Neapolitan Painting of the 17th to 19th Centuries (Edinburgh Festival Society, 1988).
Noon, P., Richard Parkes Bonington: the complete paintings (New Haven and London, 2008).
Olson, R. (ed.) Ottocento (New York, 1992).
Pacelli, M. L. (ed.) Courbet e la Natura (Ferrara, 2018).
Picone Petrusa, M., Dal Vero: Il paesaggismo Napoletano da Gigante a De Nittis (Torino, 2002).
Sisi, C., La pittura di paesaggio in Italia – L’Ottocento (Milano, 2003).
Spinosa, N., Art Treasures of the Banco di Napoli (Napoli, 1984).
Sumner, A. and Smith, G. (eds.) Thomas Jones: an artist rediscovered (New Haven and London, 2003).
Léontine in canotto/ Léontine in a rowing boat (1874), oil on panel, 24×54 cm, Private collection.
Self-Portrait (ca.1883) Pastel on canvas, 114×88 cm, Palazzo della Marra, Barletta.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Giuseppe De Nittis: “A happy man who would have wished everyone around him to be equally happy.” Jeanne Mairet, Souvenirs, 1907.
De Nittis was a cosmopolitan artist, at ease in different social circles, open to new perspectives, and adaptable to life in foreign countries. He was socially generous and determined to succeed, qualities that made him appear warm-hearted, as Jeanne Mairet observed. And yet, like many artists of his generation, his life was far from easy.
Giuseppe Gaetano De Nittis was born on 25 February 1846 in Barletta, Italy, at Via della Cordoneria 23, now Corso Vittorio Emanuele 23. He died at the age of 38 on 21 August 1884 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a suburb of Paris, from what was then officially termed a “cerebral and pulmonary congestion”. The precise modern diagnosis cannot be established with certainty, but he had been suffering from serious bronchitis, and his sudden death is most plausibly understood as the result of a catastrophic stroke.
His father, Raffaele, was a liberal who supported constitutional government and national unification in opposition to the monarchy. He was arrested and imprisoned under Ferdinand II for his political views and released only after the 1848 revolution. During his imprisonment, Raffaele’s mental health declined, and in 1856 he took his own life.
The year before his death, Giuseppe also lost his brother Vincenzo to suicide, most likely prompted by financial and emotional difficulties. On 30 April of the same year, he lost his dear friend Édouard Manet, someone with whom he had just been renewing his friendship. He and his wife, Léontine Lucile Gruvelle, suffered the deaths of two children in infancy, Thérèse Lucile Joséphine and Raffaele Gaetano, who both died within months of their births in 1870 and 1872. Their third child, Jacques De Nittis, was born in Herculaneum, near Naples, in 1872 and lived until 1907.
Despite the absence and early loss of their father, the orphaned brothers were lovingly raised by their paternal grandparents, as Giuseppe De Nittis recalls in his notebook, the Taccuino. He remembers the generous-hearted nature of both his grandfather and grandmother. Their grandfather had been a kind and forbearing state administrator, serving as the Architect of the Saltworks of Barletta and opening his home to workers whose thatched cottages had caught fire.
Le saline di Salina di Barletta/The Saltworks of Barletta (1864), oil on canvas 18 × 24 cm, Private collection.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
After Raffaele’s death in 1856, the eldest brother took responsibility for the family’s affairs. In 1860, Vincenzo moved with the family to Naples to improve their prospects. Although he initially opposed Giuseppe’s desire to become a painter, he eventually consented to his brother’s wishes.
Despite the fragile emotional circumstances of his youth, De Nittis’s art rarely addresses themes of social injustice or the suffering of the poor and marginalised. This is not to suggest that he was socially aloof or insensitive, or that he never included working men or women in his art. In 1879, he painted a scene in Posillipo featuring three working women, titled Au Revoir!, and in the same year he exhibited La venditrice di fiammiferi a Londra/ The Match-girl in London in Paris, although it is difficult to locate an image of the latter.
Au revoir (1879), oil on canvas, 36×54.5 cm, Private collection.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Earlier, his Sur la route de Castellamare/ On the Road to Castellamare (1875) depicts a similarly popular scene, composed around a road, as in the more famous works The Road to Brindisi and Crossing the Apennines. The painting captures an intensely hot day, showing sunburned workers pausing from their labour: one eats grapes while another has removed his workboots. The baskets carried by the man on the left will soon be loaded onto the nearby donkey and filled with stones. While these figures are clearly labourers exposed to some hardship, De Nittis does not present them as exhausted, vulnerable, or exploited.
Sur la route de Castellammare/On the road to Castellammare (1875), oil on canvas,
54.5×74.5 cm, Private collection.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
This neutral tone is particularly evident when compared with Bestie da Soma/ Beasts of Burden, painted by Teofilo Patini in 1886. Patini, born in Castel del Sangro in the province of L’Aquila and also trained in Naples at the Accademia, sought to convey a clear socialist message. His workers are shown in states of poverty and hardship, expressed through their posture, facial expressions, and the composition of the work. By contrast, De Nittis occasionally drew on popular figures to introduce a moderate sense of realism into his landscapes and cityscapes, but he was not a campaigner for social justice.
Teofilo Patini: Bestie da soma/ Beasts of Burden (1886), oil on canvas, 244 × 416 cm, Palazzo del Governo, L’Aquila.
(Credit: Wikipedia).
For the most part, his subjects were rooted in bourgeois urban life, or were painted landscapes. Such choices were likely both practical (commercial), and aesthetic, yet we also know that his visits to London exposed him to scenes of poverty that left a mark. An account by Jules Claretie recalls how he passed through the poor areas of London, such as Whitechapel, in the company of De Nittis, encountering a world of neglect, poor lodgings, workhouses, and shoeless paupers. Moreover, in the Taccuino, De Nittis recalls Rotten Row, where people not favoured by fortune, wealth, or privilege seemed to be “nothing but a fleeting moment, a nonentity crushed under the wheels of the carriages.”
The biographical and autobiographical accounts of De Nittis’s life present a story of hard work, social success, and public recognition. But the reputation he won as a painter required diligence, flexibility, and self-determined assertion. He achieved the fame and recognition he deserved, yet, as Degas noted in a letter to Léontine, “He was happy and understood by the world, but not for long.” It was the determination and foresight of Léontine that ensured that a large part of his artistic legacy was collated and preserved in Barletta.
Léontine left her collection of her husband’s works to Barletta in her 1912 will, and after her death in 1913 the collection arrived in the city in March 1914. It was first housed in the former Dominican convent and then moved through a series of provisional municipal spaces before being gathered into a more formal museum setting by 1929. During the Second World War it was evacuated to Castel del Monte for safety, and afterwards returned to the city, where conditions again proved insufficient. In 1992 the works were transferred to the Castello Svevo, which offered improved but still limited accommodation. The collection finally found a stable and appropriate home in Palazzo della Marra, where it was inaugurated in March 2007.
Palazzo della Marra, Barletta. (Credit: Wikipedia).
In 1993, Federico Zeri was in an interview about De Nittis, conducted by Enzo del Vecchio, for the RAI. Zeri (1921–1998) was an Italian art historian renowned for his exceptional eye, his sharp connoisseurship, and his ability to combine meticulous archival work with intuitive stylistic insight. At this point, the collection was still in the Castello Svevo, and Zeri’s praise was placed in the context of the necessity for De Nittis’s recognition, both intellectually and through his work being granted a worthy location.
In a brief interview, he captures the sense of De Nittis as a painter with an acute vision and the skill to express that vision. He is seen as not just a great Impressionist (or member of any particular group) but as a great painter in absolute terms. He is recognised for his capacity to learn from the artistic circles around him and to adapt and capture what he sees. Zeri points out his skill in rendering the pristine, muffled sensation of a fresh snowfall. He also states that in La discesa dal Vesuvio/ The Descent from Vesuvius, De Nittis demonstrates his mastery by showing figures backlit by an atmospheric Neapolitan sunset.
Eruzione del Vesuvio (figure che discendono il Vesuvio in eruzione)/ The Eruption of Vesuvius (1872), oil on canvas, 71×130 cm, Palazzo della Marra, Barletta.
(Credit: Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali).
Zeri justly describes him as a painter capable of capturing both the bright beams of Neapolitan light and the foggy, misty atmospheres of Paris or London. According to Zeri, he also possesses an extraordinary talent for framing his scenes with the eye of a photographer. He is capable of daring choices, such as filling much of a canvas with a preponderance of sky, or, I would add, of road.
In looking at De Nittis’s work Nei campi intorno a Londra/ In the Fields Around London (ca.1875) a very French-looking scene, Zeri suggests that at this moment De Nittis appears to be a kind of home-grown Sisley or Pissarro.
Nei campi intorno a Londra/ In the fields around London (1875), oil on canvas, 45×55 cm, Private collection.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
This observation again draws out his versatility as a painter, as well as his willingness to learn from what he saw around him. We could add one more citation to Zeri’s anecdotal list, Monet’s Poppy Field near Argenteuil/ Les Coquelicots (1873).
Claude Monet: Les Coquelicots/ Poppy Field near Argenteuil (1873), oil on canvas, 50×65.3cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
De Nittis was highly respected in Paris during his lifetime, where he was seen as both an endearing outsider and an honorary Parisian. He was a painter in demand, and while he said that his fortune was made in Paris, he also acknowledged the support he received in London from the wealthy British banker Kaye Knowles. Praise for the artist was widespread during his lifetime. In one of his letters, edited by Victor Merlhès, Gauguin asserted that ‘Everyone copies either De Nittis or the great Bastien-Lepage. De Nittis and Lepage achieved perfection in what the Impressionists started.’
A number of Italian landscape painters had established reputations in France before De Nittis. Gabriele Smargiassi, for example, resided in Paris from 1828 to 1837, working on commission for Queen Maria Amalia, a Bourbon princess of the Two Sicilies who had been raised in the cosmopolitan Neapolitan court. Smargiassi produced landscapes of Naples, Rome, and France for the queen, and also exhibited at the Salon.
During De Nittis’s early years in the City of Light, Giuseppe Palizzi (1812–1888) had already established himself as a well-connected intermediary between Paris and Italy. He had met members of the Barbizon School and exhibited regularly at the Salon.
Gabriele Smargiassi: Paesaggio napoletano/ Neapolitan Landscape (1830), 30 x 40 cm, Private collection and Giuseppe Palizzi: Bosco di Fontainebleau/Forest of Fontainebleau (1874),oil on canvas, 232×320 cm, GNAM, Roma.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
It was Palizzi who introduced the Florentine Macchiaioli to Barbizon works and the plein air painting tradition. As well as being part of the Neapolitan School of Resina, De Nittis met Giovanni Fattori in Florence. The latter also had a mutual friend in Degas – as suggested by the fact that the two artists exchanged portraits in 1860.
Giovanni Fattori: La libacciata/ The Southwesterly Wind (1880-1885), oil on panel, 28.4x68cm, palazzo Pitti, Galleria d’arte moderna, Firenze.
(Credit: Wikipedia).
By 1868, the art dealer Goupil was asking De Nittis to recommend Italian artists, suggesting that he had assumed a mediating role in Paris previously occupied by Palizzi. It was at the Universal Exposition of 1867 that French critics began to recognise the quality and potential of Italian art as a contributor to contemporary culture. At the Salon of that year, Domenico Morelli won a silver medal for painting and was exploring a looser manner of handling, characterised by fluid brushwork and an increasing emphasis on immediate visual impressions. At the same time, artists associated with the School of Resina were engaged in a sustained investigation of light.
Considered collectively, many Italian painters formed an important component of a broader movement towards a modern, perceptually grounded style, one concerned with macchia, chiaroscuro, light, sensation, and the desire to capture the immediacy of lived experience.
Further evidence of cultural exchange is found in the fact that Florence held some significant collections of French art: the collections of Marie-Caroline, Duchess of Berry and Prince Anatoly Demidov offered insight into French taste. The collections held works of neoclassical restraint and Romantic sensibility. The Marquis Marcellin Desboutin, a printmaker who was a friend of both Degas and De Nittis had a Florentine villa which brought together French and Italian cultural figures who were passing through. His villa L’Ombrellino on the hill of Bellosguardo was referred to as the ‘Parisian circle on the Arno.’
Edouard Manet: L’Artiste, Portrait de Marcellin Desboutin/ The Artist, Portrait of Marcellin Desboutin (1875), oil on canvas, 195.5×131.5 cm, Museu de Arte de São Paulo.
(Cedit: Wikimedia Commons).
So, De Nittis was part of the French artistic scene, the cosmopolitan gatherings in Florence and he also had a brief spell in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples, followed by a deeper and sustained connection with the artists of The School of Resina.
He was open to the innovations of his time; he exhibited at the first impressionist exhibition of 1874, encouraged by Degas to lend weight to the new movement. He also had a significant collection of impressionist paintings, which were purchased with the discerning help of Caillebotte. Nonetheless, he did not exhibit his works with the Impressionists again and he negotiated his own path between modern innovation and the demands of the market.
In contrast to his rebellious and independent attitude towards the teaching offered at the Accademia in Naples, De Nittis seemed to make the most of, and take the best from, the opportunities that came his way. He was even attentive to the style of Meissonier when he first came to Paris though, as he later admitted, this did not really suit him. We could also set him beside James Tissot and Alfred Stevens, if we make our criteria for comparison broad enough.
He was, for the most part, incorporating the innovations of Manet and the Impressionists into a style that remained accessible to a broader public. Like his friend Manet, he continued to exhibit at the Salon and did not alienate himself from the establishment. To label his work as belonging to the juste milieu is therefore not entirely unfair: he occupied a position between a carefully finished realism suited to the Salon public and a painterly style aligned with experimental modernism.
In several of his most acclaimed works he attends closely to Parisian fashion, though never in the explicit, fashion-plate idiom familiar from Alfred Stevens or James Tissot. His elegantly dressed figures are typically shown in motion, crossing urban spaces that are equally studies in atmosphere and modern architecture. The result is a subtly balanced image in which clothing, light, and the city’s fabric coexist without hierarchy. These scenes remain indebted to the Neapolitan landscape tradition, whose clarity of light and sense of spatial breadth continue to inform his Parisian views. Even the city’s distinctive architecture, while clearly referenced, is never allowed to dominate in a self-conscious or jingoistic way. La Place de la Concorde provides a telling example: the recognisable setting is held within a veil of atmospheric effects, and its passing figures animate the square without turning it into a piece of obvious civic rhetoric.
Two of De Nittis’s early landscapes, painted in 1866, when he was engaged with the School of Resina, Casale nei dintorni di Napoli and L’Ofantino share stylistic characteristics. They are both charged with scrupulously realised details and both have blue skies that evoke the effect of enamel.
Casale nei dintorni di Napoli/ Farmhouse near Naples (1866), oil on canvas, 43×75 cm, Museo di Capodimonte, Napoli. L’Ofantino/ On the Ofantino channel (1866), oil on canvas, 60×100 cm, Private collection.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
When he later returned to Naples and Barletta he demonstrated a different style of landscape painting. Most notably, his plein air studies of Vesuvius Sulle falde del Vesuvius/ On the Slopes of Vesuvius revealed a dramatically modern style of landscape with a radically simplified form and chromatic range. In the rare moments when figures occupy these landscapes they are barely visible and seem to threaten to dissolve into the geological background. Goupil informed him that dal vero studies of such radical character were unlikely to be well received by the public and, on that basis, declined to accept them. De Nittis went on to sell some of these works privately in London.
Paesaggio Vesuviano/ Vesuvian Landscape (1871-2), Oil on panel, 18.5 x 31.7 cm, Private collection.
(Credit: Daxer and Marschall).
Sulle falde del Vesuvio/ On the Slopes of Vesuvius (1872), oil on panel, Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano.
(Credit: Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali).
Pioggia di cenere/ The Rain of Ashes (1872), oil on canvas, 40.5x28cm, Galleria d’Arte Moderna Florence.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
With the eruption of 26 April 1872, De Nittis was able to produce works which combined natural study with human drama. La pioggia di cenere depicts the people of Resina fleeing the eruption in a reportage-like canvas. The figures are dwarfed by overwhelming natural forces. There are also two studies of the eruption (one already illustrated above) that have smaller groups of people, horses and a carriage descending from Vesuvius in bright pools of light permitted by gaps in the clouds of ash. Here too the people are dynamic but small compared to the might of the volcano and its effects.
L’eruzione del Vesuvio/ The eruption of Mount Vesuvius – II (1872), oil on canvas, Private collection.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Together with Degas and Zandomeneghi, he created a freer and more direct pastel style. The favoured medium of Rosalba and Liotard was reaffirmed as serving the desire to capture the moment. Pastel drawing creates a rich, lustrous, and realistic effect by depositing pure, highly pigmented particles onto the surface, allowing colour to sit on the paper as a velvety, light-catching layer rather than sinking in. With no drying time and no preparatory medium, it has the advantage of immediacy and it can be used to create either finely finished works, or works that excitingly hover between the status of a sketch and a complete picture. From 1876, De Nittis wanted to produce large pastel works, of a natural size and scale. His Portrait d’Edmond de Goncourt, Le corse al Bois de Boulogne and La femme aux pompons offer examples from 1879-1881.
Portrait d’Edmond de Goncourt (1881), pastel on paper, 87 × 115 cm, Nancy Municipal Archives (Académie Goncourt deposit).
(Credit: ‘De Nittis – At the Salon’).
The Portrait of Edmond de Goncourt 1881 depicts the famous diarist, novelist, and critic who played a significant role in shaping late nineteenth-century literary taste. Goncourt cultivated a distinctly aesthetic, hyper-observant, and socially attuned prose style. In his diaries and fiction, he often turned his attention toward figures on the social margins, such as prostitutes, servants, minor artists, and other lives overlooked by bourgeois convention, recording them with a mixture of curiosity, acuity, and froideur. Here De Nittis works the pigment into a dense surface, creating an intensely real and tactile finish. The delight in using white and cream for fabrics, paper, and a snowy exterior is also evident. The level of detail is masterful, with a fine realisation of book spines, table objects, furnishings, as well as the rendering of Goncourt’s hair, jacket, and the curtains.
Le corse al Bois de Boulogne/ Le corse a Auteuil (1881), pastel on canvas, 200 × 395 cm, GNAM, Roma.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Alle Course de Auteil (At the Races of Auteil) 1881, our second large pastel work, is a secular triptych of modern life in Paris. This combination of three segments of racecourse life simultaneously offers three studies in intensely photographic framing, as well as some radical viewpoints from different levels and locations. It is not the sport that is depicted here but the see-and-be-seen culture of the haute bourgeoisie engaging in a leisure activity. Their elegant attire, with fine coats, hats, and dresses, reinforces the sense of display and social distinction. The composition suggests a bright autumn day, with the light and atmosphere conveying a crisp, seasonal quality.
La femme aux pompons (ca. 1879), pastel on canvas, 116.5 × 90 cm, Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
La femme aux pompons (c. 1879) shows a young woman seated outdoors on a wooden bench, turning towards the viewer. This rich pastel work achieves a remarkable sense of texture in her clothing and skin, while also capturing fleeting atmospheric effects. There is a contrast between the careful realisation of the sitter and her attire and the more gently defined landscape around her. This study of character, costume, light and atmosphere contributes to the evolving vocabulary of modern femininity in nineteenth‑century Parisian painting.
In De Nittis’s brief but highly productive life, the year of his social affirmation, 1878, came only six years before he died. He pursued the success that would reward him and offer the acclaim that he merited. In the course of doing so he moved from the management of Reitlinger to Goupil and subsequently freed himself, contractually at least, from Goupil, although at considerable financial cost. As mentioned earlier, he also travelled to London to paint ten London scenes for Kaye Knowles. Thus, on top of the labour art and creativity, we must add the demands of travel, financial worry, and social networking. In 1878 De Nittis was at a peak. He won a first-class medal at the Salon and, at the Universal Exhibition, displayed twelve paintings to great public and critical acclaim. He was awarded the Medal of Honour and appointed to the Legion of Honour.
With his change in social standing, he decided to move to a more prestigious location; he bought a house in rue Viète at the beginning of 1880. Here he held Saturday evening soirées that were attended by many famous guests of high social standing, comprising aristocratic, literary and artistic personalities. In this new residence, De Nittis was able to display his collection of Japanese art and his Impressionist paintings, as well as offering guests an interior decoration which was at the height of fashion. Almost in the manner of literary social satire, after his passing, the widowed Léontine found that she could count on the loyalty and support of only a handful of true friends.
Petit déjeuner dans le jardin/ Breakfast in the Garden (ca.1883–1884), oil or pastel on canvas, 81 × 117 cm, Palazzo della Marra, Barletta.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Among the artist’s last works, there are scenes of close family moments, portrayed in a garden in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Breakfast in the Garden and three studies entitled In the Hammock reveal two fundamental characteristics: they mark both a ‘prolonged observation of reality’ and ‘an emotional testament to his beloved family,’ as Renato Miracco has observed. The empty chair in the breakfast scene (a scene realised in scrupulous detail with wonderful still-life studies within it) adds a note of self-referential realism, as it documents the absence of the artist from the table, while he works on the painting. At the same time, the absence now holds a sense of poignancy, as we know that he was to die not long after the work’s completion. In the Hammock III also conveys another visual emotion in this tranquil garden setting; the closeness of Léontine and Jacques.
In the Hammock – III / Dans le hamac III (1884), oil on canvas, 65 × 42 cm, Museo Frugone, Genova.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Pranzo a Posillipo (c. 1879) takes us back in time a little, yet it unites a number of elements and offers an exquisite image for consideration. The picture conveys visual emotions of warmth and conviviality in an iconic Neapolitan setting. This unfinished work shows a debt to the work of Manet, and, as Martelli observed, it is as if a café-chantant scene had been transposed to Naples. The painting connects with a fond memory recorded in the Taccuino, in which De Nittis describes gatherings on a terrace beneath a full moon. We are drawn to the figure of Léontine, her head inclined in a gesture of recognition. Beyond her lie Capo Posillipo and Palazzo Donn’Anna, with the soft, glassy light of the sea and the beautifully realised colours of an evening sky in the distance. There is tremendous warmth in this image, coupled with a slightly wistful and valedictory mood, capturing a passing moment at sunset.
Lunch at Posillipo/ Pranzo a Posillipo (1879), oil on canvas, 111×173.3 cm, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milano.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
There is something inherently mesmerising about the prospect of a dining scene at the water’s edge. A similar contrast between close company and open water is captured in Whistler’s Wapping (1860–1864), which features the artist’s model and partner Joanna Hiffernan reclining on the balcony rail of a Thames-side pub, the Angel, in Cherry Gardens, Bermondsey. The scene here is more urban and socially realistic: we are in the working-class docklands of the Thames rather than the gulf of Naples. Yet both works seem to function as existential tableaux, placing human interaction at the edge of an open expanse of water.
James McNeill Whistler: Wapping on the Thames (1860–1864),oil on canvas, 72×108 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C..
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
The sense of suspended, heightened emotional significance that such a setting creates is also exploited by Bergman in the lakeside scene from Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället), as if Nature herself is timelessly observing the gathering. Lake Vättern seems to pose a silent question as the professor, the young travellers, and Marianne sit together in tenuous harmony. Arguably, it complements an existential yearning expressed by the actors in the Swedish hymn-poem by Johan Olof Wallin (1779–1839): ‘Where is the friend I seek wherever I go?’ (‘Var är den vän som överallt jag söker?’)
A scene from Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället) of 1957.
(Credit: Musings on Films).
Pranzo a Posillipo can therefore be seen as a miniature dramatic form which combines warmth with a soft undertone of transience. As such, it works well as a conclusion to our synoptic and biographical reflection on the work of De Nittis. From here we can gain some sense of his artistic range, by giving individual consideration to a number of his paintings.
De Nittis – a selection of works.
La traversata degli Appennini / The Crossing of the Appennines (1867).
La traversata degli Appennini (Crossing the Apennines), oil on canvas, 45×76.5 cm, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.
In this work, the road is the clear protagonist. The scene is overcast and veiled in mist or haze, and the sober tones and muted colours evoke a mood of melancholy, nostalgia, or introspection. The dampness of the setting is emphasised by the multiple cart tracks marking the road. There is a strong sense of departure: leaving one world behind, perhaps moving toward the unknown. Compositions featuring roads were a recurring motif in De Nittis’s repertoire, and this painting was followed by his famous, brighter work, La strada da Napoli a Brindisi / The Road from Naples to Brindisi (1872).
La strada da Napoli a Brindisi / The Road from Naples to Brindisi (1872), oil on canvas, 27×52 cm, Indianapolis Museum of Art.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
The Return from the Ball/ Il Ritorno dal Ballo (1870).
Il ritorno dal ballo/ Returning from the Ball (1870), oil on panel, 24 × 30.5 cm, Private collection.
This work reflects the concerns of the art merchant Goupil, who encouraged De Nittis towards producing Salon-friendly and commercially astute paintings. Among the subjects promoted were scenes such as this, featuring figures sensually attired in costumes suggestive of the ancien régime. This relatively small oil painting (24 × 16.5 cm) carries vaguely aristocratic overtones and evokes a sense of refined sociability, perhaps offering a sanitised or fantasy vision of pre-revolutionary France.
However, the narrative ambiguity of the scene feels distinctly modern. Set in a threshold space, the painting shows elegant but undefined women looking back through a garden gateway, suggesting the moment after a social event. While they appear cognisant of some shared activity, its nature remains unclear; and although they represent the height of elegance, their faces are withheld from view. Edoardo Dalbono’s watercolour Adelina ed Eleonora of 1873 seems consonant with the mood created by De Nittis and I add it here as an interesting juxtaposition.
Edoardo Dalbono, ‘Adelina ed Eleonora’ (1873) watercolour on card, 18.9 x 18.9cm, Naples, Capodimonte. (Author’s photograph).
From the Top of the Diligence (Stagecoach) / Dall’alto della diligenza (1872).
Dall’alto della diligenza/ From the Top of the Stagecoach (ca.1872-1875), oil on panel, 26.5×36.5, Private collection.
(Credit: WikiArt).
The viewer shares the painter’s viewpoint from the top of the coach, which invites participation in the scene while also creating a sense of detachment and observation. This elevated perspective suggests movement, with the bright road ahead of the coach dominating the foreground, at the cost of human detail. The composition is sparsely inhabited, creating an overall feeling of distance and openness. There is an atmospheric restraint, with attention focused on light and the dirt road rather than narrative incident. Seen from a position of transit rather than rootedness, the landscape can be read as a realistic document, or a visual metaphor for the journeys and transitions of life.
Sulle falde di Vesuvius / On the Slopes of Vesuvius (1872).
This title refers to a series of plein air studies of Vesuvius from 1872, of which an indicative example is provided here. These works were executed from direct observation, dal vero, and are not in the manner of Grand Tour souvenirs. Rather, they are careful studies that record Vesuvius under varying light conditions. They are almost geological in character, depicting crevasses, ridges, and the rocky slopes, with only sparse vegetation.
De Nittis employs Naples yellow for the first time in these works. They are presented in close-up, without a panoramic view, and appear to be exercises in formal simplification and concentrated focus. As noted above, in the rare instances where human figures appear, they are almost entirely absorbed into the landscape, so pronounced is the degree of abstraction.
Sulle falde del Vesuvio/ On the Slopes of Vesuvius (1872), oil on panel, 13×18 cm, Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano.
(Credit: Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali).
Che Freddo!/ Fait il Froid! (1874) and Sulla neve/ On the Snowy Path (1875).
Fait il froid/ Che freddo! (1874), oil on canvas, 43 × 32.5 cm, Private collection.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Sulla neve/ On the snowy path (1875), oil on canvas, 43 × 32.5 cm, Private collection.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
The heavy snowfall in the winter of 1874–1875 offered De Nittis the opportunity to make numerous studies of winter skies and snowy scenes. The profound silence of the snow, the pale winter light, and the outstretched, empty expanses of white delighted him, as he reflected in a passage in his Taccuino. He was so captivated by the beautifully “Japanese” vision it created that he declared it brought him fully into his own element and confirmed the vocation for which he was born: “to paint, to admire, to dream.”
These works constituted a significant and innovative departure for De Nittis in his study of atmospheric light, his use of contrast, and his employment of cool tones such as white, grey, beige, and violet. Che Freddo! was presented at the 1874 Salon, where it was well received by the public; it was subsequently sold by Goupil to an American collector for the considerable sum of 10,000 francs. In compositional terms, the framing is radical and engages the imagination in reconstructing a realistic image with a subtle narrative component. The women featured crossing a wide pathway, beside an arcing cart track, are fashionably dressed in dark costumes, and also convey a sense of rapid movement in the cold. This dynamism is counterbalanced as one of the women is being pulled back in a different direction by a child, who appears momentarily distracted. The cart track creates a depth of field that draws the eye toward a dark carriage, which contrasts with the snowy weather. In the background, an atmospheric setting stretches upward into a beautifully realised winter sky.
Sulla Neve takes the Impressionist theme of social leisure and modern life and places it in an informal, quiet setting. A woman is walking her two dogs, offering a study of movement and exuberance on a winter’s day against an architectural backdrop. Once more, we see De Nittis’s mastery of the crisp, reflective quality of winter light on snow and its interactions with different surfaces, shadows, and figures. Particularly striking is the contrast between the trodden snow and the untouched, soft, powdery expanses, which suggest a profound sense of silence.
Parisians of the Place de la Concorde (c.1875)/ Parisiens de la Place de la Concorde, A Corner of the Place de la Concorde (1880)/ Un coin de la Place de la Concorde.
La Place de la Concorde (1875), a photogravure; the original is part of the collection at the Presidential Atatürk Museum Mansion in Ankara, Turkey.
(Credit: Rob Zanger, Rare Books).
A Corner of the Place de la Concorde in Paris/ Un Coin de la Place de la Concorde (1880), oil on canvas, 65 × 81 cm, private collection.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
The first of these two works, for which I can only find a photogravure reproduction, depicts a rainy day in dark tones, with a reflective pavement. In contrast, A Corner of the Place de la Concorde presents the setting in a brighter, clearer and more sharply defined moment. The 1875 work was widely disseminated in reproductions, such as the illustration used here, and may well have been a source of inspiration for a number of subsequent painters of boulevard scenes, including Jean Béraud (1849–1935).
While remaining in the realm of probability, Boldini’s Place de Clichy (1874) is often credited with encouraging De Nittis away from narrative vignettes such as Fait-il froid! towards a broader urban vision. What is certain is that La Place de la Concorde attracted considerable attention after its exhibition at the Salon of 1875, and it was sold in October of that year to the Sultan of Turkey for 25,000 francs.
As mentioned in passing earlier, Parisians of the Place de la Concorde (1875) chooses a location dense with buildings and monuments that speak of Parisian history, French colonial ambition, administrative authority and social prestige. These include the Luxor Obelisk, the Hôtel de Crillon, the Hôtel de la Marine, the Église de la Madeleine and the Fontaines de la Concorde. Yet all of these are embedded within a self-consciously modern vision of life as mutable and provisional. The protean nature of modern experience and perception is further emphasised in A Corner of the Place de la Concorde (1880), which alters the distance, angle and atmosphere of the same location. It is as if the easel (or metaphorical viewfinder) has been repositioned on a different day. This later work adopts a wider angle and does not include a principal figural group shown from behind. It also features that familiar expanse of empty ground typical of De Nittis, here reflecting a brighter light. The figures, the atmosphere and the composition are all tuned to a lighter register.
Westminster (c.1875).
Westminster (ca. 1875), oil on canvas, 110 × 192 cm, private collection.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Kaye Knowles, the British banker and member of the country’s economic and social elite, gave De Nittis the opportunity to explore London’s distinctive visual and social character. In this work, fog or smog dissolves the mass of the Palace of Westminster in a manner that aligns with the atmospheric studies of London produced by Whistler in some of his Nocturnes, and by Monet in his studies of the city of 1870–1871. De Nittis, however, restrains his level of abstraction, and the Parliament building remains clearly recognisable.
The beauty of the image contains an inherent irony and ambivalence. The grand architecture is veiled by a haze intensified by coal consumption and industrialisation. There is a further irony in the fact that Knowles’s family wealth had its origins in the Lancashire coal-mining industry. This is not to suggest that De Nittis was making a deliberate social statement, but it is something that cannot be overlooked when viewing the work today. Despite its atmospheric origins in industrial pollution, the image is delicate, beautiful and bound to a particular moment.
Once more, De Nittis uses a bridge as the staging point for his view, enabling him to animate the cityscape with recognisable urban types. The unheroic Londoner, casually smoking on the bridge, balances the grandeur of the Houses of Parliament and adds an air of realism, while stopping short of overt social comment or critique.
There is something dignified and muted about the painting. It is not merely northern greyness; rather, it possesses a compelling sense of mystery. When we recall De Nittis’s remarks on the shocking poverty of London, we see that he nevertheless remained open to finding beauty and authenticity in diverse landscapes and atmospheric conditions. His paintings narrate the streets of London in a manner that is both modern and ‘reliable’, a quality that may have appealed to British critics.
Returning from the Races/ Retour des courses (1875).
Return from the Races/ Ritorno dalle corse (1875), oil on canvas, 32.5 × 43 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
The fascination of this composition lies in its organisation around the spectator’s gaze, giving the impression that we are walking into the scene and momentarily glimpsing frozen time. I find it interesting to compare the work with another famous preceding outdoor social tableau, albeit in a different context, Manet’s Le Concert aux Tuileries (1862). The contrasts somehow add weight to De Nittis’s chosen style.
Édouard Manet: Le Concert aux Tuileries/ Music in the Tuileries (1862), Oil on Canvas, 76×118 cm, The National Gallery, London.
(Credit: Wikipedia).
Both works share a fascination with modern social life, capturing fleeting moments of public leisure and observation. In both works, the spectator is drawn into the scene, positioned as a participant in the unfolding event, at the racecourse or amidst a fashionable concert. Manet flattens the pictorial plane, creating a tapestry-like surface in which figures and space coexist with minimal depth, while De Nittis employs an angled composition that guides the eye through the scene, producing a more immersive, almost cinematic effect. Both artists focus on the rhythm of the crowd and the subtleties of posture, gesture and attire, yet they achieve different atmospheric outcomes. Manet’s even lighting emphasizes pattern and surface, whereas De Nittis modulates natural light to animate space and movement. Together, the works resonate as parallel experiments in portraying modernity, one emphasizing the flat, social mosaic of the urban crowd, the other the dynamic, perspectival interplay of leisure, observation and the spectator’s gaze.
The Bridge / Ponte (1876).
Il Ponte/ The Bridge (ca. 1876), oil on canvas, 54×74 cm, Palazzo della Marra, Barletta.
(Credit: Artsupp).
When the viewer registers the head of a small girl at the base of the composition, they become aware of the audacious nature of the framing. It seems highly likely that De Nittis used the boundaries of the window of his mobile atelier-cab to shape this view. The painting balances realism with an Impressionist sensibility. The river is presented as an urban experience, in which infrastructure, bridges, and modes of transit convey the energy of the modern city. At the same time, De Nittis’s landscape skills come into play, lending the work an atmospheric rendering that tempers this modernity with tonal restraint.
Boulevard Haussmann (I and II) (1877).
Boulevard Haussman I (1877), watercolour on card, 31×41 cm, Private collection.
(Credit: Artnet).
These watercolours (only the first illustrated here), exhibited by De Nittis at the Paris Salon of 1877, were deemed unparalleled masterpieces by Degas. The medium lends the works a sense of lightness and immediacy, and the brief glimpse of Parisian life offers a cosmopolitan view: a cultural stage marked by mobility, anonymity, and mixture. There is delight in the study of light effects and contrasts, in the use of realistic depth-of-field, and in figures suggested with a delicate, blurred, fleeting touch that conveys motion.
The Japanese Screen / Paravento giapponese (1878).
Il paravento giapponese/ The Japanese folding screen (ca.1878), watercolor on paper, 22.5 × 31.5 cm, Pinacoteca Metropolitana di Bari.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
This work from the gallery of Bari illustrates the importance of Japanese culture for De Nittis, reflected in his interest in prints as well as decorative and material objects. The screen in the painting serves both a decorative and a compositional purpose. Its decoration, along with that of the room as a whole, is executed with restraint and subtly marked by Japanese motifs. Compositionally, the screen provides a linear and angular contrast that draws attention to the woman’s relaxed, sinuous pose.
This is an intimate work set within a private domestic interior, adopting a muted and harmonious palette. Works such as this underscore De Nittis’s status as a modern, cosmopolitan figure, fully attuned to the vogue for Japonisme and the forms of inspiration it could offer.
La parfumerie Violet, à l’angle du Boulevard des Capucines et de la rue Scribe (The Violet Perfumery) c. 1880
La parfumerie Violet/ Profumeria Violet (1882), oil on canvas, 74 × 62 cm, Musée Carnavalet, Paris.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
This painting offers a testimony to the emerging dialogue between photography and painting that unfolded in the second half of the nineteenth century. A number of tropes later associated with early twentieth-century street photography are visible here: reflections layered over interior space, and the shared transience and anonymity of passing figures. The Perfumery is emblematic of Parisian elegance, luxury goods, female consumption, and the theatricality of shopping. The purchasers are both spectators and performers.
The brisk painting techniques used to render the strolling women and men make them types rather than caricatures. De Nittis places us in the role of witnesses without offering a critique, giving the scene a lucid ephemerality.
This is the Paris of pavements, tailored coats, and polished surfaces: a world rendered in a sober steel-blue palette that recalls the works of Caillebotte. The darker tonality highlights the contrasts of white and silver in the shop windows, as well as the splashes of white fabrics and objects, which punctuate the composition like pin-pricks of light.
What might at first seem to be a simple boulevard vignette reveals layers of visual complexity. We see flat plane divisions alongside depth of field, the contrast between static architecture and the mobility of the street, and the double play of realistic depiction and social display.
Cantiere (1880–1883).
Cantiere/ Worksite (1883), oil/pastel on canvas, 73×59 cm, Palazzo della Marra, Barletta.
(Credit: Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali).
There is a striking modernity in this picture, which presents industry within an empty and abstract setting. Rather than depicting a site of collective labour and production, it is pared down to a glyph. We can now connect the work to numerous images that were to follow it, which see industrial landscapes as both barren and atmospheric. I collocate it with František Kupka’s Les Cheminées / Chimneys (1906) of the Musée d’Orsay, a work which is in sympathy with a number of De Nittis’s compositional and aesthetic concerns.
Cantiere draws close to the cinematic visions of Antonioni in Il deserto rosso or Francesco Rosi’s documentary-style approach to labour and industry in Il caso Mattei. It also seems to prefigure notable photographic works of the twentieth century, such as Charles Sheeler’s Criss-Crossed Conveyors of the River Rouge Plant (1927).
In De Nittis’s study, the softness of the pastel destabilises the hard industrial structures, as does the evening register, which renders the austerity of the image mysterious rather than merely severe. Devoid of any element of the picturesque, this is a work of stillness, mystery and modernity.
Il salotto della principessa Mathilde / The Salon of Princess Mathilde (1883).
Il salotto della Principessa Mathilde/ The Parlor of Princess Mathilde (1883), oil on canvas, 74 × 92.5 cm, Palazzo della Marra, Barletta.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
This work depicts a social gathering in the salon of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, the first cousin of Napoléon III. Here De Nittis turns to the mastery of interior light and colour, within a densely populated space. Interestingly, the patron of the work, the princess herself, is embedded at the centre of the crowd rather than being foregrounded. One of the nearer figures is a woman with her back to the viewer, a device which anchors the perspective and guides the eye into the room. These two traits alone give the picture a distinctly modern quality, suggesting the event as observed rather than contrived.
The artificial light is shown rebounding off mirrors and objects, fabrics and furniture. In broad terms this is a social tableau, but one with the emphasis on optical realism, a sense of movement and social dynamism.
In a Cab / In Fiacre (1883).
In fiacre/ In a Cab (1883), pastel on canvas, 56.5 × 73.0 cm, Palazzo della Marra, Barletta.
(Credit: Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali).
In this work, De Nittis attends to the most fleeting of gestures. We catch a glimpse of two women through the window of their cab. The half-smile of the more distant figure might suggest a momentary response to something just said; in any case, we are looking into a private space, as if by accident.
Fiacres in Paris were considered spaces somewhere between the private and the public. They could be secret, transitional places where couples met, people gossiped, or deals were made. De Nittis offers an ambiguous, speculative invitation to a narrative. It is ironic that here the painter looks into a cab and that the window frames the scene from the outside inwards; as we know, he often painted from inside a cab, and here the roles are reversed.
The pastel medium adds softness and a dreamlike quality. What we see is not judgmentally invasive or socially satirical. If anything, this is one of those charming, intriguing moments one might encounter in the life of the city.
Coda
Sometimes, happily, I would remain under sudden downpours. Because, believe me, I know the atmosphere well; and I have painted it many times. I know all the colours, all the secrets of air and sky, in their intimate nature. Oh, the sky! I have painted so many pictures of it. Skies, skies alone, and beautiful clouds.
Nature, I am so close to her. I love her; how much joy she has given me. She has taught me everything: love and generosity. She has revealed the truth, the one hidden in myth… Antaeus, who regained his strength every time he touched the Earth, great Earth!
And with their sky, I picture the countries where I have lived: Naples, Paris, London.
I have loved them all. I love life, I love nature.
I love everything I have painted.
Giuseppe De Nittis, Taccuino, parte prima: ‘A Napoli.’
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Renato Miracco’s An Italian Impressionist in Paris (2022) offers an excellent introduction (in English), and Maria Luisa Pacelli’s De Nittis e la rivoluzione dello sguardo (2019) is a fascinating exhibition catalogue. Christine Farese Sperken’s introduction to De Nittis (2007) is also a very good starting point; it is a succinct account from a leading authority and offers far more than one might expect from such a slender text.
I am also indebted to the essays within these texts by the following authors: Stefano Bosi, Omar Cuccinello, Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, Barbara Guidi, Vasilij Gusella, Robert Jensen, Hélène Pinet, Adolfo Tura, and Isabella Valente (her catalogue entry for Sur la route de Castellamare (1875) in Chiodini (2025)).
Readers are encouraged to consult these publications, and those cited below, for greater depth; any errors in this essay are mine alone.
Bibliography.
Angiuli, E. and Spurell, K., De Nittis e Tissot: pittori della vita moderna (Milano, 2006).
Chazal, G., Morel, D. et al., Giuseppe De Nittis – La modernité élégante (Paris, 2010).
Chiodini, E. (ed.) L’Italia dei Primi Italiani (Crocetta del Montello (Treviso) 2025).
De Nittis, G., Taccuino (Bari, 1964).
Farese Sperken, C. (ed.) Giuseppe De Nittis: Barletta, Palazzo Della Marra Catalogo Generale (Bari, 2016).
Farese Sperken, C., Giuseppe De Nittis: da Barletta a Parigi (Fasano di Brindisi, 2007).
Martorelli, L., Mazzoca, F. et al. Da De Nittis a Gemito (Genoa, 2017).
Mazzoca, F., Zatti, P. et al., De Nittis: pittore della vita moderna (Milano, 2024).
Miracco, R. (ed.) Giuseppe De Nittis: la donazione di Léontine Gruvelle De Nittis, catalogo generale (Roma, 2022).
Miracco, R. et al., An Italian Impressionist in Paris: Giuseppe De Nittis (Washington, 2022).
Pacelli, M. et al., De Nittis e la rivoluzione dello sguardo (Ferrara, 2019).
Picone Petrusa, M., Dal Vero: Il paesaggismo Napoletano da Gigante a De Nittis (Torino, 2002).
The featured image of this article, Francesco Paolo Michetti’s 1877 self-portrait, (Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, Naples) offers an introduction to the artist while also immediately conveying the light and colour characteristic of his work. In the words of Marina Miraglia:
The half-open mouth and the intense, passionate gaze express that healthy fullness of life and that trusting, joyful surrender to the natural course of things which are the most authentic themes—beyond the subjects portrayed—of Michetti’s painting. Through these elements, Michetti achieves a profound psychological insight, matched by a formal execution that aligns perfectly with the content, in harmonies of extremely light tones that are remarkably controlled and elegant.
Miraglia also coined, almost in passing, the phrase “the vitality of motion” (or, more literally, “the freshness of movement”) during an interview with Clemente Mariscola at the ICCD (Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione) in Rome on 17 April 2012. The term arose in relation to Michetti’s use of photography as a tool for studying movement, but it resonates more broadly: as a spontaneous utterance, it suggests the raw fact of an event unfolding in time—its inherent wonder, its Istigkeit, as Huxley might have put it.
To light and movement, one could equally add sound, so exuberant is some of Michetti’s work. Ultimately, in engaging with the work of Francesco Paolo Michetti, we are invited to encounter the ineffable energy and fascination embedded within each apparently ordinary moment.
Michetti chose the agro-pastoral community of his native Abruzzo as his open-air studio and laboratory. This setting offered him starkly contrasting possibilities. On the one hand, it was an escape from the urban and the industrial, providing the inspiration of Nature in its broadest sense — that realm which resists closed systems and rational codification. In this way, it was a locus for the primordial, the mythical, and the unexpected, qualities found in both its landscape and its people. At the same time, this escape was also an encounter with a rural underclass mired in poverty and superstition. Michetti’s pastoral inspiration drew more from the Georgics than from the Eclogues. His vision, though often soaring with beauty and charm, remained rooted in the poverty of his youth.
While Michetti’s art was never intended to be political, his work gained added significance from its timing and context, despite his being neither a fervent nationalist nor a militant social reformer. Throughout his lifespan (1851–1929), the South of Italy was burdened by the persistence of the latifundia system, with huge estates in the hands of absentee landlords and the majority of peasants surviving as day labourers under conditions of chronic poverty. The liberal state after unification failed to resolve this imbalance: the Trasformismo politics of the late 1870s prioritised parliamentary stability rather than structural agrarian reform, leaving rural discontent to fester. Popular agitation, most dramatically the Fasci Siciliani of the early 1890s, revealed the depth of frustration, while reformers such as Gaetano Salvemini began to investigate the realities of peasant life “from below,” exposing the gulf between official rhetoric and lived conditions. Various commissions and debates addressed the so-called questione meridionale, but genuine redistribution of land was continually postponed. Instead, limited initiatives—such as public works, taxation reform, or small-scale tenancy schemes—were implemented unevenly. Against this backdrop of stasis punctuated by the search for remedies, Michetti’s depictions of peasant rituals and rural life take on a double aspect: timeless in appearance, yet bound to a society where the pressure for change was never far from the surface.
Far from any romantic notions of effortless genius, Michetti’s oeuvre was the result of intense labour, and his wide-ranging creativity was disciplined through scrupulous cataloguing and research. While he immersed himself in the humble rural world of his childhood, he returned to it equipped with a rich education — one that brought modern, intellectual, and practical methods to bear on a community still shaped by paganism and superstition. He was also a photographer, conducting experiments that were almost Leonardesque, both in that medium and in painting. He developed his own alternative to tempera: a guazzo (gouache) in which pigments were dissolved in glycerine instead of egg, producing a fluid paint with a luminous finish. He also experimented with techniques for fixing pastel drawings and there is a clear sense that experimentation offered him personal inspiration, as well as forming a vital component of his artistic practice.
There is a restless side to Michetti, one that seems absorbed in the process of creation, often with little regard for the final product. Georges Hérelle, in his Nottolette dannunziane, recalls:
With the pretext that it must be unbearable to own a painting, that is, to have the same artwork constantly before one’s eyes, and that people should be spared such a torment, he got it into his head that, once a painting is completed, it would be best to make a magnificent engraving of it and then destroy the original. In this way, the engraving, kept in a folder, would only be seen by the owner whenever he felt like it. Starting from this idea, he began to search for new and extraordinary engraving techniques, and he wasted a great deal of money in the process.
A more radical testimony comes from Edoardo Scarfoglio, who recalls that Michetti once imagined creating a picture that would destroy itself over time and even fantasised that, once a work had been extensively exhibited, it ought to be torn apart. Scarfoglio glosses:
Thus, his ambition would be to leave behind nothing but a shifting, fluid, and ever-changing legend—like the one that surrounds the names of certain Greek painters, which has come down to us without any documents.
In this, Sabrina Spinazzé perceptively recognises a modern impulse: the privileging of the ‘intellectual elaboration of the image’ over its ‘material execution.’ At the same time, we should not overlook Ojetti’s mocking remark about Michetti’s desire, at the age of 70 or 71, to visit Japan. It seems likely that the artist’s admiration for Japanese culture included its philosophical embrace of transience (mujō) as central to existence. Many traditional Japanese art forms are explicitly structured around impermanence. Michetti’s radical statements may thus be read as both a philosophical affirmation of the transient, ever-changing vitality of the present moment and a practical pursuit of an art form that appears light, unburdened, and perpetually open to renewal.
It is somehow apt that the horizontal compositional style used in Michetti’s large-scale paintings both anticipated the cinematography he experimented with and drew inspiration from classical antiquity. A letter written by Sartorio recalls an evening with Michetti spent pastel drawing from illustrations of herms and Greek vases. In a 1930 letter to Tommaso Sillani, Sartorio wrote:
In the evening, under the lamps, even d’Annunzio would draw; we copied reproductions of the Greek primitives, the herms then unearthed in the Parthenon, and sometimes the Maestro would show us, commenting as he went, countless pastel studies made on Corinthian and Attic vases from the Naples Museum. That was the true Michetti.
As Sabrina Spinazzè has observed, the ‘paratactic organisation’ of some of Michetti’s works appears to draw not only on ancient vases, but also on the structural principles of friezes and sarcophagiforms that, like film, seem to unfold as movement in time and space.
While Abruzzo served as his unbounded en plein air studio, much was also adjusted and worked out in his actual studio, in the convento and even elsewhere. For example, a photograph of a model holding an armful of roots, posing on a terrace in Rome, was part of his studio assemblage for the realisation of Gli serpi (The Serpents). Some of the artist’s rooms in the convento were reported to resemble workshops or laboratories more than traditional studios.
So far, we have set limits on the romantic or mystical interpretations of Michetti’s work, but that is not to suggest such qualities were entirely absent. The ornate and flamboyant prose of Gabriele d’Annunzio, a close friend and artistic companion, often celebrated Michetti’s life and work in elevated terms, accentuating its mysticism, aestheticism, and symbolism. That these descriptions were not only expressed but seemingly welcomed suggests they resonated with some aspects of Michetti’s artistic self-conception. Still, I chose not to foreground such affinities at the outset, precisely because doing so might too easily obscure the important distinctions which also existed.
Now that we have considered some of the grounded, experimental, and systematic aspects of Michetti’s practice, it is worth turning to some of the more compellingly fantastic elements of his work. La raccolta delle zucche (The Pumpkin Harvest), painted in 1872–1873 when Michetti was just 21 years old, is a stunningly beautiful canvas marked by an irresistible strangeness and singularity. Adding to its richness, we also have what amounts to an ekphrasis of the painting in d’Annunzio’s Ricordi Francavillesi (1883), where the work is reimagined in prose.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
In La raccolta, the artist displays, to borrow another expression from Marina Miraglia, a capacity for a heightened realism based on mimesis (un realismo spinto sul mimesis), such as we might expect from a pupil of Filippo Palizzi.
At the same time, this is an oneiric and enchanted scene, bordering on Symbolist work. Fabio Benzi has noted that this element cannot be disregarded, highlighting Michetti’s friendship with Edoardo Dalbono who, in his painting La leggenda delle sirene (The Legend of the Sirens), had recently blended observational fidelity with a dreamlike quality. Dalbono’s painting was at the crossroads between the Romantic concept of the sublime and Symbolist suggestion.
(Credit: Meisterdrucke).
Certain features of Michetti’s style are rhetorical rather than representational, employing composition and figuration to move us beyond realism. This visual rhetoric, I would argue, opens the way to d’Annunzio’s writing, where it finds an even more heightened expression.
In La raccolta d’Annunzio sees the location as Bolognano, in the province of Pescara. However, in this Bolognano scene the background, ‘brings to mind a vast ruin of a pagoda, fragments of Buddhist colossi.’ He continues:
A milky vapour floats in the morning air, rising from the greenish marshes; and the plants with large rough leaves snake along, intertwine on the ground, and rise in clusters upwards. Through this vaporous freshness, men and women come carrying enormous gourds on their heads – yellow, green, mottled gourds, of strange shapes, of strange twists, resembling monstrous skulls, like vessels ruined by swelling, barbaric trumpets, or trunks of large desiccated reptiles.
The clinching moment, however, is when d’Annunzio forces a dramatic paradox: ‘The effect is fantastical, almost dreamlike; yet the scene is real.’ We are in the territory of d’Annunzio’s Symbolism here, a type of aesthetic epistemology which seems to declare that through a heightened and accentuated vision we can reach reality. While this is part of a new artistic vision, it also, arguably, revisits older arguments on imagination (fantastica) and the representational (icastica).
While it is clear that the younger d’Annunzio was inspired by Michetti’s painting and photography, the degree to which there might have been a dialectical relationship between the artists is less easy to establish, and it is not within the scope of this introduction. What is clear is that Michetti was already, in this early work, experimenting with elements of Symbolism and fantasy which can be traced to Dalbono and Morelli. Moreover, the ethereal and vibrant style of Mariano Fortuny – a realm of luminosity, vapour and smoke – played its part.
As we can see from the illustration, a procession of rural workers, together with a rafter of turkeys, walks towards the viewer. A notional depth of field is suggested, as they appear to fan out as they get closer to us, while those most distant blur into what could be an infinite regression. Nonetheless, the colour and focus of the scene fill the front of the picture plane and the overall compositional effect is vivid and shallow, brought forward by a wall.
The procession seems to emerge from what looks like a breach in the enormous wall, described by d’Annunzio above as resembling the “vast ruin of a pagoda.” Vast is the operative term here, as people appear to be encamped on what looks like a higher plain of ground at the top of the structure. The wall therefore also resembles a cliff, especially considering the cataracts that seem to flow down from it, filling the pool on the left of the painting.
In addition to the movement of the processional figures and those high up in the background, we also see a man on the left who looks as though he might be about to step forward. His dog is facing the opposite direction and is barking at some birds — a large flock of which is gliding down from the high wall behind. There are plenty of dynamic poses among the workers: arms akimbo, arms raised or folded to carry the burden of the harvest. The approaching child at the centre of the picture rocks with the rhythm of his gait, and the donkey beside him is lifting its left leg as it advances. The faint image of a shepherd in the background, to the right of the picture, is in a pose that expresses torsion; he grips a staff slung diagonally across his back.
As d’Annunzio observes, there is something aqueous and vaporous about the scene. This holds true for the composition as a whole. While there is a pool on the left, the rich greenery to the right also appears saturated, marshy. The colour of the stonework at the back seems to run and dissolve into a rising mist. Smoke rises from a fire at the top of the wall, mingling with smears of cloud above. The colour palette is beautiful: white, black, brown, red, orange, gold, green, and a sort of electric blue or cerulean. The finest detail is reserved for the costumes and their fabric in the foreground. We should digress for a moment to underscore Michetti’s keen knowledge of Abruzzo fabric, costumes and folk jewellery, which often had an apotropaic role. Most distinctive perhaps are the sciacquajje di Orsogna, the semilunar earrings which add such a distinctive touch to many of his portraits of women.
A charcoal and black chalk profile of Annunziata Cirmignani (Michetti’s future wife). (Credit: Stephen Ongpin Fine Art).
To return to La raccolta, the apparent error made by d’Annunzio, who says that the pumpkins resemble “monstrous skulls,” probably stems from misremembering. In the middle of the painting there is a floating anamorphic skull which, incidentally and possibly coincidentally, resembles the human skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Whether Michetti’s skull — probably that of an ox — is intended as a memento mori is not certain. For this viewer, it seems to allude to the primordial, to the deep history of nature, reinforcing, perhaps, the sense that the procession resembles a line of ancestry regressing into the earliest times.
Where the scene in La raccolta is brought forwards by a wall, the Duomo of Chieti fulfils a similar function in La processione del Corpus Domini a Chieti. This work was exhibited in the National Exhibition in Naples in 1877 and it generated a lot of attention, dividing the critics. The painting depicts a procession leaving the cathedral and shows how Michetti responded to the influence of Mariano Fortuny. The great appeal of this work lies in its colour, expansiveness and exuberance. Corpus Domini is a luminous work which bursts with colour and a chorus of processional figures who are leaving the church.
It is not veristic but rather a phantasmagoria of colours, textures and movement. There is a kind of synaesthesia in the painting which complements the sensorial prose of d’Annunzio. The gold of the children’s jewellery, of an icon’s halo and of the band’s brass instruments conveys sound, as does the smoke and sparks of the fireworks that are being set off. A flock of birds in the sky to the left of the composition may have just erupted into flight at the noise of it all. Light brown, light blue, gold and ultramarine punctuate the scene while the costumes, the processional canopy and a decorative ceremonial carpet once more offer close studies of intricate fabrics.
(Credit: WikiArt).
D’Annunzio described Corpus Domini as a ‘sacred bacchanal’ and the nude children, the fireworks, the beautiful women and the exultant light of the painting give it a distinctly pagan vitality. The critics who could not accept the work were perplexed by what they saw deciding that, whatever it was, it could not be considered serious art. Giovanni Costa (1826–1903) saw it as an internally inconsistent and was clearly disturbed that it didn’t offer a true representation of a religious procession. He saw that some areas were carefully drawn while others appeared to have been forgotten. Some colours were in harmony, while others clashed; some figures were rounded, while others were flat. The very brightness and colour of Corpus Domini seemed to provoke in him a feeling of moral disapprobation.
However, while Costa’s response left some room to acknowledge Michetti’s skill, the condemnation of Adriano Cecioni (1836–1886) was unequivocal. He thought that the work was ‘false, mendacious and charlatan’ and that it was little more than ‘a fan in a frame.’ It was Francesco Netti (1832–1894) who ‘got it’, realising that Michetti’s chromatic and sonorous explosion was intentional and offered the public a breakthrough into a new artistic vision influenced by Fortuny and Japanese art. Corpus Domini was to be enjoyed and celebrated for what it was, principally a celebration of the ‘beautiful things’ in life containing as it did ‘women, children and flowers.’
Impressione sull’Adriatico (Impression of the Adriatic), painted in 1880, is a striking example of Michetti’s mastery in depicting maritime scenes. The work was praised by Boito as ‘an Adriatic of lapis lazuli, with bursts of blinding light,’ and it presents a bathing scene set in strong light, just before sunset. As in many of Michetti’s works, the image seems to hover between a mythical study and a portrayal of an unspoilt contemporary rural moment, showing locals bathing by the rocks of Ortona. The brilliance of the canvas—its rich contrasting colours, the subtle tones of the sunset and the surface of the water, together with the serenity and innocence of the bathers—makes it a luminous and radiant work. The interplay of nudity, partial nudity, and gestures of modesty situates the scene in an interstice between ethnographic idealism and aestheticised reverie, between purity and pagan sensuality. Its dreamlike atmosphere recalls Morelli and Dalbono, while the treatment of colour and light reveals the influence of Fortuny. This warm painting reflects Michetti’s deep sympathy with the communal rhythms of life in Abruzzo during his time.
(Credit: Meisterdrucke).
Il voto (The Vow), painted in 1883 and also exhibited in the Esposizione di Roma of that year, is an exceptionally large canvas (250 x 700 cm) housed in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. Begun in 1881, it depicts a scene from the feast of San Pantaleone (Saint Pantaleon) in Miglianico: panteleimon in Greek means “all-compassionate,” and the saint was the patron of midwives and physicians, also invoked for protection against illness and headaches. His feast falls on 27 July, and we may therefore assume that the oppressive throng of pilgrims is assembled in the heat of a summer’s day. The painting presents the dark interior of a crowded church where figures press together: some stand, some sit, while others advance by prostration towards the effigy of the saint. It is an anthropological and expressive work, raw in its intensity, and reminiscent of the popular scenes painted by Courbet and Jules Breton, as well as managing to capture archaic ritual in the manner of Giovanni Verga.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
One memorable detail of this work was that it was provocatively labelled ‘non-finito.’ More accurately, it was of course a ‘finito, non-finito’, that is to say Michetti intended the work to expound the lessons of Fortuny, combining close study with more impressionistic brushwork. It also blended well with the anti-modern, anti-rationalist focus of Angelo Sommaruga’s Cronica Bizantina and the sensual decadence of the writing of Gabriele D’Anunzio.
I morticelli is a study of the funeral of two children, painted in 1880; this work is held in the Museo Nazionale d’ Abruzzo. The horizontal format emphasizes movement, while the close attention to facial expressions captures the individual responses to the tragedy in the moment depicted. The bleakness of the scene is softened by its natural setting, with flowers and sunlight. There is also a choral dimension: the participants represent members of the local community, including the priest, the musicians, and the children and adults of the village. The funeral unfolds in a liminal space, as beyond the idyllic rural setting stretches the unbounded horizon of the Adriatic Sea. This is a moving study of nineteenth century misère which is alleviated by nature and the sympathetic gathering of a community. I morticelli also shows awareness of Courbet’s Un enterrement à Ornans (A Burial at Ornans) and suggests that Michetti was aware of the French artist’s realism and respect for rural life.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
La figlia di Jorio (Jorio’s Daughter), the 1895 version, won first prize at the Venice Biennale that same year. This huge canvas (280 × 530 cm) has a horizontal format and reads like a cinematic frieze: a fleeing woman strides from right to left before a chorus of men whose faces display a range of reactive expressions. La figlia evokes a spectrum of emotions in the crowd that is watching her pass—curiosity, lust, admonition, mockery, and contempt seem particularly central. Here, too, Michetti demonstrates a keen study of movement: the fleeing woman’s feet propel her forward, with the left heel about to touch the ground while she rises onto the ball of her right foot. Her face is not visible, as she is in the act of covering it with her bold red mantle. She moves with energy and confidence, conveying a stately, sober, and austere presence.
The Maiella mountains form a dramatic backdrop; the ridge line is sharply defined and bathed in high, bright light. There is a radical photographic crop of a standing male figure at the right of the composition, and another realistic detail is the woman carrying a load on her head, who is still but turning back momentarily, with a shawl wrapped around her. This work illustrates well Michetti’s refinement of disegno, a process aided by his photography. The same skill is also documented by d’Annunzio, who refers to Michetti having a ‘high operation of the intellect’ which was able to choose the right line, out from ‘a mystery of countless outlines.’ This new leanness and precision might also have been encouraged by Michetti’s interest in Japanese culture, as here the aesthetic concept 間 (ma) encourages respect for the space, or rather the living interval between things.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
A succinct and fitting narrative for Jorio was furnished by Ettore Janni. He relates the daughter’s story as follows:
She gives herself to the man who opened her arms to her in a gesture of tenderness… and the daughter of Jorio becomes the talk of all. The rigid and cruel virtue of the village turns savagely against her with shame and mockery… and a storm seizes and shatters the soul of the daughter of Jorio… she rises again, looks around her… now she will carry out her revenge.
The daughter of Jorio becomes the scourge. She is the demonic seductress, the sorceress who enchants men and drives them mad… and around her swirls an aura of terror, of desire, of sacrilege. Then the scourge falls and she atones more for her revenge than for her first sin.
She lives on in her solitude… Is she dead? Who knows?… but her spirit still wanders the land, passing through the veils of a legend that is one of sin, but more of suffering and sorrow.
The rigid mores of rural life, patriarchal double standards and a kind of misogynistic myth-making close in on the daughter, who is only named as the property of her father. Nonetheless, Michetti succeeds in turning the myth and solitude of the daughter into something powerful and worthy of respect. Her upright posture, modesty and purposeful stride contrasts with the wave of recumbent men whose faces are distorted by ignorance.
Gli storpi is a work of 1900, painted on a large canvas (380 × 970 cm), and is housed in the Museo Michetti in Francavilla al Mare. It can be paired with Gli serpi of the same year, which is also held in Francavilla. Both works were executed in a short period, following a long process of preparation and planning, in order to be ready for the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris.
Gli storpi illustrates an account by the anthropologist Antonio de Nino, who described the procession of the sick and infirm of Casalbordino. This pilgrimage took place on the first Sunday of August, to commemorate the appearance of the Madonna dei Miracoli, which had occurred in 1527. When we compare Michetti’s painting with his photographic and documentary sources, we are left with the impression that he aimed for a relatively contained realisation of the scene. As well as colour, expression and movement, there is a cool positivist detachment that tempers his work. The extant photographs taken by Michetti which informed the painting had a biting realism which showed physical deformation and the atrophy of limbs, the stooped and the hunched, and beggars with ulcerous skin lesions.
Gli storpi captures all the surprise of a single moment: for example, on a hill at the centre of the canvas, two oxen dominate the composition with all the force of chance. They seem to suggest a robust and vital aspect of nature, rising above the smaller, more shadowy vale of human suffering beneath them. The upper slope of the hill and the oxen are bathed in golden sunlight, which forms a luminous band across the centre of the composition.
(Credit: Rubricando).
We know that Gli Serpi was the result of a field trip made in 1884 with Antonio De Nino, together with Costantino Barbella and Gabriele D’Annunzio, to San Domenico di Cocullo for the Feast of the Snakes. Michetti returned from the visit with extensive photographic documentation. This religious celebration took place every year on the first Sunday of May. According to local folklore, the harmless snakes used in the ceremony, when wrapped around the breasts of mothers who were not lactating, could restore their milk. San Domenico of Cocullo was considered a thaumaturgical saint, believed also to protect against snake bites. Unsurprisingly, the feast has pre-Christian roots, possibly tracing back to the worship of Angitia, the ancient Roman goddess of snakes.
(Credit: Rubricando).
There is a magical quality to Gli serpi with its vivid colours of gold, green, splashes of red and bright touches of white. The mixture of closely defined elements and impressionistic suggestions, also notably found in Il voto, makes this another dreamlike study. The clouds of incense and a flowing, almost dissolving, canopy of gold in the right half of the composition also contribute to this atmosphere.
Turning to Michetti’s workplace contexts, in the summer of 1880 his project for a studio on the beach at Francavilla al Mare was completed; in the same year, he established a creative collective called the Cenacolo delle Arti. In 1885 he purchased a disused fifteenth-century Franciscan convent in Francavilla al Mare, Santa Maria del Gesù, which he converted into his studio and a meeting place for the cenacolo, later known simply as il Convento. Within its walls, a circle of artists and intellectuals gathered, including Gabriele D’Annunzio, Costantino Barbella, Paolo De Cecco, Francesco Paolo Tosti, Edoardo Scarfoglio, and Antonio De Nino. Il Convento thus functioned as a site where painting, literature, music, material culture, and ethnographical scholarship intersected, grounded both in local traditions and in broader cultural developments.
There is a passage by Italo De Sanctis that describes the context of the cenacolo with warmth, as a kind of utopia:
[Michetti] had grown fond of that quiet countryside, all fresh with vegetable gardens and orchards. One could get by with little money, in a solitude that felt somewhat wild. The people were kind, and the wine was like the people. The women—beautiful, upright, and graceful—wore white blouses and short skirts, showing their full breasts and shapely arms without the slightest malice. The men were solemn, like monuments.
He invited friends and colleagues, who came eagerly and formed the cenacolo—the circle that gave Italy its loftiest poetry, its most forceful painting, its most heartfelt song. Francavilla was the ideal place for their capricious way of life; and there they lived in the full grace of the Lord, in the joy of creation, the fever of work, the intoxication of song, the raptures of love. Days of good humour, of complete joy!
Rosy dawns followed one another in the forgetting of the seasons, and a musical enchantment filled the ecstasy of light, a fragrance of spikenard hung in the air. Young, free, and carefree, they never felt fatigue. Days of intense and fruitful work were followed by nights of delirious joy, under the moonlight. Even the most enchanting Amazons would come down from Chieti to the shore, to make their lives more like a fairy tale, in that little corner of paradise.
Both the sources and concerns of Michetti’s art were multiple. The cenacolo provided interdisciplinary input into his creative process, while his own work undoubtedly inspired his companions, most notably d’Annunzio. Equally important, perhaps, was the conviviality and mutual encouragement that such a circle must have fostered. It is possible to work back from Michetti’s paintings, tracing the influence of those around him: musical, documentary, ethnographic, dramatic and symbolist elements can all be found in his art. Yet the greatest reward comes from contemplating the final unified whole and, with it, the particularity of Michetti’s project.
Photography was an extremely important medium for Michetti. He used it to deepen and develop his drawing and painting, but also recognised it as an artistic medium in itself. In this context Miraglia observes how ‘the strength of photography lies precisely in its language, whose prerogative is exactly to remain constantly balanced between denotation and connotation, between documentation of reality and figurative reshaping.’ Photography could capture a moment and freeze it with a level of detail previously unachievable but it would also remain a representation, an act shaped by the decision of a photographer which also imposed sharp limits through its cropping of an image.
Michetti used photography in varied ways and for different projects. At first, he employed it for portraits and for studies of posed models that would inform his compositions. He also photographed the rural life of the Abruzzo, including its choral gatherings. Through experiments with photography and cinematography he was able to capture a realistic sense of movement, developing his own film camera and, later in 1922, he even invented a cinema projector. His legacy further includes experiments with stereoscopic photography: this, together with his use of life models and terracotta models, helped him attain a sense of volume and plasticity in his painting.
Examples of Michetti’s photography. (Credit: Studio Trisorio.)
This was a period of rapid technical innovation which saw improvements in the compactness and portability of cameras; something tied, in turn, to pre-coated plates of film that used the gelatine silver bromide process. Such developments in film also significantly reduced the time required for a figure to hold a pose. It is not hard to imagine how photography enhanced Michetti’s pictorial representation, particularly in his treatment of light, line, and movement. Its influence is evident in his portraits in charcoal and chalk, executed on paper prepared with dried clay, where he applied colours in broad patches corresponding to areas of light and shadow. Photographs helped him to capture expression and detail, as well as informing him about light and shade. Michetti’s charcoal portraits seem to suggest a clear debt to photography.
Michetti developed a dialectical relationship with his medium, which allowed him to engage more deeply with his subjects. He moved fluidly between drawing, painting, and his photographic sources. It seems highly likely that photography played a crucial role in enabling Michetti to realise a pared-down style of disegno. For example, Jorio demonstrates a notable austerity of line, and Michetti’s general catalogue contains a number of monochrome studies—both of figures and of landscapes—that may have been inspired by his experience as a photographer. At the same time, we should also cite the likely influence Japanese ink painting as an influence on his monochrome works.
Michetti – monochrome studies. Credit: Mutual Art and WikiArt.
The binomial nature of black and white photography (as well as other very significant contextual factors) may also have influenced the proliferation of rapid pencil sketches made by him post-1910.
Pencil sketch, post 1910 ca. Credit: Gliubich, casa d’aste.
Another area of restraint, in which the effusive manner of Fortuny cedes to a fifteenth century sobriety, is in Michetti’s Illustrations forThe Amsterdam Bible from the period 1893-1897 (for illustrations, see Strinati 1999 (b) p. 151.)
The breadth of Michetti’s work would make any introduction fall short in some way, however there are more aspects of it which deserve to at least be mentioned. Michetti was a landscape artist and he excelled in the creation of landscapes which were often, although not exclusively, executed in pastel and tempera (or other mixed media). Such was Michetti’s mastery of pastels it is often stated that they were the inspiration behind Giuseppe Casciaro’s adoption of them. Casciaro is said to have been struck by the pastels exhibited by Michetti in the Promotrice in Naples of 1885. Michetti’s studies bridge the Neapolitan and French en plein air artistic tradition, offering stunning works that convey brightness and immediacy.
A hillside path with blooming cherry trees. Michetti, 1905 (Credit: National Gallery Washington).
While on the subject of the study on nature, it is worth tracking back again to his work as a photographer. From the 1890s onwards the Michetti archives have pictures of trees, leaves, flowers, rock formations, seaside rocks and rocky rivers. Some of the close-up photographs reveal an interest in natural textures that anticipate the work of the American photographer Edmund Weston whose ‘straight photography’, developed from the 1920s onwards, included close-up images of shells, cabbages, peppers, rocks and dunes.
Michetti’s skill at rendering idyllic charm and grace has perhaps received little attention here and we should at least make passing reference to it. La pastorella (The Shepherdess) in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome can stand to represent his poetic grace in the depiction of rural scenes. This work of 1887 offers an example of the many exuberant, intensely colourful and technically skilful pastoral scenes that Michetti completed.
(Credit: AcquistoArte).
At the later date of 1896 we have a return to such grace in L’offerta (The Offering) in which Miraglia sees ‘Pre-Raphaelite reminiscences.’ This work, which is in the Royal Collection in the Villa Savoia, was completed for Queen Elena; in it the queen is represented as a kind of secular Madonna. She is depicted sitting down, with her son Giorgio in her arms, receiving an offering from a kneeling shepherd. Clearly, this apparent return to an earlier style of painting was considered fitting for the commission.
(L’Offerta (studies). Credit: ANCA, Case d’Asta).
Michetti was a great portrait artist. His skill in this genre is represented in his self-portraits, his studies for large-scale paintings, in formal commissions and in work for friends. We began with one of his self-portraits, so here we can look at a study of a friend and fellow artist of the cenacolo. The Portrait of Costantino Barbella (ca. 1888) depicts the sculptor from Chieti with two of his most famous sculptural works on either side of him. On the left is the figural group Canto d’Amore (Song of Love) while on the right we have Canesto d’Amore (Basket of Love). This warm portrait captures what d’Annunzio referred to as the handsome Barbella’s ‘nostalgic eyes of a shepherd and [his] thick pirate’s moustache.’
(Credit: Archivio di Stato di Chieti).
Michetti’s productivity did not end there: he produced etchings; designed decorative fabric motifs; carried out anthropological research on textiles; studied flowers and vegetation; created designs for stamps, postcards, and book illustrations (including the Amsterdam Bible, as mentioned earlier); and designed a classically decorated label and amphora for the Abruzzo liqueur Corfinio. He also worked on fabrics and theatre sets, together with actors’ costumes; drew up architectural plans for his Casino al mare and designed furniture; and even created unique curtains and decorative frames for his paintings.
With this in mind, it is little wonder that Ojetti recorded the artist saying, “I believe, you know, that no one has ever worked as much as I have in their life.” What is more perplexing perhaps is how his fame has slipped from international recognition and how little is in print about him in English. I hope that this short and incomplete summary of his achievements might stimulate some wider interest in this great artist from the Abruzzo, who was educated in Naples.
[This article relies on the Italian scholarship listed in the bibliography below. My intention is to introduce Michetti to an English-speaking audience and to encourage readers to consult these secondary sources. Any errors or infelicities are my own .]
Producing these articles requires care, time, research, and resources. Contributions to help sustain this exploration would be greatly appreciated.
(The two volume general catalogue for Michetti, listed below, features articles by Fabio Benzi, Gianluca Berardi, Teresa Sacchi Lodispoto and Sabrina Spinazzè. These are names worth searching for on the internet and the Galleria Berardi of Rome has a website and a Facebook page which is well worth consulting.)
Benzi, F. (et al.) Francesco Paolo Michetti: catalogo generale volume 1. Milan, 2018.
Benzi, F. (et al.) Francesco Paolo Michetti: catalogo generale volume 2. Milan, 2024.
Caputo, R., La pittura Napoletana dell’Ottocento (2 vols.) Napoli, 2017.
Del Cimmuto, P., Il vero e il sentimento. Ascoli Piceno, 2016.
Di Tizio, F., D’Annunzio e Michetti: la verità sui loro rapporti. Casoli (Chieti) 2002.
Garofolo, D., Francesco Paolo Michetti: il genio fotografo. Silvi Marina (TE) 2015.
Janni, E., F. P. Michetti in ‘La Lettura’, VX, 1914, 62, pp. 967-969.
Miraglia, M., Francesco Paolo Michetti Fotografo. Torino, 1975.
Strinati, C. (Ed. (a)) Francesco Paolo Michetti: dipinti, pastelli, disegni. Napoli, 1999.
Strinati, C. (Ed. (b)) Francesco Paolo Michetti: Il cenacolo delle arti, tra fotografia e decorazione. Napoli, 1999.
Appendix: Some of the lesser known figures cited in this article.
The following are brief biographical notes on artists, writers, and cultural figures who were part of Francesco Paolo Michetti’s circle or who influenced and collaborated with him. They are included to provide context for the references made in the text and to highlight the broader cultural network surrounding Michetti. I have not included details of the more widely known artists and literary figures.
Costantino Barbella (1853–1925) – Abruzzese sculptor, known for terracotta depictions of rural life. A close friend and collaborator of Michetti, they shared an interest in elevating peasant culture through art.
Camillo Boito (1836–1914) – Italian architect, art critic, and novelist. A leading theoretician of architectural restoration in Italy, he also wrote extensively on art and aesthetics. Boito’s critical writings engaged with contemporary painters, including Michetti, influencing public and scholarly reception of their work.
Adriano Cecioni (1836–1886) – Painter, sculptor, and critic of the Macchiaioli movement. His realist ideals resonated with Michetti’s own pursuit of naturalistic truth in art.
Giovanni Costa (1826–1903) – Italian painter and landscape artist, associated with the Macchiaioli and later the “Etruscan School.” Costa was influential in promoting naturalistic painting and mentoring younger artists, including Michetti, shaping his approach to light, landscape, and realism.
Paolo De Cecco (1864–1928) – Polymath from Chieti, Abruzzo: painter, writer, inventor, and accomplished mandolinist. A cultural figure tied to Michetti’s circle, his paintings of rural Abruzzo paralleled Michetti’s own subjects, while his versatility made him a hub of local artistic life.
Italo De Sanctis (1869–1925) – Painter from Abruzzo whose portraits and genre scenes show Michetti’s influence. A younger colleague, he carried forward Michetti’s artistic legacy in the region.
Antonio De Nino (1837–1907) – Archaeologist and folklorist from Abruzzo. His studies of regional traditions complemented Michetti’s use of Abruzzese rituals, folklore, and peasant life as artistic subjects.
Georges Hérelle (1848–1935) – French philosopher, translator, and ethnographer. He introduced Italian Decadent literature to French audiences, translating works by D’Annunzio, Deledda, and Serao. His scholarly interests also encompassed Basque folklore and regional history, and he maintained close intellectual ties to Michetti and other figures in Italian artistic circles.
Ettore Janni (1865–1937) – Writer, journalist, and critic. Part of the intellectual exchange around Michetti, engaged in literary and artistic debates that intersected with Michetti’s milieu.
Francesco Netti (1832–1894) – Painter from Apulia, known for historical and genre scenes. His detailed realism and interest in local life resonated with Michetti, and he participated in exhibitions that brought him into Michetti’s artistic network.
Ugo Ojetti (1871–1946) – Journalist, critic, and writer. A younger figure in Italian cultural life, he critically engaged with Michetti and helped frame his place in Italian art history through journalism.
Giulio Aristide Sartorio (1860–1932) – Symbolist painter and later Secessionist. His large allegorical works echoed Michetti’s own monumental style; they shared exhibition spaces and artistic ideals in Rome’s cultural life.
Angelo Sommaruga (1857–1941) – Publisher and journalist. Founder of Cronaca Bizantina, he provided a platform for many writers and artists in Michetti’s orbit, including Gabriele d’Annunzio, one of Michetti’s closest collaborators.
Tommaso Sillani (1888–1944) – Journalist, writer, and diplomat. Though of a younger generation, he connected with Michetti’s extended intellectual network, particularly in literary and political discourse.
Edoardo Scarfoglio (1860–1917) – Journalist and writer, co-founder of Il Mattino. His sharp journalism and literary ties linked him to Michetti’s cultural circle, especially through shared Abruzzese roots and connections with other intellectuals like d’Annunzio.
Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957) – Historian, politician, and anti-fascist activist from Italy. Though not an artist, he moved in intellectual circles connected with Michetti and others from Abruzzo, contributing to the cultural and political discourse of the period.
Francesco Paolo Tosti (1846–1916) – Abruzzese composer, famed for his songs. Shared regional background and friendship with Michetti; both carried Abruzzo’s cultural voice beyond Italy (Tosti in London, Michetti in Paris and Rome).
Links and videos:
Accessed on 30 September, 2025.
Michetti and photography – interview with Marina Miraglia.
Introduction – Vincenzo Gemito and Mathilde Duffaud
Mathilde Duffaud, la parigina, was Gemito’s first love—the first profound adult attachment of a foundling child. He met her in 1873 while living with his adoptive parents in the Palazzo del Mojariello in Capodimonte. Mathilde lived on the floor above with the French antiquarian Duhamel. Already known as a model for Antonio Mancini, she was initially approached by Gemito for the same purpose. In time, however, their relationship evolved into a deep mutual affection.
Mathilde was a serene beauty, nine years his senior, with brown hair, large black eyes, and a sweet smile. He, by contrast, was a mercurial young artist in his early twenties, already displaying the emotional intensity that would later overwhelm him—un artista folle of great talent.
According to the scholar and biographer Ottavio Morisani, Mathilde exerted a benevolent influence on both Gemito’s character and his career, encouraging him to pursue further artistic development in Paris. He moved there in March 1877, and she joined him in August. Their time in Paris, however, was marked by hardship—financial difficulties and the worsening of Mathilde’s health. She suffered from a serious illness—possibly a tumour or tuberculosis, as reported in different secondary sources—and eventually required emergency surgery.
In 1880, the couple returned to Naples for good. The following year they relocated to the Villa Galante in Herculaneum, hoping that the healthier environment might aid her recovery. Despite these efforts, Mathilde died there in 1881.
Gemito’s drawings and sculptures of Mathilde offer a rare opportunity to explore the intersection of profound personal feeling and artistic creation. They also serve as an introduction to the early phase of one of the most important Italian artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Referring to a group of drawings from the Minozzi collection, two scholars—writing independently—observe that the studies were “not made for financial gain.” This same sincerity and personal investment runs through all the works that will be considered here.
Two profiles to begin with…
(Credit: see below.)
In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue Temi di Vincenzo Gemito, there is a small reproduction of a drawing by the artist that shows his profile alongside that of Mathilde. The profiles are arranged so that they are very slightly staggered—like the edges of two playing cards shifted between thumb and fingers. The faces of the two lovers remain visible as distinct entities, separated by only the slightest difference. A reverse movement might momentarily align them in perfect tessellation, before one image dissolves into the other.
The exhibition’s curator, Bruno Mantura, offers another metaphor for this delicate boundary between individuality and mutual absorption: the lineaments of the couple, he suggests, seem to “emerge, as if out of a process of distillation.”
Love Lost.
(Image credit: Gallerie d’Italia, Napoli.)
Gemito’s powerful and haunting Self-portrait with Mathilde Duffaud commands attention like no other representation of her. The biographer Ottavio Morisani (1936) interpreted the mood of the drawing as one in which Gemito appears “inert,” while Duffaud is “no longer woman nor flesh,” having become something inspirational—an “ideal.” Once we are aware of the biographical context, the drawing conveys an unmistakable sense of loss.
Though Gemito signed and dated the front of the drawing in 1909, this is almost certainly a later addition made for the art market. Supporting this, the reverse of the sheet bears the inscription: In Ercolano / 1881 Villa Galanti / Palazzo Sforzi. Gemito. Catalogue entries by Isabella Valente (2023) and Rosanna Naclerio (2009) both suggest 1880–1881 as the most likely period of execution, with Valente favouring 1880 as closer to Mathilde’s death.
There is some variation in the literature regarding the materials used. Some catalogue entries describe it as pen and watercolour, while others specify red chalk and watercolour (sanguigna acquerellata). In either case, Gemito achieves striking emotional and atmospheric impact through the combination of a red or sepia warmth with tenebrous chiaroscuro and delicate sfumato effects.
Even a viewer unfamiliar with the drawing’s context would likely be struck by the energy of the scene. Gemito appears as an intense figure, marked by a guarded detachment that discourages intrusion. There is a sense that his calm holds something taut and volatile—an inner unrest. Behind him, Mathilde appears elevated and serene. Only her head and high collar are rendered, which enhances her sense of aloofness and self-possession, as our gaze is drawn upward. The absence of her torso is compensated by dark shading to the right of her head; the right side of her face merges into this shadow. The blank space flanking the figures compresses the scene, magnifying the emotional intensity of their portraits.
Though Mathilde is placed behind Gemito in the composition, her presence is not diminished. On the contrary, she seems to possess a graceful air of authority. Her look encompasses more, enveloping both her partner and any viewer who might be watching. Gemito almost certainly used a mirror to make this drawing, and with that in mind, we realise that the couple are not only looking out—they are also looking at each other. Even if Mathilde’s likeness was rendered after her death, her gaze can still be read as looking back at him.
The couple appear intertwined and self-contained, facing the world as one. While Mathilde is the more composed of the two, she shares something of Gemito’s dark charisma: she is part of it—and, by extension, they are part of each other.
Gemito’s right shoulder is angled forward dynamically, as if his drawing hand is about to re-engage with the paper while he watches himself in the mirror. If the drawing was created after Mathilde’s death, it nonetheless radiates a powerful magnetism. Its realisation may have been sustained by heartfelt memory, supported by earlier drawings and terracotta sculptures.
There is a strange, oneiric vitality to this work, and the intimacy of their bond is palpable.
Drawings from the Minozzi Collection
What kind of observer was Gemito?
Most of the drawings of Mathilde from the Minozzi collection are in pen and ink, or pen and ink and watercolour. Some were realised with very rapid strokes and many seem to have been completed quickly, as if Gemito was trying to capture the essence of a moment. Morisani describes the obsessive way in which he watched and documented Mathilde, suggesting that he had the ‘cruel curiosity of a surgeon’ and portrayed her in ‘continuous’ and ‘insistent’ studies. He suggested that all this was in the search for a ‘definitive form’ of her.
After reading these words of Morisani, it is hard to look at the vigorous drawings in the Minozzi collection without recalling Gemito’s notorious temper. Pen and ink lines can be severe and sharp, especially when the use of watercolour is minimal. They can seem more wire than flesh and appear like some electrical storm of creativity.
(Detail of Gemito’s energetic hatching, credit: see below.)
This sense of sharpness is increased when we remember Gemito’s ruthless capacity to document realistic detail. His pencil drawing of Anna Cutolo (whom he married after Mathilde’s death), named in catalogues as Anna Morente, is a case in point. The picture shows Anna looking like a weak and wounded animal. She has an abdomen swollen with liquid, the consequence of a sarcoma, and yet she is being asked to sit as a model. Bruno Mantura felt that Gemito, in this context, may have followed Anna’s decline with the ‘attention of a cold and angry observer.’ In this situation, it is not so much the fact that Anna is ill, but the uncomfortable position she is in—a pose that strips her of dignity and exposes the full extent of her condition.
(Credit: see below.)
Looking back to the seventeenth century, a pen and ink drawing attributed to Rembrandt, A Sick Woman Lying in Bed, Possibly Saskia (Petit Palais, c. 1635–40), offers another intensely personal and realistic study of the illness of a loved one. The work directly conveys the dejected and weary nature of the subject, though in a more compassionate way. While there is an inevitable sense of detachment—as the artist observes rather than shares in the experience—the woman’s distress is primarily expressed through her facial features and the position of her hands. At the very least, she is shown lying down, covered, and as comfortable as possible.
Coincidentally, in a drawing of 1886, Gemito portrayed Anna in a reclining pose and also added white—though to her face. However, current scholarship suggests that Anna was not ill in this work, and that her pallor in the portrait may have been due to Gemito’s mental state at the time, as well as his own personal artistic taste. (See Cat. 24 in Carrera et al. (2023).)
(Credits: Wikimedia Commons.)
Gemito was a man of extremes and his numerous drawings of Mathilde might testify to his intense and obsessive nature. Although it was Anna who cared for him during the darkest periods of his mental illness, his volatility must also have been evident during his relationship with Mathilde. His difficult temperament extended to his friendships as well. In an 1878 letter, the painter Antonio Mancini accused him of taking the best from their relationship while giving back only an “impossible character.” One account from Schettini, cited by Hiesinger (2007), even claims that Gemito physically assaulted Mancini, attempting to strangle him, after which Mancini feared being left alone with him. The altercation reportedly stemmed from Mancini breaking a mutual agreement: they had pledged not to sell works without each other’s approval, nor at low prices. Mancini, however, had sold some paintings to buy food—for himself and his companions.
While it seems reasonable to intuit (or at least project) traces of agitation and irascibility in some of the leaner, and more tempestuous of the Minozzi drawings, this should not be taken too far. Gemito brings a softness and sensitivity into some of the pictures of Mathilde through the use of shading, as well as through the inclusion of finely rendered detail and psychological and emotional elements. Beyond this, we have one or two works in pencil which bring us closer to the realisation of a rounder and more tactile quality which can be found in his terracotta busts of Mathilde.
(Credits: see below.)
The drawings selected above are among the most atmospheric in the collection; they are acutely sensitive and seem to capture Gemito’s fascination and love for Mathilde very well. The work on the far right is in pencil.
The inspiration for the use of pen, ink and wash must have come from the influence of Morelli and Mariano Fortuny. Looking at the works below, we can see similarities of approach in all three artists, in the style of the hatching and the massing out of darker areas with blots, brushes or smears of ink.
[Image credits: Left Mariano Fortuny, Cecilia de Madrazo Playing the Piano (Wikimedia commons)/ Centre: Vicenzo Gemito, Mathilde Seated (see below)/ Right: Domenico Morelli, The Artist’s Daughter Eleonora Reclining on a Chaise Longue (Wikimedia Commons).]
However, Fortuny’s work is more finely wrought and complete, both in composition and in the realization of detail. In contrast, Gemito and Morelli appear to have worked more quickly, aiming for a rapid overall impression and focusing closely only on selected areas of particular interest. In their drawings more generally, some parts tend to taper off or are left entirely void. While this is, of course, a limited comparison, it does suggest that Morelli was more attuned to immediacy than to Fortuny’s control and finesse—and that Gemito adopted a similar approach to drawing.
While Gemito’s drawings confirm Morisani’s assertion that he studied Mathilde frequently and relentlessly as she went about her life, many seem to sketch out her overall presence, rather than pursuing specific detail. For example, if she is drawn engaged in an activity, then the dynamics or detail of that activity may not be clearly defined, but rather lost in a tangle of suggestive lines and shading: we can see this in the work below, Mathilde al lavoro (GDS 2826).
(Credit: see below.)
Gemito’s overall artistic legacy contains many drawings which study energy and anatomy, especially those made in his classicising phase. As such, they also resemble the investigations of master draftsmen from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. However, these drawings of Mathilde are profoundly personal and seem to be concerned with recording her presence and its fascination, rather than trying to capture a specific physical dynamic, or perfect aspects of anatomical detail. The overall feeling is intimate and domestic.
It is possible, if not likely, that these drawings contributed to an overall awareness of Mathilde that served his sculptures of her. Notwithstanding this, they are not serial preparatory drawings which investigate details of physiognomic representation, or even study arrangements in composition, for a final project. To a large extent she is both the subject and the goal. He wants to capture her presence in time, for himself.
As suggested by an earlier comparison, we find ourselves in emotional territory reminiscent of Rembrandt’s pen and ink drawings of Saskia—such as Saskia Asleep in Bed, housed in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Rembrandt’s drawings of Saskia, like Gemito’s drawings of Mathilde, document a private world, and a relationship within that world, which is passing ineluctably.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons.)
In an essay by John Berger, Go Ask the Time, there is an analogy that parallels the nature of these domestic studies. Although it concerns storytelling, it also speaks to the character of the drawings:
Everyone knows that stories are simplifications. To tell a story is to select. Only in this way can a story be given a form and so be preserved. If you tell a story about somebody you love, a curious thing happens. The storyteller is like a dressmaker cutting a pattern out of cloth. You cut from the cloth as fully and intelligently as possible. Inevitably there are narrow strips and awkward triangles which cannot be used – which have no place in the form of the story. Suddenly you realize it is those strips, those useless remnants, which you love most. Because the heart wants to retain all.
These drawings are not honed projects—they are fragments which are valuable in themselves. Like the remnants in Berger’s analogy, they are the carefully chosen pieces cut from a larger, ungraspable whole. What they preserve is partial, shaped by affection and attention, and by the limits of what can be held onto. In their quiet specificity, they offer not the full story, but something more intimate: a sense of what it means to try to hold on to a life as it constantly moves beyond reach.
Another interesting aspect of the Minozzi drawings is the paper upon which they are drawn and some light on this subject has been shed by Simonetta Funel, see (Capobianco and Mamone, 2014). Among the published reproductions of his drawings listed below are drawings on squared (account book) paper, lined paper and a page from the Bible, The Epistles to the Hebrews, XI. The Minozzi collection has a number of drawings of Mathilde on pages from the Bible and the possible connotation of devotion derived from associating the paper with its subject cannot be easily dismissed.
(Credits: see below.)
The incorporation of such a variety of types of paper opens up some obvious questions. We wonder whether he was economising, or laying his hands upon whatever was available when he felt the need to draw. While this might have been the case in some instances, it certainly could not have been the rule. The reason we know this is that some of the sheets he used were rare and selected for the quality associated with their age. For example, his famous drawing Scorfano, in the Galleried’Italia of Naples, was on manuscript paper from the 18th century.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons.)
Once we see one element of choice at work, we are entitled to speculate whether he even liked the way that more everyday types of paper responded to ink. The safest approach is probably to assume that a mixture of accident and design played a part in the process of selection. In terms of intentional connection, Simonetta Funel found a photograph of a drawing of Anna, portrayed as Trinacria, on a geographical map of Sicily from 1770.
There is an accidental consequence to seeing that Gemito exercised his talents on everyday paper: when an artist creates something extraordinary on the most ordinary surface, it serves as a reminder that true talent comes from within. Such skill can be summoned wherever and whenever it is needed, as long as the artist’s energy and skill endure. Clare Robertson has noted how Annibale Carracci often offered small studies as payment in kind, even to people of humble origins. One example is his Head of an Old Woman (early 1590s) in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, which was painted on a sheet of old accounts—visible beneath the thin layer of paint. Similarly, Carlo Siviero recounts how Gemito, finding himself in the Villa Farnesina without paper, spontaneously made sketches after Raphael on lottery slips, demonstrating the same kind of improvisation and resourcefulness.
(Credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum.)
Gemito ‘in pieces’ over Mathilde?
There are two small bronze heads of Mathilde by Gemito which, while tenderly rendered, are disturbing in their suggestion of decapitation. One of the two bronze sculptures is set on a bronze cushion which has simulations of creases and bumps to create an air of realism. The other is perched on a marble plinth.
(Image credits: see below.)
We can attempt to explain away the sense of brutal severance evident in such shoulder-less, and practically neckless, representations through an appeal to cultural allusions and precedents. As the catalogue entry for Gemito (2009) has suggested, artists traditionally focused on anatomical fragments, or made plaster casts, in preparation for sculptures and paintings, as well as working on them as studies in their own right.
One example might be Géricault’s Study of Feet and Hands (Musée Fabre), cited below. Similarly, Rodin used plaster casts in preparation for his sculptures and also created finished studies of paired hands to explore their expressive potential. A bronze cast of Rodin’s The Cathedral is also included below.
(Credits: Gericault – Web Gallery of Art/ Rodin – Wikipedia.)
Italian religious art has a tradition of depicting headless saints. In a different but thematically related context, 19th century drama and opera also explored scenes of decapitation—for example, Schiller and Donizetti, both of whom visited Naples, dramatised the fates of Mary Stuart and Anne Boleyn.
Appealing to cultural tradition does not, however, diminish the possibility that intense emotion influenced this choice. In her study The Body in Pieces, Linda Nochlin explores how bodily fragmentation preoccupies Western art from the 18th to the 20th centuries. When discussing Gericault’s Severed Heads of 1818, she observes that they “foreground…the absolute abjectness of these subjects.”
(Credit: Benjamin Blake Evemy.)
This insight can be applied, with some modification, to Gemito’s small bronze heads of Mathilde. Unlike Gericault’s heads, which convey abject poverty, suffering, and execution, Mathilde’s expression is tender rather than tormented. This contrast underscores the tragic and premature nature of her death, expressing the abjectness of losing someone beautiful and beloved too soon.
Another work that shares this macabre subject is Paul Gauguin’s 1892 painting Arii Matamoe (The Royal End). Although this work post-dates Gemito’s sculpture and therefore could not have influenced him, it may have been inspired by Gauguin witnessing an execution in Paris as a youth. The use of the guillotine in France was frequent in the 1850s and 1860s and had a widespread impact on the European psyche; moreover, this gruesome method of administering justice endured for decades. The last public execution by guillotine in France occurred in 1939, the last execution in France took place in 1977, and the death penalty was only abolished in 1981. In any case, the dramatic impact of Gauguin’s work is captured well by Elizabeth Childs: “The visage is as horrific as it is legible, for it is a severed head placed on a white pillow that sets it off with shuddering clarity” (see Homburg and Riopelle eds. Ottawa, 2019, p.146).
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
Returning to the particular nuances of our subject, the tender repose of Mathilde’s half-closed eyes and the human warmth captured in her face and hairstyle are cruelly contrasted by her bodiless state, which transforms her into an image of lifelessness and irrevocable loss. As Nochlin observes, the vertical form represents the “axis of beauty,” and to lose this verticality is, symbolically, to lose dignity. Reducing the human form to a horizontal fragment is de-sublimatory. In these small sculptures, love, beauty, bitter loss, and haunting memory coexist simultaneously, creating a poignant tension that lingers with the viewer.
Another work by Gemito seems to reinforce this interpretation. After Anna Cutolo’s death, he sculpted a Neapolitan water jug, a mummara, with a disembodied hand reaching around its handle. This domestic object, likely symbolizing everyday life and nurture, bears two inscriptions: on the front, “Nannina,” and on the back, “so’ lacreme d’ammore e nun e acqua” (“these are tears of love, not water”). Arguably, all three sculptures are powerful expressions of lacerating grief and loss—they are sculture strazianti.
(Image credit: see below)
The extreme isolation of Mathilde’s head may also serve an idealising function, akin to Rodin’s sculpture Thought (c. 1895), which portrays the head of his student and fellow sculptor Camille Claudel. Originally titled Thought Emerging from Matter, Rodin’s work emphasised the idea that carving reveals an intuitive form latent within the material—and, by extension, within the artist. Similarly, Gemito’s focus on Mathilde’s head perhaps highlights it as the most expressive site of her inner life. This emphasis on the ‘seat of thought’ aligns with the purpose of a memorial: to capture not just physical likeness, but a more enduring, abstract presence.
Claudel later suffered from mental illness, and it is possible that the sculptures of both Rodin and Gemito emerged from a shared atmosphere of psychological intensity—marked by turmoil, loss, and perhaps even remorse. In Rodin’s case, the sense of loss stemmed not from bereavement, as with Gemito and Mathilde, but from the breakdown of his romantic relationship with Claudel.
(Image credit: Web Gallery of Art.)
Gemito often plays with the tension between completeness and incompleteness in his sculpture. His Mask of the Emperor Alexander loses the upper part of Alexander the Great’s head, including the characteristic hairstyle (l’anastolé) associated with his representation. This fragmentary treatment gives the statue a feeling of authenticity, although, ironically, his likely sources—the Rondanini sculpture and the Alexander as Helios from the Musei Capitolini—both have complete heads.
Conversely, in a study of Psyche, Gemito adds the upper part of the cranium, which was missing from his antique model, and masterfully includes flowing hair tied at the back of the head. Similarly, in a terracotta bust of his wife Anna, a Hellenistic vein is accentuated by leaving a broken finish on the left side of the base. As Cinzia Virno has observed, this detail lends the piece an air of antiquity.
The nature and degree of finish were, therefore, deliberate elements of Gemito’s artistic repertoire. Even a cursory glance at his portrait sculptures reveals variations in the length of his subjects’ necks, the style, angle, and definition of their shoulders, and the extent of broken-edged finishes. However, none of the works I have encountered are as severely cropped as the small sculptures of Mathilde’s head. These fragmented portraits, at the very least, arrest the viewer’s attention, disrupt the expectation of a complete form, and compel us to pause.
Feeling whole…
As a counterbalance to the proto-modernist rhetoric of fragmentation, we can look at some of the very human and tactile terracotta works that Gemito made of Mathilde. One terracotta portrait from 1879 depicts her in what appears to be a peignoir, with an elaborate appliqué dress underneath. The graceful vertical line of her robe is accentuated by the lace trim lining the gown’s closure. This work showcases Gemito’s skill in rendering surface texture, fine detail, and flow in sculpture. Mathilde’s face here is extremely gentle and slightly wistful.
(Credit: Artnet.)
A terracotta bust of Mathilde from 1872 conveys a similar wistfulness, enhanced by the hollowing of the eyes and the slightly open mouth. Here, her face emerges in smooth clarity from the undulating surfaces of her hair and dress, which blend defined elements with areas that seem to recede into an undefined organic texture.
(Credit: see below.)
Another bust, dated 1877, shows Mathilde with a smile that seems to mask physical strain. The curve of the smile echoes other traversing lines—such as that of her shawl—and coordinates with the slight tilt of her head. Once again, skilful hollowing and shaping create chiaroscuro effects and recreate textures, notably the lace detail in her high collar. The swirl of her shawl adds a note of realism, giving the impression of a very personal, intimate moment.
A pastel by Degas, Portrait of a Woman Wearing a Green Blouse (c.1884), while completed seven years later, makes for interesting comparison; it captures a gentle melancholy, which is similar to Gemito’s sculptures of Mathilde.
(Credits: Gemito, see below/ Degas, Artchive.)
To conclude, I would like to share a quotation from Conversation with My Sculpture (Colloquio con la mia scultura), a poem by the Sicilian artist Emilio Greco (1913–2013). Its delicate evocation of captured beauty and timelessness aligns with Gemito’s tender and intimate portrayals of Mathilde:
I have stopped this moment of your beauty To have you alone with me, companion of my thoughts It seems you have flown out from the depths of the earth, Like a spring, And the path of the centuries has barely brushed Your cheeks…
Emilio Greco in his studio.
(Credit: Edarcom Europa.)
Producing these articles requires care, time, research, and resources. Contributions to help sustain this exploration would be greatly appreciated.
(General note on image credits – where there were no online reproductions available, I made photographs from books. The published images of Mathilde that I have consulted in research, and in some instances have photographed, are listed beneath the bibliography. I hope that these citations and the educational/not-for-profit status of the article suffice, otherwise I can make amendments as necessary.)
Bibliography
Bellenger, S. (ed.) Napoli Ottocento. Milano, 2024.
‘…a dodici anni mi recai a Napoli, dove rimasi fino ad adulto. Io giunsi a Napoli in pessimo arnese. La fame era allora molta, ma scarsa la fama…’
‘…at twelve years old, I went to Naples, where I stayed until adulthood. I arrived in Naples in terrible shape. At the time, there was a lot of hunger, but little fame…’
(Quoted Virno (2019) vol. 2. 503.)
Lo scugnizzo, 1868 (Private collection) offers us an excellent introduction to Antonio Mancini (1852-1930); it is a noteworthy work of his early Neapolitan phase, prior to his first visit to Paris in 1875.
This was Mancini’s first large-scale painting and it was significant enough to draw his teachers, Filippo Palizzi and Stanislao Lista, to his improvised loft studio, part of the family home in Vico Majorana in Naples. Domenico Morelli must also have seen Lo scugnizzo and it is to this work that Dario Cecchi connects Morelli’s Neapolitan dialectal exclamation, ‘A’ stu schugnizzu dico bene, nun saccio pròpete che l’aggiu ‘cchiù a ‘mparà’, indicating that he no longer knew what to teach his talented pupil.
The painting, realised in Mancini’s sixteenth year, is certainly a testament to his precocious talent. It seems to capture the formative emotional experiences of his youth and to mark a definitive point of departure for a significant body of works which were to follow. Dario Cecchi (1918-1992) wrote an excellent biography of Mancini which allows us to see how the artist’s impoverished early years can give sense and depth to this distinctive masterpiece.
There can be no doubt about the importance of autobiographical understanding here when we know that, in later life, Mancini himself said, ‘Lo Scugnizzo ero io’, ‘I was the urchin.’ In this powerful affirmation he was also indirectly revealing his lifelong feeling of inferiority in the presence of the wealthy. The antiquarian Augusto Jandolo recalled Mancini saying, ‘Vulgarity is often the daughter of poverty, and poverty has always been my closest relative.’
The overall importance of this work is underscored by the fact that the Mancini family made a number of attempts to buy it back; Antonio’s nephew finally managed to purchase it in 1920. When the artist saw it again, he declared how he painted it in a loft at the age of 16 when he was famished. (…Avevo sedici anni: l’ho fatto dentro una soffita, con una fame!…)
Mancini and Morelli; capturing emotion on canvas.
In outline, the painting depicts the life-size image of an out-of-place street urchin (scugnizzo), dressed in rags, standing in a fashionable bar, beside the discarded remains of a party. The essential polarity created is therefore between poverty and wealth: a poor boy contrasts with objects from a world of careless indulgence.
Among the various achievements in Mancini’s painting that would have appealed to Morelli must have been the way in which it realises an intense emotionality. At the end of his Roman residency, Morelli was required to produce a showcase work. Among the requirements that led to Gli Iconoclasti (The Iconoclasts) (1855), was that it should convey an intense emotion, a ‘martyrdom of the soul.’
In order to convey such truthful feeling, Morelli entered the emotions of his historical subjects through imagining characters in his own time. Thus, the Byzantine monk and painter St. Lazarus (who was persecuted during the iconoclastic period of the 8th and the 9th centuries) was imagined as a ‘young liberal,’ while the role of a brutal executor was realised through contemplation of ‘the character type of a policeman.’ This anecdote illustrates Morelli’s defining combination of fantasy and realism.
The emotional drama of Morelli’s ‘Gli iconoclasti.’
(Credit: Wikipedia)
But Mancini did not need to find such means for imaginative empathy. He was a poor and hungry youth and he had been a poor and hungry child. When very young, he witnessed infant mortality in the orphanage run by his aunt Chiara in Narni. Moreover, in the Naples of the Ottocento, he would have been surrounded by the poverty, neglect and exploitation of children.
On the subject of hope and a precarious childhood.
Mancini was an earnest student, but one dependent on education where and when he could find it. He found it with the religious orders of the Scolopi (Piarists) in Narni and the Gerolomini in Naples. He must have hoped to find progress and stability through these opportunities and, in relation to this, there are further traces of his childhood experience in another work, completed a year before Lo scugnizzo.
Fanciullo napoletano (Neapolitan Boy) was finished in 1867 [See, Virno 2019, cat.13]. This is a representation of an innocent boy ready to leave for school with a bundle of books, and a flower stem in bloom, under his arm. There were to be other, later works, of young students with books; the theme was obviously close to his heart. When he painted Lo scugnizzo Mancini had both talent and the motivation for success but nevertheless, this might not have been enough.
Dutiful towards his teachers (and mindful of the expectations that his parents were investing in his talent) he was also in an extremely uncertain situation. Anyone who has read works by Charles Dickens, and knows anything about the author’s childhood, could quickly imagine Mancini’s circumstances at the age of sixteen. The relics of a party in Mancini’s painting are like the brightly lit and food-laden windows of A Christmas Carol to London’s poor: the abundance is alluring, within apparent reach, but ultimately inaccessible. In 1865, Mancini used to loiter outside the Caffé d’Europa in Naples, in the hope that one of the painters would invite him to eat with them. ‘Sometimes [he] was invited’ he said, only to add, ‘but more often not.’
The precariousness of the young painter is the precariousness of Lo scugnizzo. There is no grand Morellian heroism here but rather the everyday pathos of a vulnerable street urchin. This mood matches the fragile uncertainty of our aspiring young artist and, in emotional terms, we are not that far from the dignity in suffering portrayed in religious works of the Neapolitan Seicento.
Talent transforming scarcity.
We can see this painting as demonstrating just how far scarcity can be elevated and transformed by talent. Tomaso Montanari’s 2016 television monograph La vera natura di Caravaggio shows us how the rich visual and emotional variations found in Caravaggio’s art in Rome were probably born in a basement studio, with a small range of props and a limited repertoire of low-cost models. In a similar act of creative magic, in his loft studio, with a model taken from the streets, Mancini elevates the dramatic status of his scugnizzo. His skill as a painter and the simple compositional choice of juxtaposing the boy with objects and décor associated with an extravagant lifestyle produces a compelling masterpiece.
Material detail and realism.
While the fabrics and the decoration of the bar are sumptuous, some of the beautifully rendered lustre and texture derives from more mundane objects, such as the discarded paper, the foil on the bottles (with their commercial labels) and the reflections in the empty glasses. In all events, beside the boy and at his feet, we have a wonderful set of effects of light and texture, as well as bravura still-life studies.
We can add to the list of skilfully depicted objects, surfaces and textures: we have padded-fabric wainscoting, studded at the top, with a frill trim at the bottom; masks and costumes; richly patterned damask wallpaper; glass seen through glass; decorated China cups, in different positions; an abandoned photograph, photographs in a magazine or newspaper, and strewn cut flowers. This is a declaration of what the young painter is capable of and we can only guess that the attention to such a range of fine realistic detail must have been a particular delight to the eyes of Filippo Palizzi.
The difficult face of child poverty.
Mancini employs a strong light, which rakes in from left to right. One consequence of this is that the most telling planes of the boy’s face are partially hidden, by being in a right profile which is retreating into shadow. What is still noticeable is that there is something delicate and detached about his expression and line of sight. The simplicity of the face allows it to catch a range of projections from the viewer, who is set an emotional challenge.
Should the admirer of this painting affirm the ephebic beauty and fragility of the boy, or should they shake themselves out of such effete aestheticism and be mobilised by the sight of social injustice? Perhaps the apparent dilemma is merely the fruit of language as, in vision, everything can reach us at once and one thing need not be separated from another.
Moreover, if we compare the scugnizzo’s expression to what Linda Nochlin calls a proto-documentary photograph from 1910, by Lewis Hine, then we might simply decide that Mancini achieved a strikingly faithful portrayal of reality. This is because Hine’s frontal portrait ‘Addie Card, 12 years old, anemic spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill, Vermont,’ silences us in a similar way to Mancini’s painting; through its subtle and haunting representation of youthful suffering. As suggested in Auden’s poem, Musée des Beaux Arts, great tragedy is often muted by its existence within a context of indifference and daily routine.
(The photograph is in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (see link below) and is also reproduced in Nochlin, 2018, p. 106.)
Mancini and artistic tradition; observations on light, colour and mood.
The Seicento artistic heritage of Naples lays some claim to the colour and mood of this work of art, along with its chiaroscuro lighting discussed above.
The tonalities of the Neapolitan Baroque share the stage in this emotionally charged but finely modulated scene. There are earthy hues of red in the painting which combine with gold, yellow and white. These colours, and the boy’s sallow skin, are redolent of the seventeenth century: we can also feel the influence of Naples in Mancini’s use of Pompeian red and Pozzuoli Earth. The palette has a richness and luxury which is nonetheless tuned to a register of quiet sorrow.
There is an emotional kinship and affinity between Lo scugnizzo and the pictorial world of Bernardo Cavallino (1616-1656). I am referring to the Cavallino perceived by Raffaello Causa as an ‘evocative and anxious personality, tender, mournful and sentimental.’ A painter who confronted subjects in an ‘intimist key.’ (See Introduction in Lurie, A and Percy, A (eds.) Bloomington, 1984.) Without falling into an excess of sentimentality, we are presented with both warmth and want.
Bernardo Cavallino, La pittura: An Allegory of Painting. Collection Novelli, Naples.
(Credit: Mutual Art)
Bernardo Cavallino, Santa Cecilia (1645 ca.), Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
(Credit: Wikipedia)
Lo scugnizzo – comparative meditations on expressive posture and the statuesque.
Mancini’s street-child has an overtly statuesque quality, almost as if he is a wax figure placed in a maquette. His right profile creates a sensation of movement against the alignment of the feet, which face to the left at about 45 degrees. This is suggestive of a division in the boy’s attention; he is reticent or hesitant. It is as if the remnants of the party belong to another world that is forbidden.
There is life too in his flexed right leg, but the potential for contrapposto is not realised, as this is not a conventionally heroic, or even an especially graceful stance. In a classical, or classicizing, context one could reasonably expect a hand gesture to accompany a youth in such a flexed, asymmetrical posture. This is certainly the case with the Idolino of Pesaro and with Vincenzo Gemito’s Narciso (Narcissus) of 1886.
Idolino di Pesaro (Museo archeologico nazionale di Firenze.)
(Credit: Wikipedia.)
Gemito Vincenzo, Narciso (1886), Villa Pignatelli, Naples.
(Credit: Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali.)
But in Lo scugnizzo all mobility and swagger has been cut short: there is no pointing or outstretched hand, no tilting hip and no eloquent void between the arm and body. Instead, the contrapposto dynamism somehow gets trapped as it travels towards his torso. Rather than energy moving out to the extremities, the fingers are interlocked and his arms hang down before him. This is not youthful cocksureness, it is rather the diffidence of an endearing but downtrodden child who looks as though he might step away in shyness at any moment. In mood we are closer to Murillo’s street-children, or the adults in Millet’s L’ Angelus.
Looking forward in time, less than a decade after Mancini’s Lo scugnizzo, Rodin offered a sculptural vision of pathos that breaks the stasis of hopelessness and rises into the torso. In his statue L’Age d’airan (first exhibited as Le Vaincu; modelled in 1876 and cast in 1906) the emotions of a vanquished adult break through into movement and gesture in the upper body. Realism here takes us into another dimension of emotional complexity and ambivalence, as we have an indeterminate awakening into what could be release, or simply mounting suffering. What feelings are innocently assimilated, and perhaps only partially comprehended, in Mancini’s child seem to have graduated into a fully embodied reaction in Rodin’s adult.
L’Age d’airan (The Age of Bronze) 1877, by Auguste Rodin. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons.)
True feeling in an uncertain setting.
A game of perception is played out in Mancini’s inclusion of the edges of picture frames on the red wall in his background. Including evidence of paintings is part of the lavishness of the scene but we can also see it as a device that renders the picture more real. If the world of paintings is behind the boy, then what we are seeing must be reality. However, in terms of overall composition, we are not transported into a plausible space. To make the situation feel credible, we would have to invent some form of justifying narrative. We could decide that it is about a boy who has wandered into a bar which had a party the night before; alternatively, we could call it a religious allegory about restraint, or temptation. But there is something reductive in any such invention and it is better to leave the image as puzzling and unsettling, as that is part of its power.
Nothing lasts; how Lo scugnizzo can change the way we look at Alla Dogana (The Customs).
Lo scugnizzo is painfully ephemeral. The party it alludes to has already finished, objects lie abandoned, and the revellers have gone. The artifice of the pictorial arrangement also reinforces a sense of transience: we know that it will only last for as long as the artist requires, then the real-world scugnizzo will go back to the street and any props will be packed away.
With this in mind, it is interesting to see how the work can shift our viewing of Mancini’s Alla Dogana (The Customs) (1877). On its own, the latter work might seem to be a testimony to an age of travel, wealth, and cosmopolitan living. TheCustoms is certainly a picture which aims to appeal to the Parisian marketplace. The woman who sits in the painting is well-dressed, apparently self-possessed and is perched on a trunk which bears testament to her wealth and the ability to afford to travel. She is, we might think, just waiting to head off to new lands and new experiences. The room she is in has the appeal of domestic sophistication and does not resemble a customs office; it has fine, lined wallpaper, an oil painting, and a delicately crafted writing desk.
However, there is an uneasy disorder and incompleteness in the left of the canvas which might invoke an underlying sense of the precarious nature of human life; something arguably intrinsic to Mancini’s personal experience and, by extension, to his art.
Here a crate has either been opened, presumably for a customs inspection, or it has not been packed to completion. Piled together in a box and padded with old newspaper, we see a jumble of objects which, at one level, are visually more intriguing than looking at the lid of a closed crate or suitcase. There is also something dynamic and transitional about this detail which catches our attention.
However, at the same time, the objects have lost the kind of appeal that once led to their acquisition. Like the remains of the party in the Lo scugnizzo, these are objects which are out of use; they are no longer animated or given meaning through social usage. There is something sad, unrewarding and superfluous about them. The woman in the picture might be in a less enviable situation than we first thought. After all, she is quite literally spaesata (lost/ out of her familiar surroundings). She is neither at home, nor at her final destination and, in emphasis of this fact, one of the words that is visible in the newspaper packaging is déménagements.
In the setting of the painting she is in some kind of holding place. The ambiguous room, somewhere between a customs office and a living room, is ultimately a studio construct.This study could be a return to, and a reworking of, the feelings of the displaced, socially excluded, and vulnerable child in Lo scugnizzo.
Moreover, if we accept Hiesinger’s conjecture that the model in this painting is Mathilde Duffaud, Vincenzo Gemito’s first love, then we are in unsettled circumstances. (The idea is plausible, as the model strongly resembles Gemito’s two bronze heads of Mathilde, one on a cast cushion and the other on a plinth.) Mathilde would have just arrived in Paris by the end of 1877, the year of the painting, to be reunited with Gemito. She had an illness that was to necessitate the couple’s return to Naples in 1880 and by 1881 she had passed away in Herculaneum. An awareness of both the alienation in Lo scugnizzo and the biographical reality of Mathilde’s ill health, and her impending return to Naples, destabilises and complicates our understanding of what we are seeing.
Conclusion: a studio misèreand the inspiration and heroism of childhood.
Linda Nochlin’s study of the visual representation of misère in the nineteenth century opens with a definition of the term by a young French sociologist, Eugène Buret. He argues that misère is distinct from poverty as it is a ‘pain felt morally’, and its ‘pain penetrates to the moral sense.’ Buret’s qualification is highly relevant to Lo scugnizzo which probes a viewer’s moral and emotional core.
While parts of Nochlin’s study of nineteenth-century art offer some possibility of parallels with Mancini, most notably the chapter on the artist Fernand Pelez (1848-1913), most of the images considered deal with small groups of the urban poor and the rural poor; people in the streets and in the fields. There is also an examination of representations of the Great Irish Famine (also known as the Great Hunger) which occurred between 1845 and 1852. The images of this extensive tragedy are considered to be the paradigmatic example of nineteenth-century misery.
Within this great social sweep of urbanisation, industrialisation and poverty there were also more intimate representations of struggle and social difference; more intimate domains, such as brothels, cafés, music halls and dance studios. Mancini’s Lo scugnizzo offers his own microcosm for the age; a studio misère, a solitary study of psychological and dramatic intensity realised with a poetic refinement. It is a work of great originality and sensibility, innovative and apt for its time, while still influenced by tradition.
Wordsworth’s short poem of 1802 My Heart Leaps Up declares that ‘The child is father of the man.’ The same poem also connects a sensibility for beauty with the state of childhood. There is a similar idea in Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life where he declares that ‘genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will.’ He also refers to ‘that stare animal-like in its ecstasy, which all children have when confronted with something new.’ Mancini’s precocious talent enabled him to articulate his genius while still close to the youth which was its source. His own childhood and an empathy for the scugnizzi that modelled for him are of seminal importance in his art, as are the sentiments that both he and they embodied. Mancini’s Lo scugnizzo is part of that understated nineteenth-century heroism in art; one which stood apart from the accoutrements of status and glory and chose instead to be rooted in contemporary social reality. It is a heroism that might simply be the maintenance of a dignity of being. Here, the boy’s quiet forbearance is innocent, devoid of reaction and reproach: such qualities will need to come from the concern of the viewer.
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(The Scugnizzo has also been alternatively named as follows: Ama il prossimo tuo come te stesso/ Miiseria e stravizio/ Lendemain de fête/ Il terzo comandamento/ Fremito di desiderio/ Desideri.)
Inner Surfaces 