Pitloo,
Gigante and the Posillipo
School
Pitloo: the Castel
dell'Ovo
After 1815 and the end of the Napoleonic
Wars, there grew up in Naples a school of painting much
different from that at the Bourbon court of the late
1700s, art that had been typified, say, by the works of
Jakob P. Hackert (1737-1807), the German who
became court painter of Ferdinand
IV of Naples; much of it, even the
landscapes, was formal almost to the point of looking
staged, as if the artist had asked the trees to turn
their branches a bit to the right and move closer
together.
That changed when Anton
Sminck Pitloo (1790-1837), a Dutch painter, moved
to Naples, became a lecturer at the Art Academy in Naples
and opened a studio in the Chiaia section of town. He
gathered around him a number of others painters to found
what is now called the “Posillipo School”—a school of
landscape painting done en plein air (outdoors) in natural
lighting, works with a more spontaneous, lively and
lighter approach, and one that used light and colors in
ways that anticipated Impressionism later in the
century.
Gigante: Amalfi
The name Posillipo
stems from the ridge overlooking the western end of the
Bay of Naples; it is the perfect place to sit out in the
open and look back at the coastline, the city, Vesuvius
and the islands in the bay, and to paint what you see.
The foremost of the
Posillipo school is conceded to be one of Pitloo’s
students, Giaquinto Gigante (1806-1876). His
early experience was with the Neapolitan Royal
Topographic Office, the office that turned out maps.
That interest stayed with him throughout his life; he
worked on the engravings for the well-known Viaggio pittorico nel
regno delle due Sicilie [Paintings of a Trip in
the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies] published in the early
1830s. He also became somewhat the court painter for
members of the Russian aristocracy during their visits
to Naples in the 1840s. Gigante did exhibit briefly in
Paris but generally did not travel much. Most of his
works are of areas in or near Naples. A substantial
amount of Gigante’s work is in the collections of the
museums at Capodimonte
and San Martino. There are
occasional exhibitions on the Posillipo School, the most
recent one in 2006 at the Villa
Pignatelli.
[Here is another view of
this same stretch of coast by Raffaele Carelli, another
artist of the Posillipo School.]
other artists/paintings:
Oswald Achenbach
Thomas Jones
Gasparo Vanvitelli (van
Wittel)
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste
Joli, Antonio
Coleman, Charles Caryl
to
art portal
to top of this
page
© 2002 - 2023