MICHETTI, FRANCESCO PAOLO

MICHETTI, FRANCESCO PAOLO. – Painter, born in Tocco Casauria on 2 October 1851, died in Francavilla a Mare on 5 March 1929. In 1868, having obtained a scholarship from the provincial administration of Chieti, he went to Naples, where he formed a friendship with Dalbono, while at the Academy he studied under Filippo Palizzi and Domenico Morelli.

Already established by 1870 with small paintings of children and animals, now in the Museum of S. Martino in Naples, in 1872 and 1875 he exhibited at the Paris Salon. But he became famous in 1877, when he exhibited in Naples the Corpus Domini (Rome, Crispini collection), a lively, picturesque representation of a religious festival in Abruzzo. From then on, for more than 20 years F. P. M. produced an infinite number of paintings (in 1899 he exhibited 200 simultaneously at the Venice Biennale and 100 in Berlin), almost always taking as his subject scenes or figures characteristic of Abruzzo, gradually moving from the initial stylistic modes-

MICHETTI, FRANCESCO PAOLO - La pastorella - Rome, National Gallery of Modern Art.

...to the initial stylistic modes he had developed in the Palizzi-Morelli-Dalbono milieu, while also showing sensitivity to Fortuny’s picturesque polychromy (in Naples in 1874), and toward a livelier, more abundant form of painting (Il Voto, Rome, Gallery of Modern Art, 1880–83), and then toward a more solid and composed manner (La Figlia di Jorio, Pescara, Municipal Hall). An instinctive artist of great potential and expressive immediacy, he remained extremely active until 1900, when he sent two large canvases to the Paris Exhibition: Gli storpi and Le serpi, now in Francavilla, in the Municipal Hall; in them it is possible to recognize a return to the initial modes of his style. Thereafter he lived inactive as a painter, taking an interest above all in various technical problems.