MORELLI, DOMENICO. - Painter, b. in Naples on 8 July 1823, d. there on 13 Aug. 1901. A pupil at the Neapolitan Academy of Costanzo Angelini and Camillo Guerra, he was set by them on the path toward the principles of Neoclassicism and Purism, which he soon abandoned in favor of an assiduous veristic research.
His earliest paintings reflect the modes proper to Romantic painting, but after obtaining a pension to Rome (1848) and having made numerous journeys in Italy, especially to Venice and Florence, and after also having stayed in Paris where, though without understanding it, he grasped the value of the new painting of the Impressionists, he carried on a most intense activity to spread naturalist taste, in Naples itself, where it had already long been followed by artists even older than he, such as G. Gigante, F. and G. Palizzi. This especially in the years between 1860 and 1880, during which Naples had a truly preeminent role in the field of Italian artistic culture. Considered in his own times as the greatest painter of the peninsula, later opposed by criticism, today the place — indeed a very notable one — that M. occupied in the field of nineteenth-century Italian art is gradually coming to be recognized. Having placed himself at the head of the anti-academic revolt, he intensely practiced "the study of the true," which many times resolved itself in him into the search for realistic verisimilitudes introduced even into his sacred painting.
Numerous indeed are his pictures inspired by sacred subjects: from the first period of his activity is a Madonna with the Child in her arms; from the time of his Roman stay around 1848-50: The Christian Martyrs before the Pyre and the Martyrs Carried to Heaven. From his period of most intense activity is the fresco with the Assumption in the chapel of the Royal Palace of Naples. To the last years of his life, when his painting, by then freed from any traditional or imitative bond, tended only toward a rapid realistic rendering of facts, belong also numerous compositions on biblical subjects, sometimes only sketched, at other times brought to completion in large pictures, such as the Christ in the Desert of the Galleria d'arte moderna in Rome or the Embalmed Christ of the same collection.
Bibliography4 works
Emilio Lavagnino