MORELLI, DOMENICO. – Painter, born in Naples on 8 July 1823, died there on 13 August 1901. A pupil at the Neapolitan Academy of Costanzo Angelini and Camillo Guerra, he was guided by them toward the principles of neoclassicism and purism, which he soon abandoned in favor of assiduous veristic research.
His earliest paintings reflect the modes proper to Romantic painting, but after receiving the pensionership in Rome (1848) and making numerous journeys in Italy, especially to Venice and Florence, and after also staying in Paris, where, although without understanding it, he grasped the significance of the new Impressionist painting, he pursued an extremely intense campaign to spread naturalist taste. In Naples itself, this had already long been followed by artists older than he, such as G. Gigante, F. and G. Palizzi. This was especially so in the years between 1860 and 1880, during which Naples played a truly pre-eminent role in the field of Italian artistic culture. Regarded in his own time as the peninsula’s greatest painter, and later opposed by the critics, M. is today gradually being accorded the truly remarkable place he occupied in the field of nineteenth-century Italian art. Placing himself at the head of the anti-academic revolt, he intensely practised “the study of reality,” which often took the form, in his work, of seeking realistic verisimilitudes introduced even into his sacred painting.
Numerous, in fact, are his paintings inspired by sacred subjects: from the early period of his activity is a Madonna with the Child in her arms; from the period of his stay in Rome, around 1848–50: The Christian Martyrs before the Pyre and The Martyrs Carried up to Heaven. From the period of his most intense activity dates the fresco of the Assumption in the chapel of the Royal Palace of Naples. His final years, when his painting, now freed from every traditional or imitative bond, tended solely toward a rapid realistic rendering of events, also produced numerous compositions with biblical subjects, some merely sketched, others brought to completion in large paintings, such as Christ in the Desert in the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, or the Embalmed Christ in the same collection.