International studio (15.1901/1902(1902))

Domenico Morelli


Other pictures illustrative of this period of
Morelli’s art and inspiration are Count Lara and
his Page, Tasso Reading his Poem to the Three
Eleonoras, the Vespri Siciliani, the Bath at
Pompeii. They are pictures which show the care-
ful union of the realistic and academic method ;
and, however admirable, strike one, especially in
view of the painter’s later art, as cold and lacking
in spontaneity. Morelli was by this time Professor
in the Academy of Naples and very much under
the influence of Palizzi,
who had been named
Director ; he was working,
more reflectively than
imaginatively, to close the
breach between the Realists
and the Academy.

But new wine will not
be confined in old bottles.

The fire that burned be-
hind the glowing black
eyes that look so straight
from the artist’s likeness of
himself, painted for his
brother-in-law and fellow-
patriot, Senator Villari,
leapt the bounds of the
rigid containing outline
which to Palizzi was a sine
qud non of art, and itself
fashioned the figments of
the poet’s imagination in
glowing colours and lumin-
ous shadows. There is
something truly magnifi-
cent in the way in which
Morelli flings his very soul
on to the canvas when he
is inspired by subjects from
the life of Christ or, as in the
Temptation of St. A nthony,
by the fanaticism of early
Christianity. The broad
silences of the desert or
of the sea live with their
own life, and yet are
dominated by the power
that emanates from the
single figure of the Christ
or by the tragic interest
that breathes from the
small group, or groups,
contained in the immen-
sity. “ARAB IMPROVISER

And in this Morelli differs substantially from his
friend Ussi, for whom deserts and inhabitants
formed almost an organic whole. A comparison
of Ussi’s Arab Encampment with Morelli’s Christ
Tempted in the Wilderness, or of the two pictures
entitled Prayer in the Desert, the same subject so
differently conceived and executed by the two
men, at once reveals, in most interesting fashion,
the fundamental distinction between their charac-
teristics as artists.

■X.

A

7 £

!; t_ -

\ W

> U h

}L

#7"

/ j'

A77-

\ % 1

• V- ' *>,

Ac'


rfA

» •


A

BY DOMENICO MORELI.I

87