DOI Heft:
No. 104 (November, 1901)
DOI Artikel:Anderton, Isabella Mary: The art of Domenico Morelli
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19874#0095
Domenico Morelli
HE ART OF DOMENICO
MORELLI. BY ISABELLA M.
ANDERTON.
Italy is gradually losing her warrior-artists—the
men who fought to free their country from the
stranger, who painted patriotic pictures that came
near sending them to prison, who craved for artistic
as well as political liberty, and struggled free of the
trammels of the pseudoclassicism with which the
Accademie of the earlier part of the century bound
their students. Filippo Palizzi has passed away,
and his lovingly studied scenes of country and
animal life remain to mark his protest against con-
ventionality ; Telemaco Signorini, the restless,
versatile painter of Old Florence, with its Ghetto
and its Mercato Vecchio; Stefano Ussi, whose
Expulsion of the Duke of Athens aroused the en-
thusiasm of patriots bent on the expulsion of the
Austrian, and whose oriental sketches put the seal
to the independent temper of the man ; and now,
full of honours and glory, the aged Neapolitan
Senator Domenico Morelli.
Domenico Morelli was born to poor and obscure
parents in 1826, and reached the age at which
youthful enthusiasms are strongest at the very
time when a fervent struggle after a new ideal in
politics and in art was breaking down social
barriers and bringing the most capable men of all
classes to the front. And young Morelli, to an
enthusiasm whose impetus alone would have carried
him well to the fore, added a power of poetical
conception, a nicety of observation of artistic
methods, a tenacity of purpose in the adoption and
development of such methods as most appealed to
him, which have ensured and justified his position
as one of the greatest of recent Italian artists,
and inspirer of the modern school at Naples.
" Our new school," writes Morelli in his com-
memoration of Filippo Palizzi, "sprang from the
mind, more reflective than imaginative, of a man
(Palizzi) seated in the open air, his colour-box and
palette on his knees, and a sheep or a cow before
him, diligently analysing effects of light and colour,
seeking to imitate the surface exactly as he saw it
on the model. These canvases he showed, in his
1sy domenico morelli
count lara and his page "
XXIV. No. 104.—November, 1901. 83
HE ART OF DOMENICO
MORELLI. BY ISABELLA M.
ANDERTON.
Italy is gradually losing her warrior-artists—the
men who fought to free their country from the
stranger, who painted patriotic pictures that came
near sending them to prison, who craved for artistic
as well as political liberty, and struggled free of the
trammels of the pseudoclassicism with which the
Accademie of the earlier part of the century bound
their students. Filippo Palizzi has passed away,
and his lovingly studied scenes of country and
animal life remain to mark his protest against con-
ventionality ; Telemaco Signorini, the restless,
versatile painter of Old Florence, with its Ghetto
and its Mercato Vecchio; Stefano Ussi, whose
Expulsion of the Duke of Athens aroused the en-
thusiasm of patriots bent on the expulsion of the
Austrian, and whose oriental sketches put the seal
to the independent temper of the man ; and now,
full of honours and glory, the aged Neapolitan
Senator Domenico Morelli.
Domenico Morelli was born to poor and obscure
parents in 1826, and reached the age at which
youthful enthusiasms are strongest at the very
time when a fervent struggle after a new ideal in
politics and in art was breaking down social
barriers and bringing the most capable men of all
classes to the front. And young Morelli, to an
enthusiasm whose impetus alone would have carried
him well to the fore, added a power of poetical
conception, a nicety of observation of artistic
methods, a tenacity of purpose in the adoption and
development of such methods as most appealed to
him, which have ensured and justified his position
as one of the greatest of recent Italian artists,
and inspirer of the modern school at Naples.
" Our new school," writes Morelli in his com-
memoration of Filippo Palizzi, "sprang from the
mind, more reflective than imaginative, of a man
(Palizzi) seated in the open air, his colour-box and
palette on his knees, and a sheep or a cow before
him, diligently analysing effects of light and colour,
seeking to imitate the surface exactly as he saw it
on the model. These canvases he showed, in his
1sy domenico morelli
count lara and his page "
XXIV. No. 104.—November, 1901. 83