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Art Portal
Entries in Naples: Life, Death & Miracles dealing with art, sculpture, and photography Directly below this index are: miscellaneous art article #1 miscellaneous art article #2 miscellaneous art article #3 Here
is a Brief
History of Neapolitan Art
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Statues 8 statues (and sculptors) Art Gallery, National (Capodimonte) art, modern (installation) art, modern (museum) art (stolen, Nazi) Academy of Fine Arts Achenbach, Oswald Anguissola, Sofonisba Artemisia & Judith Art theft Art theft (large-scale looting) baptistery of San Giovanni in fonte Bearded Lady, the Beffi (Master, triptych, of) Byzantine art in the south (1) (2) Caravaggio exhibit Caravaggio's "7 Works" on loan? Caravaggio, the last Carbone, Riccardo (photographer) Carelli, Raffaele Cavallini, P. in Naples Chapel of Treasure of San Gennaro Christ of Maratea (statue) Coleman, Charles Caryle Crossing out beauty De Dominici, Bernardo Degas, Edgar De Marinis, Fulvio de Matteis, Paolo Doryphorus (Spear Bearer) Early Netherlandish Painting early photography Escher, M.C. Eisenstaedt, Alfred Ferrara, "Rosina", the muse of Capri Fontana, Livia Futurism Galizia, Fede Garzoni, Giovanna "Giant," the (fountain) Gentileschi, Artemisia Gigante, Giaquinto Gioconda, la Girolamini, church reopened Horse Tamers (statues) |
Iaia IMMAGINARIA 2018 Impossible Exhibit, the (2014) Infiorata (flower petal mosaics) installation art Joli, Antonio Jones, Lois Mailou Kapoor, Anish Laurito frescoes Lear, Edward Le Brun, Elisabetta Migliaro, Vincenzo Mon(n)a Lisa Monument fountains museum, archaeological museum, archaeol. (staircase) museum, San Gennaro Napoli Underground art gallery "Neptune" fountain Opus Continuum Other 19th Century, the (exhibit) Painters of Neapolitan Baroque period postcards Pitloo, Anton Polykleitos (and The Spear Bearer) Pompeii (art restoration) Ragolia, Michele Renoir, Pierre-Auguste Royal Porcelain Factory Salerno Ivories Salvi, Selene (paintings) (2) Sirani, Elisabetta Siren's Last Song Statuary in the Villa Comunale Street art Tree of Life mosaic in Otranto Vanvitelli (van Wittel), Gasparo(1) (2) Veiled Christ Volpe, Vincenzo votive wall shrines women painters |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is Miscellaneous Art Article #1 revised Dec. 17. 2019 A Remarkable Coincidence
(1) E.A. Robinson
(2) In Death - a
painting (3) A Tale of Two
Academies
Believe it or not, what
follows touches on all three.
Her Eyes
I passed the
poem on to Selene Salvi. She is a friend, a
painter, and a writer and usually has insight on
these things. I told her only that, as far
as I knew, no one seemed to know who Robinson
was talking about in the poem, but it must have
been a woman he loved. I mentioned that he had
never married.UP from the street and the crowds that went, / Morning and midnight, to and fro, Still was the room where his days he spent, /And the stars were bleak, and the nights were slow. Year after year, with his dream shut fast, /He suffered and strove till his eyes were dim, For the love that his brushes had earned at last, And the whole world rang with the praise of him. But he cloaked his triumph, and searched, instead, /Till his cheeks were sere and his hairs were gray. “There are women enough, God knows,” he said …“There are stars enough—when the sun’s away.” Then he went back to the same still room /That had held his dream in the long ago, When he buried his days in a nameless tomb, /And the stars were bleak, and the nights were slow. And a passionate humor seized him there—/Seized him and held him until there grew Like life on his canvas, glowing and fair, /A perilous face—and an angel’s too. Angel and maiden, and all in one,—/All but the eyes. They were there, but yet They seemed somehow like a soul half done./What was the matter? Did God forget? … But he wrought them at last with a skill so sure /That her eyes were the eyes of a deathless woman With a gleam of heaven to make them pure, /And a glimmer of hell to make them human. God never forgets.—And he worships her /There in that same still room of his, For his wife, and his constant arbiter/Of the world that was and the world that is. And he wonders yet what her love could be/To punish him after that strife so grim; But the longer he lives with her eyes to see, /The plainer it all comes back to him. I got more than I bargained for. Selene replied: Selene reminded me again that she was not talking about the Naples Academy of Fine Arts, but a separate organization founded just after the unification of Italy (1861), not to combat the older Academy, but to have their own say at the start of a new age of Neapolitan art. The time period was critical; there was no real market for art and only a few artists who could avail themselves of traditional religious or aristocratic commissions. Many risked poverty, and the youngest, with no financial means at all, had given up hope. A lot of time was spent in lengthy discussions on how to overcome the crisis, how to help those who had been left behind, how to open the way for a new way of “doing” art. And then Annibale Rossi proclaimed that the only true help for artists lay not in meetings and discussions but in finding a practical way to help them sell their paintings and statues.3*After a few years of "new Italy," the two organizations merged. She had a few words about the engraver, Cucinotta. He was born in Messina in 1830 and was executed by firing squad in Paris in 1871. As Fusco writes, we have no way of knowing if he was an active participant in the Communard*The four notes are all from the essay IDEALS OF THE SOCIETY TO PROMOTE FINE ARTS IN NAPLES (by Selene Salvi). The entire essay is on the Facebook page of Opus Continuum here. Firing squad? What's going on? Readers should note that the 1860s and '70s were years of great agitation in a century of extreme agitation going back to the French revolution. The reference here is to the Paris Commune in 1871, but in southern Italy of the 1860s the tension of post-unification was just as bad. Life in general in Naples was uncertain. The city and much of the south was under martial law for the rest of the decade in order to combat lingering, active hostility from forces still loyal to the old Bourbon kingdom of Naples. Yet art went on, as it will, like the mounting pressure of water behind a cracked dam (the dam here is political repression). Sooner or later the water finds its way through the cracks and then —we know what happens. The similarity to the poem is remarkable. As to the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples (see index at top of this page): a replica of Michelangelo's David in the Academy
(image,
above, left: Facade of the main academy
building on Via Santa Maria di Costantinopoli)
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This is Miscellaneous Art
Article #2
Jago
& the Veiled Son
"The truth is that art cannot change events, cannot stop atrocities. But art can stand alongside beauty to foster togetherness and fellowship."
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