Domenico Morelli

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Italian painter Domenico Morelli (1823-1901) was one of the most important Neapolitan artists of the 19th century. He enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Naples in 1836. His early works are Romantic and contain imagery drawn from the Middle Ages and Byron. In 1848 he won a fellowship to study in Rome and took part in the insurrections of 1848 and was wounded and briefly imprisoned. Morelli visited Florence in the 1850s where he received his first public recognition for The Iconoclasts. He participated in the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855 and, later, in Florence was an active participant in the Macchiaioli discussions on Realism. Morelli claimed that it was these discussions that made his own work less academic and helped him to develop a freer style and to experiment with color. In this period, he is grouped into the school of Realism.

By the mid-1860s Morelli was one of the best-known Italian painters of the times. He was appointed consultant for new acquisitions of the Capodimonte art museum in Naples and, thus, had significant impact on the subsequent direction of the collections. In 1868, Morelli became a professor of painting at his old school, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Naples. From that period onward, his interest turned to religious, mystical and supernatural themes, drawn from Christian, Jewish and even Muslim sources. Perhaps best-known from this period is the Assumption on the ceiling of the Royal Palace in Naples. Morelli was also one of the collaborators for the illustrations of the Amsterdam Bible in 1895. From 1899 until his death, he was president of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Naples.