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Nicola Palizzi ( Vasto 1820 – Naples 1870 ), Orsini square in Benevento. Oil on canvas cm 25,5 x 37 situated ( Benevento Piazza ) and dated ( 1853 ) lower left. © Ottocento Art Gallery.
ROME.- Among latest acquisitions, Ottocento Art Gallery offers some view paintings that represent a dreamy voyage around Italian country, rich of extraordinary monuments and beautiful landscapes: Nicola Palizzi ( Vasto 1820 – Naples 1870 ), Orsini square in Benevento; Ippolito Caffi ( Belluno 1809 – Lissa 1866 ), Rome, view of Piazza del Popolo; and Mauro Reggio ( Rome 1971 ), Rome, Aelian bridge.
19th century view paintings: The views of Piazza del Popolo in Caffi usually have a central point of view, which underlines the artist’s intention to highlight the specularity of the two churches. In this case an eccentric vision is adopted with respect to the axis of the square, thus conferring greater evidence to the obelisk that stands in the middle of the composition. The Flaminio obelisk is, after the Lateran one, the oldest and the tallest in Rome: with its twenty-five meters of monolith granite it was brought from Eliopoli to Rome by Augustus and was placed in the Circus Maximus. Moved here in 1589 by Domenico Fontana by order of Sixtus V, in the early nineteenth century was added by the Valadier a base with four circular tanks decorated with Egyptian lions, very evident in the watercolor presented here. The two churches, Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Montesanto, are no longer obvious protagonists of the whole, but close the proscenium as a great theatrical backdrop, perfectly aligned with the Torlonia buildings built by Valadier between 1818 and 1824. Painterly, the watercolor has a soft and extremely soft light, in harmony with the liquidity of the technique adopted: in the delicate apparent monochrome of the whole that suggests a morning light, the spot of the green outcrops of the Pincio emerges to the extreme right. The one presented by Ottocento Art Gallery is considered a second version of the watercolor with a similar subject, published (No. 58) in the catalog, edited by Annalisa Scarpa, of the exhibition “Caffi. Luci del Meditteraneo “, set up in 2005 in the double seat of Belluno (Palazzo Crepadona) and Rome (Palazzo Braschi). A feature that does not diminish the value of this proof of the talent of the great Venetian view painter: in fact, an element that can not be overlooked in the views of Piazza del Popolo of Caffi, in the various specimens we know, is the extraordinary participation of the artist in depict this place. As Scarpa pointed out, there is no single version of this subject identical to the other: it is as if the artist “felt” this space in a particular way.
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Ippolito Caffi ( Belluno 1809 – Lissa 1866 ), Rome, view of Piazza del Popolo. Watercolor and pencil on paper cm 20,5 x 29,5. © Ottocento Art Gallery.
Member of the famous family of artists from Abruzzi who gave nineteenth-century Italian painting masters of unquestionable talent, Nicola Palizzi arrived in Naples in 1842 and immediately enrolled at the Royal Institute of Fine Arts, led by Gabriele Smargiassi. His very early works are very much influenced by the attendance of Neapolitan artistic circles and the school of Posillipo, as can be seen in the “View of the Madonna dell’Arco”, now in Vasto, preserved in the Civic Art Gallery. In 1845 he wins the pensioner in Rome, which, however, does not take place due to the insurrectional movements going on in the city. Of Nicola Palizzi you can see the ability to use different styles and registers from the works done in the Fifties. From the documentary style, to the small format, to the adventurism of classicist landscapes, the painter from Abruzzo stands out for his technique, fluid colors and bright brushstroke. In 1854 he went to Avellino for a trip following which several works were carried out, later exhibited at the Bourbon Biennial. Here it is, in fact, present with the paintings “View of Avellino in the moonlight”, “The Trajan’s Arch in Benevento”, “Gran paesaggio di composizione” and “Isola di Capri taken from Massa”. Precisely at this stage of his production is to ascribe this study made for the painting “Piazza Orsini a Benevento”, conserved in the municipal art gallery of Vasto, where the ability to synthesise and build typical of Palizzi’s palette find their maximum expression in a scene of the city market in which stands out the profile of the statue of the archbishop of Benevento, who later became Pope. In the work offered by Ottocento Art Gallery, as in the “Landscape with Gypsies” of the Palizzi collection of the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, the late suggestions of the School of Posillipo are evident. Considered by Ricci «… of paramount importance, especially for the way in which the Palizzi painted the stage of the houses on the left and for the Spadarian vivacity with which it made the crowd of the market; vivacity that we will find in the “Earthquake in Torre del Greco” and in the sketch of “The massacres of Altamura” by Michele Cammarano». (V. Paolo Ricci, 1960, pp. 49 – 50, Tab. 66).
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Mauro Reggio ( Rome 1971 ), Rome, Aelian bridge. Oil on canvas cm 100 x 200, made in 2014. © Ottocento Art Gallery.
Contemporary Art: «During the last year of the Academy of Fine Arts I stopped painting the usual models and still lifes to focus attention only on the urban landscape. What interested me was the architecture of the different buildings of different eras and styles and their forced approach. Rome offers countless views with these characteristics and then I went to work painting the various archeologies related to the architecture of the Baroque or twentieth century rationalism or the East Ring Road, considered by many a sort of “ecomostro” but that has always reminded me of the old film “Metropolis” directed by Fritz Lang and provokes surreal suggestions even in its decadent realism. In order to focus the architectures of the chosen subjects more carefully, I immediately stripped them of the elements that were foreign to me and therefore the perspectives of the squares and streets are devoid of men, automobiles, various signs, advertising posters». With these words, the painter Mauro Reggio, considered by many to be the greatest Italian vedutist active in the current national artistic scene, tells the definition of his stylistic figure, achieved in a metaphysical and twilight tension that animates the gallery of Roman views that populate his production in recent years. The painting offered by , Ottocento Art Gallery is a view of the Roman bridge Elio, known to most as the Sant’Angelo bridge, one of the most famous buildings in the world, both for the regularity, symmetry, the opening of the light and the distance from the hair water of the arches, both for the nobility of the materials and the monumentality of the whole. Reggio highlights these peculiar characteristics of architecture, preferring a vision from below that, adopting a clever use of chiaroscuro and the play of shadows reflected in the water mirror of the Tiber, underlines the harmonious beauty of the building, surmounted by the orange sky dark, typical of the master’s palette, an “unlikely and surreal” chromatic choice, according to the same definition of the painter, which gives an alienating atmosphere to the whole composition, almost as if you were in a dystopian landscape created by the director Ridley Scott . Graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts, Reggio’s works can be found at Palazzo Madama, seat of the Senate of the Italian Republic, in the Grand Hotel of Rome, in Bulgari stores all over the world. Of his pictorial production, wrote Luca Beatrice, Maurizio Calvesi, Rossana Campo, Paolo Manazza, Marcello Pera and Vittorio Sgarbi.
