Scuola caravaggesca napoletana del XVII secolo

Neapolitan Caravaggio school of the 17th century Saint Francis Oil on canvas 76 x 63 cm In 1606, Caravaggio fled Rome, taking refuge in Naples. In his first Neapolitan sojourn, which lasted about a year, he executed a series of large canvases of sacred subjects where his change in style is noticeable; his painting became darker and more rarefied, crude in its realism and obsessive pursuit of violent representation, as evidenced by the abundance of heads cut from biblical themes, or saints caught in the act of bloody martyrdom. The turning point, came with the creation of the great altarpiece The Seven Works of Mercy, 1606-07, which was to change the course of seventeenth-century Neapolitan painting, with the involvement of early followers such as Carlo Sellitto and Giovani Battista Caracciolo, known as Battistello. Trained in late Mannerist circles, Sellitto and Caracciolo made Caravaggio's light and the realism of the Lombard master their own without renouncing a personal language made up of reminiscences of Mannerist plastic forms for Sellitto and descriptive preciosities for Caracciolo mindful of the lesson of Orazio Gentileschi. Fundamental and in some ways epochal was the contribution of Jusepe de Ribera, the Spagnoletto, leader of the Caravaggesque painters of the second generation such as: Francesco and Cesare Fracanzano, Filippo Vitale, Bartolomeo Passante, Giovanni Dò, Giovanni Rica and the Flemish Hendrick van Somer. From the mid-1930s, the Neapolitan Caravaggesque strand was influenced by the luminosity of the Emilian and Roman Baroque thanks to the arrival in the city of Domenichino and Giovanni Lanfranco. Bernardo Cavallino, a precocious painter, began with Caravaggist realism, with fascination for Simon Vouet and Artemisia Gentileschi he met during his stay in Naples. Close to Massimo Stanzione, known as the Neapolitan Guido Reni, Cavallino had an extremely cultured and refined language consisting of the Caravaggesque component revised in a classical key, enhanced by the vivid Venetian chromatism of Titian and Veronese. Neapolitan school of the 17th century Saint Francis Oil on canvas 76 x 63 cm