FALCIATORE, Filippo

Italian painter, active in Naples. He was a pupil of Lorenzo Vaccaro, and then of his son, Domenico Antonio Vaccaro (1678-1745), an artist whose influence was to pervade all his early work, inspiring small pictures bathed in clear, silvery light and azure tonalities that gradually shaped his ‘neo-Mannerist’ Rococo style. His early works are mostly scenes from the Old and New Testament, now dispersed among public and private collections both in Italy and abroad. In these works, while following the footsteps of the master, he updated the schemes with a new sensitivity.

Of his activity as fresco-painter little remains, the first point of reference being 1741, when he frescoed the vault and walls of the sacristy of the church of Santa Maria del Carmine Maggiore in Naples. His rocaille sensibility reached the height of preciosity in the five panels with gold backgrounds and the two tondi representing Cain and Abel and Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (Naples, Museo Duca di Martina).