NAPOLETANO, Filippo - b. ~1589 Napoli, d. 1629 Roma - WGA

NAPOLETANO, Filippo

(b. ~1589 Napoli, d. 1629 Roma)

Italian painter, originally Filippo d’Angeli or de Liagno. After training in Naples with the landscape painter Goffredo Wals, in about 1614 Filippo Napoletano moved to Rome where he became a member of Agostino Tassi’s workshop. Strongly influenced by Adam Elsheimer, Paul Bril and Tassi, Napoletano painted, according to Giulio Mancini, ‘fires and boats’ though no extant work can be securely assigned to his early years in Rome. From 1617 to 1621 he was active in Florence in the service of Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici, working closely with Jacques Callot. Besides the occasional religious and mythological subject, Napoletano produced landscapes and small scenes of everyday country life. During this time he was in close contact with the Dutch Italianate painters Cornelis van Poelenburgh and Bartholomeus Breenbergh, who also worked for the Medici.

Soon after the death of Cosimo II in 1621, Napoletano returned to Rome, where he decorated the palace of Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio with landscape frescoes (1622-23, now Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi). He also supplied the Barberini tapestry manufactory with a series of cartoons depicting famous castles, including Fontainebleau, Grottaferrata and Castelgandolfo (1627, private collection). According to Giovanni Baglione, Napoletano was the first Italian artist to paint from nature at Tivoli.

Soon after his election as ‘principe’ of the Accademia di San Luca in 1629, Napoletano fell ill and retired to Naples, where he died that same year.

Dante and Virgil in the Underworld

The subject of the painting, depicting odd skeletal creatures, is inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which the author describes his visit to the underworld with Virgil. Two standard features of Dante’s Hell are included: Charon’s boat, and Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the underworld. The huge arched structure is based on the ruins of the Basilica of Maxentius, making it likely that the picture was painted in Rome.

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Naval Battle

The taste for oil paintings on stone slabs which were chosen as a substitute for the traditional supports of wood or canvas was already known in the sixteenth century, but reached its maximum popularity in the course of the first half of the seventeenth century. This Naval Battle, celebrating in 1617 of the Grand Duke against the Turks, was painted by a follower of Filippo Napoletano.

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River Landscape

The prolific Neapolitan painter produced many paintings at the court of Cosimo II de’ Medici between 1617 and 1621, especially landscapes and genre scenes. This peaceful scene incorporates the latter into the former. A cosmic harmony is present in the echoing shapes of the central tree and the cumulus cloud above.

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Seller of Snails

This small, well-executed, disagreeable painting on copper may be more than just a particularly repellant genre scene. Beginning e generation before Filippo’s activity, certain paintings reasserted the divine or natural social order by identifying certain foods as suitable to the appetites of the lower classes. More refined, literally lofty meats were assigned to the more delicately nurtured.

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Two Shells

This painting illustrates the fluid boundaries between natural science and visual arts. The mollusk on the left is Tridacna elongata, the one on the right, Cassis cornuta, both are from the Indian Ocean. This was the age of taxonomy, under the influence of Aristotle and discovery.

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