The kind of blue of the Grand Tour
“If I could give happiness a nuance, it would be within the cooler of a Pitloo painting.“
Vin
The gouache opens the world to the story of the perception of Neapolitan-ness.
The art of reproducing the sky and the light of Naples in all its contrasts of colour and the blaze in the eruptions of Vesuvius is to consider the visual identity of the Grand Tour, which penetrated the freshness of the gaze of those travellers who, for around eight years, travelled in order to “learn how to live”.
Taste for the scenery of holiday landscape painting began with Philipp Hackert with his horizontal canvases and large, wide-angle views and continued on to Paolo[Jennie 1] Fabris, who probably introduced the the gouache technique to Naples.
The rapid, bold brushstrokes ensured the quick-drying of the colours on the palette, starched canvas and pieces of paper as a memento of the blue of Naples and Vesuvius.
In addition to any practical reasons, some masters sensed, to varying degrees, that this technique was the most fitting for portraying an eruption’s ceremonial mystery.
It is an animatedly cultured painting, rich in blue. More than a mere description of the places, via piercing light, chromatic blending and atmospheric allusions, the painting relies on reproducing the same state of mind created by a tangible impact with the city, its people, its natural environment, its art and history documentation, its exasperating meet-ups and exceptionally pleasant breaks in intellectual stillness.
A little later, the final fall of Louis Napoleon in 1815 caused Pitloo, who was resident in Paris at the time, to lose his previously granted scholarship. In what might have seemed a misfortune, it was actually the starting point for a powerful new era – the birth of the Posillipo School. The innovation in the local tradition of landscape painting introduced by Pitloo consisted above all of the depiction of reality and an impressionistic rendering of the effects of light and colour.
Like for the Impressionists, the label “Posillipo School” was given by the academics who weren’t at all enthusiastic about the “en plein air” way of painting and roaming around that part of the city full of Virgilian ruins, viceroyalty palaces and cliffs of tuff rock.
Leaving his native town of Arnhem, Pitloo studied in Paris and Rome and taking inspiration from William Turner, Camille Corot, Rebell and Dahl (to name the principal artists who had been through Naples before 1820), went on to create his very own artistic vision. It was intimate, calm and very much in the romantic climate of the time. And, as often happens in art, this cultural vitality of new thoughts mixed with the more or less famous protagonists of the Grand Tour translated into a new way of looking at things.
Like for the Impressionists, the label “Posillipo School” was given by the academics who weren’t at all enthusiastic about the “en plein air” way of painting and roaming around that part of the city full of Virgilian ruins, viceroyalty palaces and cliffs of tuff rock.
Leaving his native town of Arnhem, Pitloo studied in Paris and Rome and taking inspiration from William Turner, Camille Corot, Rebell and Dahl (to name the principal artists who had been through Naples before 1820), went on to create his very own artistic vision. It was intimate, calm and very much in the romantic climate of the time. And, as often happens in art, this cultural vitality of new thoughts mixed with the more or less famous protagonists of the Grand Tour translated into a new way of looking at things.
The landscape paintings of Naples and her marvels were so coveted by the travellers on their Grand Tour that they wanted to take a memento back home home with them. This was the reason why both talented and less talented painters had specialized in the production of these images that sellers had already been marketing for a century and a half.
The Neapolitan landscapes from the Tour in Italy were the preferred souvenir, much mythologized and hankered after. As Salvatore di Giacomo told us, not even the great royal landscape painter Jakob Philipp Hackert was above selling these formats to the Bourbon Court.
A foreigner in Naples, Pitloo created the base for that School that Giacinto Gigante inherited after the Dutchman’s premature death in the 1837 cholera epidemic. Gigante was already Pitloo’s pupil at the Academy.
Giacinto Gigante ably went on to demonstrate the vividness of the School’s effects of colour with a high level of experimentation. Light and colour were extremely important for the Posillipo School’s
training because, as Eduardo Dalbono wrote:
“ Pitloo stopped where he found pictorial inspiration: an effect of the light, a break in the clouds, a ray of sun, a darkening storm, a sunrise or sunset, a misty phenomenon, a gathering of figures, a tree, a street and everything that caught his artistic eye. These he translated truthfully, directly and with great haste onto his little pieces of paper”.
And like Pitloo, his pupils followed him in the exploration of a landscape revealed through emotion: Vianelli, Fergola, Smargiassi, the Palizzis and the Gigantes (to name the most famous). Eduardo Dalbono also called the Posillipo School the school of “hunters on the fly”. This pursuit of natural landscapes animated by an erupting Vesuvius, ruins that stretched from Paestum to Gaeta, figures intent in observation or of the moon or a stormy sea covered by pale blue or purple-ish skies anticipated that which was a real revolution of visual impression at the end of the nineteenth century in France.
Raffaello Cause efficiently synthesised that of Posillipo as “European painting that came from European presuppositions”, partly recalling the romantic ideas that from Goethe onwards had shaken up a Europe of aristocrats, painters and foreign writers meandering through Naples in exactly the same way as Shelley, Madame de Stael and many others had.
Leopardi died eight days before Pitloo during the same cholera epidemic in Naples. The interim spaces of the wayfaring painters in the Gulf of Naples are the colours of the Posillipo School – those same ones as the endless superhuman silences beyond the hedgerows, in a sea in which drowning is sweet among the broom bushes and volcanoes.
