Almost seventy years after the exhibition of drawings set up in 1955 by Palma Bucarelli in Valle Giulia, Domenico Morelli (Naples, 1823–1901) back to being the protagonist a Roma in the halls of National Gallery of Modern Art, as it had already been, in 1907 when the fund was exhibited consisting of graphic works, cartoons, sketches and paintings left in the artist's atelier at his death, purchased by the State and transferred from Naples to Rome.
Domenico Morelli on display in Rome: paintings, sketches, sculptures, works on paper
The exhibition Dominic Morelli. Imagining things not seen» offers a large part of the artist's very rich and heterogeneous fund together with works also coming from other public institutions or private collections, with the exhibition of about thirty paintings and 9 sketches, 9 sculptures, a corpus of 48 oil tablets on wood with landscape paintings made on the coast south of Naples, a large mixed-media cardboard and a conspicuous selection, 160 works on paper, among the over 800 sheets belonging to the Morelli collection conserved by the National Gallery. Moreover for the first time since the beginning of the last century, the canvas of the painting is shown to the public unfinished The Troubadour Among the Nuns, coveted at the time by the French merchant Jean-Baptiste Michel Adolphe Goupil and the subject of a conservative intervention by the students of the Central Institute for Restoration. After cleaning, the precious frames of the paintings appear in the variety of their techniques: carved and decorated with pure gold leaf and mecca silver, to which was added, in a particular case, the application of a strip of fabric on the wooden surface .
Dominic Morelli: who is he?
Considered one of the most important Italian artists of the second half of the XNUMXth century, Senator of the Kingdom of Italy in the XVI legislature, Domenico Morelli nominated for his importance consultant of the national museum of Capodimonte, in 1868 he obtained the teaching post at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples - where he had studied and where he had many students, including Giuseppe Costa, Francesco Coppola Castaldo, Giuseppe De Nigris , Raffaele Ragione and Achille Talarico.
The interest of the exhibition at the National Gallery is essentially due to the numerous documentary material which allows one to enter Morelli's pictorial world by following on the one hand the paths of his obsessive attention to expressive detail which leads him to create a considerable number of sketches before transferring his figures and his landscapes from his studies to his paintings and on the other hand his great mental openness to European artistic culture which will lead him in particular to rigorously approach the fascinating Hispanic oriental world and in particular the Arab world present in many of his works without being never been.
The Odalisque series: suggestions from the oriental world
Extremely sensual female figures with exotic features (among many, The Woman in the Oda, 1874, formerly in the Maglia collection, now in Tel Aviv (private collection), or in the Turkish Bath (private collection), which appear as evocative meditations on the of Mariano Fortuny, his friend and admirer.Morelli - underlines a profile dedicated to him by Treccani - had the merit of bringing together the lesson of the Spanish painter, from the refinement of Japanese art with its decorative motifs and its cold colors, to the flashes of vibrant light, restoring them in enchanting atmospheres, as in The sultana and the slaves returning from the bathroom (1883 Milan, Balzan Foundation).These choices provoked many negative judgments from the official critics, especially those of Tuscan origin , who at the National Expositions of Naples in 1877 and Turin in 1880 sided heavily against the Neapolitan school, accusing Morelli himself of having given in to «the art of fashion».
In a famous interview published in 1892 in "Il Pungolo", Morelli reveals his sincere vision of the Orient to a vast public for the first time and, when asked if he had ever been in those places of the Orient, he he replies: «[…] I carry it within me: my heart and mind are full of it: if I close my eyes, I think, I feel, I live in the East. Its uses, customs, rites learned with long and difficult readings leap before me as if recalled, by magic [...] the landscape, the air, the color I have studied in those who have studied it over there, and the I studied here where everything reminds of the Orient, here where it is felt and intuited. Go to Pozzuoli, to Cura, along our enchanting shores, go to Calabria and, everywhere, in the plains, in the sea, in the sky, in the inhabitants, feel the Orient[..]»
Morelli, in practice, did not feel the need to go that far and sincerely believed that the evocation of the climate and atmosphere of Naples, historically receptive and multi-ethnic, would not cause him serious internal imbalances. Southern Italy found it much closer to those places than the geographical distance between the Middle and the farthest East had established.
In addition to the landscape and a certain climate, even the cultural traditions established in the ancient Mediterranean capital prove him right. Since the eighteenth century, Naples had welcomed the famous community of the Chinese College where young people from the ancient Ottoman Empire stayed (Albanians, Bosnians, Montenegrins, Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks, Lebanese, Egyptians) in order to receive an adequate religious formation and ordination priestly to be able to carry out missionary activity in the countries of origin. Naples also had a link of history and civilization with ancient Egypt, supported by the cult of the goddess Isis and enhanced by the presence of excavated materials with everyday objects, exhibited in the Egyptian section of the ancient palace of the Royal Studies
Domenico Morelli: the mature years
The fame of Morelli, not just how painter but also as an active intellectual in the artistic and cultural institutions of united Italy, it was soon consolidated on a national and international scale. In fact, he was interested in the historical and social problems connected to the process of creating the unitary state, making himself a point of reference for the redefinition of the new role of the artist, engaged and participating in the construction of the new civil society
In his mature years he concentrated on religious themes, always according to a rigorous method of study and research of texts, from the sources and legends of Christianity to the positivist theories of Ernest Renan and David-Friedrich Strauss on the historical figure of Jesus. Christological, inaugurated in the 1902s with Christ walking on the waters of the sea – «among the first of these new works, which however is one of the least successful» (Villari, 22, p. 1900) – absorbed almost all of his late production ; for this period (from the late XNUMXs to XNUMX), think, for example, of the substantial nucleus preserved in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, including Good Friday, Pater Noster, Jesus Calls the Sons of Zebedee, Christ Watching the Apostles, The Repentance of Judas. The figure of Christ, an extraordinary coincidence of humanity and divinity, is imagined by Morelli as immersed in a strongly evocative setting, mindful of that Orient that he had known thanks to the photographic repertoires, of which he possessed a vast collection.
Domenico Morelli
National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art
Rome Viale delle Belle Arti 131
curated by Chiara Stefani with Luisa Martorelli
November 21, 2022 - January 29, 2023
