The Posillipo School

The collection of paintings displayed in these rooms includes the names of the most influential painters of the Posillipo School. In terms of completeness, homogeneity, quantity and, above all, the quality of the works, the Correale Museum’s collection is considered to be the most important collection of nineteenth-century Neapolitan landscape painting in existence today.

The Posillipo School was founded by the Dutch landscapist Anton Sminck Van Pitloo (Arnhem, 1790 – Naples, 1837) in 1820. Having arrived in Naples in 1816, Pitloo cultivated his artistic interests in the city, finding an ideal patronage and a fertile stimulus for his work. The artist began painting by sticking to the ‘from life’ observation of nature, translating his personal interpretation of the landscape and the effects light produced on it into painting, starting with en plein air drawing. He also introduced the technique of oil painting on canvas or cardboard, abandoning the use of an easel. Pitloo’s innovative idea was to complete the painting without second thoughts, so as to capture and transfer the mutability of light onto canvas. His paintings were particularly appreciated by the new generation of painters, so much so that he was identified as ‘one of the most brilliant artists of the time’.

Pitloo’s personal vision of painting and painting techniques led him to found a school, which was called the School of Posillipo because he observed the city from the top of the hill district of Posillipo, a privileged position to enjoy splendid panoramic views.
Pitloo’s house-studio became a veritable hotbed of talent: numerous young artists destined to become great names in a new, fertile artistic season belonged to the Posillipo School: Teodoro Duclere, Achille Vianelli, Gabriele Smargiassi, the Palizzi brothers as well as Giacinto Gigante, the true great heir to the pictorial revolution introduced by Pitloo.

The landscape, in the renewed vision of the Posillipo school followers, became a classroom for drawing and painting, but above all it was considered the true centre of representation. It thus happened that air, water, earth and fire became sky, sea, countryside and volcanoes, matter always characterised by a shining, delicate, almost transparent, natural aura. Romantic.
In addition to depicting Vesuvius, the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the hills and seashores of Naples and Sorrento, the painters of Posillipo also depicted calm scenes of everyday life, animated by lively popular figures, immersed in an unspoilt and always soothing nature.
The small canvases produced – particularly intense and engaging – became masterpieces, the object of desire of the Neapolitan nobility but also of the many foreign visitors on the Grand Tour, who bought directly from the hands of the painters

After Pitloo’s death from a cholera epidemic, Giacinto Gigante became the most original interpreter of the School. He excelled in watercolour technique and representations of pure colour, thus emancipating Neapolitan landscape painting: his production amplifies visual astonishment with chromatic effects of rare, delicate, shining, almost liquid beauty.
From 1851, Giacinto Gigante became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, going on to a brilliant career that led him to the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1867 and 1869.