Whether it be from direct influence or similarity of origin, Fortuny has found his ablest successors amongst the Neapolitan artists. As early as the seventeenth century the school of painting there was very different from those in the rest of Italy; the Greek blood of the population and the wild, romantic scenery of the Abruzzi gave it a peculiar stamp. Southern brio, the joy of life, colour, and warmth, in contrast with the noble Roman ideal of form, were the qualities of Salvator Rosa, Luca Giordano, and Ribera, bold and fiery spirits. And a breath of such power seems to live in their descendants still. Even now Neapolitan painting sings, dances, and laughs in a bacchanal of colour, pleasure, delight in life, and glowing sunshine.

Kunst für Alle.
MORELLI.THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY.

A wild and restless spirit, Domenico Morelli, whose biography is like a chapter from Rinaldo Rinaldini, is the head of this Neapolitan school. He was born on 4th August, 1826, and in his youth he is said to have been, first a pupil in a seminary of priests, then an apprentice with a mechanician, and for some time even facchino. He never saw such a thing as an academy. Indeed, it was a Bohemian life that he led, making his meals of bread and cheese, wandering for weeks together with Byron’s poems in his pocket upon the seashore between Posilippo and Baiæ. In 1848 he fought against King Ferdinand, and was left severely wounded on the battle-field. After these episodes of youth he first became a painter, beginning his career in 1855 with the large picture “The Iconoclasts,” followed in 1857 by a “Tasso,” and in 1858 by a “Saul and David.” Biblical pictures remained his province even later, and he was the only artist in Italy who handled these subjects from an entirely novel point of view, pouring into them a peculiarly exalted and imaginative spirit. A Madonna rocking her sleeping Child, whilst her song is accompanied by a legion of cherubs playing upon instruments, “The Reviling of Christ,” “The Ascension,” “The Descent from the Cross,” “Christ walking on the Sea,” “The Raising of the Daughter of Jairus,” “The Expulsion of the Money-Changers from the Temple,” “The Marys at the Grave,” “Salve Regina,” and “Mary Magdalene meeting Christ risen from the Grave,” are the principal stages of his great Christian epic, and in their imaginative naturalism a new revolutionary language finds utterance through all these pictures. There is in them at times something of the mystical quietude of the East, and at times something of the passionate breath of Eugène Delacroix. In these pictures he revealed himself as a true child of the land of the sun, a lover of painting which scintillates and flickers. As yet hard, ponderous, dark, and plastic in “The Iconoclasts,” he was a worshipper of light and resplendent in colour in the “Mary Magdalene.” “The Temptation of St. Anthony” probably marks the summit of his creative power in the matter of colour. Morelli has conceived the whole temptation as a hallucination. The saint squats upon the ground, claws with his fingers, and with fixed gaze tries to stifle thoughts, full of craving sensuality, which are flaming in him. Yet they throng ever more thickly, take shape ever more distinctly, are transformed into red-haired women who detach themselves from corners upon all sides. They rise from beneath the matting, wind nearer from the depth of the cavern; even the breeze that caresses the fevered brow of the tormented man changes into the head of a girl pressing her kisses upon him. Only Naples could produce an artist at once so bizarre, so many-sided and incoherent, so opulent and strange. Younger men of talent trooped around him. A fiery spirit, haughty and independent, he became the teacher of all the younger generation. He led them to behold the sun and the sea, to marvel at nature in her radiant brightness. Through him the joy in light and colour came into Neapolitan painting, that rejoicing in colour which touches such laughing concords in the works of his pupil Paolo Michetti.

A man of bold and magnificent talent, the genuine product of the wild Abruzzi, Michetti was the son of a day-labourer, like Morelli. However, a man of position became the protector of the boy, who was early left an orphan. But neither at the Academy at Naples nor in Paris and London did this continue long. As early as 1876 he was back in Naples, and settled amid the Abruzzi, close to the Adriatic, in Francavilla à Mare, near Ostona, a little nest which the traveller passes just before he goes on board the Oriental steamer at Brindisi. Here he lives out of touch with old pictures, in the thick of the vigorous life of the Italian people. In 1877 he painted the work which laid the foundation of his celebrity, “The Corpus Domini Procession at Chieti,” a picture which rose like a firework in its boisterous, exhilarating medley of bright colours. The procession is seen just coming out of church: men, women, naked children, monks, priests, a canopy, choristers with censers, old men and youths, people who kneel and people who laugh, the mist of incense, the beams of the sun, flowers scattered on the ground, a band of musicians, and a church façade with rich and many-coloured ornaments. There is the play of variously hued silk, and colours sparkle in all the tints of the prism. Everything laughs, the faces and the costumes, the flowers and the sunbeams. Following upon this came a picture which he called “Spring and the Loves.” It represented a desolate promontory in the blue sea, and upon it a troop of Cupids, playing round a hawthorn bush in full flower, are scuffling, buffeting each other, and leaping as riotously as Neapolitan street-boys. Some were arrayed like little Japanese, some like Grecian terra-cotta figures, whilst a marble bridge in the neighbourhood shone in indigo blue. The whole picture gleamed with red, blue, green, and yellow patches of colour: a serpentine dance painted twelve years before the appearance of Loie Fuller. Then again he painted the sea. It is noon, and the sultry heat broods over the azure tide. Naked fishermen are standing in it, and on the shore gaily dressed women are searching for mussels; whilst, in the background, vessels with the sun playing on their sails are mirrored brightly in the water. Or the moon rises casting greenish reflections upon the body of Christ, which shines like phosphorus as it is being taken from the cross: or there is a flowery landscape upon a summer evening; birds are settling down for the night, and little angels are kissing each other and laughing. In all these pictures Michetti showed himself an improviser of astonishing dexterity, solving every difficulty as though it were child’s play, and shedding a brilliant colour over everything—a man to whom “painting” was as much a matter of course as orthography is to ourselves. Even the Paris World Exhibition of 1878 made him celebrated as an artist, and from that time his name was to the Italian ear a symbol for something new, unexpected, wild, and extravagant. The word “Michetti” means splendid materials, dazzling flesh-tones, conflicting hues set with intention beside each other, the luxuriant bodies of women basking in heat and sun, fantastic landscapes created in the mad brain of the artist, strange and curious frames, and village idylls in the glowing blaze of the sun. There are no lifeless spots in his works; every whim of his takes shape, as if by sorcery, in splendid figures.

Hanfstaengl.
MICHETTI.GOING TO CHURCH.
Kunst für Alle.
MICHETTI.   THE CORPUS DOMINI PROCESSION AT CHIETI.

Another pupil of Morelli, Edoardo Dalbono, completed his duty to history by a scene of horror à la Laurens, “The Excommunication of King Manfred,” and then became the painter of the Bay of Naples. “The Isle of Sirens” was the first production of his able, appetising, and nervously vibrating brush. There is a steep cliff dropping sheer into the blue sea. Two antique craft are drawing near, the crews taking no heed of the reefs and sandbanks. With phantomlike gesture the naked women stretch out their arms beckoning, embodiments as they are of the deadly beautiful and voluptuously cruel ocean. By degrees the sea betrayed to him all its secrets—its strangest combinations of colour and atmospheric effects, its transparency, and its eternally shifting phases of ebb and flow. He has painted the Bay of Naples under bright, hot noon and the gloom of night, in the purple light of the sinking sun and in the strange and many-coloured mood of twilight. At one moment it shines and plays variegated and joyous in blue, grass-green, and violet tones; at another it seems to glitter with millions of phosphorescent sparks: the rosy clouds of the sky are glassed in it, and the lights of the houses irregularly dotted over abrupt mountain-chains or the dark-red glow of lava luridly shining from Vesuvius. Now and then he painted scenes from Neapolitan street-life—old, weather-beaten seamen, young sailors with features as sharply cut as if cast in bronze, beautiful, fiery, brown women, shooting the hot Southern flame from their eyes, houses painted white or orange-yellow, with the sun glittering on the windows. The “Voto alla Madonna del Carmine” was the most comprehensive of these Southern pictures. Everything shines in joyous blue, yellowish-green, and red colours. Warmth, life, light, brilliancy, and laughter are the elements on which his art is based.

Alceste Campriani, Giacomo di Chirico, Rubens Santoro, Federigo Cortese, Francesco Netti, Edoardo Toffano, Giuseppe de Nigris have, all of them, this kaleidoscopic sparkle, this method of painting which gives pictures the appearance of being mosaics of precious stones. As in the days of the Renaissance, the Church is usually the scene of action, though not any longer as the house of God, but as the background of a many-coloured throng. As a rule these pictures contain a crowd of canopies, priests, and choristers, and country-folk, bowing or kneeling when the host is carried by, or weddings, horse-races, and country festivals; and everything is vivid and joyous in colour, saturated with the glowing sun of Naples. Alceste Campriani’s chief work was entitled “The Return from Montevergine.” Carriages and open rack-waggons are dashing along, the horses snorting and the drivers smacking their whips, while the peasants, who have had their fill of sweet wine, are shouting and singing, and the orange-sellers in the street are crying their goods. A coquettish glancing light plays over the gay costumes, and the white dust sparkles like fluid silver, as it rises beneath the hoofs of the horses wildly plunging forward. The leading work of Giacomo di Chirico, who became mad in 1883, was “A Wedding in the Basilicata.” It represents a motley crowd. The entire village has set out to see the ceremony. The wedding guests are descending the church steps to the square, which is decked out with coloured carpets and strewn with flowers. Triumphal arches have been set up, and the pictures of the Madonna are hung with garlands. Meanwhile the sindaco gives his arm to the bride, beneath whose gay costume a charmingly graceful little foot is peeping out. Then the bridegroom follows with the sindaco’s wife. All the village girls are looking on with curiosity, and the musicians are playing. Winter has covered the square with a white cloak of snow; yet the sunbeams sport over it, making it shine vividly with a thousand reflections.

Hanfstaengl.
FAVRETTO.ON THE PIAZZETTA.

Of course, the derivation of all these pictures is easily recognisable. Almost all the Neapolitan painters studied at Fortuny’s in the seventies in Rome, and when they came home again they perceived that the life of the people offered themes which had a coquettish fitness in Fortuny’s scale of tones. From the variously coloured magnificence of old churches, the red robes of ecclesiastics, the gaudy splendour of the country-people’s clothes, and the gay glory of rags amongst the Neapolitan children, they composed a modern rococo, rejoicing in colour, whilst the Spaniard had fled to the past to attain his gleaming effects.