Giacinto Gigante (Naples 1806 - Naples 1876)

Giacinto Gigante (Naples 1806-1876) trained in Naples, where he spent the whole of his working life and where some of the most important new English painters, from Bonington to Turner, were working at the end of the 1820s. Gigante was influenced at an early age by these artists, who brought a new sensitivity to landscape painting, based on an intimate relationship between light and colour. This sensitivity went well beyond the tradition of strict vedutism to enrich the vision of nature with sentiments and emotions, making it the repository of complex relationships between its essential, objective reality and the artist’s emotions, moods and obsessions.
This subtle and intense sensitivity found new forms marked by the free effusion of colour in light, which had a profound influence on art in the second half of the 19th century in many parts of Europe.
The group of painters belonging to the Posillipo School working in Naples at the time found in Gigante an exponent of unrivalled skill and sensitivity. He was the most receptive to the lessons that new English painters were spreading in Europe, starting in France, where they made long stays, but also from stopovers in Italy.
Among the various ideas put forward by this new vision of landscape was the explicit manifestation of lyricism, which is particularly evident in Giacinto Gigante’s work.