Giuseppe Palizzi (Lanciano 1812 - Paris 1888)

Together with his brother Filippo, Giuseppe Palizzi (Lanciano 1812 – Paris 1888) belonged to a dynasty of painters that made a major contribution to artistic developments in the South of Italy in the 19th century. For Palizzi, as for Giacinto Grande, the example of the French, English and Dutch artists who helped to make Naples an artistic and cultural centre with links to northern Europe was of primary importance.
Nonetheless, a stay in Paris from 1844 onwards also had a major influence on the artist. The example of Corot, which Palizzi had already absorbed, was augmented in Paris by the impact of Courbet’s powerful realism. Back in Naples in 1854 for a short time, he described the novelties of the Parisian cultural scene to his brother Filippo. He then returned to the French capital, spending the rest of his career in the fervid atmosphere surrounding the search for artistic languages.
However, Giuseppe Palizzi did not follow the main path of French art after the 1860s, which was to lead to Impressionism. His works, in fact, reveal an entirely original relationship between the new Neapolitan school of painting and the style of landscape art, between romantic and realist, developed by the French artists active from the 1830s onwards, which Courbet later endowed with intense materialism.