Giuseppe Cammarano
Portrait of Vincenzo Bellini
1819

About the Item

Artist: Giuseppe Cammarano Medium: oil on canvas Signature: Signed and dated lower right: “Gius. Cammarano f. 1819” Provenance: Naples, private collection Bibliography: G. Brevetti, L'altra faccia di un “bad painter of royalty and Olympus”. Su Giuseppe Cammarano e il suo inedito ritratto di Vincenzo Bellini, in “Valori Tattili”, No. 18, 2021, pp. 60-73 Provenance: Besançon, private colletion Giuseppe Cammarano, painter at the Bourbon court, executed this portrait of a young Vincenzo Bellini who arrived in Naples in 1819. Unlike the academic style required at court, here the artist expresses himself with extreme fluency. Indeed, the image embodies the vitality and energy typical of Romantic portraiture, here revealed through the wavy hair, the earring and the dreamy gaze turned to the right. In 1819, the date next to the signature at the bottom right of this portrait, Cammarano was busy decorating a room in the Royal Palace with the subject of Minerva rewarding the Virtues, but above all making portraits of the family members of the prince heir Francis I (Caserta, Royal Palace), which were to be included the following year in the large group portrait (now in Capodimonte) in which the spontaneity achieved in the individual portraits is lost, replaced by rather funny and disharmonious results. However, compared to those academic and clearly well-defined portraits, in this painting of a disheveled young man, the atmosphere is completely different. Evidently, not “restrained” by a courtly purpose, Cammarano felt free to venture into a style of painting not bound to strict rules and, in line with his young age and the temperament of his subject, produced an image that exudes energy and vitality with a romantic touch, shedding a new and unprecedented light on the evolution of the painter's portrait painting. The subject in question is most likely to be identified with a very young Vincenzo Bellini, whose features are well known thanks to a considerable number of portraits that show a variety of his physiognomic features such as the reddish hair, the shape of the eyes, the full lips, the earring on the left ear lobe, and more generally the Norman appearance. If we compare our portrait in particular with the one preserved at the Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella in Naples - dubiously attributed to Cammarano himself and probably executed a few years later - we can see a very close resemblance, not only in the facial features, but also in the choice of the young composer's posture, here too facing to his right. This second portrait would therefore have been made based on the first one, which would also have served as a precedent for a third portrait, also painted by Cammarano and in which, unlike the first two, the subject looks to his left (Naples, San Martino Museum).

Creator:

Giuseppe Cammarano (1766 - 1850)

Creation Year:

1819

Dimensions:

Height: 19.49 in (49.5 cm)Width: 15.36 in (39 cm)

Medium:

Canvas,Oil

Movement & Style:

Romantic

Period:

1810-1819