Camillo de Vito Art

Eruzione del 1810 is a wonderful gouache on paper, made around 1810 by the Italian painter Camillo de Vito. Title and signature in black tempera on the lower margin. This is a really beautiful gouache of the first half of the nineteenth century representing the spectacular phenomena of the eruption of Vesuvius in 1810 under a suggestive full moon obscured by an cloud of ash and lapilli, still today marvels for the brilliance of the lava colors and which seems to be really glowing . It makes that feeling palpable, which is also an Enlightenment aesthetic category, of the sublime, or of the ecstasy mixed with the fear of man in the face of natural phenomena of this magnitude. We feel like the fisherman portrayed in the foregroud and bewildered in front of this show. In Good condition, it preserves the brightness of the colors and shows a very loose hand, with some very small abrasion and widespread fungal blooms, margins with some abrasion, a light water stain at the center and a light wavy paper. Since Vesuvius awakens, starting in 1631, the volcano becomes an iconic image of the city of Naples. His eruptions attracted incredibly scholars and visitors from all over the world. First represented for devotional purposes with San Gennaro next to the crater, it later became a must for the Grand Tour, together with the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, it is painted and celebrated by a large number of renowned foreign artists. Claude-Joseph Vernet, Hubert Robert, Jean-Honoré Fragonard establish new iconographic canons for the representation of Vesuvius and its surroundings which become simplified the reference models in the following century. It was the German Jacques Philipp Hackert (1737-1807) who rediscovered the technique of the gouache at the end of the 18th century and Pietro Fabris (doc. 1754 - 1779) who used it in the representations of Vesuvius in eruption, commissioned by Sir William Hamilton (1779) , as a supplement to five works at Campi Phlegraei...