Filippo Palizzi - Dogs

Animal portraits in art have ancient origins, appearing even in primitive cave paintings. For religious reasons, various types of animals appear in the works of various ancient civilizations. It was especially in the Middle Ages, within the International Gothic style, that animal depictions became widespread as true life portraits, both within works of art and in notebooks of drawings and sketches. The presence of animals as subjects in art remained constant until the contemporary era.

The Palizzi brothers are renowned as artists of an extraordinary nineteenth-century school of painting. Their genre scenes are distinguished by an extraordinary level of refinement, reaching the pinnacle of naturalism. The most prominent was Filippo Palizzi, who specialized in animal depictions, which he executed with meticulous attention to detail. This panel, which, both in terms of its support and format, appears to be a sketch, an artist's exercise, nevertheless demonstrates Palizzi's remarkable pictorial quality. Even with a quicker, more informal approach, he managed to create lifelike dog figures with a perfectly naturalistic rendering. The hatching is rapid, but the richness of detail is extraordinary, as is the coherent play of shadows and the exaltation of the animals' three-dimensional qualities.

Filippo Palizzi was born in Vasto in 1818 and died in Naples in 1899. He initially modeled statues for nativity scenes, until he moved to Naples where he began to devote himself to painting. He trained first under Camillo Guerra and then under Costanzo Angelini and Giuseppe Bonolis. He was one of the first painters in Italy to attempt a veristic style. He focused primarily on genre scenes and animal portraits. His work was inspired by observation of life, but he also dabbled in photography.

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