Giacomo del Pò
Giacomo del Pò, also spelled del Po, was an Italian Baroque painter and engraver.
Biography
Early life and education
He was born in Palermo, the son of Pietro del Pò who was also his teacher. He was admitted to the Roman Accademia di San Luca in 1664. He was chiefly occupied in decorating the mansions of the Neapolitan nobility with emblematical and allegorical subjects. His earliest surviving paintings, Virgin and Child with St. Gaetano and Rest on the Flight into Egypt, are in the late Baroque classicist idiom then current in Rome. Within a short time, however, he came under the spell of Luca Giordano, whose influence is evident already in the Plague of Sorrento. In the few pictures securely datable to the 1690s, such as the Annunciation and Visitation, his accommodation of Neapolitan traditions is even stronger. His use of dark underpainting results in deep tonalities, and the emotional expressiveness of the figures often borders on sentimentality, particularly in single-figure compositions like the St. Casimir and St. Januarius.Mature work
Between 1700 and 1710 del Pò became one of the most dominant painters in Naples, with Francesco Solimena and Paolo de Matteis. In contrast to Solimena’s powerful chiaroscuro and de Matteis’s limp classicism, he offered an expressive, anti-classical style characterized by streaming filaments of deeply saturated colour, shimmering light effects and sweeping compositional movements that bear a strong affinity to the Genoese works of Gregorio De Ferrari; del Pò may have known of these through drawings and engravings. Although most of his surviving works are altarpieces and easel paintings, his contemporary reputation rested above all on the success of his decorative frescoes in Neapolitan palazzi. His only extant work in this genre consists of three frescoed ceilings, depicting elaborate allegorical subjects, in the Palazzo Mattei, Naples, for which two oil sketches, the Triumph of the Virtues and the Allegory of Virtue, survive.Other frescoes are known only through Bernardo de' Dominici’s descriptions and through rare oil sketches. Del Pò collaborated with Francesco di Maria and Francesco de Mura, in the frescoes for the Palazzo Carafa and the palace of the Prince Caracciolo de Avellino. He painted frescoes in the gallery of the Marquis of Genzano. In these works del Pò richly interlaced monochromatic figures with others painted in naturalistic colours to produce effects that de' Dominici called ‘bizzaro e pittoresco’; these were to constitute del Pò’s principal legacy to 18th-century painting in Naples.
Several of his church frescoes in Naples are in a similar manner, notably those in the transepts of Santa Teresa agli Studi and those above the portal to the convent of San Gregorio Armeno. In these, as in the commemorative portraits of Gian Domenico Milano and Giacomo Milano in the sacristy of San Domenico Maggiore, Correggesque angels and allegorical virtues in imitation of bronze or marble sculpture are combined with the principal figures to create a dense pictorial structure. Del Pò’s numerous small pictures on secular themes were characterized after about 1710 by increasing luminosity and a more distinctly 18th-century style. He painted mythological works and a large number of pictures based upon literary sources, such as two scenes from Paradise Lost – the Gates of Hell and the Sleep of Adam and Eve – which were the earliest painted illustrations of Milton’s epic poem in Italy. Camilla in Battle, which forms part of a series of paintings on copper illustrating scenes from the Aeneid, borrows its composition from del Pò’s Triumph of St. John of the Cross.