GARGIULO, Domenico

Italian painter and draughtsman. He received the nickname Micco Spadaro because his father was a maker of swords (spade). He was trained from about 1628 in the workshop of Aniello Falcone, where Andrea di Leone (d. 1677) and Salvator Rosa were also studying; de Dominici recounts that Gargiulo and Rosa painted landscapes in the open air in the Neapolitan countryside. His early works were influenced by Paul Bril, who in 1602 had painted landscape frescoes in the atriumGLOSSARYthe colonnaded forecourt on the west side of an early Christian church, originally the open central forecourt of a Roman house. of Santa Maria Regina Coeli, Naples, and by the vivid realismGLOSSARYRealism (with an upper case "R"), also known as the Realist school, denotes a mid-nineteenth century art movement and style in which artists discarded the formulas of Neoclassicism and the theatrical drama of Romanticism to paint familiar scenes and events as they actually looked. Typically it involved some sort of sociopolitical or moral message, in the depiction of ugly or commonplace subjects. One of the main representatives and spokesmen was the painter Gustave Courbet. In the dispute about ways to represent reality, Realism rebelled against the idealistic and classicist tendencies in painting. of Filippo Napoletano's small landscapes. The latter arrived in Naples in 1627-28 and may have stimulated Gargiulo's interest in the etchings of Jacques Callot and Stefano della Bella.

It is probable that Gargiuolo spent time in Rome where he became familiar with the landscape painting then in full flower. He worked for the Carthusians in Naples over a period of more than twenty years. He began in 1637 with two frescoes in the atrium of the church of San Martino. These were followed between 1638 and 1640 with a lunette in the so-called Tesoro Vecchio. In 1640-42 he decorated the lay brothers' choir in the Certosa di San Martino.

Gargiulo was in contact with the German painter Johann Heinrich Schönfeld, who sojourned in Naples from 1638 to 1643, who was also indebted to Callot's engravings.