Italian Orientalism
Neapolitan Orientalists
The study of history was introduced in the 19th century and progress in transportation and travel brought geography into the imaginations of Neapolitans.
The opening of the Suez Canal
The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 provided direct access from the Mediterranean to the Horn of Africa, where Italy embarked on its colonial policy. Such conquests did not immediately affect painters. Except for Vincenzo Marinelli, Marco De Gregorio, and Ettore Cercone, they were rarely travelers.
Yet they managed to arouse in bourgeois society a taste for the exotic, thereby fueling a market and a passion for collecting.
Orientalism took shape in Naples thanks to an imaginary world created by painters, many of them foreign like Jean-Léon Jérôme (backed by company Goupil & Cie), Benjamin Constant, and Horace Vernet who spent a lot of time in Italy and Algeria, and it was strongly associated with verism.
A typical example of Neapolitan Orientalism in our gallery is portrait of Two Oriental Women by Ettore Cercone.