Pietro Antonio Novelli Biography
Pietro Novelli, known as the Monrealese (Monreale, 2 March 1603 – Palermo, 27 August 1647), was an Italian painter and architect, the most important and influential artist of the seventeenth century in Sicily. He was one of the greatest painters of his time and was appointed architect of the kingdom. Giovan Pietro, his full baptismal name, is the fourth son of Pietro Antonio Novelli, also an appreciated painter. He trained in his father's workshop in Monreale. The young Pietro served his apprenticeship with the noble Carlo Maria Ventimiglia, mathematician and master of science. His human and artistic path, developed over a few decades in which the transition from late Mannerism to the first great season of Baroque took place. In addition to his activity as a painter which earned him the nickname Raphael of Sicily or the Sicilian Van Dyck from authoritative foreign critics, he was also an engraver, architect and military engineer for the two-year period 1643 - 1645 in Milazzo. Novelli constantly manages to renew his style, following the stimuli offered to him through knowledge, direct or mediated, of the results of the artistic culture of his times. In fact, in Palermo he was influenced by the paintings of the Genoese school present in the Oratory of Santo Stefano Protomartire at Monte di Pietà and by Caravaggio's Adoration of the Shepherds in the Oratory of San Lorenzo. The influences of the Flemish painters present in Palermo at the time were also strong, such as Antoon van Dyck who stayed in the Sicilian capital in 1624. In 1623, he married Costanza di Adamo and had two children, but the son (Antonio Geminiano known as Pietro Antonio ) died at a young age. His daughter, Rosalia, born in 1628, proved to be such a faithful disciple of her father's model that she could be confused with him due to the attribution of certain works. In 1624, when the plague afflicted the entire city, Pietro authoritatively embarked on his short but intense career. Novelli's travels had great importance in the evolution of his painting. He visited Rome between 1622 and 1625, where he had the opportunity to study the major painters of the Renaissance. During a trip to Naples in 1630, he saw the works of Jusepe de Ribera and some Neapolitan naturalist painters who encouraged him to develop a more realistic painting. In the years of his maturity, viceroys, aristocrats, exponents of the emerging bourgeoisie, churches, convents, monasteries, villas, companies, brotherhoods and congregations, in Palermo as in other centers of Sicily and beyond, competed to own a Novelli. To prevent and combat the frequent Barbary attacks by corsairs and pirates, as tensions worsened between Philip IV and the rulers of other European states regarding dominance in the Mediterranean Sea, he was called upon to hold the position of civil engineer starting from 20 January 1643. and soldier of the Kingdom upon appointment of the viceroy of Sicily Giovanni Alfonso Enriquez de Cabrera, count of Modica, for whose entry into Palermo he created the triumphal arch on 16 June 1641. On 21 September 1644 he also obtained the position of engineer and city architect for appointment of the Senate of Palermo, succeeding the deceased Vincenzo Tedeschi. These commissions definitively recognized his genius and fame, while his contemporaries, following the custom of the time, went so far as to suggest risky comparisons with Apelles or Michelangelo. He died five days later in the riots in Palermo on 22 August 1647, where he fought alongside his friend Giuseppe D'Alesi, and was buried in the friars' cemetery in San Domenico. In 1788, a century and a half after his death, the classicist painter Father Fedele da San Biagio wrote about Novelli's works: "When I see and consider them, I am surprised, and I would not be able to tear myself away from them. I remain enchanted by those heads painted, drawn, and sculpted to the ultimate subtlety, to the ultimate taste, and to the ultimate perfection, as far as art can reach". In 1828, by his biographer Agostino Gallo, a bust of him signed by Valerio Villareale was placed in the church of San Domenico, the pantheon of Sicily. Over a hundred works, including paintings and frescoes, with religious or secular subjects, are today unanimously recognized by him, together with as many drawings. Numerous of his works, paintings and drawings, are exhibited today at the Regional Gallery of Sicily in Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo.
