Achille Vianelli Biography
Achille Vianelli (Porto Maurizio, 21 December 1803 – Benevento, 2 April 1894) was an Italian painter, engraver and teacher with French citizenship. His father Giovan Battista Vianelli, originally from Veneto, had married a Parisian and therefore changed his name to Vianelly or Viennelly and assumed French nationality, becoming Napoleon's consular agent in Porto Maurizio. Achille kept his new surname and French nationality until after 1938. From Porto Maurizio the family moved to Otranto, where Achille spent his youth. In 1819 he was in Naples, to study painting; but his father and sister returned to France, to reunite with him only in 1826. In Naples Achille became an intimate of Giacinto Gigante, together with whom he studied the landscape taken from life, attending for a few months the school of Wolfgang Hüber - a German painter specialized in shooting topographical of academic taste - he then became a student of Anton Sminck van Pitloo, in whose atelier the Posillipo School originated in 1820, in which Vianelli also participated. In the 1930s he gradually abandoned oil landscape painting to dedicate himself to perspective views of squares and church interiors, created with the watercolor technique and especially with sepia monochromes, of which he developed a valuable technique. Many of his views were reproduced in etching or lithographed and published in volumes dedicated to the city of Naples. In 1848 he moved to Benevento, where he dedicated himself to painting and in 1850 he founded a drawing school in the Cloister of Santa Sofia. Among his students there was Gaetano de Martini. His son Alberto, also a landscape painter, born in 1847, moved to Paris in 1875. One sister, Flora, had married Teodoro Witting, a German landscape painter and engraver active in Naples, in 1826, and the other sister, Eloisa, became the wife of Giacinto Gigante in 1831. His nephew Gustavo Witting, son of Flora and member of the Gigante house, was also a landscape painter, among the late followers of the Posillipo School. His fame spread to France and Louis Philippe called him to give painting lessons to the kingː for this reason Achille Vianelli lived temporarily in France, until 1846. He died in Benevento, at the age of 91.
