Gennaro Villani Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Gennaro Villani (Naples, 4 October 1885 – Naples, 25 December 1948) was an Italian painter and teacher. Gennaro Villani began his artistic career at a young age and lived and worked between Italy and France. Read the full biography

Gennaro Villani (Naples, 4 October 1885 – Naples, 25 December 1948) was an Italian painter and teacher. Gennaro Villani began his artistic career at a young age and lived and worked between Italy and France. He stayed in Paris from 1912 to 1914 and during his Parisian period he was invited to join French Academies. He was a pupil of Michele Cammarano - whose teaching was based on a rigorous shooting from life and based on a dry pictorial language, characterized by a powerful and highly constructive chiaroscuro, of Gaetano Esposito and Vincenzo Volpe. With the experiences gained in France and with the knowledge acquired of the French impressionists and the Fauves painters, his style was more based on a freer use of color and diversified chromatic ranges: an example is the Pasture, a work that was exhibited at the Promoter Neapolitan painting from 1916 and purchased by Corrado Ricci for the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome. In the 1930s his work was strongly influenced by the style of the twentieth century artistic movement, with a return to traditional plastic-volumetric research. Only in the 1940s and in the last period of his life did he return to a freer use of colour. From 1922 to 1925 he held a teaching chair at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lucca and from 1922 to 1925 he held the chair of Landscape at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples. He became a close friend of many Neapolitan artists and writers, including Roberto Bracco, Salvatore Di Giacomo and Francesco Cangiullo.