Giuseppe Errante

Giuseppe Errante ( born March 19, 1760 Trapani, † February 16, 1821 in Rome) was an Italian painter of classicism in Sicily and Rome.

Life

Errante was born the son of a leather merchant and went at a young age in the workshop of the lesser-known sculptor Domenico Nolfo in Trapani. Later he moved to Palermo at the painters Fedele Tirrito and Gioacchino Martorana. In 1784 he went to Rome for the architects and artist Giuseppe Barberi ( 1746-1809 ). Where he met Antonio Canova know, who introduced him to Roman society. In this time in Rome the altarpiece S. Vincent and Anastasius for the Basilica of the same name and the ceiling fresco wedding Cupid with Psyche in the Palazzo Altieri.

Between 1787 and 88 he was in Naples, where he received an annual pension and a house in Rome for his painting Leda and the Swan and for the decoration of the palace of Caserta King Ferdinand IV. In 1791 he was entrusted with the establishment of an art school in Trapani. Around 1794, it came against him for charges of a conspiracy, but managed to flee under a false name to Milan, where he worked as a painter and fencing master until 1810.

By the favor of Napoleon's General André Masséna he presented in 1806 Napoleon during his visit to the Milan Pinacoteca di Brera a series of paintings with mythological and allegorical content and subsequently received several significant orders. In 1810 he was invited by the Viceroy to go as head of the art school in Naples. Because rheumatic complaints he refused and hired himself in Rome was primarily as a hard master. 1815 and 1817 he published treatises on color. He died in Rome February 16, 1821 and is buried in the Roman church of San Salvatore in Onda.

While he was influenced initially by the Sicilian late Baroque, he later turned on studying the paintings of Correggio (which he often imitated ) the classical eclecticism of Anton Raphael Mengs to. Many of his works can be found in a French private collection. His main work, the dome fresco applies souls in purgatory in the Santa Maria della Morte in Civitavecchia.

One of his students in Rome was the portrait painter Giuseppe Gandolfo from Catania.

Works (selection)

• Santa Maria Dell'Orazione e Morte ( Civitavecchia ): dome fresco souls in Purgatory (1788 )
• Palazzo Altieri ( Rome): Ceiling fresco wedding Cupid with Psyche ( 1793)
• Museo Regionale Agostino Pepoli (Trapani): Still Life with rifles and pistols