Biagio Mercadante

the man and the artist

Biagio Mercadante was born in Torraca on the 12th of May 1892 and died in Torraca on the 30th of August 1971. He was a painter whose work, both parallel and indifferent to all the avant-gardes, trends and fashions of the twentieth century, moves genuinely in the space of a life of province frozen in time and authentic. In the early years of the twentieth century the liveliest art being created in Naples was still that of the surviving masters of the great school of the 19th century. After the death of the two great innovators, Morelli and Palizzi, the young artists of the time, including Mercadante, learned from Maestro Michele Cammarano to construct the human figure, to render the anatomy of trees, to model the rocks and mountains silhouetted against skies cloaked in blue. We then see luminous landscapes and sketches of everyday life emerging from his rich palette, rendered with broad and effective brushstrokes.

In 1927 he was among the founding members of the "Gruppo Flegreo", which had his studio in Naples in the Porta Capuana area in the small Latin quarter.

In 1964 he was designated as a member of the Tiber Academy. He has been defined as a "lyrical and anti-rhetorical artist with an ancient spirit of the sacredness of the female body".

There is no other place for Mercadante, there is Torraca with its streets, its landscapes, its churches, its peasants, its threshing, its markets; a , in short a small, unique and traditional world, of habits and customs that do not change and which are at the centre of his art.

Upon his death, a poem was dedicated to him by his sister, the poet Gemma Mercadante, entitled “Emptiness”: “Since you left the world has emptied. Yet your things are intact, just as you left them. Not a voice, not a trembling call, just a longing for tears. The colours are so faded now that your brush is silent!”