Francesco Di Bartolo (17 January 1826 – 2 February 1913) was an Italian engraver and painter, active in Naples, Rome and Catania, mainly in the field of intaglio printmaking. Biography
Born in Catania to the jurist Antonino Di Bartolo and Giuseppina Consoli (1794–1877), he received his early education in his native city. He was a nephew of Giacomo Di Bartolo, known as Bartulu, a patriot, soldier, orator and tribune of Catania who played a prominent role in the city's public life during the Risorgimento. Calcedonio Reina described Francesco as the “nephew of the celebrated leader of the people”. Di Bartolo produced an etched portrait of his uncle entitled Giacomo Di Bartolo, cittadino catanese (“Giacomo Di Bartolo, Citizen of Catania”).
Although his family intended him for legal studies, he showed an early inclination for the arts; he therefore refused to follow his father's profession and, under the guidance of the Sicilian neoclassical painter Giuseppe Gandolfo, learned above all the fundamentals of drawing. In the same period he began his first experiments in copper intaglio in Catania, in connection with local makers of devotional images. The celebrated surgeon Euplio Reina, a family friend, recognized his abilities and supported the beginning of his professional career, obtaining for him his first commission in burin engraving, the Santa Marta, intended for the hospital of the same name in Catania, where Reina worked as physician and benefactor.
Later, after obtaining, thanks to the Santa Marta, an annual subsidy of 288 ducats from the Decurionate of Catania, subsequently renewed on account of his merit in 1854, the young Di Bartolo enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples, in the class directed by Tommaso Aloysio Juvara, who, sharing the chair with Francesco Pisante, taught the "great genre", that is, classical burin engraving, but also the "different methods", that is, alternative techniques of printmaking. Here Di Bartolo produced his first important burin engraving, the emperor Charles V after Jovita Garavaglia, and became especially devoted to etching, which he found freer and more congenial to his own inspiration. Tommaso Aloysio Juvara created a class rich in talent, a true school, which also included Saro Cucinotta and Gaetano Micale. In the same context, Di Bartolo took part in the workshop of the San Carlo Borromeo, after Giuseppe Mancinelli, assisting his master, working in burin engraving and completing the work, which was published in 1875.
Di Bartolo's intaglio production, after he completed his academic studies in 1860, met with considerable approval, and the artist remained in Naples. Between academy and anti-academy, he formed friendships with artists of the Neapolitan school such as Filippo Palizzi, Domenico Morelli and Edoardo Dalbono, was one of the first members of the Società Promotrice di Belle Arti of Naples and produced some of his best-known etchings, also intended for subscribing members, such as La leggenda delle sirene after Dalbono. After Palizzi he translated lively animal scenes, and after Morelli, in particular, Tasso and Princess Eleonora d'Este and The Iconoclasts, commissioned by the House of Savoy.
In 1864 the royal house also commissioned him to engrave the portrait of King Victor Emmanuel II, on the occasion of the transfer of the capital from Turin to Florence. With these works, Di Bartolo entered the circuit of official commissions, in which engraved translation also assumed a function of dynastic and state representation. At the same time, however, concerned that the advent of photography might "bring about the collapse of the art" of reproductive engraving, in 1863 he had submitted the burin engraving of Saint Agatha and three etchings after Palizzi to the celebrated engraver Luigi Calamatta, director of the Brera Academy, "in order to obtain an opinion", receiving appreciation and encouragement to continue with etching rather than with burin engraving. Di Bartolo then worked in etching with renewed energy. The practice of engraving continued for a long time to retain strength, prestige and continuity. This fact is all the more significant when one considers that Di Bartolo also entered the system of Neapolitan illustrated publishing, taking part in the enterprise of Usi e costumi di Napoli e contorni descritti e dipinti by Francesco de Bourcard, in two volumes, 1857 and 1866, one of the most important illustrated publishing works of the nineteenth-century Neapolitan milieu, in which engraving continued to perform a decisive function of translation, dissemination and circulation of images. He illustrated two chapters with two etchings, later also hand-coloured, after original drawings by Teodoro Duclère: "Il castagnaro" and "Il paludano", in the second volume, published in 1866.
His work brought him fame and also earned him the post of honorary professor "with salary" at the Neapolitan Academy of Fine Arts, where he had studied.
Meanwhile, he continued incessantly to work on his copper plates, still in etching, in the art of portraiture, turning his portraits into his true "original works", which would make him famous and sought after by the most varied rulers and illustrious figures of his time until the end of his life. He was a renowned portraitist of the rulers of the House of Savoy, including King Umberto I and Margherita of Savoy,Queen Margherita, who granted him numerous honours, and of various illustrious men of his time, including Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour and the ministers Cesare Correnti and Salvatore Majorana Calatabiano.
In 1872 he moved from the Academy of Fine Arts to the Royal State Calcography in Rome, following his master Aloysio Juvara, who had been called there by the Minister of Public Education Cesare Correnti for the reorganization and reform of the Institute and had then been appointed co-director together with Paolo Mercuri. There Di Bartolo worked on important ministerial commissions, and therefore on his most significant burin engravings, such as Sacred and Profane Love after Titian, the Madonna and Child after Murillo and the Madonna of the Harpies after Andrea del Sarto.
He remained there even when, because of internal problems and rivalries within the Institute, his master Aloysio Juvara took his own life in 1875, continuing to struggle and work in an often hostile environment, producing graphic masterpieces such as the drawing of Michelangelo's Last Judgement, which he was not allowed to translate into an etching.
In the spring of 1876, during his years at the Royal State Calcography in Rome, Di Bartolo was in Catania, where he received Pedro II d'Alcantara, Emperor of Brazil, as a guest in his own home. Di Bartolo had also portrayed the emperor in a work that is currently untraced.Giuseppina Freni, study on Francesco Di Bartolo, c. 1955. He accompanied Pedro II to the university, where the emperor attended incognito a lecture by Mario Rapisardi on the final book of Dante's De Monarchia, and also accompanied him on excursions to Mount Etna.
Di Bartolo also portrayed the Bey of Tunis and received him as a guest in his home in Catania.
In those years his position in the Roman milieu strengthened, and recognition also came with the summons by the Minister of Industry, Agriculture and Commerce Salvatore Majorana Calatabiano to take part in the artistic organization of the young Italian state in view of the Universal Exposition of Paris, held in 1878, in which Di Bartolo participated as a juror. He therefore appeared there not only as an exhibiting artist, but as a figure entrusted with representing Italian expertise in the field of applied arts and artistic industries. The appointment placed him at the heart of the Italian organization of the event; he entered the state machinery of juries, classifications, reports and national representations through which the young Kingdom of Italy presented its artistic and industrial image to Europe. In Paris Di Bartolo took part in the dual capacity of exhibitor in the engraving section and juror. His name is linked to Class XVII, relating to inexpensive and luxury furniture, and to Class XVIII, devoted to the work of upholsterers and decorators; the juries of the two classes in fact decided to join together because of the connection between the industries under consideration. Di Bartolo wrote the official report Industria dell'intaglio in legno, intarsio e mosaico in Italia, included in the Annali del Ministero di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio – Esposizione Universale del 1878 in Parigi, published in Rome in 1879, dealing in particular with the artistic part of the industries covered by the two classes. The appointment documents the recognition of Di Bartolo not only as an artist, but also in technical and institutional terms, as he was called to assess Italian production in an international setting in which art, industry, decoration and the modern organization of the image were brought into direct comparison.
His participation in Paris also had an official sequel. After the close of the Exposition, Di Bartolo received a sovereign recognition for the merits acquired during the event, together with the commemorative medal sent by the French Government. The episode confirms the role assumed by the engraver not merely as the author of exhibited works, but as a representative of Italian artistic culture in an international context regulated by juries, ministerial reports and institutional hierarchies.
In all national and foreign exhibitions Di Bartolo showed his splendid engravings, especially his etchings, winning prizes and gold medals. His exhibition activity is documented from the 1859 Exhibition of Fine Arts at the Royal Bourbon Museum in Naples, where he exhibited six engravings and obtained a silver medal; from the Universal Exposition of Paris of 1867, where he presented The Iconoclasts after Morelli; from the First Italian Exhibition of Fine Arts in Parma in 1870, where he obtained another silver medal; from the Universal Exposition of Vienna of 1873, where the works he sent were awarded a bronze medal; from the Promotrice of Palermo in 1876, where the Portrait of the Count of Cavour won him the gold medal; and from the Exhibition of Messina in 1882. At the Vatican World Exhibition in Rome in 1888 he obtained the gold medal with the copper engraving of the Pope, Il S. Padre Leone XIII.
For his works he was appreciated in France, Germany and England, and numerous academies elected him an honorary member. A significant part of his graphic production is also documented in the collections of the British Museum, which preserves eleven sheets connected with his corpus, including engraved portraits of Tommaso Aloysio Juvara, Filippo Palizzi, Domenico Morelli, Giulio Monteverde, Eleuterio Pagliano, Stefano Ussi, Francesco Saverio Altamura, Giovanni Dupré and Cesare Correnti, as well as The Legend of the Sirens after Edoardo Dalbono. In Russia, the Imperial Academy of Saint Petersburg appointed him honorary professor. The recognition from Saint Petersburg should not be understood as a generic foreign distinction: the Imperial Academy of Saint Petersburg was one of the major artistic institutions of the Russian Empire, the official centre for the training and legitimation of artists. Di Bartolo's inclusion among its honorary professors therefore attests to the consideration achieved by his engraved work outside Italy, in a European academic circuit in which the prestige of drawing, reproductive engraving and portraiture retained full institutional value. Exhibition success was thus accompanied by international academic recognition, consistent with the circulation of his work and with the role assumed by the artist in the exhibitions and artistic institutions of the second half of the nineteenth century.