Commoner

(1856 – 1936)
Trained at the Naples Institute of Fine Arts under Domenico Morelli, Vincenzo Caprile preferred the formal synthesis of the Portici School. In this portrait of a young girl, the artist draws from the "genre" repertoire shared with his friends Gaetano Esposito and Vincenzo Volpe (entry 24), content to let those "tears of things" shine in images of girls from a simple life, in the hope that the subject might be purified through the qualities of form. A calm and objective narrative elevates the model to a dimension of noble composure, where pictorial expertise redeems the everyday fact into a pure and silent emotion.