Bartolomeo Pinelli was an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 illustrator

Illustrator

An Illustrator is a narrative artist who specializes in enhancing writing by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text...

 and engraver.

Life

Pinelli was born and died in Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

, the son of a religious statues modeler. Pinelli was educated first in Bologna

Bologna

Bologna is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna, in the Po Valley of Northern Italy. The city lies between the Po River and the Apennine Mountains, more specifically, between the Reno River and the Savena River. Bologna is a lively and cosmopolitan Italian college city, with spectacular history,...

 and then at the Accademia di San Luca

Accademia di San Luca

The Accademia di San Luca, was founded in 1577 as an association of artists in Rome, under the directorship of Federico Zuccari, with the purpose of elevating the work of "artists", which included painters, sculptors and architects, above that of mere craftsmen. Other founders included Girolamo...

 in Rome. He lived in a poor quarter of Rome. His son, Achille Pinelli

Achille Pinelli

Achille Pinelli was an Italian painter. Born in Rome, he was the son of the painter Bartolomeo Pinelli and his wife Mariangela Gatti....

, was a famous watercolorist in his own right.

An extremely prolific artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

, his illustrations depicted the costumes of the Italian people, the great epic poems and numerous other subjects, including popular customs. In general, the most recurring subject is Rome, the ancient city as well as the modern one: its inhabitants and its monuments.

In his first years of independent work, he painted figures in watercolor in the style of the painter Franz Kaiserman. Starting in 1807, he produced an album of 36 watercolors, entitled Scene e Costumi di Roma e del Lazio. His first series of carvings, begun in 1809, was entitled Raccolta di cinquanta costumi pittoreschi incisi all'acquaforte. In 1816 he finished the illustrations for his work La Storia Romana and, in 1821, those for the work La Storia Greca . He also produced a series of prints on La Storia del Brigante Decapitito, about a brigand who, while he sleeps, is decapitated by his wife in revenge for having murdered her child. This particular work illustrates the attention Pinelli lavished on popular tales. Between 1822 and 1823 he finished a set of fifty-two prints for the work Il Meo Patacca

Meo Patacca

Meo Patacca or Roma in feste ne i Trionfi di Vienna is the name of a poem in rhymes written by Giuseppe Berneri .- The poem :...

.

He died poor on April 1, 1835.

Works

Oreste Raggi, writing in 1835, the same year that the artist died, cites many of Pinelli's designs and watercolors, and around forty collections of engravings published in Rome under ten different editors.

Among those:

• Collection of Roman costumes (1809) – 50 bronze carvings
• Another collection of Rome costumes – 50 bronze carvings
• The carnival of Rome – one bronze carving
• Roman History – 101 stamps
• History of the emperors, starting from Ottavio – 101 stamps
• Dante, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise – 145 stamps
• Costumes of the Roman countryside (1823) – 50 bronze carvings
• Torquato Tasso
  Torquato Tasso
  Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata , in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem...
  
  's Jerusalem Delivered
  Jerusalem Delivered
  Jerusalem Delivered is an epic poem by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso first published in 1581, which tells a largely mythified version of the First Crusade in which Catholic knights, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, battle Muslims in order to take Jerusalem...
  
  – 72 stamps
• Ariosto
  Ludovico Ariosto
  Ludovico Ariosto was an Italian poet. He is best known as the author of the romance epic Orlando Furioso . The poem, a continuation of Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, describes the adventures of Charlemagne, Orlando, and the Franks as they battle against the Saracens with diversions...
  
  's Orlando Furioso
  Orlando Furioso
  Orlando Furioso is an Italian epic poem by Ludovico Ariosto which has exerted a wide influence on later culture. The earliest version appeared in 1516, although the poem was not published in its complete form until 1532...
  
  – 100 stamps
• Virgil
  Virgil
  Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
  
  's Aeneid
  Aeneid
  The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of roughly 10,000 lines in dactylic hexameter...
  
  – 50 bronze carvings
• Collection of ancient costumes
• Greek History – 100 bronze carvings
• Costumes of the Kingdom of Naples – 50 bronze carvings (1828)
• Meo Patacca – 50 bronze carvings
• Swiss costumes (1813) – 16 bronze carvings

External links

• Aneddoti su Pinelli by Giggi Zanazzo (in Romanesco)