Giuseppe Raggio (1823–1916) was an Italian painter.

Life and career

He was born in

Chiavari Chiavari (; ) is a seaside comune (municipality) in the Metropolitan City of Genoa, in Italy. It has about 28,000 inhabitants. It has a beachside promenade and a marina and is situated near the river Entella (river), Entella. History Pre-Rom ...

, and while his father wished him to join the merchant marine, by 1845 he had decided to study painting, and participated in his first exhibition in Genoa. He enrolled in the

Accademia di Belle Arti This is a list of the tertiary-level schools or academies of fine art in Italy that are recognised by the Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca, the Italian ministry of higher education. Accademie di Belle Arti The of ...

Florence Florence ( ; ) is the capital city of the Italy, Italian region of Tuscany. It is also the most populated city in Tuscany, with 362,353 inhabitants, and 989,460 in Metropolitan City of Florence, its metropolitan province as of 2025. Florence ...

, where he studied under the neoclassical painter

Giuseppe Bezzuoli Giuseppe Bezzuoli (28 November 1784 – 13 September 1855) was an Italian painter of the Neoclassical and Romantic periods. Biography He was born to Luigi Bazzuoli, a farmer, and his wife Anna, née Banchieri. Later, he changed the spelling of ...

. By 1846, he became friends with

Giovanni Fattori Giovanni Fattori (September 6, 1825August 30, 1908) was an Italian artist, one of the leaders of the group known as the Macchiaioli. He was initially a painter of historical themes and military subjects. In his middle years, inspired by the Bar ...

and painters of the

Macchiaioli The Macchiaioli () were a group of Italian painters active in Tuscany in the second half of the nineteenth century. They strayed from antiquated conventions taught by the Italian art academies, and did much of their painting outdoors in order ...

movement who frequented the

Caffè Michelangiolo Caffè Michelangiolo was a historic café in Florence, located in Via Larga (now renamed Via Cavour). During the nineteenth century Wars of Italian Independence, it became a major meeting place for Tuscan writers and artists, and for patriots an ...

. In 1848, amid the revolutionary turmoil, Raggio moved to

Rome Rome (Italian language, Italian and , ) is the capital city and most populated (municipality) of Italy. It is also the administrative centre of the Lazio Regions of Italy, region and of the Metropolitan City of Rome. A special named with 2, ...

. In Rome, he met the painter of agrarian subjects, Nino Costa. While he continued to paint some religious subjects such as a ''Holy Family'' (1854, Genoa) and a ''Samaritan'' (1862), Raggio by 1860 favored scenes of cattle farming in the Lazio countryside sa subject matter for his paintings. His ''Bufali'' (1860) at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence marks this change. In 1865 at Dublin, he exhibited ''Campagna Romana''. He painted in oil and watercolor. In 1880 in Turin, he exhibited '' Bovi che vanno all' aratro''; at the 1881 Exhibition of Milan, ''tratto della Campagna romana''; in 1883 in Rome, ''La malaria'' and ''Jolillius''; and at the 1884 National Exhibition of Turin, ''Pellegrinaggio di ciociare at Rome alla visita di San Pietro''. Other paintings include: ''Bufalo alla palude''; ''Mandria di bovi''; ''All'abbeveratoio''; ''Paesaggio romano''; ''Scena campestre e Solitudine''; ''Un duello interrotto'': ''Costume romano''; ''Cavallari romani''; and ''La pastura nelle campagne romane''. For a 1913 exhibition, the painter and art critic Sartorio spoke of Raggio as a

man of simple nature, a believer, who does not know what the world owes to the value of his genius... bypassed and excluded between two generations of painters... (he is an) Artist not to budging an inch from the convictions which he had set himself, and his paintings, from a young age to today, have only one character, a single focus: to tell the story of the humble inhabitants of the Roman Campagna in communion with the herds of sheep and cows. He depicts views of the town devastated by floods and cataclysms, desolate with fever, and in which living descendants of those aborigines, who conserve the seeds of Ancient Rome, and of the right of Catholic morality. The population while poor and stray, maintains the innate goodness, spirituality, generous and fantastic, and fair in his humility, this has pleased the Ligurian painter.

In 1915, he was knighted in the

Order of the Crown of Italy The Order of the Crown of Italy ( or OCI) was founded as a national order in 1868 by King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II, to commemorate Italian unification, the unification of Italy in 1861. It was awarded in five degrees for ...

. Due to his advanced state of poverty, a commission from the Società Economica di Chiavari, composed of Pietro Gaudenzi, Giuseppe Canevelli, and Luigi Brizzolara, approached him to buy some of his works at a reasonable price. He died by October of the next year. Raggio's work has been sold at auction on multiple occasions. The record paid for one of his works was $17, 996 USD for ''Arab horseman resting outside a mosque,'' in 2007, at Christies in London.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Raggio, Giuseppe 1823 births 1916 deaths 19th-century Italian painters Artists from the Kingdom of Sardinia Italian male painters 20th-century Italian painters Painters from Rome Painters from Lazio Italian painters of animals Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze alumni 19th-century Italian male artists 20th-century Italian male artists