Giulia Napoleone
(Pescara 1936)

Giulia Napoleone was born in Pescara in 1936. When she was twenty she moved to Rome where she was part of the lively artistic and literary scene (Flaiano, Carlo Levi, Maccari, Mazzacurati…). She also travelled abroad frequently: to Australia, North Africa, the Pyrenees and Scandinavia.
In Rome she obtained a second higher qualification at the Liceo Artistico I, and attended the Scuola del Nudo at the Accademia di Belle Arti. She became an enthusiast of photography and of music (she studied the violin). In 1958, she met Morandi: those were the years of her first exhibitions; more and more so, the artist felt a strong need to concentrate solely on painting. In 1965 she began to study and work at the Calcografia Nazionale (National Engraving Centre), a relationship which she consolidated later, between 1974 and 1976. She also had a long stay at the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam in order to perfect the art of copperplate engraving. Through Seghers, Rembrandt and the German masters of the 15th Century, she perfected the techniques of the burin, the pierce punch and mezzotint to bring to life “constellations of illuminated pins”. Around half way through the Seventies, she took part in Galleria dell’Arco, run by Giuseppe Appella. There were intense exchanges between artists, poets and writers, which led to the artist coming closer to the world of poetry, contemporary and not. From Lucretius to Mallarmé, from Baudelaire to Sbarbaro, folders and art books abound: “the journey of emotions which perhaps resemble a linear stenography, at the threshold of writing”. Then the colour explodes in her watercolours, shown in exhibitions in the early Eighties.
In 1997 the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica dedicated a considerable anthological show to her work, a collection of “works on paper”, produced in over thirty years of work, with copper-plate engravings, inks, watercolours and pastels in which abound “spiders webs in a single colour whose intensity varies continuously, and the flow of grids of signs, exact, mathematical” beyond which extends “the silence which corroborates an unlimited space”.

The artist, in parallel to her artistic quest, has had a long career of teaching art topics; for twenty years she held the chair for Pictorial Disciplines at Rome’s Liceo Artistico I.