Fireworks in Naples - Oswald Achenbach

Painting Detail

Fireworks in Naples
Artist: Oswald Achenbach
Medium: Painting, Oil on canvas, 65.5x101.5 cm
Date: 1875
Genre: Cityscape, Landscape
Source: Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, 1933

The view is to the west just after sunset with the darkened Castel dell'Ovo at the extreme left but the view no longer exists today, as it is painted from the old Santa Lucia section of Naples. The lighted church below the height of Mt. Echia, just to the left of center (with the silhouetted fountain backlit by fireworks) is the Church of Santa Maria delle Catene. It still exists, but the street in front of it, via Santa Lucia, is now an inside road, having been cut off from the sea by entire square blocks of new buildings and a new outside coast road built during the great urban renewal, the Risanamento, at the end of the 1800s. That new area sits on land reclaimed from the ancient and picturesque small harbor of Santa Lucia seen in this painting and that harbor is gone.