Eugenio Zampighi Biography | Oil Paintings

Eugenio Zampighi was thirteen when he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Modena to study under Antonio Simonazzi, he was also influenced by the Realist Modenese painter Giovanni Muzzioli.

After Eugenio Eduardo Zampighi won the Poletti Prize in 1880 at the age of twenty-one, for his painting A Retiarius Gladiator Wounded in a Flavian Amphitheater, he first went to Rome and later Florence to continue his studies and where he settled in 1884. During the 1880s, he began to create a collection of genre scenes, which had phenomenal success on the art market and brought him worldwide commissions. His style was influenced by that of Gaetano Chierici, and the Florentine Macchiaioli School.

Inspired by, and most fond of, the domestic lives of the peasants, Zampighi displayed sympathy for their small, intimate world and no detail was inconsequential, everything was studied and reproduced.

Eugenio Zampighi's work as a photographer was for the most part utilized to take photos of models in peasant costumes to use in his painting and took place in his studio. These photographs were used as a reference to create a happy and idyllic image of Italian rural peasants and their home interiors, devoid of any social criticism, which was so appreciated by the foreign tourists. Having a successful formula he painted the same stereotypes right into the 1930s.

Art Movement: Realism.
Artists Influencing Eugenio Zampighi: Antonio Simonazzi, Giovanni Muzzioli, Gaetano Chierici.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.