Pio Joris - The Supplication

The painting shows a commoner carrying her sick daughter to the sanctuary (visible in the background above) to beg for her healing and who, overwhelmed by the weight and pain, stops along the steps.

Pio Joris attended the Academy of Rome between 1855 and 1860 and the Academy of San Luca for only one year in 1861. Unfortunately, no surviving evidence exists from his early years or his youth, and we therefore lack useful comparison elements for dating. At the time, students were trained according to the classical-mythological-biblical genre models that were dominant both inside and outside the Academy from the final decades of the eighteenth century until after the Restoration and again until the 1840s and 1850s. The work in question, however, while maintaining an academic character (firm contours, full volumes, smoothly applied colors, steady and uniform lighting), addresses a social issue through a narrative and pathetic approach, demonstrating the assimilation of both Romantic themes (the emphasis on sentiment) and Verist themes (the episode itself is 'real' even if reconstructed in the studio from memory and imagination).

The painting thus appears to be an early work, dating back to before the "turning point" of 1866, when Joris, accompanied by his friend Vertunni, spent a long summer in Naples, Sorrento, and Capri, seeking out new landscapes. During this stay, Joris personally met Palizzi and Morelli, and this encounter brought about a radical shift in his style, which later became lively, vibrant, and bathed in vibrant light. Further developmental elements for Joris were his friendship with Fortuny and, through him, with the art dealer Goupil, and his long stay in Paris.

The work in question is therefore a rare (and therefore even more valuable), indeed a very rare testimony to Joris's youthful period, when he was still maturing and searching for his own personal style. However, interpreting the stone staircase in the background as the "Scala Fenicia" in Capri, one could even date the work to the autumn of 1866, that is, a delicate moment of transition when the artist, returning from his stay in Naples, still lingered on painting in the old manner and had not yet adopted the new style he would soon adopt.

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