Giovan Andrea Coppola

Giovan Andrea Coppola

He was born in Gallipoli on 13 January, 1597. He moved to Naples, graduated in medicine; there, evidently, he acquired his first artistic experiences.About his artistic formation there are still difficulties and uncertainties, even though we can reconstruct his movements: firstly to Rome and then to Florence, to Paris in 1634 and the following year he returned to Italy: these were certainly decisive years for his artistic formation.In his early works he benefited from Bellisario Corenzio and Marco Pino’s works, to get refined through the experiences gained in Rome, France and Florence, where was staying his cousin Giovanni Carlo Coppola, to whom he owed  his classicist propension and his marked preference for Carracci. Coppola returned to Gallipoli in 1637 and married Elisa Rocci. Probably in that period he executed the sketches with scenes from the life of the Virgin and of the Saints Andrew and John the Baptist, on the wooden retable of the Pirelli altar and the Madonna of the Rosary in Alliste. In 1642 he executed the great painting of the Souls in purgatory in the Cathedral, thus beginning the great cycle of works, with the Assumption, Saint Agata’s Martyrdom, the Adoration of the Magi, the miracles of St. Francis of Paola, and finally the Virgin in Glory and the Saints Nicholas and Oronzo, that the painter did not have time to complete, because  his death occurred in January 1599.

[From: Il grande Salento per immagini (Storia - Arte - Cultura - Tradizione GALLIPOLI) Texts by Elio Pindinelli, Published by Il Salentino Editore - translated by Rocco Merenda]