Giovanni Battista Lusieri

Giovanni Battista Lusieri (1755–1821) was an Italian landscape painter from Naples. He was court painter to Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies before working for Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin and becoming involved in the removal and shipping of the Elgin Marbles to England.

Biography

According to the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD), Lusieri travelled in Naples, Greece, and Turkey. He was employed by Lord Elgin, to make drawings of the Acropolis. He is known today for removing and shipping the Elgin Marbles to London. Lusieri painted his landscapes in accurate detail, and resisted the fashion for imaginative constructions imitating Claude Lorrain, arguing that paintings should be taken from real life. From 1799 he spent his time working for Lord Elgin in Greece, and less time painting. Lusieri was originally employed to create sketches for Elgin of Greek antiquities. Lusieri was empowered to also employ moulders who were to create casts of Greek sculptures. Elgin however found that marble sculptures were missing and that they had allegedly been destroyed. It was Lusieri who persuaded the reluctant Elgin to remove the sculptures in order to protect them from local Turkish opportunists, who were breaking off bits to sell to tourists.

Legacy Lusieri's body of work was seriously reduced when many of his paintings were lost in a shipwreck in 1828.

A considerable number of his extant paintings are in the possession of the Elgin family. These paintings and others were in Lusieri's very first exhibition, at the Scottish National Gallery in 2012.