Kunelakis, Nikolaos

Nikolaos Kunelakis was born on the island of Crete in 1829 . At this time, the Liberation War of Greece ended, but Crete remained outside of the revived Greek state.

The ongoing Turkish persecution forced father Kunelakis to emigrate with his family to Russia, to Odessa . Subsequently, the family moved to St. Petersburg , where Nikolaos entered the Academy of Arts .

In 1857, Kunelakis traveled to Rome and Venice to get closer to the works of Renaissance artists.

Ultimately, Kunelakis settled in Florence . Here he lived and worked until 1867. During this period, he met and married a Zoe Campani, a Greek woman. But the wife died of tuberculosis a year after the wedding.

The artist also contracted tuberculosis and decided to move to a hotter Egypt . On the way to Egypt, he visited Athens and the Acropolis of Athens .

Kunelakis died in Cairo in 1869 ^[1] .

Kunelakis left behind a limited number of works, both because of his short life (he died at the age of 40) and because of his careful, but slow work.

Despite this, his work provided him a place among the significant Greek artists of the 19th century. Although Kunelakis painted mostly portraits, he owns a number of significant paintings of a semi-naked and naked human body. Most of the surviving works of art in Greece belonged to the Kunelakis family. This is a portrait of his wife, Zoe Campani, Group portrait of the artist's family, Head of an old woman, Mother and daughters. All these works are kept in the National Gallery of Greece .

The self-portrait of the artist and the portrait of the Countess John Volter are in the collection of Euripides Kutlidis, while his paintings are naked in other collections.

The Greek public was late in getting acquainted with the works of Kunelakis.

His name was first noted in 1878, in the magazine “Estia” (Outbreak), according to which his mother-in-law, Eftimia Kompani, presented 7 works of the artist to the Gallery of the School of Fine Arts.

The Greek public met directly with the art of the artist in 1895, at the exhibition “Society of Friends of the Muses”. The artist's works were exhibited in 1900 at the exhibition "Society of Art Lovers".

Since 1915, the National Gallery has exhibited Kunelakis's Family Portrait at all exhibitions in Zappio . Recognition of Kunelakis in Italy is confirmed by his self-portrait, which is kept in the Uffizi and the “Head of an old woman” stored in the Museo Civico of the city of Padua . In Kunelakis’s paintings with a mythological theme, his acquaintance with the works of Jean-Auguste Ingres ^{[2] [3] [4]} affects him.