1. Geremia Discanno was an Italian genre and landscape painter, who collaborated with archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, art historian Emil Presuhn, and Naples-based chromolithographer Victor Steeger, to record wall paintings in the Roman ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum that were being excavated at the time.
Geremia Discanno's father, Gennaro Discanno, was a successful painter of ecclesiastical commissions who lived with his family in the wealthiest district of the city near the intersection of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele and the Corso Garibaldi, just around the corner from the birthplace of another famous painter and contemporary, Giuseppe De Nittis.
Raffael was imprisoned for two years while Gennaro, Geremia Discanno's father, suffered only a one-year sentence to a spiritual retreat in a monastery of Capuchin friars because of his relationships with the church and local clergy.
Geremia Discanno demonstrated his natural gift for art by painting "King Manfredi's Tournament" in 1859, a copy of a curtain made for the Piccinni Theater in Bari by the eminent Terlizzi painter, Michele De Napoli.
Meanwhile, Geremia Discanno studied under the guidance of conformists Domenico Morelli and Filippo Palizzi, two of the faculty who voted to expel Geremia Discanno's former neighbor, De Nittis, from the Institute for insubordination in 1863.
Geremia Discanno participated in the "Solemn Exposition of the Society of Encouragement of the Belle Arts" and garnered respectable sums for his paintings, more than acclaimed artists Giovanni Boldini, Giovanni Fattori and Telemaco Signorini.
However, De Nittis left suddenly for Paris and the bright lights of the Ville Lumiere while Geremia Discanno returned south, retiring in solitude to a remote farm in the Canosan countryside.
Between 1868 and 1870, Geremia Discanno shuttled back and forth between the farm and the city while he continued to paint, but struggled with stingy commissions and few awards.
Geremia Discanno became so knowledgeable about the art of Pompeii that he served as arbiter in controversial interpretations between archaeologists and art historians.
Geremia Discanno was consulted repeatedly by renowned Dutch painter of classical subjects, Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
In 1890, Geremia Discanno was commissioned by the empress Elizabeth Amelie Eugenie von Witterback, wife of Franz Joseph of Hapsburg, emperor of Austria-Hungary, to decorate the vaults and stairways of her imperial villa known as the Achilleion, on the Greek island of Corfu with Pompeian designs.
Between 1902 and 1904, Geremia Discanno was engaged in the development of an adhesive to preserve frescoes exhibited at the museum in Naples as evidenced by correspondence in the archive of the Superintendency of Naples.
Unfortunately, Geremia Discanno was sued by one of his subordinates and their collaborators, who claimed to be the actual inventor and demanded exclusivity of the process.
Geremia Discanno continued to paint oils on canvas depicting Apulian rural scenes.
Geremia Discanno died shortly after its completion on January 14,1907, in Naples.