Neapolitan Song

Neapolitan Song is an imaginary view of the Bay of Naples by the Italian-American modernist Joseph Stella, painted in 1929. The lush, exotic plants in the scene derive from studies Stella made at the Bronx Botanical Garden, rendered with the precision and devotion to nature he admired in Italy's Renaissance painters. The tips of a palmetto leaf radiate across the picture plane like a visible, unfolding wave of sound, evoking the song of the title. The painting reflects the homesickness Stella felt for his native Italy, which he had left for the United States in 1896; here the Neapolitan song seems to reach across the sea, bridging his old home and his adopted country. The work is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as a gift of Françoise and Harvey Rambach.