Gabriele Iovacchini’s Paintings and Drawings

I was born in Abruzzo, a province on the Adriatic coast of Italy.  After completing my art studies, I worked as an art teacher. Since I was very young, I have been a great admirer of the Great Masters.
I love to copy their paintings not just to be appreciated by others but also because I love to have them at home, to be surrounded by them. Though such copies may have been made by an unknown artist such as myself, the oil copy of a famous painting shares almost all of the physical characteristics of the original if the materials and techniques are faithful to the original.  By contrast, a photographic reproduction shows neither the thickness of colour and cannot reproduce the dynamism of the brushstrokes.
Reproduction has a long and proud tradition.  Many famous artists drew inspiration from their predecessors by way of copying famous works of their time.  Tiziano Vecellio painted a copy of Raffaello's "Portrait of Julius II", which can be seen at the Uffizi Museum in Florence.  Peter Paul Rubens would alternate between his own paintings and reproductions of others; it is thanks to him that we can admire Leonardo da Vinci's "Battle of Anghiari", which was later lost; he also painted a copy of Raffaello's "Portrait of Baldassarre Castiglione". Francisco de Goya's copies of Diego Velasquez bear testimony to the promise of his apprenticeship.
Vincent Van Gogh enjoyed reproducing works of art from Millet and Daumier.  His copy of Eugene Delacroix's "Pieta" is famous. Paul Gauguin delighted in reproducing the works of his impressionist contemporaries. More recently, André Derain, who was self taught, often went to museums to copy Old Masters and Pablo Picasso reproduced many paintings he appreciated. One of Francis Bacon's most famous paintings “The Screaming Pope” is a reinvented image of the one first painted by Velasquez as his "Portrait of Pope Innocent X".
I do not aim for a perfect imitation, but rather I paint using the original work as a model, a guide to creating my own work.  My reproductions use oil on canvas and I do not use any assistance other than my own hand and eye.  My inspiration is drawn from art books, so the dimensions and colours might be very different from those of the original.  This is my way of paying homage to those artists that I love and respect and, most important in the words of Van Gogh: "I learn things".