Wilhelm von Gloeden

Wilhelm Iwan Friederich August von Gloeden, also known as Barone Guglielmo, was born in Wisman on 16 September 1856 and he died in Taormina on 16 February 1931. He graduated in art history at the University of Rostock in 1876 and he continued in painting at the Grossherzoglich-Sächsische Kunstschule Weimar (1876-1877), an art school that existed from 1860 to 1910. Suffering from what appears to have been tuberculosis, moved to southern Italy, first to Naples and soon after to Taormina in Sicily in 1878, where he lived until his death.

He was a German photographer active mainly in Italy. He is best known for his studies of male nudes in a pastoral setting of Sicilian boys, which he photographed together with amphorae or costumes inspired by ancient Greece, to suggest an idyllic location in antiquity that refers to Arcadia. From a modern point of view, his work is notable for its skillful and controlled use of lighting, as well as the elegant posing of his models. The innovative use of photographic filters and skin lotions of his own invention, a mixture of milk, olive oil and glycerin to mask skin imperfections, also contributed to the artistic perfection of his works. He founded his own photography studio initially as a hobby and he began photographing boys in the 1880s, at the same time he created studies for portraits of local farmers and landscape photos. This passion turned into a profitable profession starting in 1893, when his work was exhibited internationally, his study of two young men clinging to an Ionic column was published in the English capital and this brought his work to the attention of a wider audience. After 1895, when his family suffered an economic collapse, exhibitions were opened in Cairo, Berlin, Philadelphia, Budapest, Marseille, Nice, Riga, Dresden and Rome. Most of von Gloeden’s work dates from this period up to the outbreak of the First World War. His idyllic “Illustrations of Homer and Theocritus”, or photographs of scantily clad young men in classical poses, were also reproduced as postcards and enjoyed some popularity as souvenirs for tourists.

While nowadays von Gloeden is best known for his nudes, in life he was also highly regarded and known for his landscape photography, which helped spread tourism in Italy, he also documented the damage caused by the Messina earthquake of 1908. Most of his images and portraits were made before 1914-15, in the period between 1890 and 1910. After 1918 he photographed very little, but continued to make new prints taken from the voluminous archives he possessed. The first monographic exhibition dedicated to Von Gloeden’s work was held in Italy only in 1978, in Spoleto, on the occasion of the Festival dei Due Mondi.