The Girl on the Rock in Sorrento (Fanciulla sulla roccia a Sorrento) is an 1871 painting by Italian artist Filippo Palizzi. Palizzi was deeply influenced by the return to Realism after Romanticism of the French Barbizon School of the 19th century.
The Barbizons were concerned with light and simple rustic and genre scenes. Palizzi’s strong diagonal of rock and the girl’s position looking out to the immensity of the sea at Sorrento provides a sense of ascent and the youthful and fearless projection of the self into the future. Her gaze lifts upward and continues the trajectory of the diagonal.
Filippo Palizzi’s The Girl on the Rock in Sorrento is in the Balzan Collection in Milan, Italy.