I have just mentioned Francesco Solimena, an artist who gained recognition throughout Europe, and who was, after (or together with) Luca Giordano, the most highly-regarded and successful exponent of painting in Naples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the wake of the various local trends of the Baroque style. Unfortunately, none of Solimena’s work has been identified in the Holy Land, either. Yet in my opinion there is an indication of his high standing in the late eighteenth century, in both the major European courts and among illustrious patrons, on the one hand, and with the Franciscans who were involved in various ways with the adornment of the Holy Sepulchre and other sites in Palestine; and this reputation became stronger and more widespread especially after the early works of about 1680, with his initial study of Giordano and Pietro da Cortona, and then after 1690, when he revived the tenebrist, Baroque aspects of Mattia Preti’s Neapolitan work in a modern key. Solimena met with similar success and international esteem in the period in which Naples passed from Viceregal rule to that of the Viennese Hapsburgs (1707–34), when – touched by the idealism of Arcadian poetic culture – the painter first produced canvases and frescoes reflecting a sumptuous, bright classicism, as in the altarpiece of the Resurrection in the Belvedere Palace Chapel in Vienna, of which the preparatory sketch survives in the Österreichische Galerie in Vienna (fig. 10); after 1720, he created more complex compositions that were rigorously purist in form.19 The significant point here is that shortly before 1730, when (as Commissioner-General for the Holy Land in Naples) the Franciscan Father Giovanni Antonio Yepes planned the shipment of a cycle of fig. 9 Paolo De Matteis, Resurrection. Naples, canvases with Stories of Christ and the Virgin to Jerusalem and the Holy church of the Pietà dei Turchini Sepulchre, he turned not to the great master – now elderly, still very p. 66 fig. 8 Paolo De Matteis, Aurora and the Chariot of the Sun. busy, and above all, notoriously tight-fisted – but to the painter most Pommersfelden, Schloss Weißenstein receptive to his recent oeuvre, the young Francesco De Mura. According to Bernardo De Dominici, Solimena regarded De Mura as his most keen and sensitive pupil, and in any case the latter had recently provided notable proof of his qualities, and was earning a growing reputation through some prestigious commissions. After a brief apprenticeship with the modest Domenico Viola, De Mura had moved to Solimena’s crowded workshop in 1708, distinguishing himself within a few years by his adoption of the master’s style and standing out with respect to many other pupils and pedestrian followers. His success led him – perhaps on Solimena’s recommendation – to receive his first important undertakings, in 1713 and 1715 (Naples, churches of San Girolamo delle Monache and San Nicola alla Carità), followed between 1725 and 1728 by further work that was always marked by a careful, intelligent emulation of Solimena: he painted for the Collegiata dell’Assunta in Castel di Sangro, in Abruzzo (large canvases with Christ Shown to the People and Christ Falling on the 8BZ UP $BMWBSZ CFGPSF 7FSPOJDB, fig. 11, of which the sketches survive in the Bob Jones University Museum in Greenville, South Carolina, and the Molinari Pradelli Collection at Marano di Castenaso, respectively); for the church of the Annunziata in Airola, in the province of Benevento, and once again for the church of San Nicola alla Carità in Naples; and, notably, for Santa Maria Donnaromita in Naples he painted an Adoration of the Magi (fig. 12) with iconography and composition that look forward to his fresco in the apse of the Jesuit church, known as the Nunziatella, in Naples. Almost at the same time, probably after completing 19. Solimena’s lengthy career and prolific oeuvre was marked by his inclinations (as one phase succeeded the other) towards a Baroque style midway between Luca Giordano and Pietro da Cortona, a revival of Mattia Preti’s Neapolitan manner, then of aspects of Maratta-inspired classicism, and a subsequent position between academic art and formal purism, before his final evolution towards a renewed Baroque intensity. Ferdinando Bologna’s monograph of long-ago 1958 is still valid, together with addenda (including Bologna’s own subsequent scholarship) outlined in N. Spinosa, Pittura napoletana del Settecento, cited in note 17, pp. 21–27, 51–55, 97, and 101–24; in 3JUPSOP BM CBSPDDP, cited in note 14, I, pp. 273–90; and in N. Spinosa, Pittura del Seicento a Napoli, cited in note 16, pp. 28–31 and 217–35.
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