(Canale di Serino 1657–1747 Barra di Napoli)
Madonna and Child with Saints,
oil on canvas, 128 x 102 cm, framed

Provenance:
art market, Spain;
where acquired by the present owner

We are grateful to Nicola Spinosa for endorsing the attribution for the present painting (written communication, in copy).

Spinosa dates the present Madonna and Child with Saints to Francesco Solimena’s full maturity. Parallels can be found in other depictions of the subject, in some cases, Solimena even used the same model for the figure on the right, that attends with her face partially covered by her cloak. The closest comparisons can be made to works painted between 1720 and 1725, such as the Madonna and Child in Palazzo Barberini, Rome, the altarpiece in the church of San Filippo Neri, Turin (1723) and the sketches for the fresco depicting the Expulsion of Heliodorus in the Temple of the Gesù Nuovo, Naples (1725). Characteristic of this phase of the artist’s career is the creation of compact figures, built from sharp contrasts between light and shadow, which indicate Solimena’s growing interest in contemporary sculpture, particularly that of Lorenzo Vaccaro, with whom he collaborated on several occasions.

According to Bernardo De Dominici, who was Solimena’s main biographer, the artist’s father Angelo, a pupil and collaborator of Francesco Guarino, had initially planned to direct his son towards humanistic studies. However, Francesco’s precocious talent was recognised by Cardinal Vincenzo Maria Orsini, who convinced his father to let him pursue a career as a painter. After a very early stage of activity at his father’s side, following Guarino’s naturalistic lesson, at the age of seventeen Solimena moved to Naples, where he began working in Francesco Di Maria’s workshop, but immediately showed a preference for the powerful and dramatic style of Luca Giordano, Mattia Preti and Giovanni Lanfranco, artists who had paved the way for the great period of Neapolitan Baroque.

The artist’s first important public work was the fresco of the vault of the Chapel of Sant’Anna in the Gesù Nuovo in Naples, which was followed over the years by numerous ecclesiastical commissions for the city’s main churches, both for frescoes and works on canvas.
The artist’s stylistic evolution was strongly influenced by the production of Luca Giordano, known as ‘Fa Presto’, characterised by an extremely free and rapid execution. The two also had the opportunity to work side by side on the decoration of other chapels in the Gesù Nuovo church. When Giordano died in January 1705, Solimena was entrusted with the completion of a series of paintings destined for the royal chapel of the Alcázar in Madrid. This opened the painter’s phase of greatest celebrity, which saw him sought out by patrons from all over Europe, from the Elector Prince of Mainz, Lothar Franz von Schönborn, to Queen Elisabeth Farnese of Spain.