(Gaeta 1680–1764 Naples)
The Birth of the Virgin,
oil on canvas, 103 x 56 cm, framed

Provenance:
probably Luigi Vanvitelli (1700–1773), Naples;
Private collection, Mill Neck, Long Island;
art market, New York;
where acquired by the present owner

Literature:
probably J. Garms, Die Briefe des Luigi Vanvitelli an seinen Bruder Urbano in Rom. Kunsthistorisches Material, in: Römische historische Mitteilungen, 13, 1971, p. 271;
probably N. Spinosa, Luigi Vanvitelli e i pittori attivi a Napoli nella seconda metà del Settecento: lettere e documenti inediti, in: Storia dell’arte, 14, 1972, p. 195, note 9;
probably F. Strazzullo, Le lettere di Luigi Vanvitelli della Biblioteca Palatina di Caserta, Galatina 1976, vol. I, p. 558

We are grateful to Matteo Borchia for his help in cataloguing this lot.

The present painting is the bozzetto for the first canvas of a series of five paintings, executed in the summer of 1756 by Sebastiano Conca. Conca was commissioned to produce this series for the chapel of the Reggia di Caserta, depicting various episodes from the life of the Virgin for Carlo III Borbone and his wife Maria Amalia of Saxony. This was certainly the most important commission Conca received from the Bourbon court in Naples. The commission also involved the painters Giuseppe Bonito and Anton Raphael Mengs (with the exception of Bonito’s Immaculate Conception and a few fragments of Conca’s Nativity nothing remains of these works which were destroyed by bombing in August 1943).

Luigi Vanvitelli wrote to his brother in a letter dated 13 July 1756, that he had received the preparatory study for a Nativity of the Virgin as a present from Conca. Vanvitelli was the Bourbon court architect and designer responsible for the Reggia di Caserta, and he had known Conca since youth when both the painter and architect had worked for Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in Rome. They had consequently collaborated on works at the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere and on works for the Fabbrica di San Pietro.

Particularly in the foreground group, the artist reveals himself to be conversant with the iconography of the best known examples of this theme, painted at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Annibale Carracci and Francesco Albani. Conca himself had already painted a version of the Birth of the Virgin in 1741 for the basilica of the Misericordia at Macerata: this work has a more essential composition with fewer figures. The scene he planned for Caserta was enriched with many additional figures inspired by some of his earlier works: the group with God the Father, for example, reiterates that represented in two versions of the Immaculate Conception conserved in Marfa (Sala degli Atti Letterari, Convento) and in Macerata. Indeed, the reuse of compositional formulae, even after a considerable passage of time, is typical of Conca’s working practice.

The fluid and luminous strokes that characterise this study also appear in the artist’s later works. They occur for example in the preparatory canvases for the vault paintings of Santa Chiara, Naples, representing the Transportation of the Sacred Ark (Pandolfini, Florence, Dipinti Antichi, 15 October 2013, lot 151) and the Meeting of Solomon and the queen of Sheba (Christie’s, Milan, Old Master Pictures, 25 May 2011, lot 56). There are particularly close points of comparison with the Annunciation (Morton and Mary Jane Harris collection, New York) and the Adoration of the Magi (W. Lacy collection, Lausanne) which were both included in the 1981 exhibition and at the time were already considered studies for the paintings of the same subjects made for Caserta. Despite his advanced age, Conca was capable in the present work of creating a scene of charged vitality imprinted with the Arcadian classicism of the early Settecento and enriched with a vivid luminosity, especially evident in the foreground figure of Saint Anne, that is evocative of the contemporary painting style of Corrado Giaquinto.

Giancarlo Sestieri has suggested that the present painting may be a collaborative work of Sebastiano Conca and Corrado Giaquinto.