Francesco Solimena (4 October 1657 – 3 April 1747) was a prolific Italian Baroque painter, one of an established family of painters and draughtsmen. In his early years, influenced above all by Luca Giordano and Mattia Preti, he developed a highly personal and dramatic handling of light and shade, yet his later art reveals a tendency towards a more restrained classicism. Solimena had many pupils, making him one of the strongest influence in Neapolitan painting of the early 18th century.
Training and early work, to 1690
Francesco Solimena was born in Canale di Serino in the province of Avellino. He received early training from his father, Angelo Solimena, and through him absorbed a deep-seated attachment to the naturalist tradition and particularly to the art of his father’s teacher, Francesco Guarino. With his father, he executed a Paradise for the cathedral of Nocera (a place where he spent a big part of his life) and a Vision of St. Cyril of Alexandria for the church of San Domenico at Solofra.
Solimena was patronized early on by Cardinal Vincenzo Orsini (later Pope Benedict XIII). Encouraged by Cardinal Orsini, he moved to Naples in 1674, and initially attended the school of Francesco di Maria in order to perfect his studies of anatomy. After enduring this brief phase of rigid academic discipline, he began to study the most important Neapolitan works of the mid-17th century, particularly the fully fledged Baroque art of Giordano and Preti. Rejecting the classicism of his contemporaries, he based his art on effects of light.
Bernardo de' Dominici, who was a friend of Solimena, described four paintings, Judith and Holofernes, the Conversion of Saul, the Sacrifice of Isaac and Lot and his Daughters (Museo de Arte de Ponce), as Solimena’s earliest works and commented that, heavily influenced by the art of Solimena’s father, they displayed a ‘strong…and deeply felt quality’. Between 1675 and 1680 Solimena appears to have collaborated with his father. The Vision of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus (Solofra, San Domenico), commissioned by the Orsini family, where his restrained, naturalistic colour is given new warmth by a fluent and painterly handling derived from Giordano, and the fresco of Paradise (Nocera Inferiore Cathedral), which echoes Lanfranco’s later Neapolitan works, date from this period. Francesco’s St. Rosalia (Naples, Pisano priv. col.) reveals, in the handling of the drapery and face, the influence of Guarino’s naturalism, while the flood of radiant light is derived from Giordano’s work of the period 1650–60.
Among Solimena’s first commissions given him by the Neapolitan religious orders were the frescoes (1677) in the chapel of Sant'Anna al Gesù Nuovo and those in San Giorgio ai Mannesi (bozzetti in Naples, Lauro priv. col.), in which it is possible to observe how the figure of St. Anthony shows a debt to Giovanni Battista Benaschi’s firm disposition of masses, while the St. Nicholas anticipates the St. Nicholas of Bari at Fiumefreddo Bruzio, Calabria. Another of these works was the painting for the chapel of the Crucifix, Santa Maria dei Miracoli, Naples, St. Ignatius, Filippo Neri, Francis and Dominic (1678–9), which de' Dominici described as having been inspired by Preti and ‘exceptional in drawing and chiaroscuro’.
By the 1680s, Solimena had independent fresco commissions, and his active studio came to dominate Neapolitan painting from the 1690s through the first four decades of the 18th century. Solimena painted many frescoes in Naples, altarpieces, celebrations of weddings and courtly occasions, mythological subjects, characteristically chosen for their theatrical drama, and portraits. His settings are suggested with a few details – steps, archways, balustrades, columns – concentrating attention on figures and their draperies, caught in pools and shafts of light.
His first great work was the fresco cycle depicting legends of St. Thecla, Archelas and Susanna (1680) in San Giorgio, Salerno. Here, as in the Vision of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, the windswept apparition of the saint in the clouds is matched by the turbulent portrayal of the nun in ecstasy, her black habit set against a luminous background. In the Three Saints Led to Martyrdom, in which the Classical warriors and magnificent architectural background echo Pietro da Cortona’s Rape of the Sabines (Rome, Capitoline Museums), Solimena united naturalism more successfully with the grandeur of the Roman Baroque. In another fresco in this series, now only partially visible, a fragment of still life reveals his talent for this genre, which was said by de' Dominici to be considerable.
Solimena’s Virgin and Child with St. Peter and Paul (Naples, San Nicola alla Carità), in which the upper part of the canvas is derived from Giovanni Lanfranco’s Virgin with St. Hugo and Anselm (Afragola, Chiesa del Rosario), is similarly linked to 17th-century traditions. An increasingly powerful response to the dissolving light and tones of Giordano characterizes the Education of the Virgin (Bristol Museum & Art Gallery), the Adoration of the Magi (Houston, Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation) and the Virgin of the Rosary, which may date from 1680–82; the first painting remains formally linked to Angelo Solimena’s works of the 1680s, such as the Coronation of St. Anne, although the result is quite different.
In 1681 Solimena began a long association with the abbey of Montecassino. The innovative composition of his altarpiece of St. Jerome, Francis of Assisi and Anthony of Padua, which he based on sweeping diagonals, was developed in the four frescoes of groups of saints (1681–4) in the choir of Santa Maria Donnaregina Nuova, Naples. In the scenes from the Life of St. Francis the flood of golden light, derived from Giordano, sets off the ‘lovely harmonies of colour, characteristic of his new and more beautiful style’ (de' Dominici). The cloud-borne figures, enveloped in billowing drapery, reinterpret a Baroque theme originally created by Bernini. In the Miracle of the Roses (1684) the brilliant luminosity counteracts the sense of depth created by the architecture, and the forms are bathed in a vibrant, atmospheric light. This work, painted in the same year as Giordano’s Christ Driving the Money-changers from the Temple (1684; Girolamini, Naples), is Solimena’s most perfect fusion of the influences of Lanfranco and Giordano.
In 1685 he painted a group of works for the Gesù delle Monache, Naples: a St. Clare, for that saint’s chapel, and the Annunciation and the Marriage of the Virgin for the chapel of the Immaculate Conception. In these compositions he used increasingly dramatic chiaroscuro effects, causing him, especially in the latter work, to emphasize the foreground figures, who stand out clearly against an architectural background that is painted in steep perspective and enveloped in a murky atmosphere pierced by strong shafts of light. His Annunciation and Nativity (both 1686; Naples, Congregazione del Monte dei Poveri) perfectly unite the influences of Preti and Giordano. These works were followed by a 1687 painting for the Bishop of Nardò, the St. Francis (1688) for Santa Maria Donnaregina, Naples, the Nativity (1689; Aversa, Annunziata), with an ecstatic vision of soaring angels, and by the central vault frescoes in San Nicola alla Carità, Naples.
The frescoes in the sacristy of San Paolo Maggiore, Naples, where Solimena painted Virtues on the vault and side walls and two large frescoes, facing each other on the end walls, of the Conversion of Saul (1689) and the Fall of Simon Magus (1690), were the climax of his early career. They were lavishly praised by de' Dominici, who wrote of their ‘beauty of colouring, nobility of aspect, perfection of ideas, diversity of physiognomy’ and their ‘excellent compositions, with the most beautiful contrasts’. Giordano’s influence remains in the bright colours and sensuous appeal of the allegorical figures and in the brilliant ingenuity of the large figure compositions, which are, however, more academically conceived. As he moved to the second of the large frescoes Solimena began to develop the use of thicker pigments to strengthen shapes. Related to these works is the fresco recently rediscovered in the Palazzo di Vico Santa Maria Apparente, Naples, and ascribable, because of the coat of arms, to the Nifo Medici family. The theme of this fresco, formerly interpreted as Naples Freed from the Vices, is now thought to depict the Entry of Alessandro de’ Medici to Florence. The Discovery of Moses (Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum) and the Dream of St. Joseph (Paris, Louvre) are stylistically close to this fresco and date from the same period.