Solimena, Francesco Lot n° 6018

St. Francis in meditation. Oil on canvas. 75 x 63,5 cm. Circa 1680. Francesco Solimena first studied with his father, the Neapolitan painter Angelo Solimena, then from 1674 briefly with Francesco di Maria. But he soon tired of his father's academicism and studied independently the paintings of the Neapolitan masters Luca Giordano, Mattia Preti and Giovanni Lanfranco. He also continued to work closely with his father in the second half of the 1670s, including on the dome fresco Gloria del Paradiso in the Cathedral of San Prisco in Nocera Inferiore. His own first important public commission was a ceiling fresco in the Chapel of Saint Anne in the church of Gesù Nuovo in Naples, which he executed in 1677, but which today unfortunately survives only in fragments. His early work also includes the Throned Madonna with Child and St. Dominic and St. Catherine of Siena, painted ca. 1680-81, which can be found today in the Gemäldegalerie Berlin (Inv.No. 71.1) The influence of Luca Giordano can clearly be seen in this Rosary Madonna. Nicola Spinosa, who verbally confirmed the attribution of our painting to Francesco Solimena to the previous owner on the basis of professional photographs, dates our painting to this early period of maturity of the painter around 1680, since it is also stylistically oriented to Giordano and his bright, warm colors, the light-filled composition as well as the painterly, soft and sweeping brushstroke. From the 1690s onwards, the disegno emerges more clearly in Solimena's style, and he makes use of clearer contours and a more defined physicality, thus paying homage to a different, elegant classical ideal. Solimena devoted himself to the depiction of his namesake even more often in the following. For example, a comparable composition dated around 1695 was formerly in the Monastero di San Giuseppe, Assisi (see Nicola Spinosa: Francesco Solimena (1657-1747) e la Arti a Napoli, Rome 2018, p. 308, no. 117). His Vision of St. Francis, painted around 1703/05, can be found today in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden (inv. no. Gal. no. 498). Provenance: Private collection Austria.