Description
(Piano del Cilento, 1662 - Naples, 1728) Sketch depicting Madonna and Child with Purgatory Souls, c. 1710 Oil on canvas, 54.5X36.5 cm. Provenance: Rome, private collection Paolo de Matteis was one of the most celebrated Neapolitan artists, proving to be among the most refined and brilliant interpreters of painting between Arcadia and Rococo. A pupil of Luca Giordano, the painter worked for major European patrons. He lived in Paris during the first decade of the eighteenth century and broke away from his initial training by elaborating a richly evocative style. Ours succeeded in imposing this renewal by breaking free from mannerist Jordanism and anticipating Francesco Solimena as early as the last decade of the seventeenth century, conceiving a renewed aesthetic-formal vocabulary. At this time the canvas under consideration can be referred to, the conduct of which suggests that we are in the presence of a model intended for the completion of a larger composition. Comparison comes in the aid of the altarpiece signed and dated 'Paulus De Matteis p. 1698' preserved in Nardò (fig. 1) and the altarpiece signed and dated 1710 kept in the Church of the Holy Spirit in Ischia, in which we can note the same transcoloring colors without the slightest hint of shadows. It can therefore be said that the author, in this case, initiates that evolutionary process by modulating the Baroque emphasis, lightening the Jordanesque draftsmanship trying to reach that aesthetic ideal of greater rationality and, paraphrasing Orazio Ferrari, obtain a trait, albeit an acerbic one, of an Enlightenment vision of art (cf. O. Ferrari, Le arti figurative, in Storia di Napoli, Naples 1970, VI. 2, p. 1326). Reference bibliography: N. Spinosa, Neapolitan Painting of the Eighteenth Century. From Baroque to Rococo, Naples 1986, I, pp. 31-35, 129-138 C. Gelao, Confraternities art and devotion in Apulia, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, Naples 1994, p. 268 Paolo de Matteis un cilentano in Europa, exhibition catalog edited by G. Citro, Naples 2013, ad vocem
93
(Piano del Cilento, 1662 - Naples, 1728) Sketch depicting Madonna and Child with Purgatory Souls, c. 1710 Oil on canvas, 54.5X36.5 cm. Provenance: Rome, private collection Paolo de Matteis was one of the most celebrated Neapolitan artists, proving to be among the most refined and brilliant interpreters of painting between Arcadia and Rococo. A pupil of Luca Giordano, the painter worked for major European patrons. He lived in Paris during the first decade of the eighteenth century and broke away from his initial training by elaborating a richly evocative style. Ours succeeded in imposing this renewal by breaking free from mannerist Jordanism and anticipating Francesco Solimena as early as the last decade of the seventeenth century, conceiving a renewed aesthetic-formal vocabulary. At this time the canvas under consideration can be referred to, the conduct of which suggests that we are in the presence of a model intended for the completion of a larger composition. Comparison comes in the aid of the altarpiece signed and dated 'Paulus De Matteis p. 1698' preserved in Nardò (fig. 1) and the altarpiece signed and dated 1710 kept in the Church of the Holy Spirit in Ischia, in which we can note the same transcoloring colors without the slightest hint of shadows. It can therefore be said that the author, in this case, initiates that evolutionary process by modulating the Baroque emphasis, lightening the Jordanesque draftsmanship trying to reach that aesthetic ideal of greater rationality and, paraphrasing Orazio Ferrari, obtain a trait, albeit an acerbic one, of an Enlightenment vision of art (cf. O. Ferrari, Le arti figurative, in Storia di Napoli, Naples 1970, VI. 2, p. 1326). Reference bibliography: N. Spinosa, Neapolitan Painting of the Eighteenth Century. From Baroque to Rococo, Naples 1986, I, pp. 31-35, 129-138 C. Gelao, Confraternities art and devotion in Apulia, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, Naples 1994, p. 268 Paolo de Matteis un cilentano in Europa, exhibition catalog edited by G. Citro, Naples 2013, ad vocem
