Francesco Solimena Canale di Serino 1657 - 1747 Barra

This recently rediscovered sketch is a mature work by Solimena, and clearly served as a bozzetto or preliminary design for a full-scale altarpiece. Until now the design for the altarpiece had only been known through Solimena's signed preparatory drawing in pen and brown ink and black chalk (see Fig. 1), today in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (inv. no. P22, 372 by 255 mm., reproduced in A.E. Popham and K.M. Fenwick, European Drawings in the National Gallery of Canada, Toronto 1985, pp. 67-68, no. 99, fig. 99). Such careful preparation was typical of Solimena's meticulous working method and varied little throughout his career, although typically after 1730, the bright rococo colouring of his earlier oil sketches is replaced by a darker and at times almost monochromatic style, in which emphasis is increasingly given to the broader compositional masses of light and shade.

We are grateful to Professor Nicola Spinosa for confirming the attribution to Solimena on the basis of photographs, and for suggesting a date of execution in the 1730s. He further proposes that this sketch is Solimena's first working idea for his important altarpiece commissioned by Don Ferdinando Sanfelice in 1733 for the main altar of the new church of San Gaudioso in Naples, completed the following year. Solimena's finished altarpiece no longer survives, as it was lost in the destruction of the church during the insurrections of 1799, but its final appearance is described at length by his biographer Bernardo De' Dominici in his Vita of Solimena (contained in his Vite de' Pittori, Scultori e Architetti Napoletani, Naples 1742, vol. III, p. 608). Another bozzetto, which probably represents a more advanced stage of Solimena's design, in which numerous other saints and figures are introduced, is recorded by Ferdinando Bologna (Francesco Solimena, Naples 1958, p. 197, reproduced fig. 202) as in the Grimaldi collection in Naples. While Saint Gregory the Great, with his traditional emblems of the triple cross (held by the putti) and book, was a widespread devotional figure, that of Saint Gaudiosus or Gaudioso was particular to Naples alone. A fifth century bishop of Abitina in Africa, Gaudiosus was exiled by the heathen king Genserico and set adrift on the open seas in an old boat. He finally made landfall in Naples where he was later venerated after his death in 451 or 452 AD. Catacombs associated with him survive to this day in the Piazza Sanità, under the Church of Santa Maria della Sanità, itself built in the early seventeenth century.