Wadsworth Atheneum acquires modello by Francesco Solimena

20 January 2023

The Wadsworth Atheneuman acquires an important painting by Francesco Solimena

Robilant+Voena has sold an important painting by Francesco Solimena (1657 to 1747) to the Wadsworth Atheneum. It is the modello for the ceiling fresco at San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, painted as a proposal for the Dominicans to consider before work on the decoration began. The fresco itself was executed between 1705 and 1707 and measures fourteen metres by five, while the modello measures 229.5 by 93 centimetres.

With this commission Solimena reshaped Neapolitan painting, drawing together what he had taken from Luca Giordano, Mattia Preti and Pietro da Cortona while absorbing the changes then under way in Rome under Carlo Maratta. The turning angels, the foreshortening and the upward movement through the clouds give the composition a swirling motion that shows him moving from the Baroque towards the Rococo. He took the painterly Neapolitan tradition and opened it up by abandoning compartmented space, so that the ceiling reads as a single expanse rather than as a set of divided fields.

Several differences separate this modello from the finished fresco, among them simplified architecture and altered expressions in the putti, but it stands as an early and unusually complete statement of a decisive commission. It joins a collection of Italian painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at the Wadsworth Atheneum.