1657-1747 Italian Francesco Solimena Gallery Francesco Solimena was born in Canale di Serino, near Avellino. He received early training from his father, Angelo Solimena, with whom he executed a Paradise for the cathedral of Nocera (place where he spend a big part of his life) and a Vision of St. Cyril of Alexandria for the church of San Domenico at Solofra. He settled in Naples in 1674, there he worked in the studio of Francesco di Maria and later Giacomo del Po[1]. He apparently had taken the clerical orders, but was patronized early on, and encouraged to become an artist by Cardinal Vincenzo Orsini (later Pope Benedict XIII)[2]. By the 1680s, he 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. He modeled his art??for he was a highly conventional painter??after the Roman Baroque masters, Luca Giordano and Giovanni Lanfranco, and Mattia Preti, whose technique of warm brownish shadowing Solimena emulated. 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. Art historians take pleasure in identifying the models he imitated or adapted in his compositions. His numerous preparatory drawings often mix media, combining pen-and-ink, chalk and watercolor washes. Francesco Solimena 'A study for the fresco cycle in the Sacristy of San Paolo Maggiore in Naples', Whitfield Fine Art.A typical example of the elaborately constructed allegorical "machines" of his early mature style, fully employing his mastery of chiaroscuro, is the Allegory of Rule (1690) from the Stroganoff collection, which has come to the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. He apparently hoped to see his son Orazio follow a career in the law, for which he received a doctorate (de Domenici), but also became a painter. His large, efficiently structured atelier became a virtual academy, at the heart of cultural life in Naples. Among his many pupils were Francesco de Mura (1696-1784) , Giuseppe Bonito (1707-89), Pietro Capelli, Gaspare Traversi, and most notably Corrado Giaquinto and Sebastiano Conca. The Scottish portraitist Allan Ramsay spent three years in Solimena's studio. Solimena amassed a fortune, was made a baron and lived in sumptuous style founded on his success. Francesco Solimena died at Barra, near Naples, in 1747.  Related Paintings of Francesco Solimena :. | Portrait of Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor | Judith with the Head of Holofernes | Expxulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple | Bathseba im Bade | Charles VI and Count Gundaker Althann |
Related Artists:
Cogghe Remy
Belgian , Mouscron 1854-Roubaix 1935
jose Madrazo Y Agudo
Spanish Neoclassical Painter, 1781-1859 was a Spanish painter of the Neoclassic period. Born in Santander. Studied in Madrid with Cosme de Acuna and Gregorio Ferro, both rectors of the Academia de San Fernando at the beginning of the 19th century. Don Fernando La Serna, who was named ambassador to France at the time, brought Madrazo to Paris, where he entered the studio of Jacques-Louis David. There, under royal patronage from King Carlos IV, he executed a painting of the Death of Lucretia and other canvases on events from classic Greco-Roman history. He moved to Rome during Napoleonic times, where he was briefly jailed for failing to complete oaths of loyalty to the newly installed Napoleon II of France as King of Rome. In Rome, he was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca. King Carlos IV named him pintor de camara (painter of the chamber), a position confirmed by King Ferdinand VII.
ZEILLER, Jakob Johann
German painter (b. 1708, Reutte, d. 1783, Reutte) Austrian painter. Trained initially by his father, Paul Zeiller (1658-1738), he subsequently studied in Italy (1723-32) with Sebastiano Conca and at the Accademia di S Luca in Rome, and with Francesco Solimena in Naples, then at the Kaiserliche Akademie in Vienna. From 1733 to 1743 he was a regular collaborator on Paul Troger's frescoes, contributing mainly architectural frameworks painted in the style of the Bolognese quadraturisti. He retained such frameworks in his own paintings throughout his life, even in south Germany where this was generally unusual. Troger's influence on the style of Zeiller's figures and on his iconographic repertory was such that his first independent works in Austria