SOLIMENA, FRANCESCO. – Known as Abate Ciccio, painter and architect, born in Canale di Serino (Avellino) on 4 Oct. 1657, died at Barra near Naples on 4 Apr. 1747.
Head of the Neapolitan painting academy of the 18th century, he devoted himself entirely to artistic activity and teaching, and his name became associated with an extremely prolific output, scattered through churches and palaces in Naples and Campania and in the principal public and private collections of Europe. His influence on artistic culture in 18th-century Italy and France (Fragonard) was decisive, reaching even to Venice, where it had repercussions on the pictorial language of a Piazzetta and a Tiepolo.
Besides his father Angelo, a not undistinguished painter in the Giordano tradition, Solimena had as his master Francesco De Maria, an epigone of the Bolognese Academy. But his receptive versatility pointed him rather towards an eclecticism in which the breadth of compositional design was sustained by the rigour of chromatic and luminous harmony.
Hence Solimena was drawn to Mattia Preti, without neglecting suggestions from Cortona and Venice, mediated by the examples of Luca Giordano’s Neapolitan activity. What enabled him to acquire an unmistakable style was, however, a refined architectural sensibility and an extraordinary ease in narrative articulation, which allowed him to satisfy the most diverse iconographic demands by focusing on the intrinsic quality of the brushstroke, always dense and vibrant. Even in moments of lesser inspiration, Solimena reveals a thematic consistency that keeps him far from empty repetition and graphic involution: his technical skill rarely lapses into graphic artifice, even when the mature delight in detail is most evident. The evolution of his style can be traced without difficulty from his early frescoes in S. Giorgio dei Mannesi, S. Anna al Gesù Nuovo in Naples, and S. Giorgio in Salerno, up to the concluding cycle of these early experiments in the apse of S. Maria Donna Regina (1680–84). Along this path Solimena proceeded with ever greater coherence, reaching the summit of his powers in the grandiose ensembles of the sacristies of S. Paolo Maggiore and S. Domenico and in the masterly, highly animated *Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple* on the inner façade of the Gesù Nuovo (1725). Other evidence of the narrative felicity of these years survives in the canvas for the abbey of Montecassino with SS. Francis and Anthony (1681), the frescoes of S. Patrizia (1682), those of the vault of S. Nicola alla Carità (1701), and above all in the crowded canvas with saints from S. Girolamo delle Monache, which features in the foreground a marvellous still life of scattered flowers (1693), and in the Venetian canvases with Rebecca and Eliezer and Rebecca at the Well.
The quality of works now lost is revealed by the sketches for the canvases executed for the Council of Genoa (1708–1717), preserved in the Pinacoteca of Naples: scenes densely populated with minute figures, in a nativity-scene style. Of his numerous portraits, mention should be made of that of Princess Caracciolo, conceived in precious harmonies of light tones, and the self-portrait in the Uffizi, one of the masterpieces of this genre for its expressive force.
Solimena’s taste and manner influenced all Neapolitan art, from architecture to the figurines of nativity scenes and terracotta. As a builder he left a fine example in the harmonious façade of S. Nicola alla Carità. It is two-tiered, in the Baroque manner, but vigorously conceived in a balance of projections and recesses that enhance the structures without being overwhelmed by decoration. Other evidence survives in drawings preserved in the Archivio di Stato in Naples and in a large number of altars, portals, and funerary monuments scattered through the churches of Naples and its environs.
From Solimena’s school emerged the architects Domenico Antonio Vaccaro and G. Battista Nauclerio; the sculptors F. Cebrano and G. Sammartino, that is to say some of the most fertile and brilliant artists of 18th-century Naples; and from his painting were influenced the leading masters of the Neapolitan school of the 18th century: De Mura, Bonito, Giaquinto, and Diana. – See pl. LXI.