SOLIMENA, FRANCESCO. — Known as the abbot Ciccio, painter and architect, b. at Canale di Serino (Avellino) on 4 October 1657, d. at Barra near Naples on 5 April 1747.
Leader of the Neapolitan painting academy of the eighteenth century, he devoted himself entirely to artistic activity and teaching, and linked his name to an extraordinarily prolific output, dispersed among the churches and palaces of Naples and Campania and the principal European public and private collections. His influence on artistic culture in eighteenth-century Italy and France (Fragonard) was decisive and reached even Venice, where it affected the pictorial language of a Piazzetta and a Tiepolo.
In addition to his father Angelo, a painter of no little merit in the manner of Giordano, S. had as his teacher Francesco De Maria, an epigone of the Bolognese academy. Yet his receptive versatility led him instead toward an eclecticism in which breadth of compositional structure was sustained by the rigor of chromatic and luminous harmony.
S. was therefore drawn back to Mattia Preti, not without suggestions from Cortona and Venice, mediated by examples from Luca Giordano’s Neapolitan activity. Nevertheless, an innate architectural wisdom and an extraordinary ease in the articulation of narrative enabled him to acquire an unmistakable style and to satisfy the most disparate iconographic requirements, relying on the intrinsic quality of his brushwork, always dense and vibrant. Even in moments of lesser inspiration S. in fact reveals a thematic solidity that keeps him distant from empty repetition and graphic involution: technical skill almost never lapses into gratuitous artificiality, even when manneristic self-indulgence is most evident. The evolution of his style can be followed without difficulty from the youthful frescoes of S. Giorgio dei Mannesi, S. Anna al Gesù Nuovo in Naples, and S. Giorgio in Salerno, to the concluding cycle of these early experiences in the apse of S. Maria Donna Regina (1680–84). Along this path S. proceeded with ever greater consistency, reaching the height of his possibilities in the magniloquent complexes of the sacristies of S. Paolo Maggiore and S. Domenico and in the masterful, extraordinarily animated Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple on the inner wall of the façade of the Gesù Nuovo (1725). Other testimonies to the narrative felicity of these years remain in the canvas in the abbey of Montecassino with s. Francesco and s. Antonio (1681), in the frescoes of S. Patrizia (1682), in those of the vault of S. Nicola alla Carità (1701), and above all in the crowded canvas with saints in S. Girolamo delle Monache, which has in the foreground a marvelous still life of scattered flowers (1693), as well as in the Venetian paintings with Rebecca and Eleazar and Rebecca and Jacob at the Well.
The quality of the lost works is revealed to us by the sketches for the canvases executed for the Council of Genoa (1708–1717), preserved in the Pinacoteca of Naples: scenes crowded with tiny figures, in the manner of nativity scenes. Among the very many portraits, mention should be made of that of Princess Caracciolo, already conceived in precious harmonies of light tonalities, and the self-portrait in the Uffizi, one of the masterpieces of its genre for expressive effectiveness.
S.’s taste and manner influenced all Neapolitan art, from architecture to terracotta nativity figurines. As a builder he left an outstanding example in the harmonious façade of S. Nicola alla Carità. It has two orders, according to the Baroque model, but is conceived with vigorous equilibrium in the projections and recesses that enhance the structures, which are not overwhelmed by decoration. Other evidence remains in drawings preserved in the State Archive of Naples, and in a large number of altars, portals, and funerary monuments scattered throughout the churches of Naples and its environs.
The architects Domenico Antonio Vaccaro and G. Battista Nauclero emerged from S.’s school; as did the sculptors F. Celebrano and G. Sammartino, that is, some of the most prolific and gifted artists of eighteenth-century Naples. The principal masters of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan school—the De Mura, Bonito, Giaquinto, and Diana—were influenced by his painting. — Vedi tav. LXI.