Artista attivo a Napoli, XVII secolo

Oil on canvas

cm. 48x73. Framed

In this enchanting painting, undoubtedly intended for the private devotion of a refined Neapolitan gentleman, one immediately perceives all the most fertile moods of seventeenth-century Neapolitan painting at one of its happiest conjunctures, around the fifth decade of the century. Thus we recognize in this canvas elements akin to the art of the main protagonists of this lively phase, in which residual elements of Caravaggesque naturalism converge in a peculiar interpretation of classicism of Reni and the Emilian painting: from Stanzione to Pacecco, from Andrea Vaccaro to Cavallino. But the most stringent tangencies would be said to be those that link our painting to Onofrio Palumbo (the Virgin in both the Annunciation and the Adoration of the Shepherds, both in the church of Santa Maria della Salute in Naples) and even more so to Artemisia Gentileschi: think of the face of Bathsheba (Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio), the profile of the woman who is washing the basin kneeling in front of the child in the Birth of the Baptist in the Prado Museum in Madrid, or that of the Virgin in the Adoration of the Magi in Pozzuoli Cathedral. The comparison of our composition with the group of the two women and the child in the foreground in the Triumph of David in the State Art Museum of Florida in Sarasota is also interesting.