During the thirty years of Austrian rule the painter, at the peak of his international fame, produced various canvases, especially for the different Viceroys who succeeded each other in Naples: from Althan to Daun and Harrach. For the last one, Count Alois Thomas Raimund, who was Viceroy in Naples from 1728 to 1732, Solimena painted numerous canvases, the subjects being mainly Biblical or the Evangelists, but also sundry portraits of the Viceroys or their consorts. These, together with other seventeenth century Neapolitan paintings collected by Father Ferdinand Bonaventura, as well as early eighteenth century works, were long kept in the Harrach palace in Vienna and then were displayed for some years at Schloss Rohrau, the family castle a few kilometres from the Austrian capital.

Among these paintings much attention has been paid, by both modern and contemporary art critics, to Solimena’s work; he had already painted the subject previously in other compositions, as recorded by eighteenth century sources, producing a sumptuous image of the Madonna and Child (39 x 30 in / 99 x 76 cm.). The painter having been commissioned by the council of Cava dei Tirreni, as recorded by the biographer Bernardo De Dominici (Vite (1742-5), 2008 edition, p. 1152), it was donated to the Viceroy (and therefore it can be dated as between 1728 and 1732; see the Harrach collection catalogue, when it was still in Vienna, restored by Heinz in 1960, p. 71, no. 82), but in this case the Madonna can certainly be attributed to Solimena himself, because of its pictorial, compositional, formal and expressive qualities, as well as the perceptive study of light and shade and the knowledgeable arrangement of rare and precious chromatic materials; it can be dated to those years in which he executed such commissions as the present painting, hitherto unpublished, which comes from a private English collection and which is in the finest state of preservation.

A number of stylistic features confirm this attribution: for one thing, the painter appears to have used the same models for the two Madonnas and for the children, but arranged them differently. In the Harrach version the Madonna is positioned almost facing the artist, in a space with a stone pillar on one side, with the Child resting on His mother’s left arm and lying on a white cloth that covers a rich cushion. In the painting under consideration, the Madonna, wearing clothing of elegant simplicity and colour identical to that in the other version, is represented in profile, against a dark background and containing no structural elements; the Child is on His feet, supported by the mother’s right arm and resting on a cushion that is almost identical to the one in the Harrach version; in addition He is wrapped in a white cloth, held in the Madonna’s hands. In both versions the Child is facing the person looking at the painting. In both the composition is identical, as is the emotional response: both the Child and Madonna are smiling and display a sweet and intense gaze, but at the same time they are marked by a somewhat melancholy mood (an obvious portent of the future destiny of the Son).

This is another feature displayed by the two compositions, documenting clearly the cultural inclinations and stylistic choices that characterise the work of Solimena in the years to which the two versions belong: the courtly tone, supported by refined sensitivity and cultivated elegance in the clothes and appearance, with which the artist has transferred on to canvas this very human episode of maternal affection and family intimacy. In point of fact the two pictures portray, with researched and studied pictorial representation (perhaps because of the subject in a better way than in other compositions with more figures painted in those years, but with complex and more ‘artificial’ articulation), the conception of the real and practical art of painting that had been worked out and experimented with by the master in this advanced phase, even if not the final one, of his career. Already as far back as 1700, as recorded in the paintings with ‘stories of Mary’ in the Neapolitan Church of Santa Maria Donnalbina (in particular those that were smaller and depicting two figures), but especially from the beginning of the second decade of the eighteenth century, Solimena had exceeded his youthful propensity for painting in the Baroque style in the manner of Luca Giordano and Pietro da Cortona, and after a phase spent on reworking the ‘shadowy’ and severe aspects of Baroque as practised by Mattia Preti in Naples, with ever increasing conviction he approached the temperate classicism that developed around the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, especially in painting, on the Roman models of Carlo Maratta. It coincides with the spread of this particular aspect of classicism in Rome, patterned on that of the sixteenth century, but also with initial signs and evidence of moderately rationalist leanings and hence certainly running counter to the use of imagery and the liberal and visionary trends of the contemporary Baroque tradition, the birth of what came to be called the Arcadia literary and poetic movement: a movement which centred upon Rome and Naples for its development, spread and production. It is significant that Francesco Solimena was among the most active adherents of the Sebethia Colony, the Neapolitan branch of Roman Arcadia, both for the choices he made in art and because he became the most well-known composer of sonnets that were noted for their elegant form. This was precisely around 1700, and as from this date, apart from unforeseen and brief reversals (in particular, between 1705 and 1708), he moved towards an ever-increasing development of a pictorial method that became more refined, more studied, of courtly elegance, both through the clarity of composition and the form it displayed: especially in ‘official’ portraiture these were the signs of forward movement, to the extent of becoming virtually Imperial, even if the subjects portrayed derived from the need to have allegorical and commemorative themes.

However, this is not the case with this Madonna and Child, in the version under consideration and the one of Harrach. Although the artist could certainly not have been unaware of the pictures belonging to the early sixteenth century Renaissance, avoiding expressive stylistic attacks and reactions upon what may have appeared to some as devotion, as evidenced to a great extent by the ‘distant images’ of saints and Madonnas painted in Naples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (a prime example being Francesco De Mura, who was a prominent pupil of Solimena, but in the latter twenties of that century reworked them with solutions that seemed only to be distantly related, the subjects being predominately religious), he went back to ‘true’ images, with simplicity and knowledge of the use of the pictorial art, but avoiding formal abstractions and leanings towards the melodramatic, apparently returning to what was ‘natural’, making things brighter and warmly communicative. It was obviously related to long-term reflection on his youthful beginnings, in a moderately naturalistic style, acquired from his father Angelo and his models, especially Francesco Guarino, but now filtered through a mutated and increased sensitivity, and matured also by the recent and new examples, both in culture and taste, of the European society of the early eighteenth century.