Paolo de Matteis
Born Piano del Cilento, Salerno, 9 Feb 1662; died Naples, 26 Jan 1728.
Italian painter and silversmith. He was important to the history of painting in Naples in the transitional period between the 17th and 18th centuries. His elegant art encouraged the movement away from Baroque drama towards a more tender, rocaille style in harmony with the earliest manifestations in Naples of the Arcadian school of poetry and of the Enlightenment. He painted frescoes, altarpieces and allegorical and mythological pictures.
1. Early years: Rome and Naples, to 1701.
He arrived in Naples while still young and received his first artistic training in the workshop of Luca Giordano. He was in Rome before 1683, where he was the pupil of Giovanni Maria Morandi (1622–1717), a still-life painter, and here he became a protégé of the 7th Marqués del Carpio, Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán, the Spanish Ambassador, who had already begun to form an impressive art collection. In Rome the influence of Giordano was modified by the formal elegance of the painting of Carlo Maratti. De Matteis’s earliest known work, the Allegory of Divine Wisdom Crowning Painting as the Sovereign of the Arts (1680s; ex-library ceiling, Convent of SS Gerolamo and Francesco, Genoa; Malibu, CA, Getty Mus.), represents a balanced synthesis of Baroque and classical styles. When the Marqués del Carpio was nominated Viceroy of Naples in 1683, de Matteis followed him there, and the first important works that follow his return to Naples continue in this vein. They include a Virgin and Child (1690; Naples, S Giovanni dei Fiorentini), a series of six canvases of scenes from the Lives of SS Francis and Clare (1690–95; Cocentaina, Spain, Convent of the Clarisas), the overdoors with the Baptism of Christ and the Resurrection for the Casa de Campo in Madrid (1696; Madrid, Real Acad. S Fernando, Mus.) and lastly the fresco of St Bruno Interceding with the Virgin Mary for Suffering Humanity (1699), which decorates the vault of the pharmacy of the Certosa di S Martino, Naples. He sent other works to Pistoia at the request of the bishop G. M. Marchetti: the altarpiece depicting the Vision of St Gaetano Thiene (signed and dated 1693) in S Paolo in Pistoia and two canvases, Pan and Syrinx and Apollo and Marsyas (both 1695), for the Marchetti family’s palace (in situ). The painter’s fame, when he was only a little over 30, had clearly spread beyond Naples.
In these years de Matteis created a delicate, graceful style that broke with the vigour of the Baroque. Even when his compositions were directly indebted to Giordano, as in Olinda and Sofronia Rescued by Clorinda (dated 169?; Norfolk, VA, Chrysler Mus.), which is derived from Giordano’s painting of the same subject from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Genoa, Pal. Reale), de Matteis’s treatment, without high drama, has an 18th-century elegance and lightness. His art encouraged the classical tendencies of established artists such as Francesco Solimena, although Solimena’s classicism became more rigidly academic.
2. International success: Paris, Rome and Naples, 1702–28.
De Matteis, a successful artist with an international reputation, was appreciated by the most refined connoisseurs. He was invited by Victor-Marie, Comte d’Estrées (1660–1737), to go to Paris, where he stayed from 1702 to 1705 and worked for the Dauphin, among others, and in the gallery of the palace of the Compagnie des Indes Orientales (destr.). No works from this Parisian visit have survived. The contact with the elegant art of 18th-century Paris confirmed de Matteis in the style he had already developed. In 1707, during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), Naples became part of the Austrian Empire, and de Matteis was one of the favourite artists of the new governors. The first of the Austrian viceroys, W. Philipp Lorenz, Graf von Daun (1669–1741), commissioned him to paint a ceiling for one of the rooms of his palace in Vienna; the grandiose subject for this work was Justice, Fortune and Valour Helping Hercules, Crowned by Glory, while Time and Truth Defeat Slander and Envy (Vienna, Pal. Daun–Kinsky, 1714–19). Through the viceroys of Naples, Paolo de Matteis had important commissions from leading members of the Austrian aristocracy, among them Emperor Joseph I (reg 1705–11), for whom he executed, before 1711, the altarpiece for the chapel of the Hofburg, Vienna, showing St John of Nepomuk and King Wenceslas (in situ).
This was the most fruitful period of de Matteis’s life. He was in touch with the most advanced intellectual circles in Europe and in 1712 received a particularly important commission from anthony ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of shaftesbury, who considered him the best painter in Italy. To demonstrate his own aesthetic theories on the nature of history painting, Lord Shaftesbury gave de Matteis precise instructions for a painting of Hercules at the Crossroads between Virtue and Vice. He later published this programme, under the title A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgement of Hercules (London, 1713). Paolo de Matteis followed Shaftesbury’s instructions closely, fulfilling at the same time his own interest in complex philosophical concepts. A drawing (Paris, Louvre) suggests that Annibale Carracci’s celebrated Hercules at the Crossroads (c. 1596; Naples, Capodimonte), painted for the Camerino in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, was one of several sources. There are three versions of de Matteis’s final composition (St Giles House, Dorset; one signed and dated 1712, Leeds, Temple Newsam House, see fig. [not available online]; and Munich, Alte. Pin.). Other works from these years have similarly literary and mythological themes, among them Night (Quimper, Mus. B.-A.), Diana and the Hunt (Paris, Louvre), the Venus Giving Arms to Aeneas (1714; ex-Pal. Buonaccorsi, Macerata) and the Self-portrait in the Act of Painting, an Allegory of the Peace of Utrecht (1713) and the Peace of Rastadt (1714) (c. 1714; fragment, Naples, Capodimonte; sketch for whole scene, U. Houston, TX, Sarah Campbell Blaffer Gal.). His contemporaries and later de Dominici criticized the bizarre nature of the latter invention, which is rich in emblematic allusions: the painter shows himself, wearing a dressing-gown, accompanied by a monkey—an allusion to Mimesis—and by other allegorical figures. However, de Matteis particularly liked this subject and elaborated it in another large picture from which the self-portrait is missing (Mainz, Landesmus.). An Annunciation (1712; St Louis, MO, A. Mus.) and an Adoration of the Shepherds (Richmond, VA. Mus. F.A.), both of which are less complex formally and iconographically, were inspired by Arcadian literary principles; they were painted for Aurora Sanseverino, Duchess of Laurenzano (1669–1730), a poetess, and under the bucolic pseudonym Lucinda Coritesia, the moving spirit behind the Naples literary Arcadian society.
Throughout this period de Matteis also executed many works for churches: frescoes with the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of the Virgin with the Queen of Sheba and Solomon in the cupola of the church of Il Gesù Nuovo in Naples (1713; frescoes destr. 1776; small oil sketches, Naples, Capodimonte, and W. Berlin, Gemäldegal., respectively); the fresco in the cupola of the large chapel of Taranto Cathedral depicting the Glorification of St Catald (1713); and the canvases in the abbey of S Martino delle Scale, Palermo, with the History of St Benedict and other Benedictine Saints (1725). These works are large and complex decorative schemes in which the well-established devices of Baroque decorative painting are brought up to date by a delicate and airy touch; their style suggests how important the last frescoes by Luca Giordano in the Cappella del Tesoro (1704) at the Certosa di S Martino, Naples, were, even to de Matteis. There is no disparity of style between these religious works and his freer allegories, mythological scenes and paintings of subjects from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, or from other literary sources, which continued to be in demand from the most enlightened aristocratic and bourgeois collectors. De Matteis was resident in Rome between 1723 and 1725, when he painted the Blessed Andrea Conti d’Anagni Performing a Miracle (Paris, priv. col.) for Pope Innocent XIII and was commissioned by Benedict XIII to paint an altarpiece with the Virgin and Child Appearing to St Dominic in the Orsini Chapel of S Maria sopra Minerva, Rome (in situ).
In the final years of his life de Matteis made models for sculpture in silver. There is the well-known bust of St Sebastian, cast by Gaetano Starace (1727), in S Sebastiano a Guardia Sanframondi, Benevento, and the design for the completion of the altar frontal of the Trinità delle Monache in Naples, which was originally projected (1725) by another painter, Giacomo del Po. A group of marble figures with the Virgin and Child and St Joseph (untraced) was, according to de Dominici, directly sculpted by de Matteis.
Oreste Ferrari. "Matteis, Paolo de." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T056005 (accessed April 11, 2012).
