S.Alfonso De’ Liguori ispira le Madonne di Francesco Solimena e Paolo De Maio

Abstract

The essay traces the thread of continuity that runs through the pictorial representation of the Holy Mary’s face, starting from Raffaello’s and Leonardo’s prototypes and from the seventeenth-century of the Madonna della Puritàby the artist Louis De Morales, now admirable in Basilica of San Paolo Maggiore, Naples. The writing refers to the exceptional reworking of the Holy Mary’s image in a naturalistic key made by the Irpinian artist Angelo Solimena and, in particular, to his Madonna del Rosario e santi. The study shows how San Alfonso dei Liguori, with the publication of the Gloria di Maria(written in 1750), re-enacts the Marian theme after the crisis, in the eighteenth century, of the cult of Mary contested by some Catholic writers. The author of the essay focuses on the little-known relationships that existed not only between San Alfonso dei Liguori and Francesco Solimena (of whom the saint, still a boy, was a pupil) but also between San Alfonso and Paulo De Maio, a pupil of Solimena, demonstrating how the Marian style, theme and iconography expressed in the works of these two artists were directly influenced by the thought of San Alfonso.