Trinitarian Theology, Neapolitan Painting: Paolo De Matteis and Francesco Solimena

For a period of about fifteen years, Paolo De Matteis (1662–1728) created frescoes featuring the Trinity. These murals have one feature in common: they all imitate a Spanish work by his former teacher, Luca Giordano (1634–1705). De Matteis and Francesco Solimena (1657–1747) were arguably the two major and competing contributors to the grand architectural decoration in Neapolitan painting after Giordano. By imitating the older artist, De Matteis’s Trinitarian murals set forth a lineage that set him apart from Solimena, whose descendance was less distinguished, as he had trained with his father Angelo (1629–1716). Taking into account Solimena’s fresco in San Domenico Maggiore, Naples, I examine the stakes in picturing the triune God by rivaling painters. These works involve post-Tridentine concerns with intercession as well as conflicts of Mariology between Jesuits and Dominicans in Naples.

The profound difficulty in understanding the concept of one God in three persons was legendary, making its way into St. Augustine’s medieval hagiography in a story still painted in eighteenth-century Italy.^[1] Around the time of composing De Trinitate, the African Church Father encounters a child on a beach whom he afterward recognizes as Christ, trying to fit the ocean into a hole in the sand. The boy exclaims that he is more likely to succeed in this endeavor than the saint is in grasping the tripartite nature of the one God. Such difficulty of comprehension led some post-Tridentine theologians to consider how artists should – and, more importantly, how they should not – represent the Trinity so as not to confuse the uneducated masses. In doing so, they were responding to an instruction issued by the Council of Trent (1545–1563) regarding the challenge of picturing the invisible God:

So if accounts and stories from holy scripture are sometimes etched and pictured, which is a help to uneducated [indoctae] people, they must be taught that the godhead is not pictured because it can be seen with the human eye or expressed in figures and colours.^[2]

The passage reiterates St. Gregory’s belief that images served as books for illiterates, a notion still central to the Roman Church two centuries after the council. In 1736, Lione Pascoli could write that painting teaches not only those unable to read but also the mute and the deaf.^[3] Informed by theological commonplaces formulated by St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Council of Trent, artists were faced with the challenge of engaging and instructing all audiences in the Trinity. For this purpose they visualized the workings of intercession, crucial to the post-Tridentine Church, when distinguishing between the three persons of God.

The Apocalypse, the Dominicans, and Francesco Solimena

In 1706, Solimena began to paint The Glory of St. Dominic (also referred to as The Triumph of the Dominican Order, among other titles) on the ceiling of the sacristy of San Domenico Maggiore (fig. 1).^[4] The mural features a descending hierarchy of divinity. The Trinity at the apex is followed by the majestic Virgin Mary and then Dominican saints. Her figure becomes even more towering once it is recognized that her right leg is bent, the knee resting on a cloud. Allegories of virtues constitute the group below the Dominicans, and further down an angel with a firebolt is attacking allegorical figures of heresy placed on what looks like a bridge, one falling from it headfirst as if about to enter the friars’ space. The heavenly figures are seen from a slightly low point of view, God the Father most of all, directing attention to the beholder’s physically and spiritually inferior position. Not counting the cherubs, the artist painted only the falling figures di sotto in sù.

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Francesco Solimena, The Glory of St. Dominic, 1704–1707, fresco. Naples, San Domenico Maggiore, sacristy

Bernardo De Dominici, in his lengthy eighteenth-century biography of Solimena in the Vite de’ pittori, scultori, ed architetti napoletani, praises the fresco as a major work of Neapolitan painting while offering an allegorical interpretation:

The image represents the Trinity above in an almost blinding manner and further down the most holy Virgin and St. Dominic, who presents himself to her, with all the Dominican saints protected underneath her mantle as she points downward to many heresiarchs beaten down by the sanctity and doctrine of so many saints of the religious order….^[5]

The characterization of the saints being protected by the Virgin’s mantle is not literal but indicates a general idea of her being patron of the Dominicans. She is holding a scepter that echoes that of God the Father in demonstration of the source of her authority. Even though Mary’s commanding gesture is directed at the friar rather than downward, De Dominici aptly perceives the fall of the heretics as willed by the Dominicans, acting on her behalf. The Virgin conducts the angel to place a star above St. Dominic’s head as he, keeping respectful distance, kneels at a lower level, almost as if he were receiving a military decoration during an audience with a superior. The star relates to a vision that St. Dominic’s godmother had during his baptism: appearing at his forehead, it illuminated the entire world.^[6] In the fresco the saint accordingly is shown standing on a globe, like an echo of that which serves as an armrest for God the Father. Because Mary is crowned by stars, the effect is akin to St. Dominic being gifted one of her ornaments while the white lilies behind him further connect the two via chastity, the flower being their shared attribute.

That St. Dominic receives special favors or commandments from the Virgin – the fresco suggests both – is tied to his hagiography. Géraud de Frachet, in the Vitae Fratrum, writes about a vision of a monk that foreshadowed the founding of the Dominican Order. During a deathlike illness he sees the Virgin Mary kneeling for three days and nights while supplicating her son that he might have mercy on mankind. In the end Christ agrees to send whom he calls Preachers to turn people toward the right way for the sake of their salvation.^[7] A related story appears in another thirteenth-century source, Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend.

Among the five other Dominicans venerating the Virgin, to her right is the ruddy St. Thomas Aquinas. On Mary’s left in the foreground is St. Catherine of Siena with the crown of thorns. Between and behind her and St. Rosa of Lima appears a Dominican nun.^[8] St. Peter Martyr with the blade planted in his skull rises above his female colleagues while gazing devotedly at the Virgin. His presence inscribes the combat against heresy into the origins of the Dominican Order. Dominic’s purpose in forming a sodality of itinerant preachers included fighting Albigensian and Catharist heresies. St. Peter Martyr was killed by Cathars when traveling in Lombardy on a papal mission as inquisitor. The heretics denied the Trinity and hence the representation of the three persons of God – the pictorial antithesis to the heretics below – marks the original motivation behind the Dominican Order: to defend the Trinity. The mural also communicates the Dominicans’ intense devotion to the Virgin Mary, whom they considered a bulwark against heresy.^[9]

When picturing the Virtues, Solimena relied largely on Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia even as he reduced the number of attributes described by the humanist.^[10] Divine Wisdom – slightly below center with a helmet – is supporting a book with the Paschal lamb while holding a shield adorned with the dove of the Holy Ghost. Next to her sits Catholic Faith, raising a chalice with a powerful, triumphant gesture. She is followed by Obedience carrying a yoke, her right hand partly obscuring a sun on the chest of the woman to the extreme left, which identifies her as Virtue. Her visual analogy to St. Thomas Aquinas, who also sports a sun on his chest, alludes to his definition of the virtues in the Summa theologiae. The woman with a bared shoulder below Obedience folds her hands over her chest while holding her hair with the right. She has been described as penitent and Magdalene-like.^[11] I tend to see her as Hope instead, the green drapery being a standard attribute, also according to Ripa, who describes similar manifestations as Divine Hope with folded hands and gaze turned upward. The capricious motif of holding the hair does not subtract from her prayerful mien. With two of the Theological Virtues being present, one might expect Charity as well, the greatest of the three (1 Cor 13:13). Rather than being part of the cluster of virtues, however, charity is embodied by the Virgin Mary, whose traditionally red gown here connotes the equally customary color of the virtue. Hope is gazing at the Virgin as her line of vision runs along the arm of Faith, marking the trio of Theological Virtues that culminates in Charity/Mary. Identifying the Virgin in this way alludes to the legendary origins of the Dominican Order as described above.

The prominence of Divine Wisdom calls for further consideration. In the liturgy, Wisdom is associated with the Virgin Mary, her status in this respect also being part of the immaculist argument.^[12] The frescoed virtues can be seen as attributes of the Virgin, but a Thomistic perspective would go even further than Marian panegyric. The Summa (II–II, Q45, A1) calls attention to the traditional status of Wisdom as being among the gifts of the Holy Ghost, and in Solimena’s fresco both are placed along the central, vertical axis. Receiving this gift presumes faith, and hence Faith is seated next to Divine Wisdom. The theologian describes how with Wisdom one can understand the highest causes, including divine ones. In the fresco Divine Wisdom is looking upward in the direction of God while perceiving his Trinitarian nature, unlike the Cathar heretics emblematized below.

The peculiar vision that Dominic’s mother had during her pregnancy – a small dog with a torch escaped from her womb and put the world on fire – has become the animal at bottom right, holding a torch to the green hydra. The militant interpretation of the animal is a play on the friars as the Domini canes, the “dogs of God” persecuting heresy. Apart from the tonsured, backturned figure at left, suggestive of Martin Luther, the other figures cannot be identified with particular heresies, despite De Dominici’s identification of them as arch-heretics. The figures have become an occasion for the painter’s display of his mastery of the heroic male nude. One tries to protect his head underneath a drapery against the firebolt while others fall when hit by light, as if struck down by truth and the Dominican saints’ virtues. The sparsity of attributes among the heretics may be seen as a simplification in favor of clarity and elegance. It does, however, also allow for polyvalence, bringing into play the Book of Revelations.

Before his description of the sacristy at San Domenico, De Dominici characterizes a change in Solimena’s more mature style that includes noble actions shown in the most natural way (azioni nobili e naturalissime) and clouds and air painted with excellent taste (sommo gusto).^[13] The issue of picturing the supernatural in a persuasive manner with a renewed attention to natural phenomena is exemplified by the setting, as nature enhances the spiritual hierarchy. De Dominici describes the radiance of the Trinity as almost blinding (quasi abbagliata); what makes it so is the burst of sunlight behind the three. Moving downward, the clouds increasingly lose their golden tones and finally turn a dark gray at the horizon against the blue of the sky. As they disappear behind the bridge, they begin to resemble fumes rising from Hell, a motif with eschatological implications.

This, among other visual clues, calls the beholder’s attention to chapter twelve of St. John’s Apocalypse with the famous description of a woman with a crown of stars, clad in the sun, standing on the moon, and about to give birth. A red dragon with seven heads arrives to devour her child, but once born her son is taken up to God’s throne to rule all the nations – the woman and child were universally interpreted as Mary and Christ. War then breaks out in Heaven, but St. Michael hurls down the dragon and the rebellious angels. St. John hears a voice mentioning the blood of the lamb, calling “woe to the earth and the sea” (Rev. 12:12) because the devil is now inhabiting the terrestrial sphere.

The dragon, also referred to as a serpent, sends a flood to sweep away the woman, but the earth opens and swallows the waters. The crown of the Woman of the Apocalypse consists of twelve stars, a number that can be recognized in the fresco even though some are covered by the Virgin’s neck, the upper half of the crown revealing six. The placement of the triumphant Mary below the Trinity alludes to the Book of Revelation regarding her son having been taken up to God. The hydra below evokes the dragon/ devil accompanied by fallen angels/heresiarchs, the angel with the firebolt in turn becoming St. Michael. The Lamb of Revelations is alluded to by Divine Wisdom while the unusual placement of a bridge below, connoting both water and firm ground, can be tied to the devil’s attempt at creating a flood and the warning to the earth and the sea against him. The voice heard by the evangelist, insinuating that the world now suffers because the devil no longer is in Heaven, might be associated with the heretic falling off the bridge as if about to enter the beholder’s space. After the expulsion of the rebel angels – the original apostasy – the devil operates in the sublunar sphere where the Dominicans fight against his influence.

By the seventeenth century, the Woman of the Apocalypse had become the conventional way of representing the Immaculate Mary in Catholic art. At the time of the death of King Charles II in 1700, the Spanish Crown had for a century associated itself with the Marian belief, amounting to a national cult. Spain placed pressure on the pontiffs that the Immaculate Conception might become dogma – a status it only received in the nineteenth century.^[14] The viceroys of Naples followed the Spanish rulers with respect to the promotion of Mary’s immaculacy. Pedro Téllez-Girón, 3rd Duke of Osuna and viceroy of Naples from 1616 to 1620, with the support of the Jesuits ordered that all magistrates as well as doctors and professors of the university must take an oath to the Immaculate Conception in a Jesuit church. This led to the Dominicans’ boycott of the viceroy.^[15] Despite certain exceptions, historically the Dominicans had been opposed to the Immaculate Conception. It was not until 1673 that they were made exempt from the rule that placed university instructors in Naples under threat of losing their positions unless they took the oath. The tensions that arose between Jesuits and Dominicans over the Virgin Mary had reverberations into the eighteenth century.

In Solimena’s fresco the allusions to Rev. 12 combined with the allegory of Divine Wisdom unavoidably bring to mind the Immaculate Conception. In the neighboring church of the Gesù Nuovo a few years earlier the Jesuits had deployed the biblical passage in a pictorial argument for the Marian belief, seen in De Matteis’s Woman of the Apocalypse and St. Michael Fighting the Dragon (fig. 2).^[16] In San Domenico Maggiore, because both sun and moon are missing among Mary’s immaculist attributes – the crescent under her feet seems at that point to have been obligatory, unless she is stepping on the serpent as in Caravaggio’s altarpiece in the Borghese Gallery – the image fails to communicate the Immaculate Conception. The fresco inscribes the Dominicans in an apocalyptic narrative, their historical fight against heresy becoming part of God’s plan for the future without adhering to the Marian belief. There is little to suggest that by the early eighteenth century the Dominicans were disputing heresies regarding the Trinity, but their particular self-representation via Solimena could have had other aims. The Jesuits equally represented themselves as the eradicators of heresy. As has been noticed, among the sources for Solimena’s heresiarchs are the expelled figures in Baciccio’s (1639–1709) vault of the Gesù in Rome. While alluding to their historical roles as defenders of the Trinity, the Dominican friars in Naples appropriated the militant and triumphant imagery of the Jesuits for a maculist purpose.

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Paolo De Matteis, Woman of the Apocalypse and St. Michael Fighting the Dragon, 1698, fresco. Naples, Gesù Nuovo

The Trinity According to Paolo De Matteis

At the same time as Solimena was employed in San Domenico Maggiore, De Matteis executed inside the church of San Sebastiano in Guardia Sanframondi in Benevento what would become the first in a series of Trinitarian murals (fig. 3). The commission for San Sebastiano from the local Monte de’ Pietà was part of the reconstruction of the church in the aftermath of the earthquake of 1688, which destroyed much of the city. Domenico Antonio Vaccaro (1678–1748) created the meandering stucco frames that separate the vaults above nave and choir into smaller scenes.^[17]The central field above the nave is now referred to as The Assumption of the Virgin, but because the Madonna, placed somewhat off center, is kneeling and immobile, it rather shows her in perpetual devotion to the Trinity. The heavenly scene is bordered by the four Evangelists while the spandrels of the vault feature allegories of Mary’s virtues.^[18] The Glory of St. Sebastian, covering the central oval field above the sanctuary, is surrounded by framed images of the Theological Virtues. Charity is represented twice, both for the sake of symmetry and because of the greater status of that virtue in relation to the two others.^[19]

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Paolo De Matteis, Virgin Mary Adoring the Holy Trinity, ca. 1705–1706, fresco. Guardia Sanframondi, San Sebastiano

By covering a smaller area with fewer figures, De Matteis’s design in Benevento is necessarily different from Solimena’s in Naples. Christ with the Cross and the Father are both turning toward the Virgin Mary in a centering movement, in contrast to the expansive energy of Solimena’s group. Both painters applied the ingenious notion of letting virtues be embodied in the Virgin Mary and angels, respectively. Even though the Theological Virtues in the church of San Sebastiano can be found above the high altar, they reappear in different form in the Trinitarian fresco of the nave as well. Of the five young angels (as opposed to the putti) one below the Virgin is dressed in the red of Charity and another further below in the green of Hope. To Mary’s right is an angel with folded hands gazing upon the Trinity above in a rendition of Faith, the white clothes corresponding to Ripa’s four different personifications of religious faith.^[20] The spirit in green is carrying an architectural model with three towers like a votive offering. To his left is a long-necked bird behind a cloud. Even if not the most graceful of painted birds, De Matteis’s animal can be read as a crane. The coat of arms of Guardia Sanframondi shows three towers with a crane on top with a stone in its talon. The avian motif has a source in Pliny the Elder, who describes how one crane keeps watch while the others are at rest (Nat. Hist. 10.30). Should the guarding crane fall asleep the stone would drop, waking it up. This traditional emblem of vigilance is embedded in the name of the city. As per the fresco, hope sustained the people of Guardia Sanframondi during the rebuilding of their town in the aftermath of the earthquake.

By showing the Virgin adoring the Trinity, De Matteis brought the economy of intercession into play. The belief that prayers addressed to saints were in turn passed on to God was, with respect to the Virgin Mary, summarized in the invocation ora pro nobis (“pray for us”) from the Hail Mary. In 1563, the Council of Trent set down the dogma on intercession:

… it is a good and beneficial thing to evoke them [the saints] and to have recourse to their prayers and helpful assistance to obtain blessings from God through his Son our lord Jesus Christ, who is our sole redeemer and saviour ….^[21]

The Theological Virtues in De Matteis’s fresco also imply how devotees connect with God, the purpose of intercession. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa (I–II, Q62, A1) explains how man’s union with the Godhead is beyond human nature. For that reason God created the Theological Virtues so that humans may become virtuous and directed toward their Creator; hence the presence of the three virtues among the angels in De Matteis’s image of Marian intercession at Guardia Sanframondi.

The painter himself apparently experienced in very concrete terms the benefits of intercession. An episode from De Dominici’s biography of the artist – published in 1745 together with those of Giordano and Solimena in volume three of the Vite – describes how De Matteis after the negative reception of his frescoes at Santa Maria degli Angeli found himself short on commissions and money, especially since he had recently married. Someone then proposed that his wife go to the Minim church of San Francesco del Palazzo “and recommend herself warmly to this thaumaturge [St. Francis of Paola], because certainly his intercessions would bear fruit.”^[22] Her prayers were heard, and soon her husband received a commission from the very same church.

Solimena’s Trinity group in the Dominican sacristy has a commanding yet unforced character. It is an all-encompassing deity, an “airy” presence that anchors the heavenly scenery. The organization of the three figures at first seems related to Titian’s Trinity in the famous Gloria (Madrid, Museo del Prado). Painted for Charles V, it was known outside of Spain through Cornelis Cort’s reproductive engraving of 1566 (fig. 4).^[23] The dove of the Holy Ghost soars above the first two persons of the Trinity, sitting next to each other with Christ on the Father’s right as described in the New Testament. Like the iconography of the Throne of Mercy (discussed below), this pictorial commonplace had already been established in the twelfth century.^[24] Because of Titian’s fame and continued importance to modern painting, his composition in particular might be considered a point of departure for the Neapolitan artists when setting forth this version of the Trinity. A drawing by Luca Giordano at the Metropolitan Museum of Art demonstrates how Neapolitan painters continued to work with – and against – Titian’s schemata (fig. 5).^[25] Solimena in his fresco orients the heads of Christ and the Father along the same horizontal but undermines Titian’s surface-bound geometry. Christ gives the impression of moving forward in his seated pose while God the Father, placed slightly deeper in space, seems to recede. De Matteis’s Trinity in Guardia Sanframondi at first also comes across as symmetrical, but the V-shape in which the human figures are inscribed is so dynamic that it too disrupts the self-contained, immobile character found in Titian.

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Cornelis Cort after Titian, Gloria, 1566, engraving, 52.6 × 37.6 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. no. 49.97.535

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Luca Giordano, The Holy Trinity, ca. 1685–1690, red chalk, 26.6 × 38.4 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. no. 62.129.1r

Such “Wollflinian” concerns on the part of the Baroque painters with open, dynamic, “atectonic” form have theological ramifications. Internally the Trinity is a dynamic unity, the Son proceeding from the father and – according to the Western Churches – the Holy Ghost from both the Father and the Son.^[26] St. Thomas Aquinas describes how this is not an issue of one person having been created by another (a heretical notion):

Procession, therefore, is not to be understood from what it is in bodies, either according to local movement or by way of a cause proceeding forth to its exterior effect, as, for instance, like heat from the agent to the thing made hot. Rather it is to be understood by way of an intelligible emanation, for example, of the intelligible word which proceeds from the speaker, yet remains in him. In that sense the Catholic Faith understands procession as existing in God.^[27]

A thoroughly abstract notion, its representation by artists depended on visible bodies. The static character of Titian’s image downplays the Trinitarian procession in favor of the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son, one figure mirroring the other.^[28] The dynamic relationship is instead played out in the so-called Throne of Grace, in which God the Father holds the dead Christ or supports the Cross on which he hangs. An example is the woodcut of 1511 by Albrecht Dürer (fig. 6).^[29] By showing Christ hanging from his Father’s hands, the print visualizes the progression from the first person of the Trinity to the second. After the renderings of the Throne of Grace by major seicento artists like Jusepe Ribera (Madrid, Museo del Prado) and Guido Reni on the high altar of Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini e Convalescenti in Rome, this type of image gradually fell out of favor, and it seems to have been deemed ineffective for ceiling decorations.^[30] The frescoes by Solimena and De Matteis show the three persons interacting with their surroundings, Christ most of all, and yet we are not to imagine that they are moving away from their inhabited positions. As the immobile center of the cosmos, the Trinitarian God remains dynamic within its own orbit.

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Albrecht Dürer, The Holy Trinity, 1511, woodcut, 39.8 × 28.7 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. no. 1984.1201.25

The Council of Trent defined intercession as central to the connection between Christians and the Trinity. In the decree quoted above, Christ himself is an intercessor who transmits prayers to God. This notion was not alien to, for instance, Lutheran art and thought. The emphasis and persistence with which Catholic artists set it forth, however, imply that Christ’s intercession with the Trinity was a model, and therefore argument, for saintly intercessions altogether, justifying the cult of the saints against Protestant notions.^[31] This point is carried through in the frescoes where saints are seen venerating the Trinity. The particular role played by the second person was tied to his Incarnation and terrestrial presence in the transubstantiated Host. Artists were faced with the challenge of showing Christ as somehow more approachable than the Holy Ghost and the Father to the represented saints as well as the churchgoers facing the image. At the same time, artists had to stress the equal importance of the three persons. Titian’s Gloria only does the latter, as the twin-like appearance of the Father and the Son results in neither taking visual precedence. (Cort’s design in this respect differs slightly from Titian’s, as the engraver rendered the head of Christ in profile, introducing some asymmetry.)

With this particular role played by Christ in mind, Solimena’s choice in San Domenico Maggiore to bring him closer to the audience than the Father takes on new meaning. Nude and stretching out his arms in evocation of his crucifixion as angels lift the Cross behind him, the Son combines the controlling presence of the celestial ruler with the somewhat passive air of one offering himself to the spectator. By pointing to Christ, God the Father indicates his status as the sacrificial lamb through whom the grace of the Trinity is transmitted. (A comparable motif figured in Massimo Stanzione’s [1585–1656] damaged ceiling painting in San Paolo Maggiore with saints venerating the Trinity.)^[32] In Guardia Sanframondi, Christ’s nudity and back-leaning pose make him more “open” than the Father, covered in clothes and bending forward. The location of Mary next to her son has some bearing on the crux of intercession/Incarnation as well. Not only is Christ moved by his mother’s prayers, but it was from her body that he took on flesh and blood.

A similar set of problems regarding the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, and intercession was explored in a major work of Roman settecento painting by one of Solimena’s most gifted pupils. Between 1721 and 1724, Sebastiano Conca (1680–1764) frescoed the vault of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere (fig. 7). The Glory of St. Cecilia was commissioned by the Neapolitan Francesco Acquaviva d’Aragona, Spanish ambassador and, from 1709, cardinal protector of the church.^[33] Conca’s contemporary Pascoli, in his vita of the artist, posthumously published in the nineteenth century, captures the painter’s characteristic genteelness:

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Sebastiano Conca, The Glory of St. Cecilia, 1721–1724, fresco. Rome, Santa Cecilia

And it was certainly beautiful and lovely to see the Saint in triumph led by the most blessed Virgin before the divine tribunal, surrounded by an immense and great crowd following her. Jesus in courteously welcoming her has placed on her head a well-woven garland of lilies as a sign of her virginal candor.^[34]

According to Pascoli, the fresco was nothing less than a sensation, the parts being angelically distributed while the whole was altogether celestial. Expecting the artist to produce his greatest work so far, Conca’s audience was not disappointed. The entire city of Rome came to see it and – contemplating it in parts and in its entirety – remained engrossed and stupefied.^[35]

Conca based the upper part of his invention on Solimena’s Dominican sacristy fresco, except this time Christ has stepped down from his place and is standing next to his mother, the Cross that in Solimena’s fresco is behind the seated figure now serving as a placeholder. Conca’s decision to make his fresco a homage to his former teacher through imitation also brought the Neapolitan patron into play. Christ is crowning St. Cecilia with a flowery wreath in allusion to the crowns of red roses and white lilies that the angel handed to her and her spouse St. Valerian upon their wedding, with promises of chaste cohabitation.^[36] The presence of the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, and a female saint being crowned cannot but bring associations to the Coronation of the Virgin. The image positions Christ and his mother – the bride and groom of the Song of Songs – as the celestial ideal of celibate matrimony.

The fresco operates with a complex chain of intercessions, beginning with St. Urban below as he looks into the nave while gesturing toward St. Cecilia, the pontiff being the most direct link between churchgoers and the celestial scenery. The Virgin Mary is seen receiving the devotions of the male martyrs: Cecilia’s husband – baptized according to legend by the saintly pontiff – his brother-in-law Tiburtius, and Maximus. (Pascoli identifies the saints with a single exception: to the right of the brothers are two martyrs, one of whom might be Maximus while the other so far remains unidentified.) Mary in turn will pass the saints’ prayers onto Christ. His role as intercessor is spelled out through his pairing with Mary while his temporary departure from the seat of the Trinity is a direct reference to his intermediary role.

Translating Luca Giordano’s Gloria at the Escorial

When De Matteis chose to imitate Giordano in his five frescoes with the Trinity, it was part of a strategy whereby he could emerge as the incarnation of his former teacher for the eighteenth century. De Matteis’s self-fashioning as Giordano redivivus is a rich topic that is beyond the scope of the present study and shall only be addressed briefly. This view of the younger painter was set forth in his first biography. Likely composed by Antonio Roviglione, it appears in the first posthumous edition of Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi’s Abecedario pittorico (Naples 1731).^[37] The text praises De Matteis’s swiftness of execution, seemingly endless new inventions, and imitations of other artists, Giordano included, all features that tie student to master.

De Dominici, invested in representing Solimena as the leading Neapolitan painter of his age, subverted the narrative of De Matteis’s earlier biographer. One example is his take on the painter’s legendary speed of painting as a vice that aggravated what to him had already been a problem in Giordano. In De Matteis’s biography in the Abecedario pittorico, the imitation of other artists is a token of virtuosity as it both implies emulation and a willed and successful transformation of the self into an artist of the past. De Dominici, on the other hand, sees De Matteis’s imitations of other artists as a form of hubris, and he scoffs at the thought that the latter’s works could compare with Raphael, Correggio, Titian, Veronese, the Carracci, Domenichino, and Reni.^[38] Such a characterization precluded the possibility of De Matteis playing the part of a new Giordano.

Donald Rabiner’s studies of the Gazzetta di Napoli have revealed that, prior to his departure for Spain, Giordano was the artist most frequently referred to in the Neapolitan newspaper; attention then shifted to Giacomo del Po (1654–1726) and, above all, to De Matteis. It was only from the mid-1720s, after the death of most of Solimena’s competitors, that Solimena began receiving the lion’s share of media attention.^[39] De Dominici backdated Solimena’s superior position to the beginning of the century, marginalizing De Matteis to posterity by characterizing him as a prideful artist who wrongly thought himself capable of competing with Solimena. The earliest sources, however, leave a different impression.

The pictorial model to which De Matteis repeatedly turned when representing the Trinity is a ceiling that he most likely had not seen in person, since no sources indicate that he ever traveled to Spain. Among the works that Giordano painted for King Charles II at the Escorial is the spectacular Gloria with the Trinity in the vault above the grand staircase (fig. 8). Giordano returned from Spain to Naples in 1702, three years before his death. In the year of Giordano’s arrival, De Matteis left for Paris to enter the service of Louis XIV. He was back in Italy by 1705. If the two painters overlapped in Naples in 1702, De Matteis could have become acquainted with Giordano’s design from an image now lost (or he may have returned from France via Spain after all).

8

Luca Giordano, Gloria, detail, 1692–1693, fresco. El Escorial, Imperial Staircase

Giordano’s mural imitates Titian’s rendering of the same subject, then at the Escorial, in dynastic allusion to the Spanish Crown; both paintings feature Charles V and Philip II venerating the Trinity (fig. 4).^[40] In the fresco, the Virgin kneels in a gesture of prayer at Christ’s side, somewhat below him, their organization visualizing the dynamics of intercession for the benefit of the Habsburgs.^[41] Like other artists of the late seventeenth century, Giordano dissolved the static symmetry of Titian’s Trinity, in this case by placing Christ at a slightly lower level than the Father. This is a device he would have learned from Pietro da Cortona, with whom he had studied in Rome. In Santa Maria in Vallicella between 1648 and 1651, the Tuscan painter executed the Assumption of the Virgin in the apse of the tribune that connects across the church space with the Trinity in the dome, where Christ is seen interceding on behalf of humanity with the Father.^[42] A comparison between Giordano’s and Pietro da Cortona’s versions of the Trinity in Spain and Rome, respectively, makes it clear that the novelty of the former’s invention consists in the strong foreshortening of the Father and the Son, now seen from a point of view lower than that commonly used.

In Guardia Sanframonte, De Matteis’s Trinity is close to Giordano’s Spanish work in terms of the position of Christ’s torso and raised arm (fig. 3). The next occasion on which he painted the consubstantial God was in the dome of Santa Caterina a Formiello in Naples, dated 1712 (fig. 9). By the later eighteenth century, the fresco was already deteriorating from humidity, but a restoration completed in 2007 gave it new legibility.^[43] Christ hands the crown of martyrdom to St. Catherine of Alexandria – she is already wearing the royal crown. The Virgin Mary in turn is interceding with her son for the saint. God the Father above is shown as if inhabiting a different section of Paradise, suggesting that access to the Trinity is through the Son. De Matteis’s imitation of Giordano in the figure of the Father might be seen as a response to Solimena’s similar figure in his Dominican fresco, which also draws on the design at the Escorial (fig. 1). That the more ambitious local artists upon Giordano’s return to Naples should have sought to familiarize themselves with his Spanish production through studies or copies that he brought with him is intuitive. Most likely only artists and a few cognoscenti would have been able to recognize the Spanish source in the Trinity for the Neapolitan painters. As is the case with Giordano, Solimena’s version of the Father is seen in strong foreshortening, reclining as much as he is enthroned, which creates an effect of him “resting” in his own body. With his prominent nose and deep-set eyes emerging from masses of white hair and beard that almost become one with the surrounding luminosity, Solimena’s God the Father seems very old when compared to those of his Neapolitan colleagues. Faced with Solimena’s mural, De Matteis let God the Father in Santa Caterina a Formiello read like a quotation of Giordano, claiming a space for himself as his “artistic inheritor.” For one example, whereas Solimena’s more comfortable figure only raises his right hand, De Matteis followed Giordano by letting him lift the entire arm.

9

Paolo De Matteis, Gloria with the Coronation of St. Catherine of Alexandria, detail, 1712, fresco. Naples, Santa Caterina a Formiello, dome

In 1713, De Matteis was commissioned to paint yet another dome in Naples, The Triumph of the Immaculate Conception in the Gesù Nuovo, which De Dominici says he executed in only sixty-six days during 1717. Because of concerns over its stability, the dome was demolished in 1775 and replaced with another. The lost fresco is known from two modelli, one in Naples and the other in Berlin, which, as in Santa Caterina a Formiello, both show the Father and the Son spatially separated (figs. 10, 11).^[44] The modello in the Museo Duca di Martina is presumed to predate the more complex painting in Berlin that includes Esther in front of Ahasuerus as prefigurations of the Immaculate Conception. In both paintings the Virgin is venerating the Trinity, while the Berlin modello additionally figures the final moment of Mary’s Assumption, a subject long associated with her immaculacy.^[45] God the Father is an imitation of Giordano, but Christ’s forward inclination as he welcomes his heavenly bride is more energetic than the similar figure in De Matteis’s previous dome. The painter repeated the notion from Guardia Sanframondi regarding the use of angels to allegorize the Theological Virtues, indicating the Thomistic idea of the virtues as divine gifts that unite the faithful to God. The Trinity is flanked at the left by St. Michael in armor, evoking the military model after which the Society of Jesus was organized, and at the right by three angels wearing white, green, and red draperies in allusion to the Theological Virtues, Charity symbolically placed at top.

10

Paolo De Matteis, The Triumph of the Immaculate Conception, ca. 1713–1717, oil on canvas, 158 × 207 cm. Naples, Museo nazionale di Capodimonte, on loan to the Museo nazionale della ceramica Duca di Martina

11

Paolo De Matteis, The Triumph of the Immaculate Conception, ca. 1713–1717, oil on canvas, 160.3 × 252.5 cm. Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie

With respect to the Jesuits, it is worth recalling that showing the Trinity in the form of three figures in church and chapel decorations was not a given. Since the Middle Ages, artists had added a triangular halo to express the idea of three persons in the single figure of the Father, a motif still deployed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Naples. (That this kind of halo was no absolute requirement when displaying the Trinity in the Father alone is revealed in Rome in Raphael’s Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo and Guido Reni’s Chapel of the Annunciation in the Quirinal Palace.) The Trinity as a single figure with a triangular halo was typically used for Old Testament subjects, but not exclusively so, as seen in works by De Matteis, Solimena, and his pupil Francesco de Mura (1696–1782).^[46] Such imagery found justification in St. Augustine’s foundational work on the Trinity:

And the apostle [St. Paul] has not refrained from using the very word itself, but has said most expressly, “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God”; using here the name of God specially of the Father; as elsewhere, “But the head of Christ is God.”^[47]

Representing the Trinity by a single person apparently was sound biblical practice. As regards the Jesuits, it is symptomatic that they avoided the single-figure version of the Trinity expressed in the Father. Their devotion to Jesus would naturally lead to a preference for his visualization as seen in the sculpted Trinity at the tomb of their founder in the Gesù in Rome.

After the success of De Matteis’s domes in Naples he was invited to fresco that of the cappellone of St. Cataldus in Taranto Cathedral, where he painted The Glory of St. Cataldus (1714–1715; fig. 12), the protector and former bishop of the city, in the oval dome.^[48] This time the Father and the Son are seated next to one another at the very top point of the dome with the Holy Ghost above them. Despite the two human figures being placed on the same level, just as in Titian’s Gloria, De Matteis succeeded in communicating Christ’s status as the mediator between believers and the Trinity. This time the Son is holding both cross and scepter while the Father is lifting his right arm in a dramatic gesture of blessing, directing attention to the dove above. The relationship of the latter figure to Giordano’s Gloria is less obvious because no longer seen from below, though the raised arm is a shared feature. Christ’s accessibility is now implied by the downward turn of his right arm with the scepter to the side, a variation on the modello in Naples for The Triumph of the Immaculate Conception, as if presenting his naked body to the visitors of the chapel.

12

Paolo De Matteis, The Glory of St. Cataldus, 1714–1715, fresco. Taranto Cathedral, Cappellone di San Cataldo

In Taranto the painter once again included the Theological Virtues. The angels inhabiting the vault are dressed in robes of white, blue, green, red, and gold. In the lower section of the dome at Christ’s right is one wrapped in red while to his right is another angel wearing green followed by one in white. Three putti beneath them, their faces covered in clouds, insinuate the triadic status of the angelic virtues above them. In keeping with St. Thomas Aquinas, the allegorical angels speak to how St. Cataldus’s virtues conducted him to the Trinity via Mary, she placing a hand on his shoulder while gesturing toward God. The last occasion on which the artist frescoed the Trinity was in the right nave of Santa Caterina a Formiello in the vault of the Chapel of the Pentecost.^[49] Here God the Father imitates Giordano’s version in Spain while Christ is a variation on the similar figure in Taranto Cathedral.

A Jesuit Design in Seattle

To the group of Trinitarian images by De Matteis I propose to add one more work, a drawing in pen and brown ink and wash over pencil in the Seattle Art Museum (fig. 13). Donated by a private collector to the museum in 1973, it was included the following year in a list of recent acquisitions as an anonymous design for a Jesuit church ceiling. The museum’s summary catalogue of drawings published in 1980 describes it as being in the style of Solimena, but it does not correspond to his graphic modes.^[50] While the view of Heaven might have worked well for an altarpiece, the symmetrical shape of the frame at top and bottom with rounded corners suggests a design for a ceiling decoration instead. Unlike rococo altarpieces north of the Alps, those created in eighteenth-century Italy tend to have square lower frames. It is not a given that the drawing was intended for a church nave. The relatively few figures inside the drawn frame – the entire width is occupied by a row of three saints – and the somewhat compact arrangement could suggest that the design is for a smaller space such as an oratory or a sacristy.

13

Here attributed to Paolo De Matteis, The Worship of the Trinity, before 1728, pencil, brown ink, and wash on paper, 39 × 22 cm. Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Charles M. Clark, acc. no. 73.3

Accompanied by clusters of putti, the Trinity is placed above with the Virgin Mary in a lower position next to her son. Behind the head of God the Father is a luminous triangle lightly sketched, the kind that one finds in similar figures in the frescoes by Giordano and De Matteis. The large cloud at right slightly below middle divides Heaven into two levels. Above, a bearded, praying saint kneeling on the cloud is directing his devotions to Christ while the Virgin shares her son’s intercessory function as she addresses the saintly devotee. The lower half is inhabited by saints and more angels, the latter energizing the directionality of the saints’ enraptured gazes and gestures. At left the prominent figure of a bishop is seated among clouds as if enthroned, accompanied by angels carrying his crosier and miter. His celestial supporters and the surrounding clouds move beyond the frame, entering the space of the beholder. The sense of marvel generated by the trompe l’oeil effect enhances the rhetorical address of the blessing saint (and painter) to the audience. As the bishop instructs his flock from the afterlife, a more reticent – almost shy – saint is kneeling next to and behind him, praying with downturned eyes and hands crossed over his chest. At the youth’s left is a kneeling nun, praying to the Trinity above.

It has been suggested that the young saint is either Aloysius Gonzaga or Stanislaw Kostka, both sixteenth-century Jesuit novices who died young from illness. Beatified in 1605, their canonization had to wait until 1726.^[51] The putto below him and the two above hold what might be branches of white lilies, which could be attributes of either virgin saint. It seems that in the angel above right the artist was trying out both flowers and a palm frond. The cassock with a high collar was standard in representations of both Jesuit novices, an example being Pierre Legros’s St. Aloysius Gonzaga in Glory at his tomb in Sant’Ignazio, Rome. Gonzaga, however, was typically shown wearing the white surplice over his black clothes (Legros’s marble being an exception), and De Matteis painted him that way. For this reason the kneeling saint in the drawing is likely Kostka, even though he folds his hands in a way comparable to Gonzaga in Legros’s funerary relief.^[52] The two young saints can also be identified in the Gesù Nuovo modello in Berlin. It represents two groups of Jesuit saints in the vicinity of Christ and Mary, respectively (fig. 11). In the right group Gonzaga, sporting a surplice, kneels behind a man dressed in black while behind them a youth with raised, folded hands turns his gaze upward. Below Christ’s right foot is a pair of bearded Jesuits while behind them a young, smooth-chinned man wearing the black cassock leans forward to get a glimpse of the deity from behind the saint, blocking his view. Because he is less prominent than the ecstatic youth next to Gonzaga, I tend to think that the painter grouped together the two novice beati behind the Virgin.^[53] For atmospheric effect, Kostka’s cassock is not of the same dark black as that of the bearded Jesuit in front of him.

The presence of Kostka in the Seattle drawing raises the question whether other Jesuits might be identified. The nun and the bishop can be excluded, since the order did not accept women, and no bishop saint emerged from the ranks of the Jesuits. Some connection to the order might be implied by the bishop, however, as he resembles images of St. Francis de Sales. Having received a Jesuit education in Paris, the future bishop of Geneva studied under the Jesuit Antonio Possevino in Padua. Unlike other bishop saints, he was typically shown in choir dress wearing a blue or purple cassock with a mozzetta of the same color over the rochet. Artists usually portrayed him with a full, rounded beard, the front part of his head being bald with hair along the sides. De Matteis, in an altarpiece of 1726 in the Church of the Girolamini in Naples, instead showed him with more progressed baldness (fig. 14).^[54] The bishop in the Seattle drawing corresponds to the appearance of Francis de Sales in the Neapolitan image.

14

Paolo De Matteis, Madonna and Child with Sts. Peter, Paul, and Francis de Sales, 1726, oil on canvas. Naples, Chiesa dei Girolamini

This leaves the kneeling figure before the Trinity as the potential Jesuit. He is accompanied by a large open book supported by an angel. Even though his costume is somewhat ambiguous, the flowing robes could be the black Jesuit habit with the long cape. His curly beard and hair growing behind the bald pate reappear in two of the Jesuits in the Berlin modello for the Gesù Nuovo: the one on the left wearing a yellow chasuble over the alb and the other dressed in black behind the Virgin on the right. In both modelli for The Triumph of the Immaculate Conception, the figure behind the saint in the chasuble has been recognized as St. Francis Xavier, typically shown with the mozzetta and a wanderer’s staff in allusion to his missionary activities. Considering that Francis Xavier as one of the founders of the order is positioned in the more honorable place on the left (i.e., on God’s right in the Berlin painting), the priest dressed in white and yellow must be St. Ignatius Loyola. In the two works the front figure behind/below the Virgin can then be identified as St. Francis Borgia, the third Superior General of the Society of Jesus, the two groups in the Berlin painting making up the five most important Jesuit saints and beati in an Italian context.^[55] In the modello in Naples the five are gathered beneath the Virgin, and here as well Kostka is folding his hands in prayer as he gazes upward.

With this background I propose that the kneeling saint in the drawing, facing the Trinity and the Virgin Mary, should be identified as St. Ignatius. He was commonly represented wearing alb and chasuble as well as cassock and cape. In Francesco Bertos’s statue of the saint he is wearing the outfit that in real life would have been black (fig. 15).^[56] Still, his identification in the drawing is perhaps less obvious. He was typically shown with a short beard and straight hair closely combed to the skull as seen in the bronze. In the drawing his beard and hair seem thicker and somewhat curly. The rendition does, however, correspond to his appearance in De Matteis’s two painted versions of The Triumph of the Immaculate Conception. A large book with the motto of the Jesuit Order – Ad maiorem Dei gloriam – was a common attribute of the saint as shown by Bertos and seen in statues of the saint in St. Peter’s and the Gesù in Rome. In 1693, De Matteis in his Jesuit allegory on the vault of San Ferdinando in Naples, then dedicated to St. Francis Xavier, pictured a trinity of the three major saints – in descending order Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, and Francis Borgia – with Ignatius placing his hand on the pages of the open book (fig. 16).^[57] In the drawing, the identification of the founder of the Jesuit Order makes the pointing gesture of St. Francis de Sales toward him particularly meaningful.

15

Francesco Bertos, St. Ignatius Loyola, ca. 1720–1725, bronze, 62.5 × 35.2 × 11.7 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. no. 2010.113, purchase, Assunta Sommella Peluso, Ignazio Peluso, Ada Peluso, and Romano I. Peluso gift, 2010

16

Paolo De Matteis, The Triumph of Religion over Heresy with Jesuit Saints, 1693, fresco. Naples, San Ferdinando

It is in the oeuvre of De Matteis that stylistic similarities to the Seattle drawing emerge. The forward movement of Christ differs from his slight backward inclination in Guardia Sanframondi, and he is without the Cross. Still, the pose and orientation of the two are strikingly similar. The drawn figure imitates Giordano’s Christ at the Escorial: the way in which his lower left arm emerges from his body is lifted from the earlier work. The placement of the Virgin in relation to Christ also evokes the Spanish ceiling. De Matteis was famed as a draftsman during the eighteenth century. De Dominici describes how he studied ancient statuary in Rome and made life drawings at the Accademia di San Luca when working under Giovanni Maria Morandi (1622–1717). According to the biographer, in Naples his skill in drawing academic nudes in red chalk was such that only Mattia Preti (1613–1699) and Solimena surpassed him. A number of his academic nudes were even reproduced for the instruction of young artists.^[58] Despite De Matteis’s vast output – Livio Pestilli in his essential monograph lists over 500 paintings – a very limited number of drawings have been attributed to him, and even fewer can be connected to his paintings. The production of preparatory drawings was not a given among Neapolitan artists. Writing during the seventeenth century, the Roman painter and theorist Giambattista Passeri noticed that artists in the city were averse to the time-consuming practice of making preparatory drawings and preferred instead to paint right away, which they called pittare.^[59] De Dominici even describes De Matteis’s preference for setting to work without the aid of preliminary drawings as a sign of his vanity.^[60]

The articulation of form with web-like strokes of the pen and the application of wash to a lightly sketched underdrawing characterizes Giordano’s drawings, their chiaroscuro generating spatial effects. One example is The Assumption of the Virgin (fig. 17) at Chatsworth, dating to his Spanish period (1692–1702).^[61] The Jesuit design instead tends to remain “on the surface.” Giordano’s incisive, bending lines are in contrast to the sharper ones of the sheet in Seattle, a stylistic idiosyncrasy that ties it to other drawings attributed to De Matteis.

17

Luca Giordano, The Assumption of the Virgin, 1692–1702, pen and brown ink with gray wash over black chalk on white paper, 43 × 28.2 cm. Chatsworth, Devonshire, inv. no. 625

Apart from the few studies that can be connected to De Matteis’s paintings, particularly important to the establishment of his graphic oeuvre is a drawing in the Louvre because of the eighteenth-century attribution to De Matteis displayed in the cartouche that adorns the mat (fig. 18).^[62] The drawing shows the right side of a heavenly choir intended for an arched surface and is without underdrawing. Apart from the absence of detail, it is characterized by angularity of line that is used to block out the figures while downplaying spatial depth. Other drawings attributed to the painter reveal similar stylistics: the Mass with an Apparition of the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary, and Angels at Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen and The Martyrdom of a Female Saint at the British Museum (figs. 19–20), the latter imitating Giordano’s altarpiece of the Martyrdom of St. Januarius in Santo Spirito dei Napoletani in Rome.^[63]

18

Paolo De Matteis, Angels among Clouds, ca. 1685–1695, pen, brown ink, and wash over black chalk, 45.2 × 32 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques, inv. no. 9710

19

Paolo De Matteis, The Celebration of Mass with the Holy Ghost, Virgin Mary, and Angels in the Sky above, ca. 1685–1695, pen, brown ink, and brown wash on white paper, 29.5 × 22.7 cm. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst, Den Kongelige Kobberstiksamling, inv. no. GB 350

20

Paolo De Matteis, The Martyrdom of a Female Saint, ca. 1700–1702, pen and brown ink, with gray-brown wash, over black chalk, on light gray prepared paper, 41.4 x 28.7 cm. London, British Museum, acc. no. 1978,1007.2

I propose that the Seattle drawing be added to the group of De Matteis’s “angular” drawings. The Paris and Copenhagen sheets have been dated somewhere between 1685 and 1695.^[64] The Seattle and London drawings feature more detail, a denser use of pen strokes with more articulation of form, and a sketchy underdrawing. The scene of martyrdom has been dated to around 1700–1702. I propose that De Matteis drew the Jesuit design sometime after 1702 or 1705, depending on when he became acquainted with Giordano’s Gloria. Numerous occasions could have motivated the design. Apart from the Jesuit commissions mentioned above – De Matteis had been working for that order in Naples since the early 1690s – he also painted Jesuit iconography in the city in the Chapel of the Congregation of the Monte dei Poveri, and he worked at the Nunziatelle, the Jesuit novitiate.^[65] Furthermore, in 1705 he was employed by the Jesuits in Genoa on his way back from France, and in 1717–1719 he painted canvases for the Jesuits in Taranto.^[66]

In the ceiling design in Seattle the diamond shape inscribing the three persons of the Trinity and the cherubs below at first recall the symmetry of Titian’s Gloria. In the drawing the contour from the Father’s shoulders descends along his right arm, the hand resting on the globe at center before rising in the figure of Christ and culminating in his lifted right arm. It produces an effect of continuity between the two bodies, but, as in Solimena’s Dominican fresco, the geometry of the design is unsettled through spatial displacements. Christ is seated in front of the globe and placed closer to the beholder and slightly lower than the Father, making the Trinity a dynamic unity in keeping with the continuous procession of the Son from the Father. Displaying his sacramental body, Christ together with his mother through their greater accessibility visualize the way to God in the post-Tridentine era.

De Matteis’s repeated imitations of Giordano’s Spanish work invite comparisons between heavenly and artistic generation, the Trinity being the model of all paternal authority. Thinking about art-historical change in a religious framework was embedded in the first published history of Italian art, which strategically appeared during the jubilee of 1550. Giorgio Vasari chose the Christian history of salvation as a model for his narrative of progress and triumphant excellence. The frontispiece to the 1568 edition of his Vite shows the three arts of disegno present at the resurrection of the dead (arts), perfected and brought back to life. In the aftermath of the Council of Trent, the rhetoric of the divinity of art and artists had become increasingly controversial. The artists’ biographies by Giovanni Pietro Bellori (Rome, 1672) and Pascoli neither describe supreme artists who were both born and died on Good Friday nor artists whose dead corpses behaved like those of saints in the sense of remaining intact and not emitting bad odors. (According to Vasari’s Vite, these were of course Raphael and Michelangelo, respectively.)^[67] Still, to Bellori the search for a higher and unchanging beauty meant that artists imitated their creator, while to Pascoli God remained the ultimate authority for the arts, indeed the prime architect, painter, and sculptor.^[68] Such thinking facilitated De Matteis’s positioning in Neapolitan painting through a demonstration of a filial, artistic lineage from Giordano in the Trinitarian frescoes via the Son’s progression from the Father.

The present study is indebted to Dario Beccarini, Antonio and Gerry De Falco, Chris Fischer, Chiyo Ishikawa, Stephen Orgel, Livio Pestilli, and the anonymous peer reviewers of Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.