Portrait of a Gentleman
Oil on canvas, 103x77 cm
Carefully shaved and bewigged, a man turns, with absorbed distraction, towards a point outside our focus of observation. The long jacket with turned-up edges and three buttons opens like a curtain onto a very chic waistcoat of the same color as the tassel of the curtain at the top. He holds a flower in his hand, while resting his arm on some books; the other hand is on his waist. The bright stream, which rains down from the left, emphasizes the brightness of the reds, whites, and silver tones, refracting on the jamb of the table and on the spines of the books (a virtuoso detail that speaks volumes about the commitment of this commission). He appears inside a courteous environment, characterized by heavy curtains that fall on the seat. Who is this elegant and handsome young man, sitting on the edge of the chair as if he had barely settled down and in an instant had to spring back to attention in an attitude that already reveals every inner corner of his character?
We do not know, but we know for whom he posed. Reappearing with reference to the circle of Giuseppe Bonito (1707-1789), this dazzling portrait, resolved in an elegant harmony between the red of the long jacket and the shimmering silver of the robe on the white shirt with puffs, is without discussion the masterpiece of Giacinto Diano as a portraitist; immediately after, at least, the dazzling identification of the architect Luigi Vanvitelli (1700-1773), preserved in the collections of the Royal Palace of Caserta and dated 1765. Evidently, in terms of style, it is by the same hand.
The reference leaves no residual doubts about attributing it to the greatest painter from Pozzuoli in the Bourbon era and, ultimately, as a compatriot like Raffaello Causa suggested over forty years ago, the greatest of the Neapolitans of the second half of the 18th century. The posture and setting are similar; the solution of resting an arm on books to confirm and legitimize an intellectual status, in the first place, is identical and extremely successful.
In our case, as the spine clearly attest, it is none other than the three volumes of the Historia Universale (1702) by Christoph Keller (commonly known by the Latinization of his surname as Cellarius), a German scholar who died in Halle in 1707, founder of the three historiographical categories that we still adopt and use even in the disciplinary field of art history.
This alone would be enough to qualify our subject, whose identity we do not know, as a Neapolitan reformer of the generation of Antonio Genovesi or Giuseppe Palmieri; in any case, an authoritative representative of the Southern Enlightenment in the mature years of Vanvitelli. Equally, the acutely physiognomic precision, which does not allow for any embellishment, does not escape in the faces of the two. Giacinto Diano, therefore, in a mature phase and, by now, intelligently emancipated from the apprenticeship with a master like Francesco De Mura (1696-1782) in whose workshop he is documented since 1752.
Now, beyond a comparison that we consider conclusive, we are facing one of the by far most important (one might say brilliant) examples of portraiture which, as many of us will remember, forms one of the salient chapters of 18th-century civilization in Naples. Attention: if the rounding on Diano and the proximity to the Vanvitelli portrait push our example, characterized by a sort of lucid and enameled realism, into the second half of the century; if that is the case, everything here speaks the language of Francesco Solimena's workshop as it had been defined for decades in the pre-unitary states and, by now, throughout Europe.
The names on which it is convenient to insist to familiarize ourselves with the culture of the canvas are those of Solimena himself (who supports the effort until 1747); but above all of his most faithful, autonomous, and talented pupil: precisely De Mura. Now, that the painting belongs to one of the two is formally to be excluded. Our portrait is marked, we repeat, by a polished lexicon; in some way classical (or, properly, neoclassical!); a lexicon that not only burns every residue of that neo-seventeenth-century style still perceptible in the efforts of Solimena's late epigones. But which reveals, in Diano's history and in the same local figurative culture, an openness towards new and more modern events; and we will immediately see to whom to allude.
Diano's Position
Among the beautiful Bourbon portraits that have recently re-emerged, the painting in question allows us to rethink, from the most profitable of angles, the trajectory of who, in Naples, was professor of design at the Academy in 1773 and, from 1779 to 82, in the chair of painting. It is certainly significant that Giacinto Diano was the master and first inspirer of another Giacinto: that Gigante, who is among the indispensable names of the nineteenth-century Italian canon as well as among the masters of the definition of the modern landscape.
On the other hand, a profile of the Bourbon age can be traced even by mapping the works of Diano preserved in the main Neapolitan churches: from the Pietà dei Turchini to the Trinità dei Pellegrini (nor is there a significant Abruzzo appendix by now on the verge of the century). Not to mention, of course, Diano's local legacy in Pozzuoli and in the adjacent areas. Our painting, however, digs a trace that deserves to be followed systematically. It will be noted, in fact, how the first cultural impulses of the master - of an intelligently local scope - open up to the knowledge of Roman events; and, in particular, of Pompeo Batoni (from Lucca but of Roman adoption, who died at the age of eighty in 1787), probably the greatest Italian portraitist of the second half of the century. Batoni's relationship with the late 18th-century southern Italy is all to be rethought and there is no doubt that our new painting will help the cause.
(Stefano Causa)
Bibliography:
Marina Causa Picone, I disegni della Società Napoletana di Storia Patria, Naples 1974, pp. 54 ff.
Raffaello Causa (edited by), Civiltà del ‘700 a Napoli, exhibition catalog, Naples 1979, vol. 1, passim.
Raffaello Causa, Giacinto Diano nella chiesa di San Raffaele Arcangelo a Pozzuoli, Naples 1981
Nicola Spinosa, Pittura napoletana del Settecento, Naples 1986, vol. 2, passim.
Mario Alberto Pavone, Giacinto Diano, ad vocem, in “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, 39, 1991.
Stefano Causa, Caravaggio tra le camicie nere. La pittura napoletana dalla mostra dei tre secoli alle grandi esposizioni del Novecento, Naples 2013.
