Portrait of a gentleman
Oil on canvas 103x77 cm
Carefully shaven and bewigged, a man turns, with absorbed distraction, towards a point outside our focus of observation. The long jacket with turned-up edges with three buttons opens like a curtain on a very chic waistcoat of the same color as the tassel of the drapery above. He holds a flower in his hand, while resting his arm on some books; the other hand resting on his hip. The luminous 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 a heavy drapery that falls 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 might jump back on alert in an attitude that already reveals every curve of his character?
We don't know, but we know who he posed for. Having reappeared 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 garment over the white shirt with puffs, is undoubtedly the masterpiece of Giacinto Diano, portraitist; immediately after, at the very least, the dazzling depiction of the architect Luigi Vanvitelli (1700-1773), preserved in the collections of the Royal Palace of Caserta and dated in 1765. Evidently, stylistically, it is the same hand.
The reference leaves no residual doubts about the attribution to the greatest Pozzuoli painter of 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. Similar posture and setting; identical, and extremely successful, is the solution of resting an arm on the books to confirm and legitimize an above all intellectual status.
In our case, as the spine clearly attests, it is none other than the three volumes of Christoph Keller's Historia Universale (1702) (commonly known by the Latinization of the surname in 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 historical-artistic disciplinary field.
It would take nothing more 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. Similarly, the faces of the two do not escape a very acute physiognomic pinpointing that does not foresee any embellishment. Giacinto Diano, therefore; in a mature phase and, by now, intelligently freed from the apprenticeship with a master such as Francesco De Mura (1696-1782) in whose workshop he is documented since 1752. Now, beyond a comparison that we consider decisive, we are faced with 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 the civilization of the '700 in Naples. Attention: if the rounding on Diano and the proximity to the Vanvitelli portrait move our specimen, characterized by a kind of clear and enameled Verism, to the second half of the century; if that is the case, everything here speaks the language of the Francesco Solimena workshop as it had been defined for decades in the pre-unification states and, by now, throughout Europe.
The names on which it is worthwhile to insist in order to familiarize ourselves with the culture of the canvas are those of Solimena himself (who bears the effort until 1747); but above all of his most faithful, autonomous and talented pupil: precisely De Mura. Now, whether the painting belongs to one of the two is to be excluded on a formal level. 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-seicentoism still perceptible in the efforts of the late epigones of Solimena. But that reveals, in the history of Diano and in the same local figurative culture, an opening towards new and more modern facts; and we will see immediately to whom to allude.
Diano's Position
Among the beautiful Bourbon portraits that have recently re-emerged, the painting under examination allows us to rethink, from the most profitable of angles, the trajectory of the person who, in Naples, was a drawing professor at the Academy in 1773 and, from 1779 to 1782, 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 just 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 now at the end of the century). Not to mention, of course, the local legacy of Diano in Pozzuoli and its surroundings. Our painting, however, carves out a trace that deserves to be followed systematically. You will notice, in fact, how the first cultural impulses of the master - of intelligently local reach - open up to the knowledge of Roman facts; and, in particular, of Pompeo Batoni (from Lucca but Roman by adoption, who died at the age of eighty in 1787), probably the greatest Italian portrait painter of the second half of the century. The relationship between Batoni and the late southern '700 has yet to be rethought and there is no doubt that our new painting will benefit 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. Neapolitan painting from the exhibition of the three centuries to the great exhibitions of the twentieth century, Naples 2013.
