Paolo De Matteis (Piano Vetrale 1662 – Naples 1728), attr., Joseph's Dream

Paolo De Matteis (Piano Vetrale 1662 – Naples 1728), attr.

Joseph's Dream

Oil on canvas, 49 x 65 cm

Ancient Roman frame called “Maratta”, carved and gilded wood, 61 x 76 cm

In the Christian tradition, the episode of Joseph's dream is a significant event narrated in the Gospel of Matthew. It is a series of dreams through which Joseph, Mary's husband, receives divine messages that guide his actions in crucial moments. In this particular episode the angel appears in flight indicating to Joseph the new path to take to escape the harassment of King Herod as written in Matthew (2:13). The stylistic and compositional construction undeniably refers to Naples, in particular to one of the most famous painters of the Neapolitan school of the XNUMXth century: Paolo de Matteis.

The work is linked to the Giordano style, which influenced all the artists of the time: for example, look at Joseph's Dream at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, whose construction, with the angel flying obliquely and Joseph asleep and holding his face with one hand, undeniably refers to our painting.

A pupil of Luca Giordano, De Dominici provides us with a detailed biography of Paolo de Matteis, from which it appears that “since his childhood he showed an inclination towards painting, so his father, to indulge his genius, took him to Naples where he went to draw in the churches the works of the most renowned masters of that time. But this study was interrupted by his father who, on the advice of friends, wanted him to learn literature, as a ladder by which one ascends more happily to great honors. But after some time he begged his father to let him” return to painting. Around 1682, he went to Rome where he met the painter Giovanni Maria Morandi, who introduced him to the lively artistic circle that was the Accademia di S. Luca, a true melting pot of moderate-baroque experiences along the lines of the dictates of the theoretician Giovan Pietro Bellori and the painter Carlo Maratta. In Rome he observed and drew the works of the greatest Roman masters and probably came into contact with the large group of French artists present in the city, aligned on the classicist front that united Rome and Paris at the time. In 1683 he returned to Naples and to the school of Giordano. The latter profoundly influenced all of de Matteis's production, if not that of all of Naples. The Neapolitan city of the time was characterized by the coexistence of a baroque language sometimes influenced by Cortona and the overcoming of naturalism towards a new style imported precisely by Giordano. The latter was in fact the bearer of a double matrix of experiences: on the one hand the classicism of Poussin and PF Mola and on the other a more properly baroque vision that harked back to P. Berrettini, PP Rubens and G. Lanfranco. In the art of De Matteis, who stood out among Giordano's students also for his numerous national and international commissions, we find a synthesis of the master's and Maratta's styles, but he does not lose sight of the works of Solimena or the Calabrese Knight Mattia Preti.