Paolo de Matteis

Such a ‘modern’ sensibility may have contributed to his success with French and English patrons. When the Marqués del Carpio became the Viceroy of Naples in 1683, de Matteis returned to Naples for important local commissions such as Virgin and Child (1690, Naples, San Giovanni dei Fiorentini) and the fresco St Bruno Interceding with the Virgin Mary for Suffering Humanity (1699, Naples, Certosa di San Martino). Despite being in his thirties, his fame clearly spread beyond Naples. In Spain, his early projects include a series of six canvases depicting the Lives of SS Francis and Clare (1690–95,Convent of the Clarisas, Cocentaina) and overdoors with Baptism of Christ and Resurrection for the Casa de Campo in Madrid (1696, Madrid, Real Academia de San Fernando).

Matteis was associated with the foremost intellectual circles in Europe in the first decade of the 1700s, which was the most fruitful period in his career. This begins with his stay in Paris between 1702–05, at the invitation of Victor-Marie, Comte d’Estrées (1660–1737). Besides the Grand Dauphin, his chief patrons included the Marquis de Clérambault and financiers Jean Thévinin and Antoine Crozat, whose hôtel particulier, located on the Place Vendôme (site of the Ritz Paris), he was in charge of decorating. The sophistication of 18^th-century Paris reinforced Matteis’s transition away from the Baroque vigor of Giordano and Solimena towards elegance and lightness. However, almost all of the works from this period have been lost or destroyed.

In 1707, during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1704), Naples was annexed to the Austrian Empire. De Matteis was one of the favorite artists of the Austrian viceroy W. Philipp Lorenz, Graf von Daun, through whom he received important commissions from the Austrian aristocracy, including Emperor Joseph I (St John of Nepomuk and King Wenceslas, before 1711, Hofburg, Vienna). Across the Channel, Matteis was deemed the best painter in Italy by Anthony Ashley-Copper, 3^rd Earl of Shaftesbury, for whom he painted Hercules at the Crossroads between Virtue and Vice (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum). Works with allegories, mythologies, literary subjects continued to be in demand among the most cultured connoisseurs, including Aurora Sanseverino, Duchess of Laurenzano (1669–1730), the poetess at the heart of the Naples Arcadian society.

In the 1710s and 20s De Matteis continued to work on prestigious church commissions: in the Il Gesù Nuovo in Naples (1713, destroyed), the Taranto Cathedral, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome (1725, in situ), the latter a commission for Benedict XIII during his stay in Rome between 1723–1726. In Rome he was also in the service of Cardinal de Polignac (1661–1742), the French-born cleric and diplomat and leading patron of contemporary Italian art. Towards the end of his career, De Matteis also made models for sculpture in silver.

Despite his immense commercial success, Paolo de Matteis was not a particularly well-liked figure. One of De Matteis’s most famous pictures is the very odd Allegory of the End of the War of the Spanish Succession in which the painter positioned himself audaciously in the middle of his composition, essentially transforming a political allegory into an allegory of painting. This work was painted for himself and hung in his apartment on the Via Toledo in Naples. Only a fragment of the painting has survived, the Self-Portrait now in the Museo del Capodimonte, but its composition is known from a large, finished sketch or ricordo (Sarah Blaffer Foundation, Houston). He did the same ‘photobomb’ in his portrait of Antoine Crozat and his wife.