The enthroned Madonna with Child, Saint Dominic and Saint Catherine of Siena (Madonna of the Rosary)

With the acquisition in 1971 of the Madonna of the Rosary altarpiece, Solimena became – alongside Giordano, seven of whose works are now owned by the reunified Gemäldegalerie – the second great master of the Neapolitan High and Late Baroque to be represented in the collection. Present, moreover, alongside the two pictures by Solimena are works by his somewhat older contemporary Paolo De Matteis and a painting by Francesco De Mura, an important student and follower. By the early 1690s, with Giordano departing for Madrid in 1692, where he spent ten years as court painter (and especially after Giordano’s death in 1705), Solimena became the indisputably dominant personality on the Neapolitan art scene. The Madonna of the Rosary is an early work, which dates from circa 1680–81, and hence two decades after Giordano’s Saint Michael. At that time, Solimena had not yet developed the chilly style, with its classical and academic orientation and dark, cool chromatic scale, that would become so typical of him. The style of the Madonna of the Rosary and related works executed around 1680 are characterized instead by bright, luminous colours with an emphasis on white and pale red, by vivid, curvaceous forms, relaxed modelling, and by highly impasto paint application and fluid brushstrokes, stylistic symptoms that reflect the influence of Luca Giordano, as well as of Pietro da Cortona, who was active in Rome and Florence. The Madonna of the Rosary – which is to say the Madonna with the Christ Child, who presents Saint Dominic, the founder of the Dominican order, with the rosary, while Saint Catherine of Siena, the most important saint of the order, passionately adores the Christ Child – must have been produced as an altarpiece for the rosary chapel of a Dominican church. Depictions of the Madonna of the Rosary first emerged during the late 15th century, becoming widely disseminated however only in the course of the 16th century, in particular beginning with the institution by Pope Gregory XIII of the Feast of the Rosary in 1573 in memory of the victory over the Turks at Lepanto (1571). While in the 16th century throughout Italy, and in the 17th outside of Rome, compositions commonly depicted the Madonna with a multiplicity of adoring figures, Solimena restricts himself to the pair of principal saints, the founder of the order and Saint Catherine of Siena (1347–80, canonized 1461). The compositional scheme with only two saints would soon become predominant in Roman painting. In Naples, this type was introduced by the painter Giovanni Lanfranco, who had worked in Rome from 1602 until 1633, and resettled in Naples in 1634. His altarpiece of the enthroned Madonna with two Carthusian saints (which goes back to his own Madonna of the Rosary in Perugia), today in Afragola and originally intended for the Charterhouse of San Martino in Naples, became the prototype upon which Solimena relies in his Berlin picture. There are also evident similarities with regard to the extensive red drapery, supported in Lanfranco’s picture by a large angel at the upper left corner. Originally, Solimena painted a similar angel in an analogous position. This figure held a rosary in its left hand above Mary’s head. Further to the right, an additional airborne putto was also occupied with the drapery. Both figures are revealed quite clearly by X-ray imagery. Erich Schleier | 200 Meisterwerke der europäischen Malerei - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019