Disperse Prado

This work illustrates this Verona-born artist's (Alessandro Turchi) successful activity in Rome and the prestige of his art among the high aristocratic collectors.

It is an exquisitely executed painting with realistic features and a classicist composition in which the setting, light, colours and sentimentality merge in delicate harmony.

They are works from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries that entered the Madrid museum, many of which came from convents or monasteries confiscated in 1835 or from select royal collections.

This work by Vaccaro reveals the painter’s sophisticated language, full of inventiveness and creativity, inspired by the most innovative practices that had emerged in Naples during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, ranging from naturalism to baroque classicism and Van Dyck's chromatic and moving subtlety.

It is also a fine example of how commissions from aristocrats encouraged thematic adventures as bold as a biblical story of incest.

On the one hand, the selection of works exhibited evokes the Church's role in prescribing religious art during the Counter-Reformation period in the Hispanic territories, highly visible in the emphasis placed on certain themes such as the life of the Virgin.

This painting formed part of a cycle on the life of the Virgin made for the Order of Knights of Our Lady of the Assumption in the Jesuit School of San Esteban in Murcia.

Based on an archaising composition, still in keeping with the forms of Late Mannerism, the artists create a narrative of high devotional efficacy combining rich and luminous colours with an emotive technique familiar to the viewers of the time.

The artist Francesco Solimena could be considered the emblem of the pictorial skill accumulated during the seventeenth century by the best Neapolitan workshops and also an example of virtuosity.

His creations are impressive because of their compositional boldness, effective use of light and dramatic intensity.

Here Solimena uses his wide range of resources for a narrative in which the harshness of God's punishment of the sinners contrasts with His mercy towards the repentant.