Giuseppe Bonito

Bio

As yet little is known about Bonito’s formation in the early 1730s but towards the end of the decade he produced a series of canvases for S. Domenico, Barletta (1737), and the Graziella (1738) as well as for the Monte de Pietà, Naples (1742), whose unusually vivid colour harmony has both a Rococo character and shows the influence of late Giordano and Solimena. Perhaps his most celebrated achievement was the vault decoration of The Dedication of Solomon’s Temple for the basilica of Sta. Chiara, Naples (1752, destroyed in 1943) for which a preparatory sketch survives in Capodimonte.

Bonito was also a rapid portraitist executing an extensive number of commissions for the royal family and aristocracy, beginning with The Turkish Embassy to the Neapolitan Court of 1741 (Madrid, Prado) and including the series of nine portraits of the children of Charles III of 1748-50 (Madrid, Prado). Less formal than some of his contemporaries, these portraits have considerable charm and vest the sitters with elegant poise and habit. They are unmistakably Neapolitan in character and his Self Portrait (Florence, Uffizi) blends Neapolitan traditional values with the new Classicism emanating from Rome. This same tendency can be seen in his late pictures such as his canvases for the church of SS. Giovanni e Teresa all’Arco Mirelli (1757) and designs for tapestries celebrating the Conjugal Virtues (1762-66).

Bonito was named official painter to the King of Naples in 1751, elected to the Accademia di S. Luca, Rome in 1752 and nominated as director of the Accademia del Disegno, Naples in 1753. His fame as a genre painter has often been clouded by comparisons with Traversi by art historians such as Longhi, but his influence on the succeeding generation of Neapolitan artists should not be underestimated and in particular he showed himself to be adept in adjusting his style to the changing taste of his patrons without ever renouncing his essentially Neapolitan heritage and character.