Sebastiano Conca (Italian, 1680-1764)

In 1982 the eminent art historian, Anthony Morris Clark, wrote that Sebastiano Conca was “a central figure in eighteenth-century painting” and “one of the most prolific, influential and delightful European artists of [his generation].”¹  More recently, Christopher M. S. Johns has written that Conca was among “the most successful Roman painters” of the early Settecento.²

Born on January 8, 1680 in the port town of Gaeta in the Kingdom of Naples, Conca studied in Naples with Francesco Solimena, the most important Neapolitan artist of the era.  Conca’s earliest documented activity is work as Solimena’s assistant in 1703, painting three decorative canvases [destroyed in World War II] for the great Benedictine abbey of Montecassino. 

In about 1707 Conca moved from Naples to Rome, where he remained until 1752.  One of Conca’s first important patrons in Rome was Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, for whom he painted intimate cabinet pictures of both mythological and religious themes.  Within a few years Cardinal Ottoboni created Conca his virtuoso and gave him a studio in a palace he owned in the Piazza Navonna.  Probably through Ottoboni as well, Conca came to the attention not only of several other important cardinals but also of Pope Clement XI, who employed Conca in the new decorations for the restored Early Christian basilica of San Clemente. 

The most significant painting that Conca executed for San Clemente was The Miracle of Saint Clement, a fresco on the upper wall of the nave arcade.  In about 1715 Conca also painted three altarpieces for the church representing scenes from the life of Saint Dominic, which were commissioned by Cardinal Tommaso Maria Ferrari, San Clemente’s cardinal titular.  The painter’s success at San Clemente and his growing reputation in Rome led to Pope Clement XI’s commission for Jeremiah, one of a series of twelve large paintings of Old Testament Prophets.  These pictures, called the Lateran Prophets, were intended to complement the series of twelve colossal marble statues of the Apostles completed during Clement XI’s reign for St. John Lateran, the cathedral of Rome.  The Lateran Prophets were placed on the upper nave walls of the basilica high above the marble Apostles.  The series forms the single most important papal commission of the period.

By the 1720s Conca was one of the most celebrated painters in Rome.  Between 1721 and 1724 Conca painted the most important ceiling fresco of his career, the splendid Saint Cecilia in Glory, undertaken for the newly restored basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere and paid for by the church’s cardinal titular, Cardinal Franccesco Acquaviva d’Aragona, the Spanish ambassador to the papal court.  This elegant fresco is characteristic of Conca’s mature style in its rejection of the dark and moody painting of his Neapolitan heritage in favor of pale colors, small, almost mannered figures, complex composition, and an understated, operatic quality.  The fresco clearly reveals Conca’s reinvigoration of the older classicizing Roman tradition with a Rococo elegance that would dominate painting in the papal city for the next twenty years.  And, as Anthony Clark has noted, “it was [not only] immensely celebrated at the time; [it also remains] the principal Rococo ceiling in Rome.”³

The third decade of the century also witnessed Conca’s rise as an artist of international importance, especially in regard to the Savoyard court at Turin, where he executed decorative paintings for the royal hunting lodge, the Venaria Real, and for the royal palace in the capital.  He also provided an altarpiece for La Superga, Filippo Juvarra’s majestic church at Turin.  Conca had befriended Juvarra while both were young artists working for Cardinal Ottoboni at the Palazzo della Cancellaria in Rome. 

During the 1720s and 1730s Conca also produced a number of highly popular easel pictures for visiting tourists, and he sent his altarpieces all over Italy.  Anthony Clark wrote that Conca’s “employment by foreign patrons was second only to Tiepolo’s, but probably more lucrative than his, and he commanded far more individual commissions.”⁴  His most important work outside Rome is the magnificent illusionistic fresco Christ at the Pool of Bethesda (1731), painted for the hospital chapel of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena.  Conca’s international reputation and connections to important Roman patrons led to his election as Principe of the Accademia di San Luca, a powerful post in the Roman cultural bureaucracy that he held from 1729 to 1732 and again from 1739 to 1740.  His position as Principe led to the execution of his finest altarpiece, the Assumption of the Virgin with Saint Sebastian (1740), a work he placed in the academy’s church, Ss. Martina e Luca, near the Arch of Septimius Severus.  Anthony Clark also notes that

Conca was one of the best administrators the Accademia ever had,             and his two     periods of presidency were notable for energy and accomplishment.  Usually the         Roman Academy was slow to admit people of new and controversial talent;           Conca, at least temporarily, changed this.  He also, as a very wealthy artist,        undertook the renovation of the Academy’s rooms, collections, and church.⁵

Conca’s last important Roman works were frescoes painted for Cardinal Neri Corsini’s library in the Palazzo Corsini and the frescoes and altarpiece executed for the Ruffo Chapel in San Lorenzo in Damaso, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni’s final commission (1742-43).  The most important of the Corsini frescoes is The Allegory of the Sciences (1747), and his The Virgin of the Rosary in the Ruffo Chapel still reveals the pale, delicate colors preferred by Conca to the more intense, saturated pigments characteristic of the rising generation of neoclassical painters, above all Pompeo Batoni. 

The last twelve years of Conca’s life were spent in Naples, where he completed a series of highly dramatic frescoes for the church of Santa Chiara.  Christopher M. S. Johns has written that “it is likely that [Conca] moved back to Naples because of the decreasing demand in Rome for his suave, effusive, Rococo style in competition with the new, highly classicizing idiom represented by Batoni, among others.”⁶

Sebastiano Conca died in Naples on September 1, 1764.  Celebrated in his lifetime (he was the subject of numerous eighteenth-century biographies), his reputation diminished with the advent of neoclassical, romantic and realist art, and he has only recently been recognized as one of his generation’s most important artists, not only in Italy but internationally.

 

Bruce W. Chambers, Ph.D. (1942-2007)

 

A nationally recognized historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art, Dr. Bruce Chambers received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, a master’s degree from the University of Rochester, and a Ph. D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught at  Emory University, the University of Rochester, and the Fashion Institute of Technology, where he also served as Dean of Graduate Studies.  He has been the chief curator of the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, and the director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art. 

For over a decade, Dr. Chambers held the position of director of the Willard L. Metcalf Catalogue Raisonné.  He published and lectured on a wide range of other artists and subjects, including Frank W. Benson, Thomas Cole, Robert Henri, Charles Burchfield, the art of the American South, and American trompe l’oeil money painting.  He also completed a catalogue raisonné of the mid-nineteenth-century Pittsburgh political and social satirist, David Gilmour Blythe. 

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