"Francesco De Rosa Detto Pacecco - 'allegoria Della Fede' (napoli 1607-1656) "
The Allegory of Faith.Pacecco De Rosa, pseudonym of Giovan Francesco De Rosa (26 December 1607 - 1656), was an Italian painter who was one of the protagonists of 17th century Neapolitan painting. The works of Pacecco have often been subject to discussion about their concrete attribution also with two other painters, Andrea Vaccaro (which however structured a painting more distinguishable from De Rosa in the course of his career, thanks to the approach of the vandyckian style) and Francesco Guarini.
Already since 1636 the Pacecco shows with San Nicola di Bari and the boy Basilio (sacristy of the Certosa di San Martino) an opening to classicism of Stanzione, where we also note trends imported from Domenichino, active in the city since 1631 at the construction site of the chapel of San Gennaro. This is the first documented work of the painter where, despite the obvious change in style, however, some specific passages (not stylistic) are preserved by Filippo Vitale, as the piece of the figure of little Basil in the scene that reproduces that of the Guardian Angel of the church of the Pietà dei Turchini realized by the Vital.
Works of the maturity of great artistic importance is the Massacre of the Innocents, now in the Museum of Philadelphia, Interesting from the stylistic point of view because it testifies to the understanding of classicist colorism of Stanzione and Domenichino at the expense of naturalism manifested instead in another editorial of the same subject when he was at the workshop of Vitale. The work shows an explicit parallelism to the perhaps most important work on this subject, namely the version that Guido Reni made at the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, from which Pacecco reworks the dramatic gesture of the composition, even though he creates the horizontal cut canvas (while that of the bolognese is vertical).In late maturity the painter gave himself to some great altarpieces of considerable thickness qualitative, as Saint Thomas receives the cingolo of chastity for the church of Santa Maria della Sanità in Naples, the Immaculate Conception with Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Anthony of Padua of Vibo Valentia, the Madonna with Child, Saint Dominic, Saint Gaetano and the Guardian Angel of Sant'Agata di Puglia and finally the Madonna and San Carlo Borromeo for the church of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, in which the old collaboration with Vitale returns even at an advanced stage of his career and in which we witness a variation on the classic iconographic theme as Saint Dominic is present in the painting almost in the background and cut off from Saint Charles. Pacecco de Rosa deserves a dignified place in the circle of painters of depth and character, of the interesting 17th century Neapolitan school.
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