(active in Naples from 1755 to 1788)
Fire in the Bay of Naples
Oil on canvas
105 x 155 cm / framed: 123 x 175 cm
Louis XVI period frame stamped Infroit
Provenance : Private collection, Italy
The discovery of archival documents may one day allow us to shed more light on the formation and development of one of the most original figures in landscape art in Naples, in the second half of the 18th century.
It was rediscovered in 1959 in a founding article by Constable, the great specialist of Canaletto.
Probably of Roman origin Bonavia was trained in the school of the great Italian landscape-decorators who from Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) to Leonardo Coccorante (1680-1750) gave an expressive and theatrical representation of Nature.
Bonavia was undoubtedly deeply influenced by the works of Joseph Vernet the great French marine painter who stayed in Naples from 1737 to 1746. Both artists have the same palette of light and soft tones the same atmospheric approach to the landscape even if in Vernet touch is more precise and that in Bonavia it is wide and made of brushstrokes quickly laid down, giving a mossy aspect to his works, recognizable among a thousand.
Prestigious patrons travellers of the Grand Tour, Italian aristocrats or diplomats to the court of Naples were its clientele, such as John Montagu, Lord Brudenell, who commissioned his portrait from Mengs and Batoni or the ambassador of Austria Count Karl Josef von Firmian.
Nocturnal scenes illuminated by an eruption of Vesuvius or the flames of a fire were often one of the key pieces that travellers brought back from their Italian journey (as can be seen in the collections of Stourhead or Basildon Park, which have remained intact since the 18th century). Artists like Pierre-Jacques Volaire (1729-1799) or Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) even made a specialty of it multiplying these spectacular and dramatic episodes that illustrated the pre-romantic theory of the Sublime formulated by the English philosopher Burke (1729-1797). This grandiose and sometimes destructive Nature allowed to move the public by the “delicious fear” experienced in front of the canvas.
To create a decorative effect of the opposition of subjects, these scenes were often paired with sunsets, where an idyllic nature was represented.
On our canvas to build his composition Bonavia used the contrast between the blaze illuminating a fortress reminiscent of Castel dell’ovo in the Bay of Naples and the moon illuminating the waves and the port of the city dominated by its lighthouse.
This sharp contrast between cold and silver tones and warm and glowing colors produces a most happy effect, highlighted by the many details and characters that come to hang on the light.
The lost escape of the countless small figures before the fire is perhaps a distant evocation of the eruption that destroyed in 79 of our era the city of Pompeii the “founding myth” of the Grand Tour?
We thank Mr Nicolas Spinosa who confirmed the attribution of our painting to Bonavia.
.