Paolo de Matteis

Exhibited by Nicholas Hall

Material oil on panel

Dimensions 220 × 173.5 cm

Place of Creation Paris

Price Available upon inquiry

Status Vetted

About the Work

This portrayal of Torquato Tasso’s tragic heroine Armida is an important rediscovery of a major work by the Neapolitan artist Paolo de Matteis. Painted during his Paris sojourn between 1702–05, at the invitation of the duc d’Estrées, this majestic panel has remained in the same French aristocratic family for over a century, and possibly once belonged to the Lucchese art collector, Stefano Conti (1659–1739).

Armida is one of literature’s most celebrated enchantresses, inspiring numerous plays, paintings, ballets and operas. A beautiful Saracen princess, she sets out to entrap the crusader Rinaldo but fails despite her beauty and spells. It is very unusual for Armida to feature as the sole protagonist in a painting; the inspiration may well be the 1703 revival of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s renowned opera Armide, first performed at the Paris Opera in 1686.

De Matteis was one of the great trinity of Neapolitan artists alongside Giordano and Solimena. In Paris, De Matteis was eagerly sought out by the greatest collectors of the day including Antoine Crozat whose hôtel on the Place Vendôme he decorated. This painting is an exceptionally rare survival of a work from the artist’s French period—a critical journey that brought on a wave of Italian artists, notably Sebastiano Ricci, Pellegrini and Rosalba Carriera, to work in France in the subsequent decades.

A printed catalogue with an essay by J. Patrice Marandel is available on this work.

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Provenance

Stefano Conti (1659–1739) (?), Lucca (with its counterpart Erminia)
Comte de Baillehache, Paris, by circa 1880
by descent until 2025

Literature

Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée, ‘Plaidoyer pour un peintre “de pratique”: le séjour de Paolo de Matteis en France (1702–1705)’, Revue de l’art, Paris, 1990/2, no. 88, pp. 70–79.

Vincent Drognet, ‘La maison d’un financier au début du XVIIIe siècle: nouveaux documents sur l’hôtel de Jean Thévenin, rue Neuve des Petits-Champs, à Paris’, Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français, Paris, 2004, pp. 57–84.