Nude of a Woman in the Mirror (1858)

Monogram behind the mirror: “F. O. 1858”

Provenance: private collection

Francesco Oliva, known for his work as a painter and restorer in nineteenth-century Bourbon Naples, was a great interpreter of historical Romanticism, but above all particularly versed in the treatment of the female nude, an aspect that gave him the reputation of “painter of Venuses”. According to Francis Napier, “gifted by nature with the inclination of an Etty […] of an erotic taste”[1] he had to partly give up his distinct natural inclination towards portraits and the female nude due to the fierce moralism and “decorum” of Bourbon Naples, which was more oriented towards historical subjects and exempla virtutis.

This nude of a woman executed in 1858 therefore fits perfectly into his favourite vein, for which Francesco Oliva was praised by Napier and which he started towards the end of the 1830s, after receiving his Residency at Palazzo Farnese in Rome. On his return to Naples, in fact, along with portraits and historical subjects such as Manlio Torquato, “he painted a charming Bacchante, who prostrate on a soft feather, with her back turned to the viewer, enjoys looking at herself in the mirror, and an unseen satyr looks at her with cupidity […] then a painting of another Venus to be paired with the Bacchante…”[2], testifying to the numerous female subjects the painter painted alongside the more well-known paintings of historical reconstruction. The preciosity of this modern and licentious Venus lying among precious fabrics and brocades, among jewellery and jewellery boxes, caught in the act of applying a stone to her flowing hair while looking at herself in the pretty mirror on which the painter’s monogram and date can be read, is revealed not only in the impeccable pictorial treatment of an antique master, but also and above all in the choice to replicate the fortunate iconography of the woman/goddess lying in the mirror. The one in the background, which shows us the woman’s ivory back, also allows us to expand the perspective illusion and reveal another portion of the room, but above all to note the painter’s skill in effectively rendering the real and the reality reproduced in the mirror, more veiled, less sharp, in a chromatic and compositional play of great success and modernity: “The colouring of Oliva’s works is mellow and solid, and cannot be truer; the chiaroscuro is well intended, the drapery natural, and chosen; the drawing correct, and the composition harmonious. The figures round off without hardness, the light and shadow, while they have strength, do not present those contrasting charges; the expression is excellent”[3]. The work acquires even more importance when one considers that the author would die only three years later, at the age of fifty-four, coinciding with the fall of the Bourbon kingdom and the Unification of Italy. The choice of the nude of a woman, reminiscent of the Old Masters, from Titian to Velásquez, would therefore constitute the Neapolitan painter’s fulfilled and seductive testament, pleasing to the sophisticated taste of Napier and the international public.

[1] F. Napier, Notes on modern painting in Naples, London, John W. Parker and Son West Strand, 1855, p. 50.

[2] Descrizione storico artistica del bello della città di Napoli, Naples, Stamperie e Cartiere del Fibreno, 1845, p. 28.

[3] Ibid, p. 29.