Giuseppe Bonito Biography
Giuseppe Bonito (Castellammare di Stabia, 1707 – Naples, 19 May 1789) was an Italian painter of the Rococo period. He was one of the greatest Neapolitan genre painters, his numerous canvases of a popular nature make him one of the best representatives of the genre, perhaps the most important of eighteenth-century southern Italy. He received a lot of attention, so much so that some canvases by other contemporary and fellow painters were attributed to him for a long time. The most striking case was that of the Neapolitan Gaspare Traversi who only in the twentieth century, thanks to the studies of the art historian Roberto Longhi, was recognized as the author of his entire work until then attributed to Bonito. He was a pupil of Francesco Solimena, a late Baroque painter of large altarpieces, Bonito learned from his master the use of chiaroscuro which he applied in a personal way both to large paintings of religious themes and to small paintings of a popular genre. Bonito represented his city, even in the most folkloristic and obvious aspects, with the presence of "scugnizzi" and the inevitable Pulcinella, but his painting was not moralizing or with dark meanings; as much as a portrait, sometimes sweetened and sometimes merciless, of his city and his time. Between 1736 and 1742 Bonito worked for the Bourbons for the fresco decoration of the Royal Palace of Portici. As a portraitist he was much sought after by the Neapolitan nobility, his famous portrait of Maria Amalia of Saxony, wife of the King of Naples Charles VII. One of his last works, The Immaculate Conception of 1789, was painted by Bonito for the Palatine Chapel of the Royal Palace of Caserta.
