Fedele Fischetti

One of the most successful eighteenth-century Neapolitan painters, Fischetti excelled at producing elegant compositions for the cultured elite. Although Fischetti spent most of his career in Naples, where he worked for the city's most prestigious private and ecclesiastical patrons, he infused the Neapolitan pictorial tradition with the classicizing, academic tendencies of artists working in other parts of Europe, including Pompeo Batoni, Anton Raphael Mengs, and Angelica Kauffmann.

In this refined allegory of sacred love exultant over profane love, Fischetti situates the Holy Family in a garden amid classical ruins. Both the Madonna and Saint Joseph look at the Christ Child, who, embodying sacred love, stands atop an architectural plinth, from which a statue of eros, embodying profane love, has just been toppled. One putto gleefully tramples the fractured sculpture, breaking eros's bow in the process, as another lifts a garland of roses overhead. 

We are grateful to Professor Nicola Spinosa for endorsing the attribution to Fischetti and for suggesting a date before 1770.