Un ciclo sulla vita e i miracoli di San Carlo Borromeo a Napoli

Painter Antonio De Bellis is not a popular figure, being known to only a very few scholars. He was, nonetheless, an interesting artist whose career spanned over all the phases of Neapolitan painting of the former 17th Century, from a Naturalism close to Battistello and Filippo Vitale, to a Neo-Venetian tendency produced by the rediscovery of the Venetian masters of color, Tiziano and Veronese above all others. His most famous and studied works are part of a cycle dedicated to Saint Charles Borromeus in a church in Naples, San Carlo alle Mortelle. The cycle is uneven and was probably painted in part by different unknown and mediocre artists, who worked as De Bellis’ aids. But if for a long time scholars debated about datation and attribution, the study of literary (the biography about Saint Charles written in Latin by Bascapè and that published in Italian by Giussano) and iconographic sources was almost ignored, with the exception of a brief mention in an article by Giuseppe De Vito in 1984. This paper – without the presunction to fill such a gap – is intended as a point of departure for further studies.