"Il Femminiello"

Private collection

genre

This painting is a rare, 18th-century depiction of a femminiello (cross dressed male), capturing a glimpse of a fascinating subculture that is entrenched in Neapolitan history. These men were usually the youngest child of impoverished families, and would be brought up as a femminiello and dressed as women from a young age. They were met with good humour rather than derision and were accepted almost as a third sex.

About the Artist

Giuseppe Bonito

1707 – 1789

Italian painter. A student of Francesco Solimena, Bonito became one of the most influential artists of the Neapolitan school in the 18th century. Throughout his career, but most notably during the latter part of the century when Rome was the arbiter of Neo-classicism, his style remained firmly within the rich painterly traditions of Naples. His earliest works, for example the Archangel Raphael and Tobias (1730; Santa Maria Maggiore, Naples), show an assimilation of elements derived from late Baroque artists working in Naples and a hesitant affinity to the tenebrism of Solimena. In other pictures of sacred subjects from c. 1730 onwards, however, he developed a personal neo-Baroque style characterized by sweeping movement, bold chiaroscuro and a saturated palette reminiscent of both Solimena and Luca Giordano. Paintings in this style, such as St Vincent Ferrer (1737; San Domenico, Barletta), St Lazarus (early 1740s; San Ciro, Portici) and Charity (1742; Palazzo Monte di Pietà, Naples), show that Bonito's maturity was also characterized by delicacy and grace.

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