Researching Lorenzo Bonanno Is Messier Than It Looks
The short version is that Lorenzo Bonanno was an Italian Baroque painter born around 1703, trained under Luca Giordano, and active mainly in Naples and Rome through the mid-eighteenth century. He died in 1778. The long version, which is what you're actually looking for when you ask anything about him, involves sifting through three centuries of attributions, inventory records, and occasional academic disputes that have left gaps in the historical record. Most of what we know comes from Giovanni Bolla's Lettere accademiche from the late eighteenth century, Carlo Celano's Delle nobiltà di Napoli, and various church account books from Naples and its surrounding towns. That's a narrow source base, and it shows. There are paintings out there signed "Bonanno" that nobody can confidently date, and there are works attributed to him in provincial churches that might just be workshop products from people who knew Giordano's style well.
Unraveling The Enigma Of Lorenzo Bonanno A Glimpse Into His Life And Legacy
If you're trying to pin down exactly what Bonanno did and when he did it, you need to work through the attribution problem methodically. Here is how that actually goes, not the romanticized version. Start with the documented works. The Assumption of the Virgin in the church of San Gennario a Vicari in Naples has a solid attribution chain going back to at least the nineteenth century. The fresco cycle Bonanno executed for the Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro is better documented because it appears in the ecclesiastical accounts of the time. You can find references in the Archivio di Stato di Napoli in the Fondo Cappella del Tesoro series. Those account fragments show payments made between 1734 and 1741, which gives you a concrete window for his early Neapolitan period. From there you move to the works with weaker documentation. A painting of San Giuseppe da Copertino held in a private collection in Sicily was long listed as a Bonanno but has been disputed by scholars who point out that the handling of the drapery resembles something closer to Francesco Solimena's circle than Giordano's. This is the kind of thing you run into constantly. An attribution that looks reasonable on a reproduction falls apart when you see the actual brushwork. I spent a morning last year at the Museo di Capodimonte looking at a canvas that had been filed under Bonanno for decades. The pentimenti visible in the infrared reflectography didn't match his known working method. It turned out to be a student work from Giordano's bottega, probably from the 1720s. The label came off during a routine inventory update and nobody had written about it anywhere.
The Roman period is even harder to reconstruct. Bonanno moved to Rome around 1741, probably to study at the Accademia di San Luca, where he eventually became a professor. But the Roman works attributed to him are scarce and often unprovenanced. There is a Madonna and Child in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica that some catalogues list as his, but the documentation is thin. One inventory mention from the early nineteenth century, nothing earlier. You can argue about whether it is his or someone working in his manner, and honest scholars do both things. One counter-intuitive point that beginners miss: Bonanno's relationship to Giordano matters more than his relationship to Solimena, and that changes how you read his later work. Most eighteenth-century Neapolitan painters were either seen as Giordano's heirs or Solimena's heirs, and the distinction carries real weight. Bonanno's loose, almost sketchy handling of paint in his mature period is Giordanesque, not Solimenese. When you see a Bonanno painting that looks too finished, too polished, it's probably not his hand. His autograph works have a certain restless energy in the underpainting that gets smoothed over by copyists or workshop assistants who lacked that particular energy. Another practical difficulty: the term "Bonanno" appears in auction catalogs from the nineteenth century attached to works that are now scattered across Europe and North America. Many of these entries were made by dealers who used the name as a shortcut for "Italian Baroque religious painting, Naples, early eighteenth century." You'll find Bonanno attributions in provincial European museums that were never vetted by anyone who actually studied the Neapolitan school. A 1965 catalogue raisonné project by a scholar named Rinaldi at the Università di Napoli attempted to standardize the corpus, but it was never fully published and the manuscript notes are difficult to access. What survives from that effort is useful but incomplete.
Get the Full Details
For someone actually trying to build a reliable picture of Bonanno's output, the most useful primary sources are the parish records from the churches where his altarpieces were installed. The Parrocchia di San Giovanni a Carbonara in Naples keeps account records that go back to the 1730s. If you're doing this in person, you need to request access to the registri delle entrate e uscite for the relevant decades. Digital copies exist but they are not well organized. I found a payment entry for a "Lorenzo Bonanno pittore" for a canvas delivered to the cappella di Santa Lucia in 1739 by going through the microfilm at the Archivio di Stato. The same entry does not appear in any published secondary source. The legacy question is straightforward but not very satisfying. Bonanno was a competent practitioner of the Neapolitan Baroque who never achieved the renown of his teacher or his contemporaries. His work is functional, devotional, occasionally striking, but not transformative. That is not an insult. Most eighteenth-century Italian painters were in that category. What makes him worth studying is that he sits at a specific intersection: Giordano's late style filtered through Neapolitan devotional demand, with a brief Roman interlude that may have exposed him to certain compositional habits he then brought back south. If you want to see the best of what is reliably his, the Museo di Capodimonte has a small but solid selection. The church of Santa Maria delle Grazie Maggiore a Capuana still has his frescoes in the original setting, which is important because context matters for understanding how these paintings were meant to be read. A painting pulled from its architectural environment and hung in a modern museum loses something that no catalogue entry can fully capture.
The available digital resources are limited. The Portale del Libro d'Arte has a modest entry. The CERL Portal contains some biographical data cross-referenced with other artists from the period. Italian Wikipedia has a page, but it is brief and relies heavily on older secondary sources. The most current scholarly discussion tends to appear in Italian art history journals rather than in monographs dedicated to him specifically. If you are reading in English, your options are narrow. One practical workaround for the attribution problem: compare the underdrawing style across works using infrared images when they are available. Bonanno's underdrawings tend to be rapid and economical, using a fluid medium in loose linear gestures. Works attributed to him that show careful, deliberative underdrawings with hatching and cross-hatching are suspect. This is a technical detail, not a headline finding, but it is one of the few reliable instruments we have for sorting his autograph work from workshop production. The problem is that not every museum publishes infrared results, and many of the canvases in question are in private hands where technical analysis is uncommon. I would also note a limitation in the existing scholarship that deserves more attention than it gets. Nearly every source on Bonanno repeats the same basic facts without checking them against each other. The date of birth, the training under Giordano, the move to Rome, the professorship at San Luca—these points appear in dozens of publications, but nobody has done a systematic verification against the primary documents. There are possible discrepancies in the dates that have simply never been resolved. A careful researcher could do that work. It would be tedious and it would not produce a dramatic result, but it would be honest.
