Zeuxis paints the portrait of Venus choosing the girls of Croton as models

Zeuxis Paints the Portrait of Venus Choosing the Girls of Croton as Models, painted around 1690, draws on one of antiquity's most celebrated art legends: the Greek painter Zeuxis, unable to find a single woman beautiful enough to model for his ideal Venus, selected the five most beautiful girls of Croton and combined the finest features of each into a composite ideal. The story, told by Pliny the Elder, was a touchstone of Western art theory about idealization versus naturalism. For Solimena, the subject offered the chance to paint beautiful female nudes within a mythological and art-theoretical frame — fully sanctioned by classical authority. This kind of learned mythological subject was favored by the sophisticated Neapolitan aristocracy and international collectors who dominated Solimena's clientele.

Solimena's late seventeenth-century handling combines the rich dark tonalities of the Neapolitan tradition — inherited from Ribera and Preti — with an increasingly lighter and more dynamic Baroque energy. The nude female figures are rendered with smooth, idealized modeling against Solimena's characteristically saturated draperies and deep shadow zones.