The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon

Bernardo De Dominici, the Neapolitan painter who published the lives of the artists of Naples in 1742, tells of a letter King Victor Amadeus II wrote to Solimena about the pictures he had received from him. The king said he could not pass them without stopping, held by their beauty, to look at them again. Later visitors to Turin were cooler. The French engraver Charles-Nicolas Cochin and others after him were at times critical of how the canvases were painted.

The Queen of Sheba has come from her own distant country to test Solomon's wisdom. Here she bows before him under a loggia, and the king opens his arms to receive her. Two of her maids follow with a parasol and a little dog, and the stands and steps around them are crowded with soldiers, musicians and servants carrying her gifts.

The museum dates the picture to about 1720 or 1721, while the Solimena scholar Ferdinando Bologna placed it after 1728. He saw in the queen an early form of the Virgin in Solimena's altarpiece for the church of San Gaudioso in Naples, a painting since lost and known only from photographs.