After initially being apprenticed to Filippo Viola, De Mura joined the workshop of Francesco Solimena in 1708, becoming that master’s favourite pupil. It was principally from Solimena that he developed his first pictorial manner, as seen for example in the Neapolitan churches of San Gerolamo delle Monache (1713) and San Nicola alla Carità (1715 and 1726-1727).
In his canvases for the church of Donnaromita in Naples (1728) and in the first paintings executed for the Abbey of Montecassino (1731), the artist sought to distinguish himself from his master’s solemn compositions, and in the apse decoration of the church of the Nunziatella (1732) he achieved a pictorial version of the ‘affetti’ drawn from the contemporary theatre of Pietro Metastasio. This narrative approach became more engaged in De Mura’s decoration of some of the rooms in the Royal Palace in Naples (1738-1741), in the works made during his sojourn in Turin (1741-1743) and in the years immediately following his return to Naples.
This was when he encountered the work of Corrado Giaquinto and that of some of the French painters active in Rome, particularly Pierre Subleyras.
During the 1750s De Mura began to display an interest in the classicising culture that was spreading from Rome to Naples in the mid-century with the presence of the court architects Luigi Vanvitelli and Ferdinando Fuga, and through the influence of Sebastiano Conca (who had returned to Naples in 1751), Pompeo Batoni and Anton Raphael Mengs (see N. Spinosa, Pittura napoletana del Settecento, Napoli 1988, pp. 92, 156-168, nos. 239-286).