Time.news – Art as a diplomatic means for a geopolitical repositioning. The proof of a fortunate osmosis and a concrete dialogue between the ‘sisters’ of painting and sculpture. The story of a happy season abruptly interrupted. It’s all this and much more ‘The Spaniards in Naples. The Southern Renaissance’, the great exhibition curated by Riccardo Naldi and Andrea Zezza at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, visible until 25 June next.
An exhibition project created together with the Museo Nacional del Prado, which has an ‘impossible’ loan as its fulcrum. For the first time after 400 years, in fact, the Madonna of the fish painted by Raphael for the chapel of the Doce family in San Domenico Maggiore in Naples leaves Madrid to return to the city where it was conceived and where it became a fundamental point of reference for artists active here during the sixteenth century.
Madonna and Child with Saints Raphael the Archangel with Tobias and Jerome (Madonna of the Fish)
The work was requisitioned by the Spanish rulers and transferred to the Iberian capital around the middle of the seventeenth century, e it has never gone outside the walls of the museum that houses it until now. There are 66 masterpieces that have given life to this exhibition, a sort of continuation of the one inaugurated in Madrid on 18 October last year with the title ‘Otro Renacimiento. Artistas españoles en Nápoles al comienzos del Cinquecento’, still much visited today.
The Neapolitan review, which compared to the Madrid one is characterized by a stronger link with the territory, is dedicated to one of the most fruitful and least known moments of the Neapolitan artistic civilization, the thirty years that goes from about 1503 to 1532after the definitive victory of the Spanish over France, a dispute actually opened by the death of Alfonso II in 1495, ended with Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the ‘Grand Captain’, first viceroy of the Neapolitan kingdom.
Pedro Fernández Murcia, Altarpiece of the Visitation
It is the period which, from a political point of view, saw the extinction of the Aragonese dynasty, with the passage of the Kingdom of Naples under the dominion of the crown of Spain; and from a cultural point of view, the achievement of the apex of his great humanistic season, with the handover from Giovan Gioviano Pontano to Iacopo Sannazaro. The artistic novelties elaborated in those years by Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael they were promptly received and reinterpreted in an original way in a very lively Naplesin which the loss of the function of autonomous capital did not constitute an obstacle to cultural development, but, on the contrary, contributed to the definition of a new role of transmission belt of Renaissance culture between the two shores of the Mediterranean.
Moreover, with a view to political repositioning towards the Spanish conquerors, the commissioning of works and architecture by religious orders and nobility was oriented towards the choice of Iberian artists or artistic models, in order to make explicit their siding alongside the new power.
The exhibition therefore offers a broad vision of works performed by some of the main Spanish artists active in Naples in those years, such as Pedro Fernández, Bartolomé Ordóñez, Diego de Siloe, Pedro Machuca, Alonso Berruguete. Having moved to Italy in time, the Spaniards became the protagonists of the exceptional artistic season of Naples in the early sixteenth century, supported by the patronage of the aristocracy and clergy who financed works of ambitious magnificence, often made in Carrara marble.
Diego de Siloe Burgos, Christ Scourged
Returning to their homeland, the Spaniards became ambassadors of a particular declination of the figurative culture of the High Renaissance, supported by extraordinary inventiveness and technical skills, to which the passage of Spain into the imperial reality of Charles V gave a European breath. On display, among paintings and sculptures, around a nucleus of about ten works from the Capodimonte museum, masterpieces on loan from other museums including the Uffizi and the Royal Museum of Turin, but also from Neapolitan and Spanish churches considered national heritage, and Italian and foreign private collections. Which can also be placed in dialogue, by more curious visitors, with the contemporary ones exhibited on the second floor of the Neapolitan museum.
The proof of the osmosis between the Neapolitan and Spanish artistic tradition and of the bidirectional ‘collaboration’ between sculpture and painting is visible precisely in the drapery of the mantle of the Madonna of the Fish by Raphaelwhich takes up that of a classical sculpture, still preserved in the Neapolitan national archaeological museum, the Giove Ciampolini.
The close connection between painting and sculpture, the confrontation between the so-called ‘sister arts’ found particularly fertile ground in Naples for the elaboration of models which contributed to the definition of an autonomous local school, of which the exhibition offers a wide selection of the major protagonists, from the painters Andrea da Salerno and Marco Cardisco to the sculptors Giovanni da Nola and Girolamo Santacroce.
The exhibition is organized by the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in partnership with the Museo Nacional Prado in Madrid, in collaboration with the Spanish Embassy in Italy and the Italian Embassy in Spain and with the Ministry of the Interior – Building Fund of worship and the Archbishop’s Curia of Naples. The exhibition is financed by the Campania Region thanks to the Poc Capodimonte project. The routes of art, and enjoys the patronage of the Municipality of Naples.
The layout in the Sala Causa is curated by the Spanish architect Francisco Bocanegra, who at the Prado, in the exhibition ‘Otro Renacimiento’, was inspired by the forms and volumes of Neapolitan architecture, while in Capodimonte he chose to enhance the dialogue between the pictorial and sculptural works. Various side initiatives, from guided tours, the first of which on 19 March, with the curators, to the series of conferences organized by the Cervantes Institute of Naples directed by Ana Navarro, to events dedicated to schools.