The history of the Royal Palace’s picture gallery is closely interconnected with that of the Capodimonte picture gallery, and the curators have chosen to trace the tour in two sections. A reproduction reconstructing the missing portion based on a hypothesis developed by the painting’s restorers and Palazzo Reale restorers will be on display next to the painting.
This exhibition will offer scholars the opportunity to explore the subject in depth, and reason for study will also be the observation of a gap present in the center of the canvas, at the height of the hand clutching the sponge. Venuti, who had already won the king’s trust as director general of the Kingdom ’s excavations and director of the Royal Porcelain Factory that succeeded the Capodimonte Manufactory, described the authors of the seven canvases on display in this exhibition in a document (now preserved in the Naples State Archives), referring to some of them as “schoolboys of Caravaggio.”Īnother first is the display of the Saint Praxedes from the storerooms of the Royal Palace, purchased by Venuti as a work by Valentin de Boulogne and now assigned an anonymous Caravaggio painter, since the attribution to the French painter is not reliable. The exhibition, curated by the directors of the two museums, Mario Epifani and Sylvain Bellenger, displays 15 works in the historic connecting rooms between the Palazzo and the Teatro di San Carlo, with two important new features.įor the first time, 7 of the 118 paintings acquired in 1802 in Rome by Domenico Venuti on behalf of Ferdinand IV of Bourbon are being exhibited together, with the aim of expanding the royal collections and the holdings of the Bourbon residences stripped by the French militia.
The work, owned by the Fondo Edifici di Culto and now kept in the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, aims to initiate a double dialogue in the exhibition, focusing on the one hand on the fortunes of Caravaggio’s painting in the Bourbon collections, and on theother on the treatment of the iconographic theme of the Flagellation, to which Caravaggio gives a spiritual dimension not aligned with the principles of the Catholic Counter-Reformation by emphasizing the human condition, superimposing two episodes of the Passion, the Flagellation, Ecce homo and the iconography of Christ at the Pillar.
The exhibition, as anticipated, has as its centerpiece the Flagellation of Christ by Michelangelo Merisi known as Caravaggio, which-though not part of the royal collections-is a work that marked the course of seventeenth-century art, with particular reference to Neapolitan painting. The only Caravaggio work in the Capodimonte National Museum in Naples moves a few kilometers and reaches the Royal Palace where, from March 16 to May 9, the exhibition Dialogues around Caravaggio, set up in the Genovese Gallery at the Royal Palace in Naples, and launching a collaboration between the Royal Palace and the Capodimonte Museum and Real Bosco centered on the dialogue between their respective art collections, both the result of Bourbon collecting between the 18th and 19th centuries. Moving a few miles for Caravaggio's Flagellation, which leaves the Capodimonte Museum in Naples to move to the Royal Palace, where an exhibition around the painting is on view from March 16 to May 9.
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