Art weekend in Rome, at the Scuderie del Quirinale: “Napoli nineteenth century”. The great exhibition that honors the Neapolitan city

Through a selection of 250 masterpieces, the exhibition represents a tribute to the central role of Naples in the European debate on art. Throughout the nineteenth century, Naples was a center of artistic production of absolute centrality in that long century which began with the results of the Enlightenment culture of the late eighteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War. A very rich overview of paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, history and science: of a truly centuries-old and still alive artistic and cultural tradition, fully inserted into contemporary European culture.

The sea, the mountains, the folklore, the muddy earth of Vesuvius, the lush vegetation of Campania, the splendor and even the degradation have inspired artists such as Constantin Hansen, Silvestr Ščedrin, Simon Denis, Karl Böhme, Ludwig Catel, William Turner, Thomas Jones, Thomas Fearnley, Eduard Hildebrandt, Hans von Marées, John Singer Sargent, the naturalist painters of Posillipo, Portici and Resina, Anton van Pitloo, Giuseppe De Nittis, Ercole and Giacinto Gigante, Teodoro Duclère and Salvatore Fergola.

Edgard Degas's Naples

He was an important figure Edgar Degas, artist claimed his belonging to the realist movement by rejecting the label of impressionist. Of Neapolitan origins on his paternal side, Degas, who spoke the Neapolitan language fluently, learned during his childhood and youth in Naples, where he spent fundamental stays for his education, enriching his realist formula with a new meaning.

For this reason, it is particularly important the focus dedicated to the French artist in the exhibition. Thanks to the generosity of the Musée d'Orsay, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art, visitors will be able to admire five famous masterpieces by the Neapolitan Degas gathered together in the exhibition, as well as the emblematic “View of Castel Sant'Elmo from Capodimonte” of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, very rarely exhibited

The exhibition dedicates three sections to the theme of the neo-Pompeian historicist imagination of the neo-Greek idealist imaginary and of the orientalist imaginary, which we find in Domenico Morelli. While we find an academicism to realism best represented in painting by Antonio Mancini.

And it is the raw material of Mancini's paintings that takes shape by replacing the portrayed subject. A choice that was celebrated at the 1926 Venice Biennale, where the Lady in red of the artist was indicated by Carlo Carrà as “a true masterpiece of plastic power and chromatic harmony”. 

From the perspective of these “contradictions” it is the material itself that becomes the object of painting and sculpture, canceling the differences between the one and which find an example in the search for Medardo Rosso and which in fact anticipate the informal painting of the post-war period by several decades, in artists such as Fontana or Burri.

In the 19th century, Naples was also recognized as an important scientific capital

Naples is the third largest city in Europe, after London and Paris, home to one of the oldest Italian universities, the first school of oriental languages ​​in Europe (founded in 1732), the first museum of mineralogy (founded in 1801) and many other study centers or institutions for research and study.

The the influence of the political and economic climate had a decisive role on the art forms of this historical period. Projects and programs for the urban transformation of the city, in fact, made it increasingly European so much so that, at the end of the century, Naples still communicated directly with Paris: in just three years the Umberto I Gallery was built, cafés and grand hotels were built , the bourgeois neighborhoods and the long avenues. But it is also the city of positivist debates, of legal and mathematical sciences, it is the city of the intense dialectic that links the new sciences to an aesthetic always faithful to the great realist tradition, central in the definition of Neapolitan art from the Baroque, Riberesque and Caravaggio-esque.

Video installation by Stefano Gargiulo pays homage to contemporary Naples

Inside the exhibition there is a video installation Digital Frescoes by the Neapolitan artist Stefano Gargiulo (Kaos Produzioni), the peculiarity of the Zoological Station commissioned by Anton Dohrn, the first oceanographic study center in Italy, where scientific depictions of marine fauna overlap with the decorations of Hans Von Marées and Adolf Hildebrandt still visible in the current Library.

The Scuderie del Quirinale present Travel in space and time, a cycle of four short documentaries that help tell how Naples became one of the European capitals of the nineteenth century. We will start from the inauguration of the first Italian railway line Naples - Portici in 1839 up to the artistic direction of Saverio Mercadante of the San Carlo Theater in 1840 and from the inauguration of the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station in 1872 to the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1877. videos will be visible starting from May on the dedicated YouTube channel. The meeting program is available

“Nineteenth century Naples” represents the synthesis of this long journey, a unique opportunity to admire works of the highest value and to fully understand a period full of contradictions and charm.

An exhibition project of great scope and high scientific importance organized by the Scuderie del Quirinale and the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in collaboration with the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Regional Directorate of Campania Museums,Academy of Fine Arts of Naples , Anton Dohrn Zoological Station. 

Cover image: Gioacchino Toma (Galatina, 1836 – Naples, 1891) - The rain of ash from Vesuvius 1880, oil on canvas – Florence, Uffizi Galleries, Gallery of Modern Art of Palazzo Pitti courtesy of the Ministry of Culture – Uffizi Galleries