Marta Rullán |
Rome (EFE) of southern Italy as the transmission belt of Renaissance culture between the two shores of the Mediterranean.
“The Spanish in Naples. The Renaissance of the South”, which opens next Monday at the Neapolitan Museum of Capodimonte with the support of the Madrid art gallery, addresses through 66 works -paintings, sculptures and three manuscript codices- the Neapolitan-Spanish creation between 1503 and 1532 , a period of unparalleled artistic innovation at the hands of artists such as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael.
“The exhibition relies on decades of research that have revealed the richness of a somewhat forgotten, or misunderstood, era of the artistic history of southern Italy and of Naples in particular,” explains Andrea Zezza, professor of Art History, to EFE. Modern and one of its commissioners.
Raphael returns to 16th century Naples
The Virgin of the Fish (1513-1514), who “occupies an extraordinary place in the history of art”, will finally return to Naples for the first time since the Spanish rulers took her, in the mid-16th century, from the chapel of the Twelve family of San Domenico Maggiore, where he had become a benchmark of the time.
As in other paintings by Rafael, the characters “develop a complex system of psychological relationships through looks and gestures, presenting themselves as actors in a dramatic work,” something that “had an extraordinary impact, opening up new possibilities for artists,” he points out. Zezza.
“We did not want to present the work as a kind of ‘fetish’ to venerate uncritically, but to place it within the Neapolitan context in which it arrived, determining a profound renewal of both local painting and sculpture,” the other curator, the also professor Riccardo Naldi.
The “trentenio” and the mature Renaissance
The exhibition focuses on a historical moment “in which the Spanish government in Naples was consolidated, which corresponded to an exceptional artistic flourishing, which will be a point of reference for artists active in the city throughout the 16th century”, but it does not only.
It will also be fundamental for European artistic history: “the Mature Renaissance, when Italian civilization reached its apogee with artists like Leonardo, Raphael, Giorgione, Michelangelo, whose works created a new art, to which Giorgio Vasari, the father of history of art, he called the ‘modern way’, emphasizes Zezza.
This “new language” ended up “imposing itself throughout the Italian peninsula” and spreading “throughout Europe: Spain, France and Flanders” thanks to the fact that Naples was “a center for meeting, importing, reworking and exporting ideas and objects of different origin and provenance”, as defined by the expert.
Spanish artists such as Pedro Fernández, Bartolomé Ordóñez, Diego de Siloe, Pedro Machuca and Alonso Berruguete had moved there, protagonists of Naples at the beginning of the 16th century and who, upon their return to Spain, became ambassadors of the figurative culture of that classical Renaissance. .
The Prado, the most interesting museum in Europe
“According to our current knowledge, those who left the greatest number of works and followers are two great sculptors from Burgos: De Siloe and Ordóñez,” says Naldi, who highlights two San Sebastián, the one from Siloe and the one from Berruguete, which close the shows: “They represent two different ways of elaborating the figurative culture of Michelangelo, with fundamental consequences for Spain”.
Zezza, for his part, praises the little-known Pedro Fernández, a painter who was trained in Milan “in Leonardo’s environment” and “whose works also showed the Neapolitans the novelties of Raphael’s rooms or those of the Sistine Chapel of Miguel Ángel”, two geniuses whom he met in Rome.
And both coincide in highlighting among the Italians a sculptor, Girolamo Santacroce, who was a student of Ordoñez and De Siloe and of whom two works are exhibited, the San Juan Bautista and the San Benito, which not even the Neapolitans know about, because they are preserved in a chapel closed to the public.
The exhibition, open until June 23, underlines the special bond between Naples and Spain: “Naples is the bridgehead of Spain in Italy and of Italy in Spain”, explains Zezza, who considers this collaboration “one of the most ambitious, if not the most” with the Prado, “for some years the most interesting museum in Europe”.