Exhibition dedicated to Luca Giordano opens at the Capodimonte Museum

The Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte is hosting from October 8, 2020 to January 10, 2021 the exhibition Luca Giordano. From Nature to Painting, curated by Stefano Causa and Patrizia Piscitello, from an idea of the director of the Neapolitan museum venue Sylvain Bellenger and the director of the Petit Palais in Paris, Christophe Leribault. The Paris museum headquarters hosted the exhibition dedicated to Luca Giordano, entitled Le triomphe de la peinture napolitaine.

“In this second stage, in Naples,” said director Bellenger, “Giordano is told to us as he has never been before, unlike in Paris. Although Giordano counted a lot for the French, he could not be presented in the same way to the Neapolitans, who are used to meeting him frequently, sometimes without recognizing him, in their museums or churches. The curators were able to relocate the great painter’s particularity and also to think of him in the context of Neapolitan churches, since after all it is in Naples and especially in the space of Baroque architecture, more even than in museums, that Giordano shows himself in his full dimension and gives evidence of the craft and vision that he will take all the way to Spain, with the triumphant and joyful raptures that make the monastery of the Escorial a somewhat less austere place.”

The exhibition will be divided into ten sections featuring more than ninety works, many from major foreign museums and institutions, including the Louvre, Museo del Prado, Patrimonio Nacional, and the Santamarca Foundation, and Italian ones, including the Complesso dei Girolamini, the Curia of Naples, Museo e Certosa di San Martino, Museo Duca di Martina, Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Pio Monte della Misericordia, and the Italian Society of Homeland History.

Sections will cover different themes, from drawing to relations with Caravaggism and Ribera, from his masters to works housed in the churches of Naples, to the metamorphoses of the Baroque.

Theinstallation in the Causa Room, curated by Roberto Cremascoli with Flavia Chiavaroli (Cor Arquitectos), becomes a succession of “wonder rooms.” Wunderkammer with picture frames, wallpaper and dark red woodwork: rooms capable of telling the story of the atmosphere experienced by the great Neapolitan painter. The finishing materials seem to be worn by time, like the wallpaper that simulates antique upholstery. Each “hall-salon” has a paper with the same design, but in different shades. The introductory and final rooms, with the reconstruction of the Girolamini Chapel, will be painted with “burnt” hues taken from nature. The installation space becomes a stratigraphy of the exhibition narrative.

Concluding the exhibition is an interactive multimedia installation designed and created by Stefano Gargiulo (Kaos Produzioni) to present some of the places and works frescoed by the artist in Naples, namely in the church of San Gregorio Armeno, Santa Brigida, the Certosa di San Martino and the Girolamini.

The site-specific installation proposes a small chapel where images and sounds of the Neapolitan world and Luca Giordano’s frescoes appear in the arches and vaults. The visitor is also invited to interact with votive candles placed in the center of the environment, a symbolic fulcrum from which to activate the scenarios that transform the space. All this is intended as an invitation to the visitor to continue visiting Naples in search of Luca Giordano’s works in the city’s main churches and cultural sites.

For more info: http://www.museocapodimonte.beniculturali.it/

Image: Luca Giordano, St. Michael the Archangel Defeats Rebel Angels (1657; oil on canvas, 375 x 280 cm; Naples, Church of the Ascension at Chiaia)

Exhibition dedicated to Luca Giordano opens at the Capodimonte Museum

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