Naples, Art in

NAPLES, ART IN

NAPLES, ART IN. Although the second largest city in Europe, Naples was, until the second half of the seventeenth century, considered of little interest or import artistically. Giorgio Vasari asserted that until he worked in Naples (1544–1545), no one since Giotto had produced any painting of importance there. Even as, over the course of the seventeenth century, Naples became one of the most important artistic centers in Italy—perhaps the most important by the end of the century—the development of its art was greatly dependent on the presence of foreign artists and their works, although the exact nature of that dependence is still much debated. The list of artists from outside Naples visiting or working in the city in the first half of the century is impressive; it includes Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Paul Brill, Goffredo Wals, François de Nomé, Guido Reni, Matthias Stomer, Diego Velázquez, Pietro Novelli (called il Monrealese), Artemisia Gentileschi, Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri), Johann Heinrich Schönfeld, Viviano Codazzi, Giovanni Lanfranco, Charles Mellin, and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione. The Spaniard José (Jusepe) de Ribera constitutes a special case in that, after working briefly in Parma and Bologna and for several years in Rome, he relocated to Naples in 1616, where he spent the rest of his career, establishing himself as the leading painter of the first half of the century. Works by other artists came to Naples, and the artists themselves may have visited the city; among them were Louis Finson, Domenico Fiasella, Simon Vouet, and Nicolas Poussin.

Although many Neapolitan artists visited Rome, they had virtually no impact there, with the exception of Naples's most famous permanent expatriate, Salvator Rosa. Similarly, a few Neapolitan works found their way into collections outside of Naples, but there was no significant awareness of them, except in Spain. In the second half of the century, however, Neapolitan art gained international recognition, especially owing to the impact of the highly prolific Luca Giordano, who worked in Venice, Florence, Rome, and Madrid, as well as in his native city; and later Francesco Solimena, whose career lasted until the middle of the eighteenth century. For Bernardo De Dominici, whose three-volume Lives of the Neapolitan Painters, Sculptors, and Architects was published in 1742–1745, Solimena represented the acme of art and the proof of the international import of the Neapolitan school.

STYLE

Four significant shifts in style occurred in Neapolitan painting over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: first, the introduction, in the first decade of the century, of a strong tenebrism and trenchant naturalism; second, a lightening of the palette around 1630; third, a loosening of compositions and a use of a more full-bodied figure style from the 1650s on; and lastly, a withdrawal from "baroque" illusionism to a less ostentatious classicism at the turn of the eighteenth century.

The prevailing mode in Neapolitan painting at the turn of the seventeenth century was a competent version of the "reformed" style developed elsewhere in Italy in the preceding decades. The most prominent practitioner of the style in Naples was Belisario Corenzio, who persisted in using it to the end of his career in the fourth decade of the century. The paintings executed by Caravaggio, including the Seven Works of Mercy, during his two brief sojourns in the city (1606–1607, 1609–1610) had a remarkable impact on the local school. As early as 1607, Giovanni Battista Caracciolo (Battistello) produced a strikingly Caravaggesque Immaculate Conception with SS. Dominic and Francis of Paola, a remarkable change from his earlier style developed under the aegis of Corenzio, and he maintained a stark tenebrism to the end of his career. The greatest exponent of Caravaggism in Naples was Ribera, who had already worked in this style in Rome. His rise to prominence in Naples further entrenched Caravaggism as the dominant mode there, although he developed in a direction not pursued by Caravaggio or his close adherents, namely toward bravura brushwork and use of what De Dominici called a "tremendous impasto."

After his earliest works, Ribera had generally substituted for Caravaggio's plebeian figures and sometimes awkward compositions more elegant figures and coherently organized compositions. In these aspects, and in his continuing tenebrism, he shared stylistic concerns with his rival as leading Neapolitan painter, Massimo Stanzione, although the two are often seen in stark opposition. In the late 1620s, he moved further from Caravaggio's example, lightening his palette, often using outdoor settings, and increasing the painterliness of his brushwork, evident in his Holy Trinity of the early to mid-1630s. Ribera's stylistic shift was shared by many Neapolitan artists and paralleled developments in Rome. In both instances, the artists' attention to sixteenth-century Venetian painting, whether directly or indirectly, seems to lie at the root of the shift. Reinforcing this "neo-Venetianism" in Naples may have been the presence or work of Reni, Anthony Van Dyck (possibly through the Sicilian painter Novelli), Velázquez, or others, although the matter has been vigorously debated.

Although the great plague that decimated the population of Naples in 1656 took several painters, foremost among them Stanzione, Neapolitan art was already beginning a significant change before that date, in part because of the passing of a generation of artists, but also because of the arrival, in 1653, of another outside artist, Mattia Preti. The well-traveled Calabrian had developed his earlier tenebrist manner into a vigorous, dramatic style that worked well in large canvases and fresco projects. Perhaps because of Preti's presence, and from 1664 also that of Giovan Battista Beinaschi, Neapolitan artists finally began to assimilate the Roman "grand manner" frescoes that Giovanni Lanfranco had executed in Neapolitan churches—the Gesù Nuovo, S. Martino, SS. Apostoli, and the Cappella del Tesoro in the cathedral—during his sojourn in the city (1634–1646). Although Preti left Naples in 1660, his work had a profound effect on the artistic development of the young Luca Giordano and was consciously evoked and refined years later by Solimena.

A less dramatic shift occurred around the turn of the eighteenth century within the art of Solimena, with important repercussions for his followers, especially Francesco de Mura and, in turn, de Mura's followers, who dominated the field in the second half of the eighteenth century. While some artists, namely Giacomo del Po and Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, continued to develop an exuberant, painterly style, Solimena began organizing his works with increased restraint and monumentality, in a style that has been termed "anti-baroque." In a different direction, Paolo de Matteis, who vied with Solimena for dominance in the early eighteenth century, pursued a classicizing version of Giordano's style. Giordano's brilliant, airy Triumph of Judith (1703–1704), decorating the vault of the treasury of the Certosa di S. Martino, which has been called "the source of the Italian rococo," had surprisingly few echoes in Naples itself.

PATRONAGE AND SUBJECT MATTER

Giorgio Vasari famously stated that Polidoro da Caravaggio, who worked in Naples in 1527–1528, nearly died of hunger because Neapolitan noblemen are so "little curious about the excellent things of painting" and "value more a horse that jumps than someone who can paint with his hands figures that appear alive." To be sure, the most important patronage in Naples through the eighteenth century was ecclesiastical. Most of the hundreds of churches in Naples were decorated in this period, many of them lavishly. The most important projects of the seventeenth century were the decoration of the Capella del Tesoro (or di S. Gennaro) of the cathedral (with frescoes and altarpieces by Domenichino, Lanfranco, and Ribera and sculptures by Giulio Finelli, Cosimo Fanzago, and others, largely executed in the 1630s–1640s) and the Certosa di San Martino, which is perhaps the most splendid artistic complex of the Italian seicento. Situated with a commanding view of the city and bay of Naples, the fourteenth-century monastery underwent massive rebuilding and decoration beginning in the late sixteenth century. From 1623, Fanzago was responsible for the architecture, also contributing sculpture and elaborate marble revetments in the church. Frescoes and canvases in the church and throughout the charterhouse were provided by most of the leading painters in the city—Corenzio, Ribera, Stanzione, Caracciolo, Lanfranco, Domenico Gargiulo, and Paolo Finoglia, among others—and include as well Reni's monumental Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1640). Further campaigns in the eighteenth century included work by Giordano, de Matteis, and de Mura, as well as lavish sculptural decoration by Vaccaro.

Some of the viceroys in Naples—first Spanish, then, in the eighteenth century, Austrian—were significant patrons and collectors, sometimes playing important roles in the traffic of objects and the dissemination of style between Naples and Spain, the rest of Italy, and Central Europe. Many of the seventeenth-century viceroys employed Neapolitan artists, sometimes on behalf of the king of Spain, and a few amassed substantial collections, most notably the Count of Monterrey (viceroy 1631–1637) and the Marquess del Carpio (viceroy 1683–1687). Of the Austrian viceroys, the most important collector was Count Alois Thomas Raimund Harrach (viceroy 1728–1733), who extended his already vast collection while in Naples, not only commissioning contemporary artists, especially Solimena, but acquiring seventeenth-century Neapolitan works as well.

Large-scale decoration of private palaces was rare in the seventeenth century, and nearly all the many such projects from the early eighteenth century, especially by de Matteis and del Po, have been destroyed. But over the course of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, private collecting became much more extensive, ultimately belying Vasari's severe (and biased) judgment. Foremost among the collectors of the seventeenth century was the fabulously wealthy Flemish merchant Gaspar Roomer, whose vast collection included Peter Paul Rubens's Feast of Herod.

Religious subject matter predominated, especially in the seventeenth century, for both ecclesiastical and private patrons, but significant works with other subjects were produced. Mythological subjects were somewhat unusual, as in Spain, but important examples were executed by Ribera, Stanzione, and others. Relatively few portraits were produced in Naples in the seventeenth century, although the local painters—foremost among them Solimena and Giuseppe Bonito—caught up to international practice in the eighteenth century. Naples also did not have a highly developed tradition of genre painting until the eighteenth century, when it is best represented by Bonito and Gaspare Traversi. Seventeenth-century landscape painters, especially Gargiulo (who also showed himself a brilliant frescoist in his work at the Certosa di S. Martino), tended toward the dramatic, rather than the idyllic or classical. Fanciful architectural settings were common. In the eighteenth century, idealized views predominated, produced at their highest level by Angelo Maria Costa and his pupil, Leonardo Coccorante. Neapolitan painters of still lifes—with a penchant for foodstuffs and flowers—especially Luca Forte, Paolo Porpora, Giovanni Battista Ruoppolo, and members of the Recco family, were among the most important in Italy from second quarter of the seventeenth century.

See also Architecture ; Art: Artistic Patronage ; Baroque ; Caravaggio and Caravaggism ; Classicism ; Rococo ; Rome, Art in ; Vasari, Giorgio ; Venice, Art in .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cassani, Silvia, ed. Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli. Exh. cat. 2 vols. Naples, 1984.

——. Luca Giordano, 1634–1705. Exh. cat. Naples, 2001.

The Golden Age of Naples: Art and Civilization under the Bourbons, 1734–1805. Exh. cat. 2 vols. Detroit and Chicago, 1981.

Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E., and Nicola Spinosa. Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652. Exh. cat. New York, 1992.

A Taste for Angels: Neapolitan Painting in North America 1650–1750. Exh. cat. New Haven, 1987.

Whitfield, Clovis, and Jane Martineau, eds. Painting in Naples 1606–1705: From Caravaggio to Giordano. Exh. cat. London, 1982.

James Clifton