The Prado justifies the painters and sculptors who did their ‘artistic Erasmus’ in the southern Italian capital when the city was under the rule of the Spanish crown
In the fifteenth century, Naples, with its 100,000 inhabitants, was the most populous city in Europe after Paris. Under the rule of the Crown of Aragon, it began to receive outstanding artists who had been influenced in Rome or Florence by the great geniuses of the Renaissance. “At that time Naples did not have a great artistic school, but it did have a great port, and the Spanish painters and sculptors came to do their ‘Artistic Erasmus’ in the capital of the south, when Rome or Florence were much less hospitable” , explains Andrea Zezza, one of the curators of the ‘Another Renaissance’ exhibition, who discovers in the Prado Museum the work of Spanish artists in Naples at the beginning of the ‘Cinquecento’ and that of the city the great laboratory of the special Spanish Renaissance.
On display until January 29, the exhibition reveals one of the “deeper and lesser known” chapters of European Renaissance culture. The contribution of Spain and Southern Italy to the ‘modern way’, the great art based on the revolution of Leonardo Da Vinci, Rafael Sanzio or Michelangelo Buonarroti. A “historical” exhibition according to the director of the public museum, Miguel Falomir, which brings together 75 works -44 paintings, 25 sculptures, five books and an altarpiece- from public and private collections and allows comparisons such as that of the ‘Virgin of the fish’, Raphael’s only work in the Prado, along with that of artists who were inspired by it.
It focuses at the beginning of the 16th century on a geography -Naples- and on some sculptors-painters “that form an artistic panorama often considered subordinate to the traditional focal points of the Renaissance, such as Florence, Rome or Venice, but which had a decisive transcendence between a wider political reality, that of the Spanish monarchy,” emphasizes Zezza.
Among the ‘erasmus’ of the arts trained in Naples, who would develop their brilliant and influential activity in Spain, Pedro Machuca, Bartolomé Ordóñez, Diego de Siloe, Pedro Fernández or Alonso de Berruguete stand out. Known as ‘The Eagles’, they laid the foundations of the Spanish Renaissance on their return home. Discover other artists less known to the general public and of remarkable quality, such as Giovanni Da Nola, nicknamed ‘The Michelangelo of Naples’, for his beautiful sculptures, or Andrea di Piero Ferrucci.
“They undertook an aesthetic journey through an interesting stage, for a moment when a new way of artistic expression was discovered, interpreted in a different way and that would reach the Iberian Peninsula digested, metabolized and differently,” he said. summed up the director of the museum’s Royal Board of Trustees, Javier Solana.
Organized by the Royal Bosco Museum of Capodimonte, where it will travel in 2023, the exhibition reveals what the innovations in that crucial period, between 1500 and 1530, meant for painting and sculpture, with the coexistence of techniques and materials. There is painting on wood or canvas, miniatures in polychrome wood, sculpture in wood and marble or books such as Fernando El Católico’s Missal, a piece from the Vatican library that had never left Italy before.
«We can affirm, without fear of exaggeration, that without that Neapolitan experience the Spanish Renaissance would be very different. Its development in Naples is very peculiar, more plural, less codified and with many different tendencies,” assured Falomir, claiming the unprecedented and exceptional nature of the proposal of the curators Andrea Zezza, professor at the University of Campania, and Riccardo Naldi. , from the University of Naples, for the exhibition sponsored by the BBVA Foundation.
It was in 1503 when Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the great captain, entered the city after defeating the French army intending to occupy Naples, and took charge of the government on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs. “It was a very important step in the process that led Spain to consolidate itself as a European hegemonic power. The rest of Italy, plunged into a deep political crisis, witnessed the formation of its humanistic culture, with Antiquity as a reference model admired and respected on the continent,” emphasizes Zezza.
Naples had experienced a great cultural boom in recent decades, but the loss of its political independence “did not mark the end of that glorious period.” Rather, “it helped define a new role for the city, fundamental in the spread of Italian Renaissance culture in the Iberian Peninsula.” Everything changes in 1530, when the war between Emperor Charles V and the papacy ended.
Naples had experienced a great cultural boom in recent decades, but the loss of its political independence “did not mark the end of that glorious period.” Rather, “it helped define a new role for the city, fundamental in the dissemination of Italian Renaissance culture in the Iberian Peninsula,” the curators point out.
Lacking a strong local artistic school, the southern capital, traditionally cosmopolitan, in those years welcomed the new art based on the Renaissance revolution. A fiery period animated by artists “destined for a promising future who reaped their first successes in Naples before becoming the protagonists of the Spanish Renaissance.”
On the threshold of the 16th century, in the decades preceding the settlement of the kings of Aragon, many of the most important Italian intellectuals had settled in Naples and developed a peculiar form of “monarchic humanism”, different from “bourgeois humanism”. ‘. typical of the cities, free from the center of the Italian peninsula. Thus, a new function was proposed for secular intellectuals, separated from the church and devoted to the shadow of the king, to political, social, legal and cultural reflection, as well as the transmission of the reasons of the sovereign and the construction of a state apparatus, something that would penetrate deep into European civilization.
Source: La Verdad
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