Nineteenth-century Naples celebrated at the Quirinale

A journey through the fertile and joyful lands of Naples, amidst memories of Vesuvian lapilli and cataclysms, lush Mediterranean nature and Parthenopean light, archaeological discoveries and the blossoming of the landscape genre, the rediscovery of the artistic ego and living matter: the exhibition 'Napoli Ottocento' at the Scuderie del Quirinale is all this and much more!

The journey starts with the romantic concept of the Sublime derived from the semiotics of the eruption of Vesuvius in the form of cultural malaise, in fact a bi-polar mechanism of attraction-repulsion towards destruction is activated, triggering terror and religious-moral crisis in the mind, also due to epochal events such as the earthquake that swept away Lisbon in 1755. The first geologists studied the mineralogy and conformation of the volcano, and paintings such as that of Jacob Philipp Hackert were born, blending pictorial wisdom with genuine scientific interest.

Yet, the event that most revolutionised and animated Europeans in the second half of the 17th century were the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 1738 and 1748, and painters such as Giacinto Gigante and Anton Sminck Van Pitloo, founder of the Posillipo School, were thunderstruck: this was also the turning point for the Landscape genre, which abandoned classical canons to be rendered with natural light and as the direct experience of artists. With Giacinto and Ercole Gigante, in addition to views of the Gulf of Naples, humble urban views also became the protagonists, as can be seen in Un muro a Napoli by Thomas Jones, which also shows a taste for new shots and fragments of everyday life, heralding the invention of the camera a century later. On the other hand, the search for light and the warm, blueish shadows of the Mezzogiorno can be appreciated in Sunny Terrace in Capri by Danish artist Peter Vilhem Ilsted and, as curator Sylvain Bellenger points out, the naturalistic datum is grasped differently by an Italian or a foreigner visiting the Peninsula for the Gran Tour fashion. Certainly, one is left speechless before the two small studies of stormy skies by the Dutchman, of Neapolitan adoption, Van Pitloo, between blacks bathed by the sunset and menacing lilac and violet clouds, the evocative words of Jean Cocteau's letter to his mother come to mind: "Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world. The sea is dark blue. It scatters hyacinths on the pavements'.

It was the turn of Filippo Palizzi, influenced by the Parisian travels of his brother Giuseppe and the new Barbizon School, to revolutionise Italian painting by contaminating it with a touch of verism and contact with the Tuscan Macchiaioli. In his paintings, form and content are mirrored. Francesco De Sanctis, on the other hand, propagated Risorgimento ideals and fought for anti-academism. Palizzi's mature fruit is a cosmic, animalistic landscape painting, as can be seen in After the Flood, which takes advantage of the biblical episode of Noah's Ark to plumb a vast repertoire of animal species.

This was followed by the painters of the School of Resina, among whom Adriano Cecioni and Giuseppe De Nittis stand out. We are now in the mid 19th century and Naples with its authentic and timeless flavour, which made Curzio Malaparte call it 'a Pompeii never buried', attracted many Germans who saw in it, in the wake of Goethe, an intellectual topos: the embodiment of a lost Greece, free of taboos. In addition to the charm exerted by its genuine character, the Neapolitan capital became a centre of scientific culture thanks to the initiative of Anton Dohrn, who founded a Zoological Station there and welcomed many scholars to his villa in Amalfi, delighting them with music.