It is difficult to overstate the influence of Caravaggio on Neapolitan painting in the 17^thcentury. Though active in Rome for most of his career, Caravaggio was exiled from the city for having killed Ranuccio Tommasoni, a notorious figure from a wealthy family. As a result, he spent considerable time in Naples during the last four years of his life: 1606 – 1610. The works included here by Jusepe de Ribera, Massimo Stanzione, Mattia Preti and The Master of the Annunciation to the Shepherds all bear the hallmarks of Caravaggio’s style, including the use of intense chiaroscuro and realism.

Painting in Naples throughout the Baroque period was characterized by powerful, grandiose compositions that counteracted Caravaggio’s earlier predilection for naturalism. This notion is evidenced by the monumental canvases included below by Cesare Fracanzano and Luca Giordano, which are just as theatrical in their design as they are in their size. Though smaller in scale, the oil on slate by Domenico Mondo is jewel-like in tone, while the artist’s use of bravura brushstrokes further enhance the painting’s eye-catching quality.

The heyday of Neapolitan topographical view painting was the eighteenth-century, when Antonio Joli was commissioned to execute a series of views of the city and its environs in the 1750s for the English grand tourist Lord Brudenell. Two of these, loaned by Lord Montagu of Beaulieu - The Palazzo Reale and Castel Nuovo and Naples, A Festival with a Cuccagna at the Largo di Palazzo are among the exhibition’s highlights, reflecting both the earlier influence of Gaspar van Wittel (Vanvitelli) and of Canaletto, while providing intimate glimpses of the city and its inhabitants. Also included are two fascinating views of Vesuvius by Pietro Antoniani and Pascale Mattej, which capture the drama of the erupting volcano. 

During the early nineteenth century Naples continued to be a fertile source of inspiration for vedute artists. This is demonstrated by Maria Lushington’s delightfully informal View up to Castel Sant’ Elmo executed in oil on paper and Edward  William Cooke’s painting of Vesuvius seen framed by the doorway of a fisherman’s hut: a charmingly low-key picture showing the mighty volcano slumbering in the distance. 

Still life painting in Naples flourished during the latter half of the 17^thcentury and the early 18^thcentury. This was largely thanks to the influence of Caravaggio, who had stated that executing a high-quality flower piece required as much effort as a figure subject, thus helping to do away with previous conceptions about the still life genre. Luca Forte (c. 1615 – c. 1670) was one of the first Neapolitan artists to adopt Caravaggesque naturalism in his flower paintings, and was soon followed by Paolo Porpora, the Recco brothers, and Giuseppe Recco's daughter Elena Recco, all of whose paintings can be explored below.

The present exhibition offers revealing glimpses of the city’s inhabitants as well as the townscapes of Naples. This is seen in the lively porcelain figures which include an astonishingly Hogarthian Capodimonte group of a lecherous old man and a woman with her daughter by Giuseppe Gricci, the factory’s greatest modeler. This group contrasts with the four elegant strolling figures from the 1790s produced by the Real Fabbrica and a rare Doccia figure of a Turk, which has obvious parallels with some of the oriental figures in the presepe. These themes can also be observed in the Neapolitan paintings on display, such as Gaspare Traversi’s The Sewing Lesson - a wonderfully observed bourgeois interior of the 1740s.

In the eighteenth century, Naples became an increasingly important destination for antiquarian travellers thanks to the rediscoveries of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 1730s and 1740s, and of the Greek temples at Paestum. The city's status was further enhanced by the transfer of the great Farnese collection of antiquities to Naples, including the famous Farnese Hercules, one of the most famous statues of antiquity. Naples was situated in a part of Italy which had been a Greek colony, and was therefore particularly rich in Greek artefacts, above all vases, which were avidly collected by the British Envoy, Sir William Hamilton, and later enriched the British Museum. The sumptuous 4-volume catalogue of his collection, which inspired Wedgwood’s basalt-ware copies as well as Robert Adam’s Etruscan Room at Osterley, is one of the highlights of the present exhibition. Learn more about the significance of a beautiful marble statue, visible in a niche in the lower right quadrant of the presepe. This statue represents Asclepius, a Graeco-Roman god of healing and medicine.