Bringing the history of Naples back to life in a great public art museum
With respect and admiration, this review is for Philippe de Montebello.
For as long as I have been coming to Naples, I have been studying Caravaggio’s Seven Acts of Mercy (1607). Inspired by a recent Neapolitan presentation of tableaux vivants, in which eight actors ‘performed’ twenty-three Caravaggios, recreating those paintings, I learned to describe the image as if it were a real scene. (On YouTube you can see these performances.)
It’s enchanting to watch as the actors taking their places as it were, compose Seven Acts. And it is fascinating, also, to see this swift presentation of Caravaggio’s development, as one work after the next is performed. The actors performing Seven Acts are present before you, as if the past events depicted in that painting existed right now, as they reconstruct the paintings. Here, then, there is a real ambiguity between looking at a mere representation of the past and looking directly into the historically distant world shown in the picture. We often say, speaking metaphorically, that art makes the past (which is dead) come alive. That happens literally in these tableaux.[1]
In his Foreword to the catalogue of Dangerous Liaisons, a 2006 Metropolitan Museum exhibition, Philippe de Montebello describes that exhibition as “a kind of theater,” with the artworks inserted in period-style rooms. It thus was very unlike the usual museum practice where
typically, artworks are displayed with the understanding that their aesthetic merit and virtuosity of their creators are better conveyed when they are separated spatially to underscore their uniqueness.[2]
Here is a condensed description of the essential nature of the art museum.[3] Museums detach artworks from their original settings, in order that they can be experienced aesthetically.
Many museum skeptics worried about what happened in this process. Perhaps, they said, the artworks failed to be preserved: “Museums preserve old objects, but fail to preserve the works of art constituted by these objects.”[4] Starting in the late eighteenth century, when the Louvre became a public museum, it was often argued that moving art into the museum would not preserve it; a work of art, it was claimed, was inseparable from the life of the place in which it was created and displayed. Some of these museum skeptics were conservatives, who rejected secular modernism; others, however, were leftists who disliked the bourgeois art market.
Many visual works of art are movable. But perhaps, as museum skeptics claim, when Greek or Hindu sculpture enters a museum, or when a Catholic altarpiece moves there: then these artifacts lose their intended sacred function and become works of art, set alongside other art. Some commentators speak dramatically of ‘the creation of art’ to identify the way in which very varied artifacts become artworks when they are assembled in the museum. Museum skeptics felt that the original objects did not survive because they were no longer were part of the life of the community for which they were created.
Some of these museum skeptics were conservatives, who rejected secular modernism; others, however, were leftists who disliked the bourgeois art market.
My book Museum Skepticism (2006) was concerned with the consequences of moving artworks from churches into art museums. I then took it for granted that, all things being equal, so long as old art remains in its original site, it survives. Now, however, my experience of Naples gives reason to question that claim. One development associated with modernism is the creation of the art museum, which usually is an inherently secular institution. But another, even more important for our present purposes, is the secularization of the entire culture. And these changes mean that even that art remaining in its original locations may not survive. Although the churches may survive physically intact, their sacred world has almost disappeared.
When, many years ago, I started to study closely the historic center of Naples, I thought a great deal about museum skepticism. In that city, a great deal of important art remains in its original settings. What’s also important is the almost complete disappearance of the spectacles, which were extremely important for everyday life in the baroque life of Naples. These ceremonies were an integral part of the religious experience. Our record of that visual culture is focused on the surviving evidence—the architecture, drawings, paintings, and sculpture. But as one recent historian notes,
although the ephemeral creations, temporary architecture, sculpture, parade floats, stage sets, and costumes designed for maximum astonishment but minimum lifespan. . . are rarely studied in conjunction with the more permanent legacy . . . it would be a mistake to ignore them.[5]
They are ignored because we have few visual records of them. What defined the religious identity of the historic city of Naples is not just that masses were regularly held in Gesù Nuovo, Santa Chiara and the very numerous other churches, but the presence also of a whole variety of other ceremonies, as described by social historians.
With over 150 opera costumes from the San Carlo opera house, many of them on mannequins, and more than 300 porcelain objects from the Royal Factory of Capodimonte, this was a very Neapolitan exercise in its overstimulation.
When thinking about Naples I worried, still, that my analysis was of purely academic interest. A museum curator, I feared, needs to deal with the practice of art displays, without worrying about the philosophical implications of this historical process. But then it happened, in November 2019 that I returned to Naples, and saw an astonishing exhibition at Capodimonte. Naples Naples: Of Lava, Porcelain, and Music, was presented in nineteen rooms of the Royal Apartments, each with its own theme based on the conception of opera sets, designed by the French artist Hubert le Gall, that recreated the city’s history in a series of extended tableaux. Here an interpretation of the city was presented in an elaborate full-scale three-dimensional walk-through display, filled with real works of art. .[6]
Naples Naples employed stage costumes and music from the Teatro di San Carlo, as if you had wandered onto the stage amidst a performance. Starting with a gigantic cup containing Maria Carolina of Habsburg Lorraine (the wife of Ferdinand IV of Bourbon and Queen of Naples and Sicily), there were rooms devoted to sacred music, profane music, the restoration of the Bourbons following the fall of Napoleon in 1815, and the Grand Tour when Mozart, Stendhal and Goethe visited the city. And then to Egyptomania and Chinoiserie, to minerals and other natural artifacts, to Pulcinella, and the 18th-century Commedia dell’Arte, and the events of 1799. With over 150 opera costumes from the San Carlo opera house, many of them on mannequins, and more than 300 porcelain objects from the Royal Factory of Capodimonte, this was a very Neapolitan exercise in its overstimulation.
The exhibition included over 1000 objects, over 300 pieces of porcelain from the collections of the Royal Manufactories of Capodimonte and Naples, other European manufactories and original Chinese pieces, more than 150 costumes from the Teatro di San Carlo, musical instruments from the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory in Naples, paintings, works of art and furnishings, minerals and animals preserved by taxidermy. I’ve never seen so many objects in one museum exhibition, on all sides as you walked through. I felt like I was on the street with the Neapolitan Christmas display of crèches. You saw sculptures and paintings in visually busy hangings. And on headphones you heard music from many composers associated with Naples, including Giovanni Pergolesi, Domenico Cimarosa, Giovanni Pacini, Giovanni Paisiello, Leonardo Leo, and Niccolò Jommelli. The setting thus told the story of Naples as the capital of the Bourbon Kingdom in the 1700s and beyond, from the years of Charles of Bourbon to Ferdinand II, with a succession of scenes depicting daily life, changes in history, fashion and aesthetic tastes in a multi-sensory journey.
The tableaux vivants we considered at the start brought Caravaggio’s paintings to life; here the entire modern history of Naples was displayed within the museum. It’s singularly unfortunate, then, that soon after this exhibition opened, the Coronavirus led to restrictions on national and international travel and, soon enough, to the closing of the museum. In this very large selection of tableaux vivants, the most imaginative display I’ve seen in many years, Neapolitan art was restored, as it were, to life. Recently there’s been a great deal of critical discussion about how art museums can attract audiences to their presentations of old master works. I can think of no better model than Naples Naples, a show that deserves to be much emulated.
[1] See Julie Ramos and Léonard Pouy, eds. Le tableau vivant. Ou l’image performée (Paris: Centre Andre Chastel, 2014).
[2] Foreword, Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton, Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006).
[3] See also, AngloMania, Metropolitan Museum of Art, (2006). Catalogue: Andrew Bolton, Anglomania. Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006), and my review: “AngloMania, Metropolitan Museum of Art,” ArtUS 15 (October-November 2006): 48-49.
[4] Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (Duke University Press, 2006), 51.
[5] Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Baroque & Rococo (London: Phaidon, 2012), 306.
[6] There is a fully illustrated catalogue in Italian, Napoli Napoli. Di lava, porcellana e musica (MilanL Electra, 2019). And, also, there is a full description in English on-line: capodimonte.cultura.gov.it/mdc/uploads/2021/09/press-kit-Napoli-Napoli_ENG-1.pdf.
I thank Christopher Bakke for discussing this exhibition with me in Naples.