Naples in Paris, Louvre — Italian treasures travel to the French capital

Since becoming the Louvre’s director in 2021, Laurence des Cars has brought Yves St Laurent into the Apollo gallery alongside the crowns and jewels of French monarchs, staged Things, a landmark still-life show as cerebral as it was sybaritic, and now makes an entire foreign museum her subject. The tremendous exhibition Naples in Paris hosts the treasures of the Museo di Capodimonte, Europe’s least-known great museum, on the big stage of the French capital. It confirms the Louvre, traditionally staid and inward-looking, as newly outward-bound, experimental and capable of surprise.

The Neapolitan guests — greeted by Presidents Macron and Mattarella at the inauguration in June — were welcomed as no other visiting pictures have been received in Paris for half a century: they were accorded places within the museum’s historic heart, the 300m Grande Galerie of Italian Renaissance paintings. Unprecedentedly integrated into the long-established display here, they spark a dizzying parade of comparisons, challenges, parallels, echoes.

Giovanni Bellini’s vast and original “Transfiguration”, blending human, divine and landscape elements — the stunned apostles curled up on the ground, Jesus magnified in bright white robes, the distant city and hills bathed in soft autumn light — joins the Louvre’s contrastingly austere showpiece “St Sebastian”, another monumental luminous figure, by Bellini’s brother-in-law Mantegna, filling out the story of late 15th-century Venetian art.

Caravaggio’s “The Flagellation”, vivid, violent gaolers set against the heroism yet flesh-and-blood vulnerability of Christ, painted at speed in Naples, is seen in the context of the Louvre’s “Death of the Virgin”, painted in Rome, demonstrating the artist’s evolution towards a more fluid, brutal manner after being exiled by the pope for murder.

At the Grande Galerie’s centre, “Danaë” from the Capodimonte, the earliest version of Titian’s voluptuous gold-showered nude, and the only one accompanied by a playful Cupid, meets Correggio’s sinuous, softly curving “Venus” sleeping naked, with her baby son Eros slumbering on a lion skin, from the Louvre. Each nude is revealed to the viewer/voyeur in enclosed, secret settings: the bedroom with curtain pulled back, a glade in a dense forest. It’s a majestic pairing of equals — Titian once muttered, “If I were not Titian, I would like to be Correggio” — and expresses too the sense of privileged pleasure flavouring the Louvre’s and Capodimonte’s collections, both initially legacies of monarchs.

“Venus”, painted for Count Maffei, was subsequently owned by Louis XIV — it prefigures French rococo taste. “Danaë” was commissioned by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, whose family’s paintings, shipped to Naples in 1734, form the nucleus of the Capodimonte holdings.

Farnese refinement was legendary. Among the family’s trophies here, you see it in Titian’s portrait of the ambitious cardinal, in El Greco’s searching, meditative depiction of painter Giulio Clovio and in Parmigianino’s elongated elegance. His nonchalant, half-smiling, slightly creepy “Antea”, tiny oval head set on an impossibly ample body, wrapped in silver-ribbed satin, draped with a marten fur — the dead animal’s eyes, like the woman’s, almond-shaped and fierce — is the show’s poster image. She is an enigma not quite rivalling the Mona Lisa, but nonetheless one of the strangest portraits in all the Renaissance.

Mysterious and self-contained too is Parmigianino’s princely scarlet and black portrait of the condotierre “Galeazzo Sanvitale”. A key work in launching Mannerist distortion, this takes its place alongside the Louvre’s model of High Renaissance courtly male portraiture, Raphael’s glittering-eyed humanist “Baldessare Castiglione”, painted just 10 years before.

Even for those familiar with the Capodimonte, these encounters are mesmerising. On one hand, the Farnese pictures take the role of sympathetic ambassadors, illuminating common themes and exploring nuances between the two aristocratic collections. On the other, many of the post-Farnese Neapolitan paintings function as magnificent, disruptive interlopers, disturbing the Louvre’s classical equilibrium, like flamboyant dignitaries from an exotic court.

From the first moment — the gold and tempera panel with wildly gesturing mourners in the 1426 “Crucifixion” by Masaccio, a founder of Tuscan realism absent from the Louvre’s own collection — these pictures leap out for their sharp psychological expressiveness, theatrical movement and intense atmospheres.

A taut, desperate heroine plunges the knife into her howling victim in Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes”. Wind whips across Guido Reni’s “Atalanta and Hippomenes”, stirring the lanky athletes moving in different directions, the swift suitor outrunning the tricked princess when she turns to grab a golden apple: the formal choreography is like that on a Greek vase. Francesco Guarino’s “St Agatha”, face defined by shadows, gazes out with a sensual but otherworldly air, making the reality of her martyrdom — the bloodstained white cloth covering her breast — the more shocking.

As the show unfolds towards the Neapolitan baroque, it is “the opulence and immoderation” of the visiting pictures, as curator Sébastien Allard describes them, that compel. Mattia Preti arrived in plague-ridden 1650s Naples to paint the silvery “St Sebastian”, stretched across the diagonal of the dark canvas, terrifyingly isolated, awkward, deliberately unclassical; Preti’s contemporaries criticised the figure for looking like a common porter. And in an uproarious scenario, two enormous tableaux of material splendour, Abraham Brueghel and Giuseppe Ruoppolo’s “Still Life with Fruits and Flowers” and Giuseppe Recco’s “Still Life with Fish and Other Marine Animals” — a characteristic Naples subject, relishing varied surfaces of iridescent scales, slimy crustaceans, flabby turtle — flank Luca Giordano’s towering, frothy, cherub-encrusted “Madonna of the Canopy”, as if offering her all the riches of the sea and earth.

A pair of codas to this extravagant orchestration calm the pace and are similarly unforgettable. In the Salle de la Chapelle, the Capodimonte’s history is told through a concentrated group of famous works including Titian’s loosely rendered “Pope Paul III”, wily and distrustful, and his penetratingly uneasy “Pope Paul III and His Grandsons”, capturing the power play between the elderly pontiff and the dissatisfied youths. There are also comic eccentricities: Filippo Tagliolini’s cascading porcelain “The Fall of the Giants”, Andy Warhol’s Day-Glo “Vesuvius”.

Finally, the Salle de l’Horloge returns to the show’s Renaissance origins with the Capodimonte’s choicest drawings, led by two life-size charcoal and black-chalk cartoons. Raphael’s “Moses”, the prophet kneeling, shielding his eyes from the burning bush, is a model for the fresco in the Vatican’s Stanza di Eliodoro, and “Group of Soldiers”, marching up rough-hewn steps for “The Crucifixion of St Peter” on the Sistine ceiling, is one of only two surviving large cartoons by Michelangelo. Drawings give an intimate sense of an artist in thought, but these were also the finished cartone already collected as works of perfection during the Renaissance. In the figures’ sculptural beauty and precision, dynamism, inventive design and spiritual strength, they distil and conclude the glories of this rare exhibition.

To January 8 2024, louvre.fr