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Postcard from Naples, Italy: Snippets shot in final four museums

Detail of “The Devil and the Holy Water,” Salvatore Postiglione, 1887, Gallerie d’Italia – Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano

Inartistically and illogically clumping works from four museums in this one post – 15th-century religious paintings, a Joan Miro retrospective, a house museum, contemporary art. The museums are getting short shrift in treatment because they are the final ones the blog will visit in Naples before moving across the boot of Italy. The grouping does offer a glimpse of how diverse and rich the art offerings found in Naples are.

Carriage House cat, Museo Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes
Joan Miro Exhibition, PAN – Palazzo delle Arti Napoli
PAN – Palazzo delle Arti Napoli
Museo Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes
“Shock Wave,” Mario Merz, 1987, Museo Capodimonte
Museo Capodimonte
Joan Miro Exhibition, PAN – Palazzo delle Arti Napoli
devilish detail, Museo Capodimonte
Museo Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes
PAN – Palazzo delle Arti Napoli
PAN – Palazzo delle Arti Napoli
Gallerie d’Italia – Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano
Museo Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes
“Museum,” Paolo Vetri, 1875, Gallerie d’Italia – Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano
devilish detail, Museo Capodimonte
Joan Miro Exhibition, PAN – Palazzo delle Arti Napoli
Salottino di Porcellana, Museo Capodimonte
“San Michele Arcangelo,” 1490, Museo Capodimonte
Gallerie d’Italia – Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano
Gallerie d’Ilalia – Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano
Museo Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes
Joan Miro Exhibition, PAN – Palazzo delle Arti Napoli
Gallerie d’Italia – Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano
Salottino di Porcellana, Museo Capodimonte
Museo Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes
Joan Miro Exhibition, PAN – Palazzo delle Arti Napoli
Joan Miro Exhibition, PAN – Palazzo delle Arti Napoli

As is oft the case, our camera lens seems to often focus on the devils lurking in religious art, but what dark thoughts were in the mind of Neapolitan painter Salvatore Postiglione when he conceived of “The Devil and the Holy Water” are unclear to me.

I never had thought of holy water as dangerous before. But, indeed in hindsight, it should have been obvious that the Coronavirus devil was lurking in fonts at the front of Catholic churches everywhere. Catholics always pause to dip their fingers in the communal pool of water and immediately raise them up to touch their face to make a gesture symbolizing the Holy Trinity and baptism.

March brought the draining of the fonts, but how many viral contaminants were shared by the faithful by then? So very, very sad to think of those who might have been harmed by turning to their religious rituals for reassuring comfort….

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Postcard from Naples, Italy: Frisky gods frolicked in the buff

Artemis of Ephesus, Goddess of Fertility, 2nd Century

In the mid-1700s, Charles III of Bourbon (1716-1788), King of Naples, began exploring the towns buried by Vesuvius and combined some of those finds with works of art he moved from palaces in Rome and Parma he inherited from his mother, Elisabeth Farnese (1692-1766), Queen of Spain. His son, Ferdinando IV (1751-1825), moved the treasures into a building that originally was a 16th-century riding school and later the university. Today the structure serves as the National Archaeology Museum or Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (MANN).

The mosaics from Pompeii were my favorite part of the museum, but, unfortunately the galleries containing the largest mosaics were closed temporarily for renovation. No photos appear here of the outside of MANN because it was completely covered by scaffolding, possibly removed by now.

While ancient Romans favored wearings togas, tunics, stolas and pallas, many of their gods tended to frolic shamelessly in a bacchanalian existence, cavorting and coupling in fashions far from puritanical.

Nilotic Landscape, mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii
Atlas holding the oldest known representation of the celestial sphere, 2nd century
Pan and Daphnis
Table support, 2nd century, Villa Madama. “On it is depicted the Homeric myth of Scylla gripping Ulysses’ sailors. The sea-monster that emerges from the woman’s body, her arm thrown haphazardly over her head, encircles in the loops of her fish-like tail the lifeless body of a man. Meanwhile the three dogs’ heads that emerge from her stomach wreak destruction on other shipwrecked sailors who struggle in the waves. A centaur is depicted on the opposite side… a small cupid seated on her back….”
Athena Farnese, 430
Medusa from Casa dell Vestali in Pompeii
Sarcophagus with depiction of drunken Hercules joining Dionysus in a procession, 2nd century
Apollo Citharist
Dionysus and Eros
Meridian Line
Giant head of a horse, Donatello, bronze, 1456-1466
fresco from Pompeii of the god Priapus, who threatens thieves with rape, is found in the Gabinetto Secreto
Pan
cockfight mosaic
Atlas holding the celestial sphere, 2nd century
Eros with Dolphin, 2nd century
cockfight mosaic
Kneeling Barbarian, 1st century
detail of Memento Mori, Pompeii, with death atop the butterfly representing the soul balancing on a wheel of fortune
Bacchus
Artemis of Ephesus, goddess of fertility, 2nd century
Nilotic Landscape, mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii
mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii

This is evident throughout the impressive museum, but even more so in the Gabinetto Secreto, or Secret Cabinet. In this gallery clearly marked with a warning as to its mature content, one finds the more pornographic-seeming artifacts from Pompeii and erotic objects of the Borgia Collection. The only one of the above images shot in the Secret Cabinet is that of the enormously endowed god Priapus, kind of an X-rated scarecrow threatening evil-doers with rape.