The Louvre on Tuesday unveiled an unprecedented partnership with Naples’ Capodimonte Museum for 2023. Among other things, some 60 masterpieces from the Neapolitan museum will be shown in three separate exhibitions at the Paris museum.
“An ambitious cultural programme, which also includes cinema and music, will give this invitation the dimensions of a true Neapolitan season in Paris,” said the world’s most visited art institution. The partnership is set to be presented in Paris later Tuesday by the Louvre’s new president, Laurence Des Caars.
The director of Capodimonte, Sylvain Bellenger, thanked the Louvre for the invitation to host these works. The works are already famous among art lovers, but “they still are to be discovered by most of the public”.
The Capodimonte museum was built in Naples by Carlos de Borbón in 1738 to preserve the works of art that he had inherited from his mother, Isabel Farnese. It has also been used as a royal residence by the kings of the Bourbon dynasty, by the French and by the Savoys.
Around sixty works from the Neapolitan museum can be seen between June 2023 and January 2024 in two of the main rooms of the Louvre, the Grand Gallery and the Chapelle room. In the first, “a dialogue” will be established between two of the most important Italian painting collections in the world, the Louvre and the Capodimonte, the Parisian museum explained on Tuesday.
The Chapelle room, for its part, will house the artistic origins and diversity of the collections of the Naples museum compiled by the Farnese and the Bourbons.
From June to October, the four masterpieces of the old Farnese collection will be exhibited in the Clock room: “The Flagellation”, by Michelangelo, “Moses before the burning bush”, by Raphael; and two others by apprentices of the latter previously preserved in the Louvre.
This exhibition will allow “to place the Louvre at the head of the great collaborations” between European museums, as well as to continue giving it “international visibility”, the director of the Louvre, Laurence des Cars, highlighted at a press conference.
