When Europe Began in Naples

By ROBERT HUGHES

A show of treasures from an 18th century Bourbon kingdom

"The Golden Age of Naples" a delightful exhibition of some 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings and miscellaneous objects from writing boxes to porcelain crucifixes, went on view this month at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It is a reduction of a much bigger show organized in Naples last year; but even in its abridged form it is very rewarding.

From 1734 to 1805, Naples and its provinces were ruled by a series of princelings, whose watery blue eyes and pendulous underlips festoon every wall in this show: the Bourbons, offshoots of the reigning French and Spanish royal families. They controlled a great capital: with 400,000 people, Naples was the largest city in Italy and, after London and Paris, the third largest in Europe. Its need for conspicuous display and luxury kept architects and builders in constant work. A few of them, like the artists Corrado Giaquinto (1703-66) and Francesco Solimena (1657-1747), or the architect Ferdinando Sanfelice (1675-1748), were touched with extraordinary talent. Most of the rest could deploy the kind of rhetorical eloquence and high technical polish that court art demands. Then there was a continuous infusion of foreign artists, German, French and English.

If the "Golden Age of Naples" was not solid all the way through, at least it was elaborately gilded. Any Florentine or Milanese will tell you today that Asia begins south of Rome. In the 18th century it was otherwise: Europe began in Naples.

Today Naples is a tourist's hell, but travelers in the 18th century, who were tougher and fewer than their modern counterparts, took a different view of it. The city seemed to fulfill the promise of the Grand Tour--to have the ancients as one's tutors, and the lower classes as one's brothel. Naples was poor in mementos of the Renaissance, but it offered something even rarer: no mere glimpse of classical antiquity, but a panoramic view of it.

The remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum were being excavated, in a clumsy treasure-hunting way, from the volcanic ash that had shrouded and preserved them since the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Elsewhere in Italy, the ruins of Roman public life could easily be seen--temples, stadia, places of assembly. But the archaeology of Naples gave the visitor a sense of how the ancients lived when at home--when they came off their plinths, shed their cuirasses herdiques and settled down with their wine cups and mild painted pornography, no longer behaving like noble Romans. Naples rapidly became the center of a mania for the antique, and neoclassicism was a direct result; archaeology exerted a pressure on contemporary art that exceeded even the discoveries of the Renaissance.

Figures as various as Goethe and the Marquis de Sade made the trip there; but there were other reasons than antiquity for going. "Now that I have become domesticated here I regard life but as a dream," wrote a young Scot, Craufurd Tait Ramage, in 1826. "I can no longer be surprised that pleasure should be the chief good and principal pursuit of the Italians--everything invites them to it--their outward senses are solicitated in a thousand ways to feast on the gifts of Nature." The city, lapped by its blue bay, seemed a cornucopia of pleasure (offset by attacks of the flux and the pox). Its dreamlike character, as a parenthesis in the real, or Northern world, was only heightened by the frisson of risk offered by Vesuvius, whose cone threatened to turn Naples in a literal way into the Sodom of the South.

To Stendhal, all Italian cities were provincial towns; only Naples had the makings of a capital. He was right, although Bourbon Naples produced nothing; it had a purely entrepreneurial life, as a trading port and administrative mess. Power filtered down through a tangled, grafting bureaucracy, and the life of the outlying countryside was sapped by taxes and absentee landlords. The "picturesque" poor were mostly dispossessed peasants, helplessly drawn into the city's gravitational field. The Bourbon attitude to them was symbolized by the cuccagna, a mountain of sweetmeats, hams and other goodies that was piled up in front of the royal palace. At a given signal, the poor would attack it, killing one another for a sausage while their rulers watched.

But rulers sometimes get better artists than they deserve, and so it was with the Bourbons. The dominant figure in the first half of the 18th century in Naples was Francesco Solimena, whose style--the highest of high Baroque, all energetically molded drapery, flickering runs of light and exalted faces--possessed a declamatory power that extended to his smaller works as well: his Self-Portrait, done in his 70s, is as confident an essay in self-admiration, the artist as maestro assoluto, as Italian painting of the period can offer.

Solimena's near contemporary Giaquinto is represented by three of the four altarpieces he did for the sacristy of San Luigi di Palazzo in Naples--stately, marmoreal images full of gravity, but given a curiously ghostlike quality by their pallid color and slow transitions of light.

For official portraiture, there were visiting maestros like the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs--a model of insipid correctness in most of his work, but capable of moments when real insight showed through the polish, as in his striking portrait of the nine-year-old Ferdinand IV. The child-king stands among the appurtenances of an adult world, the armchair and columns and marble slabs, like some shrunken male Alice in Wonderland. And yet by delicate adjustments of scale and proportion, Mengs succeeded in giving the impression that this toy adult was not overwhelmed by their size; that he was, in some actual sense, a king.

The "Neapolitan" spirit of the show appears, not in high religious painting or in official portraiture, but in the "minor" and decorative work: the bright frothing of shells and red coral up the side of a Capodimonte porcelain ewer, for instance, or the gross theatrical energy of the silver-gilt devotional statues. Perhaps the most striking of these is a bust of St. Irene protecting Naples from lightning. The city is held up by a cherub, and the saint holds out her right palm: a gilt thunderbolt is stuck in it. Wonderwoman does it again. The Neapolitans liked their religion brassy and extravagant, and they still do.

The treat of the show, however, is a group of paintings by Gaspare Traversi. Very little is known about his life, not even the dates of his birth and death; he worked in Naples, however, between 1750 and 1775, and the cultural milieu of the city--overlapping, as it did, with lowlife, and scratching for crumbs of patronage at the skirts of the nobility--gave him limitless opportunities for satire. Traversi's two paintings of education in the arts, one showing a girl at the harpsichord, the other a young woman learning to draw, are vinegary, weird and hilarious all at once. It is as though the talents of a Longhi had been conjoined with those of Hogarth, and the result applied to Naples and its seedy corps of connoisseurs and minor literati.

In each case the essential subject is the same--a woman surrounded by a crowd of men, who peer at her, offer advice, listen or look with varying degrees of veiled prurience, and otherwise impose on her. In The Arts--Drawing, 1760, the old man is rhapsodizing over her work as though she were a gifted parrot learning, at last, to repeat a phrase, while the supercilious drawing master points to the model she must copy. In the crammed, tilted space, the heads on their distorted bodies swell grotesquely, like pale masks. Every detail of costume is there--one could dress an opera from Traversi--but the whole has gone awry: we gaze into a cuckooland of cultural pretension. Small wonder that Traversi failed to get the big commissions; but his work stays in the mind long after the more decorative things in this show, the chalky allegories of the arts, the fetes champetres and royal hunting scenes, have blurred together in their amicable second rateness.

--By Robert Hughes

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