In 1503 Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the Great Captain, defeated the French army and triumphantly entered Naples, which would belong to the Hispanic monarchy for two centuries. Ferdinand the Catholic’s trip to the city (1506-7) will be an event, greeted with high hopes, ephemeral architecture and paintings celebrating his triumph in the manner of ancient emperors. A new era begins in a cosmopolitan city, the second largest in Europe after Paris, which had already experienced a great cultural boom in previous decades: it had been taken over in 1442 by Alfonso the Magnanimous –Ferdinand’s great-uncle–, who during his 16 years at the helm he would be a great patron of the arts, and before that many humanists had settled there.
And that vibrant Naples of that Renaissance Italy in which Raphael, Leonardo, Bramante and Michelangelo have given birth to the “modern manner”, will host, says the director of the Prado Museum, Miguel Falomir, “another unique and very powerful Renaissance”. In which Spanish artists trained in Florence, Milan, Venice or Rome would be decisive, who would later take the Renaissance language, with its admiration for classical Antiquity, to a Spain that they moved away from Gothic. Now that moment to which an exhibition has never been dedicated, Falomir points out, lands in the Prado in Another Renaissance. Spanish Artists in Naples at the Beginning of the Cinquecento.
An exhibition that brings together 75 works including paintings, sculptures, books and an altarpiece from the Girona Cathedral and that Falomir assures that it is “one of the most important made by the museum in recent years because it shows the importance that Naples and the Neapolitan experience will have for the great artists of the Spanish Renaissance, more important than Florence or Rome itself for them”. Artists such as Pedro Machuca, Bartolomé Ordóñez, Diego de Siloe, Pedro Fernández or Alonso Berruguete, who after training in the north and center of Italy will be able to create their first monumental works there with the language of the living figure and the naturalness of the art of the first Renaissance .
Andrea Zezza, curator with Riccardo Naldi of this exhibition that will later go to the Neapolitan Capodimonte Museum, recalls that Naples “does not have a great pictorial school like Florence, but rather it is a great port where everything is reworked, and when it becomes Spanish, the Spanish come to do something like his Erasmus there and also the Borgia pope dies in Rome and it becomes less welcoming for them”.
Painters such as Pedro Fernández, from Murcia, but with a typical Lombardy brush and who introduced novelties to the city traveled to Rome, where he would see Raphael’s Vatican rooms. In fact, in the center of the exhibition is the Virgin of the Fish, the only work by Raphael for Naples, “a virgin -says Zezza- that combines feelings, Leonardo’s gestures, the grandeur of ancient art… It brings together all the elements in something that It seems very simple and that creates a school in the city”, governed then by Viceroy Ramon Folch de Cardona in one of the happiest years of the kingdom.
After that work, everything that follows in the exhibition is influenced by Raphael, with people like Pedro Machuca, from Toledo, the painter’s collaborator in Rome and who when he arrived in Naples in 1517 would make “an extreme, more passionate, forceful, dramatic Raphaelism, a passionate which is built in Naples and is not a millennial Spanish characteristic, this great expressionism belongs to Italian culture”, says Naldi. And after his Erasmus in Naples, they will be ambassadors of the new Renaissance in Spain.
