Fede Galizia shines again at the Capodimonte Museum

Fede Galizia (documented in Milan, from 1587 to 1630), an established portraitist and author of famous still lifes preserved in important museums and collections in Italy and abroad, in the altarpiece for Naples compares herself with the masters of the 16th century: Leonardo for the composition around the Madonna, but also Raphael, Correggio. The new arrival in the collections also tells a piece of art history in Naples to the many visitors expected in Capodimonte during the holidays: Easter coincides with the first Sunday of the month with free admission, the museum also open on Easter Monday (second floor only, Real Bosco closed as usual on Easter Monday).

“We welcome to Capodimonte the ‘wonderful painter’ Fede Galizia, who joins her colleagues Artemisia Gentileschi, Sofonisba Anguissola, Elisabetta Sirani, Teresa Del Po, Lavinia Fontana, Angelica Kauffmann, Elisabetta Louise Vigee Lebrun in the story of female painting, just to name the most celebrated artists between the 16th and 18th centuries present in our collections, each with an extraordinary story which is also social and civil and which we want to increasingly valorise – declares Eike Schmidt, director of the Museum and Real Bosco of Capodimonte – We thank the Church of San Pasquale a Chiaia and the Franciscan Order (Province of San Giovan Giuseppe della Croce of the Order of Friars Minor, ed.) which preserved the work, identified only in 2021: we hope for new collaborations for the celebrations of the 800 years of the Patron Saint of Italy”.

The large painting was commissioned by Baldassare Noirot, a Flemish merchant, who was entrusted with the Chapel of the Magi in the ancient Church of S. Anna dei Lombardi (1581): in 1798 the collapse of the ceiling made it unusable, the works were moved to the nearby Santa Maria di Monteoliveto (the current Sant’Anna dei Lombardi) in time to avoid the earthquake of 1805 which also destroyed the “Resurrection” by Caravaggio.

The Galizia altarpiece arrived at the Royal Bourbon Museum between 1816 and 1821, with the signature clearly visible: a precaution that female painters of the time adopted to avoid being ‘erased’. But in 1937 the Museum, which had become ‘National’, indicated the painting as ‘Ignoto Fiorentino del XVI’, giving it temporarily to the Church of San Giuseppe in Rione Luzzatti, built to house the works of the destroyed church of San Giuseppe Maggiore in via Medina. With the Second World War, the destruction of the church in the neighborhood (which would become ‘iconic’ because it was at the center of the events of the Amica Geniale saga) and the spoliation of his works, traces of the Adoration and three other paintings by Capodimonte were lost, which in 1957 became the seat of the National Art Gallery, previously housed in the current Mann. But it is only in 2021 that the research published in the catalog of the exhibition in Trento ‘Fede Galizia Mirabile Pittoressa’ reveals that the Adoration is located at the Convent of San Pasquale a Chiaia in Naples. The contribution of the scholar Federico Maria Giani involved in the exhibition curated by Giovanni Agosti and Jacopo Stroppa which celebrates the painter’s Trentino origins was fundamental for the identification. And it was precisely Fede Galizia’s painting that opened the path of the recent exhibition dedicated to seventeenth-century women at the Gallerie d’Italia in Naples, the last stop before returning, or rather being exhibited for the first time, in Capodimonte. Between the two Annunciations by Scipione Pulzone and Francesco Curia (also from Sant’Anna dei Lombardi), and in front of the Adoration of the Shepherds of Santafede, the Galizia altarpiece is thus included in the context of the contemporary works produced for Naples and the Kingdom between the end of the 16th century and the first decade of the 17th century, to underline the variety of the cultural proposal of the period, between mannerism and Caravaggio influences.

In Naples there is also a second work by Fede Galizia, the altarpiece San Carlo in Estasi in the church of San Carlo alle Mortelle. (by Paolo Martini)