Back to Baroque is a sweeping exhibition project curated by Nicola Spinosa, including 6 themebased exhibitions in as many museums in Naples: Museo di Capodimonte, Castel S.Elmo, Certosa e Museo di S.Martino, Museo Duca di Martina, Museo Pignatelli, and Palazzo Reale. The project
involves the entire city and region with 27 journeys through the world of the Baroque, including churches, charterhouses, palazzi, and regional museums.
Under the patronage of the Presidency of the Republic, the event is promoted by the tourism and cultural heritage commissions of Regione Campania, and organised by the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico, Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della Città di
Napoli.
Back to Baroque illustrates the progress made by scholarship over the past thirty years, from 1979 to 2009, examining aspects, events, and genres of the Baroque era in Naples. This consists of three main periods: the arrival of Caravaggio in Naples in 1606, the work of Luigi Vanvitelli and
Ferdinando Fuga in the city (1750), and the departure of Charles of Bourbon for Spain (1759).
The exhibitions, which together form a huge region-wide event, illustrate the very latest and most up-to-date studies and research that have been carried out since the three great exhibitions put on by the superintendency for the Polo Museale di Napoli between 1979 and 1984: Civiltà del Settecento a Napoli, held in Naples, Chicago, and Detroit; Painting in Naples from Caravaggio to Luca Giordano, in London, Washington, Paris, and Turin; and Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, in Naples.
The six exhibitions at the heart of Back to Baroque show more than 350 works to the public. These include paintings, drawings, sculptures, furnishings, jewellery, fabrics, ceramics, and porcelain objects, most of which have never been shown before, or have recently been restored. These works illustrate the many different aspects of Baroque art during the 150 years in which this figurative and cultural art form held sway. The event, which is organised by Civita and Revolution, will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Arte'm.

Museo di Capodimonte
Painting from Caravaggio to Francesco Solimena (1606-1747)
Drawings from public and private collections in Italy and abroad

Castel Sant'Elmo
Restored paintings and objects from 1600 to 1750, from churches and museums in Naples
Thirty years of exhibitions of Neapolitan Baroque (photographs and films)
Focus on Baroque. Photographs by Luciano Pedicini

Certosa e Museo di San Martino
Baroque in the Certosa
The city in images
Historic portraits

Museo Nazionale della Ceramica Duca di Martina
The decorative arts in Baroque Naples

Museo Pignatelli
Still lifes from Luca Forte to Jacopo Nani

Palazzo Reale
Architecture, city planning, and cartography from Domenico Fontana to Ferdinando Sanfelice (Sala Dorica)
Baroque decorations and furnishings in the Appartamento Storico
The world of the Nativity: scenes and situations in family life (Cappella Reale)
Back to Baroque does not just illustrate the advances made over the past twenty-five years in terms of new knowledge and new collections, for it also focuses on the countless deeply rooted trends and practices that characterised Naples in the age of Baroque, with consequences that could still be felt in recent years.
Ever since the early seventeenth century, the city appeared to be constantly riven by the conflict of vices and virtues, poverty and dignity, pageantry and misdemeanours. It was a society of incorrigible individualism and touching generosity, with the most stunning cultural works alternating with expressions of widespread provincialism. Naples was experienced and perceived as a vast stage, a "great theatre of the world", where "natura e artificio", history and legend, reality and fantasy, protagonists and supernumeraries all played their part, with very different roles and actions, according to their existential decisions and true to their tragic or joyful everyday lives. The Baroque can thus be seen as a metaphor, or rather as the real and lasting destiny of Naples and of the Neapolitans, both as a whole and in their individual aspects: an endless, enthralling baroque world of ancient and modern, past and present, hopes and disappointments, passions and fears.
The project revisits the city as a splendid mix of art and culture, as it appeared to so many Italian and foreign travellers who, with curiosity and excitement, visited it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as in the early nineteenth. An extraordinary ensemble, in churches, palazzi, and museums, illustrating and once again asserting the uniqueness, originality, and value of one of the finest ages in European and Mediterranean civilisation: that of the Baroque in Naples.



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Civita, Barbara Izzo ph +39 06 692050220 e-mail: izzo@civita.it; Arianna Diana ph +39 06 692050258, e-mail
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Revolution, Alessandra Santerini, ph/fax +39 011 8123180, mob +39 335 6853767, e-mail:
alessandra.santerini@alice.it; Elena Casadoro, mob +39 334 8602488, e-mail: elena.casadoro@gmail.com