Thursday 9 March 2023 the exhibition The Spaniards in Naples opens at the Museum and Real Bosco di Capodimonte. The Southern Renaissance (9 March – 25 June 2023, Sala Causa) curated by prof. Riccardo Naldi, professor of History of Modern Art at the University L'Orientale of Naples and prof. Andrea Zezza, professor of modern art history at the University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli". The exhibition project was carried out in partnership with the Museo Nacional del Prado, where a first version of the exhibition was inaugurated, achieving considerable success with critics and the public, on 18 October 2022 with the title Otro Renacimiento. Artistas españoles en Nápoles al comienzos del Cinquecento .

Thanks to this important collaboration, the Madonna of the fish performed by Raphael will return to Naples for the first time in 400 years. The painting, intended for the Doce family chapel in San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, became a fundamental point of reference for the artists active in Naples during the sixteenth century. Taken away by the Spanish rulers and transferred to Madrid around the middle of the seventeenth century. The exhibition is dedicated to one of the most fruitful and least known moments of Neapolitan artistic civilization: the thirty years (about 1503-1532). It is the period which, from a political point of view, saw the extinction of the Aragonese dynasty, with the passage of the Kingdom of Naples under the dominion of the Crown of Spain; from a cultural point of view, the achievement of the apex of his great humanistic season, with the handover from Giovan Gioviano Pontano to Iacopo Sannazaro. The artistic novelties elaborated in those years by Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were promptly incorporated and reinterpreted in an original way in a Naples that was still very much alive, for which the loss of the function of autonomous capital did not constitute an obstacle to cultural development, but, on the contrary , contributed to the definition of a new role of transmission belt of Renaissance culture between the two shores of the Mediterranean.

The exhibition offers a wide range of works by some of the main Spanish artists active in Naples in those years, such as Pedro Fernández, Bartolomé Ordóñez, Diego de Siloe, Pedro Machuca, Alonso Berruguete. Having moved to Italy very early, they unleashed an extraordinary inventive originality in comparison with the works performed by the greatest protagonists of the full Italian Renaissance. The Spaniards became the protagonists of the exceptional artistic season of early sixteenth-century Naples, supported by the patronage of religious orders and the aristocracy, eager to leave an indelible mark of their greatness by financing works of ambitious magnificence, often created, in the manner of the Ancients, using durable Carrara marble. Returning to their homeland, the Spaniards became ambassadors of a particular declination of the figurative culture of the High Renaissance, supported by extraordinary inventiveness and technical skills, to which the passage of Spain within the imperial structure of Charles V gave a European breath.