From May 27th to September 11th the exhibition “ The little Prince. Giuseppe Sanmartino at the Royal Palace of Caserta ". The exhibition is organized with the contribution of the Friends of the Reggia and set up in the Palatine Chapel of the Royal Palace.

The exhibition starts from the discovery, in the deposits of the Vanvitellian Complex in the early months of 2021, of the marble portrait of a life-size newborn by Giuseppe Sanmartino, identified with the Royal Infante Carlo Tito di Borbone, firstborn male of King Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina of Austria .

The work, on which rigorous research was carried out, was carried out on the impulse of Queen Maria Carolina who, as a vow of grace for having given birth in 1775 the male that would have ensured the dynastic continuity of the Bourbons on the throne of Naples, commissioned a life-size portrait of the newborn Prince Carlo Tito to the first sculptor of the Kingdom, Giuseppe Sanmartino , the well-known author of the Veiled Christ of the Sansevero Chapel . The portrait was then translated into silver to be dedicated to San Francesco di Paola, a saint to whom the queen was particularly devoted. Having lost the ex voto in silver, the studies on Sanmartino, while recording its existence, have also considered the original portrait lost. In addition to the stylistic comparison with other works by the artist, such as the curtain angels of the funeral monument to Filippo di Borbone in Santa Chiara or those that appear next to Cardinal Agostino Sersale in his dedicatory monument in the Cathedral of Naples, made in those years, the he attribution of the sculpture to Sanmartino is confirmed in the post-unification inventories of the Royal Palace of Caserta. These, next to the description as a sleeping Putto, show the name of the greatest Neapolitan sculptor of the second half of the eighteenth century.

The object has been present in the collections of the Royal Palace of Caserta at least since 1879 . Iconographic studies have led us to exclude that it may be a putto or the Infant Jesus and that he should more correctly identify himself with a sleeping child, inspired by the classic allegory of the Sleep of Innocence. Subjected to a careful restoration in the museum's laboratories, the Portrait of the Royal Infante Carlo Tito di Borbone by Giuseppe Sanmartino is the rediscovery around which the exhibition collects works of various kinds, linked to the days that saw the birth of the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Naples. The exhibition thus becomes an opportunity to understand the importance of the historic event, to analyze the artist's relationship with the Bourbon royal house, to study other works hitherto unknown and attributable to him and to analyze his portraits - genre al which Sanmartino also worked - of which several traces remain in works of high value such as the Portrait of Livia Doria Carafa, Princess of Roccella, from a private collection.