AFC Winter Newsletter 2025
/AFC Winter Newsletter
AFC Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow Dr. Gabriella Johnson Renewed for Another Year at Capodimonte
The 2025/2026 AFC Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellowship at Capodimonte for Gabriella Johnson has been renewed for an additional year. Her fellowship in Naples now will conclude at the end of June 2027. “Gabriella has accomplished so much in just four months in residence in Naples that her extension was unanimously approved by the AFC board,” said Curatorial Fellow mentor and AFC board member Gretchen Hirschauer. She will continue her work on the reinstallation of the first floor painting galleries, in addition to new ones coming her way.
Click here to learn more about Gabriella on the AFC website and follow her updates from Capodimonte on Instagram: @american_friends_capodimonte.
AFC Honorary President Dr. Giovanni Lombardi Sponsors New Acquisitions
Under the Art Bonus program and with AFC Honorary President Giovanni Lombardi’s support, three important eighteenth-century works enriched Capodimonte’s collections this past November.
One of the new acquisitions includes a portrait of Charles III of Bourbon by the German artist Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779). Fittingly presented to the Museum on November 3, the feast day of Saint Charles, the work depicts Capodimonte’s founder and former resident in his role as the King of Spain. His impressive blue and white sash of the Order of Charles III, studded with a brooch from the Royal Order of the Golden Fleece, reinforces the king’s chivalric honors, while inviting eyes, a rosy complexion, and smile ground the monarch in humanity. The painting’s intimate dimensions further humanize the new successor of the Spanish Crown.
Two additional works by Italian artist Giacomo Del Po join the collection: a preparatory drawing for the principal entrance to the monastery of San Gregorio Armeno in Naples and a small painting of Saint Dominick of Gesù Maria in the Battle of Prague against the protestants.
After acquiring the three works from a private collection, Lombardi told the public gathered at Capodimonte that his donation was principally for the city of Naples, and that he was especially pleased that Charles III of Bourbon, at least in his painted form, can return “home” to the palace. He added that he was drawn to the portrait’s intimate depiction of the powerful king – a notable rejection of the rigid grandeur typical of royal portraiture.
Celebrating the new acquisitions, Director Eike Schmidt noted: “Although the palace of Capodimonte dates to the eighteenth century and contains works of the period, missing were works by artists essential to the history of Neapolitan art, like Mengs and Del Po. In short, they are important additions to the collection.” Schmidt went on to note the innumerable benefits of the Art Bonus program, which ensures that the Italian government and businesses work in tandem to enrich the collections of Italian museums. Click here to learn more about Capodimonte’s new acquisitions!
AFC Fellow Gabriella Johnson at the University of Cambridge
In October, AFC Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Gabriella Johnson traveled to the United Kingdom to hold two seminars at the University of Cambridge. Professor Melissa Calaresu, cultural historian of eighteenth-century Naples (and the history of gelato!), invited Gabriella to present original research at Gonville and Caius College’s Seminar Series in Early Modern World History. Gabriella’s seminar explored how southern Italian painters drew inspiration from their artistic practice to solve mysteries about the origin and nature of marine fossils. In Gabriella’s second seminar, she joined the Cambridge faculty’s Mediterranean Studies Workshop, for which she shared an article in progress on how Mediterranean coral, fished from Sicilian seas and sculpted into complex works of art, became a symbol of the Spanish empire.
Gabriella returned to Naples filled with fresh ideas for her independent collections research at Capodimonte. She also gained an international perspective on curation, which she has applied to her work on the re-installation of the museum's first floor.
Simone Martini in the Spotlight
Capodimonte, alongside a conservation team from the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, has begun to restore a fourteenth-century masterpiece from the collection: Simone Martini’s San Ludovico da Tolosa che incorona Roberto d’Angiò (St Louis of Toulouse Crowning Robert of Anjou), one of the artist’s greatest panel paintings. The project, which marks the work’s first restoration in more than sixty-five years, is underway in Gallery 66 on the second floor of the museum. Over six months, visitors will see the team restoring the structural integrity of the painting’s wooden support and predella – a difficult project, as the back of Martini’s work is decorated with blue fleurs-de-lis representing the Neapolitan branch of the French Capetian dynasty.
Martini’s altarpiece depicts Saint Louis, an Angevin prince who renounced the throne to embrace a religious life in the Franciscan Order. Crowned by heavenly angels, Saint Louis passes his earthly crown of the Kingdom of Naples to his brother Robert kneeling in veneration. Robes trimmed with gold leaf envelop Louis’s simple Franciscan vestments, visually suggesting that the dynasty – and Robert as successor – rules by divine right.
Periods in Dialogue at Capodimonte
New exhibitions at Capodimonte co-curated by Director Eike Schmidt put contemporary art in dialogue with some of the Museum’s most sensational masterpieces.
Nicola Samorì: Classical Collapse, an exhibition hosted by Capodimonte and the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, serves as a bridge between northern and southern Italy and examines how contemporary artists reinvent traditions inherited from a storied past. Samorì’s process of visual revision uses Old Master paintings as sites of productive tension to understand the role of tradition and human experience in the contemporary world. Highlights from the Bourbon Collection at Capodimonte, like Jusepe de Ribera and Luca Giordano’s paintings of Apollo and Marsyas introduce visitors to these complex themes that span from the seventeenth century to present day. Click to read more about the exhibition.
In a similar vein, Bertozzi & Casoni: Metamorfosi playfully conflates past and present in an exhibition of polychrome ceramics installed throughout the Bourbon royal apartments. Hyper-realistic ceramic forms initiate unexpected and surprising material conversations with the decorative arts, furniture, carriages, sculpture, paintings, and ancient mosaic floor of Roman emperor Tiberius’s villa in Capri that fill Capodimonte’s former living spaces. Click to read more about the exhibition.
Another installation was mounted in honor of celebrated Neapolitan photographer Mimmo Jodice, who sadly passed in November. A selection of photographs from Jodice’s Transiti (Transit) series reinforce the common humanity of the Renaissance and Baroque paintings at Capodimonte. Jodice’s photographs from the streets of Naples collapse time, suggesting that the expressions, features, and wrinkles of the figures that appear in Old Master paintings are our own. Jodice, a great supporter of Capodimonte, also founded a center for photography in the Bosco. Click to learn more about Jodice’s legacy.
AFC Member Tours of Capodimonte
Since her arrival on September 1, Gabriella has been welcoming AFC Members to Capodimonte for tours of the Museum and Royal Park. Write to her at fellow@americanfriendsofcapodimonte.info to organize a visit.