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Capodimonte Royal Site was the first Royal Palace desired by Charles of Bourbon (1716-1788); the young king was crowned on the throne of the Kingdom of Naples in 1734. As soon as he arrived in Naples, he searched for a hunting site – his favourite passion – in the large town that was urbanized during the 18th century; he chose Capo di Monte (Top of the Mountain), afterwards Capodimonte, to create woods for hunting. That was a suburban, rural region on the hill with a panoramic view on the city and the gulf. After buying various country houses to form the large royal estate (1735), the king decided to build his first royal palace (1737). Giovanni Antonio Medrano, the king’s engineer, transformed the forest and built the palace. The architect-engineer, born in Sicily (1703-1760), was a royal engineer in Spain at the court of Philip V and Elisabeth Farnese1, Charles’s parents. Medrano had a great opportunity in Naples, where he designed the San Carlo Royal Theatre and worked at all the royal construction sites. In the construction of Capodimonte Royal Palace, Medrano was supported by Giacomo Antonio Canevari (1681-1764). The old Roman architect had a curriculum as a court architect, he had worked between Spain and Portugal and then returned to Italy2. In 1738 the palace construction began but was ended almost one hundred years later; the finished palace respects the original project yet with simplifications and
variations, that were imposed by the royal architects who came in succession during the long construction. As soon as the project was approved, Canevari was expelled from the construction site due to the jealousy of Medrano, who continued to be the only director of the palace building until 1741, when he was also sent away of Capodimonte because of legal problems.
The Medrano-Canevari project featured a large rectangular building with two symmetrical courtyards at the sides and a large central hall, as big as the courtyards, to host a grand royal stairway, perhaps impossible to build. The façade drawing, signed only by Medrano (1737), was only recently found; it proposed two levels for the long building with only one attic in the centre. The design was more articulated and more Baroque than the façades by young talents such as the partners
of the Metro and Rizoma offices. A good number of these new museums is located in the two large Brazilian megalopolises, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, although relevant works also exist in more distant metropolises, such as Porto Alegre and Salvador, and even in small cities, like Ilópolis in the state of Rio Grande do Sul and Caçapava in the state of São Paulo, or former farms, as in the case of Inhotim Institute. We must also note that, alongside new iconic buildings such as the MAC in Niterói and the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, we find interventions based on the reuse of historical buildings with differing degrees of transformation and respect for the heritage.
One recurring characteristic in most of the projects is the decisive influence exerted by the main masters of modern Brazilian architecture over the new generations, especially that of Lina Bo Bardi, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, and, in a more diffuse fashion, by Oscar Niemeyer.
After several years of accelerated economic growth, reflected in an intense and extensive creation of museums across the country, the economic crisis that began towards
the middle of 2014 not only braked the process of building new museums, but also resulted in the halting of construction projects that were already well underway, and in the partial or total closing of some important installations that were already in operation.
The effects of the economic crisis on Brazilian museums can be perceived across the country, from north to south. In Rio de Janeiro, Casa Daros definitively closed its doors in 2005, after only two years in operation. The FIC, which integrated Porto Alegre into the global artistic circuit and received 70,000 visitors in 2015, registered only 53,000 people in 2016, largely as a consequence of the drastic reduction in hours of operation, which were limited to Friday and Saturday afternoons as of August of that year. In Salvador, MAM-BA had its visiting hours reduced, and the rehabilitation work, which had been started in 2013, has been stopped since October 2016 for lack of funds.
In the same fashion, the economic crisis caused the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) to rescind the contract for the construction of the Museum Square in 2014, completely paralyzing the construction work. The construction of the Quay of Arts in Vitória was
stopped twice, and its completion is already five years behind schedule. In Rio de Janeiro, although construction of the new MIS is already more than 70% finished, the construction site has been halted since September 2016. Its inauguration, originally planned for December 2016 in order to take advantage of the influx of tourists for the 2016 Olympic Games, is already more than two years behind schedule. At a time of serious economic crisis, low-cost and high-impact initiatives must be prioritized over the construction of new, pharaonic museums. An example is the restoration of the glass easels designed by Lina Bo Bardi for
Masp in 1968 and withdrawn in 1996; the effort to recover them, initiated in 2015 by the young architects of the Metro office who are Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s constant collaborators, represented the restoration of the original museographic concept of the most important museum in São Paulo, after almost twenty years of de-characterization.
Nivaldo Vieira de Andrade
1 Quoted in O. de Oliveira, Lina Bo
Bardi: Sutis substâncias da arquitetura,
Romano Guerra, São Paulo 2006, p. 276. 2 O. de Oliveira, op. cit., p. 281-282. 3 Quoted in D. Pisani, Paulo Mendes da
Rocha: obra complete, Gustavo Gili, São
Paulo 2013, p. 274.
4 Casa Daros, in the neighborhood of Botafogo in Rio de Janeiro, corresponds to the conversion of a former educational establishment, from 1866, into a center for contemporary Latin American art. Although Mendes da Rocha originally headed the Project between 2006 and 2008, the final version was developed by architect Ernani Freire, of Rio de Janeiro. Casa Daros was inaugurated in 2013. The controversial design for the construction of a 14-storey tower on the central courtyard of the National Museum of Fine Arts, an eclectic building inaugurated in 1908 in the center of Rio de Janeiro, was not built.
5 The first buildings intended for exhibitions designed by Oscar Niemeyer were the Arts Pavilion in Ibirapuera park, in São Paulo, better known as “Oca” (1951-1954), and the Modern Art Museum of Caracas, Venezuela (designed in 1954 and never built). Several museum designs were made by Niemeyer from the 1960s to the 1980s, but only in the 1990s did he design his most important museums.
6 K. Frampton, O museu como labirinto, in F. Kiefer (ed.), Fundação Iberê Camargo.
Álvaro Siza, Cosac Naify, São Paulo
2008, p. 93.
7 J. Figueira, Um mundo coral, in F. Kiefer (ed.), Fundação Iberê Camargo. Álvaro
Siza,Cosac Naify, São Paulo 2008,
p.136.
8 J. P. Cuenca, A barata branca do
Calatrava e o passado, «Folha de São
Paulo», Jan. 1, 2016. www1.folha.uol. com.br
9 P. A. Rheingantz, Museu do Amanhã.
Ou o esqueleto-cyborg de um crocodilo gigante com duas bocas? «Minha
Cidade», 16, 185.05, Dec. 2015. www. vitruvius.com.br
10 P.A. Rheingantz, op. cit. 11 J. P. Cuenca, op. cit.
12 MIS-RJ was founded in 1965 and is presently operating in a historical building located in the center of Rio de Janeiro. 13 P. M. da Rocha, Diálogo de formas y
tiempos, «Summa+», 128, Apr. 2013, p.
21.
14 Fernando Serapião reports that Norman Foster, visiting Bernardo Paz at Inhotim, offered to create a design for Inhotim. Jochen Volz, then artistic director of Instituto Inhotim, is said to have responded: «we don’t need stars making designs. [...] We want to work with people who are close to us. The designs made by Arquitetos Associados and Rizoma will make a difference to their careers and are helping us to blaze a path» (F. Serapião, A nuvem, «Monolito», 4, Aug.-Sept. 2011, p. 26).
15 G. Wisnik, Experiência concentrada, «Monolito», 4, Aug.-Sept. 2011, p. 66. R efe re n ce s
13 Inhotim Institute, Brumadinho: Adriana Varejão Gallery 14 Inhotim Institute, Brumadinho:
Miguel Rio Branco Gallery 15 Museum Square at Universidade de São Paulo: Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (MAE) under construction 16 Masp - São Paulo Museum of Art:
Glass easels
Capodimonte, 1737-2017
From king’s house to “museum in the museum”
13 15
1 4
2
3
14 16
1 G. A. Medrano, Façade of Capodimonte Royal Palace, 1738. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (http://catalogue.bnf.fr/) 2 F. Sanfelice (attributed), Design of Porcelain Pavilion garden, 1743-1745, Archivio di Stato di Napoli 3 G. A. Medrano, with G. A. Canevari, Plan of the noble floor of Capodimonte Royal Palace, 1738. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte 4 Design for a museum of ancient pictures in Capodimonte Royal Park, around 1740, Archivio di Stato di Napoli
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that were finally built3. In 1742 Ferdinado Sanfelice (1675-1748)4, a senior and famous Neapolitan architect, was appointed director of Capodimonte. During this period, the building of the palace went on slowly, instead the project of the park continued with new impulses. Indeed, Sanfelice was the inventor of the central core of the park, organized around large fan-shaped avenues; he created an original contamination between art and nature. Sanfelice designed the Royal Porcelain Manifactory (transforming a pre-existing building), commissioned by Charles and Queen Maria Amalia, inspired by the famous factories of Meissen and Sèvres.
Some drawings of the garden date back to the 18th century; these, probably never made, hold a great value within the study of royal gardens. Sanfelice designed a garden with groves near the Royal Manifatture and a project of a garden with exhibition pavilions still existing by an anonymous author. After the death of Sanfelice, followed Giuseppe Astarita (1707-1775) and Ferdinando Fuga (1699-1782); the former was a Neapolitan architect little-known outside the kingdom, while Ferdinando Fuga was a famous Tuscan architect, who had worked in Rome and who directed the construction of the site from 1760 until 1780. Fuga worked mainly for the park, started by Sanfelice; he was responsible for the construction of the elliptical plaza with the Teatro di
Verzura (Green Theatre), recesses and
statues at the beginning of the large avenues.
A beautiful drawing by an anonymous author, kept at Capodimonte Museum, illustrates the Royal Site at the end of the 18th century. The Palace was separated from the park by other private estates and by the public road. The plan shows the origin of the
Royal Site, born as a hunting reserve and then transformed into a park that included the Royal Palace. During the reign of Charles and his son Ferdinand IV (1759-1805), the palace wasn’t completed and almost no one of the Bourbon Family had lived there. When Napoleon’s kings conquered the kingdom (1805-1815), Joseph Bonaparte and Joachim Murat instead decided to live in Capodimonte. The palace was not finished: only three
levels of the first southern court were built and the central was incomplete. The great royal staircase had never been started, but the place was nice, with a large park and far from the Neapolitan people, who never really accepted the French kings. The French impulse, however, was fundamental: the French kings acquired neighbouring properties and built a single joint border wall for the palace and the park. Moreover, works for a new road
network began: the new roads made Capodimonte more accessible and therefore more integrated with the city. After the French defeat, Ferdinand returned to the Neapolitan throne and the works at the palace went on little by little. Antonio Niccolini (1772-1850) was appointed new director; the Tuscan artist had arrived in Naples as a scenographer of the San Carlo and became a Royal Architect thanks to his abilities5. His first designs for
Capodimonte were focused on the renovation of King Francis I’s royal apartment.
At the death of Francis, Ferdinand II became King. During his long reign the Royal Site – both the palace and the park – was finished and developed as we see it today. The palace was completed after several difficulties during the direction of Tommaso Giordano, an architect unknown out of Naples6. Niccolini’s designs like the Nineteenth-century projects were put aside. The royal stairway – designed by Giordano – a sumptuous but banal neoclassical stair, was built in the northern side of building. The staircase of the southern part, instead, is quite remarkable and links all the floors; it is formed by two parallel wings that have a hexagonal design. The structure is very interesting, it combines material, structural, and cultural knowledge of Neapolitan architecture of the 18th century, which typically includes open stairs, while the decorations
are neoclassical. During the Bourbon Restoration, the park was turned into a romantic garden; Niccolini began this transformation but it was completed by Friedrich Dehnhardt (1787-1870), Gardening Director of the Royal Botanical Garden7. Capodimonte Royal Site was completed in approximately one hundred years but the Royal Palace was immediately relegated to the back burner by other more famous Bourbon palaces in Portici – near Ercolano and Pompei – and Caserta.
The great era of the Museum of Capodimonte began in 1948, when the Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione (Ministry of Education) decided to convert the palace into a National Gallery8. The palace had originally had a museum’s “vocation” and had indeed hosted the Farnese collection, which was Elisabetta Farnese’s precious legacy. The palace had continued to be enriched by French works, during Joseph and Joachim reign9, and by Neapolitan modern pictures, during
the Bourbon Restoration. After the Italian Unification the Bourbon Palace passed to the Savoy’s House and Capodimonte hosted the gallery of contemporary Neapolitan artists. New purchases, donations and celebrating paintings increased the collection. Saverio Altamura directed the cultural project; since 1864 Annibale Sacco was responsible for the organization and acquisitions, supported by Domenico Morelli and Federico Maldarelli. Twenty years later the collection increased further, counting 605 paintings and 95 sculptures10. The royal private apartments were located in the southern side: the public and party hall were on the noble floor while the private apartments on the mezzanine floor. The rooms around the northern court hosted the gallery together with the
Armeria and the Queen Maria Amalia’s
Porcelain Cabinet. The Capodimonte Porcelain Manufactory had produced the Cabinet for the Portici Royal Palace, which was transported to Capodimonte in 1866. In this way the royal residence and the private museum-gallery had been organized; in fact the plan was meant to host the public access at least once a week11. Since 1906, the residence belonged to Aosta Dukes, an Italian minor branch Royal Family, then it became National Estate property (1920); but the State obtained the Royal Site only in 1948. A year later the Ministry also approved Ezio Bruno De Felice’s museum design12; the design followed the directives of Artistic Galleries Superintendent, Bruno Molajoli13. The architect restored the royal floor, respecting the original rooms, while he reconstructed the attic floor, which did not display architectural qualities as it originally hosted servants’ quarters. In addition, as the roofs were almost destroyed, De Felice built a new one with pre-compressed reinforced concrete. The new roofs allowed a correct and modern natural lighting for the gallery. Light didn’t reflect directly on the masterpieces14. Even the vertical connections changed: three wings were added to the royal stairway to connect the attic floor. The mezzanine floor housed the offices of the Artistic and Historical Superintendence in the southern side. The work lasted for 5 years (1952-1957); the Galleria
Museo di Capodimonte opened with an
important inauguration on the 5th of May. The modern museum occupied approximately one hundred rooms, it had a library, archives, restoration and photographic workshops. The project of the palace was linked to the restoration of the park: De Felice restored the avenues, the fountains, the ancient statues and the pavilions and also took
6 9 10 11 8 7 5
5 The elliptical plaza and the fan-shaped avenues 6 The eastern main façade
7 Plan of the Capodimonte Royal Woods, around 1790, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte
8 The party hall after De Felice’s restoration (B.E. De Felice 1966, p. 34) 9 The royal stairway of the northern side 10 The hexagonal staircase of the southern side 11 De Felice’s design of the new roof
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48 [essays] 49
care of reorganizing the gardens15. A happy season began, especially in the 1980s during which many exhibits were organized at the museum, attracting many visitors and giving the Museum of Capodimonte an international fame. In 1994, the new Designs and Prints Section, designed by De Felice, opened in the mezzanine floor16, meanwhile renovations of the showrooms and building installations continued and the noble floor was closed.
In 1994 Nicola Spinosa, Superintendent at the time, started a new renovation. The architect Ermanno Guida was the designer and the coordinator of this renovation, he was the responsible of the new signage project17. Valerio Mangoni di Santo Stefano designed the building installations and Liliana Marra was Superintendent Office responsible. The work was divided into different phases due to administrative and economic reasons to avoid the complete closing of the Museum. The Auditorium, organized in the Palace Chapel, was again transformed by Guida; the foyer was restored as well as all the first floor. Between 1996 and 1999, the second and third floor were refurbished (Maurizio Bufalotto project)18. The new organization highlighted the dual function that the palace had always had, as a residence and a gallery. The palace’s structure was always evolving with flexible rooms where the two functions were together. The first floor opened matching with the inauguration of the Farnese exhibition (September 28 - December 17, 1996): the European tour of this exhibit
ended in Capodimonte. In Naples, however, the display was enriched with the Neapolitan masterpieces that hadn’t been provided for the tour due to security reasons, becoming the core of the first floor collection. The temporal dimension became another component of the arrangement of the collection, highlighting the different origins of the artworks. Neapolitan art (13th – 18th century) was on the second floor. A small part of the second and third floor hosted the contemporary gallery; the collection was born from donations of the artists to whom the exhibitions were dedicated (the first on Alberto Burri, 1978) and with the help of Neapolitan gallerists19. This long project, divided into different phases, ended recently (2012) with the opening of the Nineteenth Century Gallery in the royal private apartments on the mezzanine floor, previously occupied by the Superintendence. This section shows paintings, sculptures and furniture from the late 18th and 19th centuries, to recreate the atmosphere of a royal and patrician palace. The transformation of the mezzanine floor began when Nicola Spinosa was Superintendent and ended during Fabrizio Vona’s direction. Linda Martino and Mariaserena Mormone were responsible for the setting and Liliana Marra of the architecture20. Today the palace of Capodimonte is itself a “museum of the museum”.
Francesca Capano
1 R. Parisi, Medrano, Giovanni Antonio, in Dizionario Biografico Treccani, LXXII, 2009 (http:/ /www. treccani.it/enciclopedia/giovanni-antoniomedrano).
2 A. Venditti, M. Azzi Visentini, Canevari, Antonio, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, XVIII, 1975 (http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/antonio-canevari).
3 F. Capano, Il Sito Reale di Capodimonte. Il primo bosco, parco, e palazzo dei Borbone di Napoli, fedOA Press, Naples 2017, p. 41 (http://www.fedoabooks.unina.it/index.php/fedoapress/catalog/ book/50).
4 A. Gambardella, Ferdinando Sanfelice architetto, Arti grafiche Licenziato, Naples 1974.
5 Antonio Niccolini architetto e scenografo alla Corte di Napoli (1807-1850) (exhibition, Florence-Naples), A. Giannetti, R. Muzii (eds.), Electa Napoli, Naples 1997.
6 A. Venditti, Architettura neoclassica a Napoli, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, Naples 1961. 7 A. De Natale, A. Santangelo, Dehnhardt Federico, in Atlante del giardino italiano: 1750-1940:
Dizionario biografico di architetti, giardinieri, botanici, committenti, letterati e altri protagonisti, V.
Cazzato (ed.), Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, Rome 2009, p. 844. 8 B. Molajoli, Il Museo di Capodimonte, Di Mauro, Cava dei Tirreni 1961.
9 A. Fiadino, Architetti e artisti alla corte di Napoli in età napoleonica. Progetti e realizzazioni nei
luoghi del potere: 1806-1815, Electa Napoli, Naples 2008.
10 M. Lucà Dazio, U. Bile (eds.), Capodimonte da reggia a Museo, Elio De Rosa Editore, Naples 1999. 11 M. Mormone, Ottocento a Capodimonte, in Ottocento a Capodimonte, L. Martino, M. Mormone
(eds.), Arte’m, Naples 2012, pp. 17-24.
12 M. Cocchieri, Ezio Bruno De Felice, Alinea, Florence 2006.
13 B. Molajoli, op. cit.
14 E. B. De Felice, Luce-Musei, De Luca, Rome 1966.
15 E. B. De Felice, Ezio Bruno De Felice: attività didattica-culturale-professionale, De Luca, Rome 1966.
16 Capodimonte da reggia, cit.
17 E. Guida, Il museo rinnovato di Capodimonte, in «Orizzonti Economici», 77, 1995, p. 66-78. 18 A. Pane, Napoli, Museo di Capodimonte, in «Parametro», 239, XXXII, 2002, p. 61.
19 M. Utili, Introduzione, in Museo di Capodimonte, M. Utili (ed.), Touring club italiano, Milan 2002, pp.
8-18.
20 L. Martino, L’Ottocento ‘privato’. Gli arredi, in Ottocento a Capodimonte, L. Martino, M. Mormone (eds.), Arte’m, Naples 2012, pp. 25-31. See: Picasso Parade. Napoli 1917, S. Bellenger, L. Gallo (eds.), Electa, Milan 2017.
R efe re n ce s 13 14 12
12 E. Guida, Design of De Ciccio Collection exhibition 13 E. Guida, Design to illuminate a wall (E. Guida 1995, p. 70) 14 ‘Ottocento Privato’ exhibition
All the images are public domain or courtesy of the author
