Artemisia Gentileschi a Napoli

Palazzo Madama has lent "Santa Caterina d'Alessandria" by Giovanni Ricca for the exhibition "Artemisia Gentileschi a Napoli", at the Gallerie d'Italia from 1 December 2022 to 20 March 2023.

The exhibition, produced in special collaborationwith the National Gallery in London and in cooperation with the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, the State Archives of Naples, and the University of Naples L’Orientale will feature carefully selected works from public and private, Italian and international collections that will provide new insights for research on the subject.

Covering the chronological period in which Artemisia was in Naples, the exhibition's narrative will proceed according to a thematic and iconographic scheme in order to explore the enormous success she enjoyed in the capital of the Viceroyalty and to give a reliable representation of the artistic grandeur of this complex historical time. In Naples, Artemisia established a flourishing workshop that collaborated, or simply interacted, with the best local artists, from Massimo Stanzione to Onofrio Palumbo to Bernardo Cavallino.

Iconographies and themes that the painter had already tested out, mainly relating to female heroines (Judith, Cleopatra, etc.), were taken up again and put on the market with countless variations and entrepreneurial methods. The exhibition aims to shed light on these themes with the help of the results of an extensive archival research campaign that was carried out for this occasion.