Scholarly Journal Articles on Ancient Art and Contemporary Life
There will be no pizza. Forget about the grand flavors of gelato. Let'due south for the moment skip over fifty-fifty the most banal of Naples generalities—the Grand Guignol crime, the welter of saints and leprous corruption and a decline apparently already nether fashion in the fifth century B.C., when the place was settled (actually, resettled) by the Greeks and named Neapolis.
While we're at it, let's also give a pass to the literary sphinx Elena Ferrante.
Better than any other person since Goethe, it is Ms. Ferrante (if she is a she) who—with her vivid though lather-operatic fictional tetralogy—piqued international interest in her somewhat benighted hometown. Ms. Ferrante wishes to remain the Garbo of Italian messages, and I say permit her. In that location is more to this messy and layered, resplendent and gorgeously decadent metropolis than My Vivid Friend. There is, to cite but one surprising paradox, an astonishing quantity of gimmicky art in this city of well-nigh iii,000 years.
But, wait. "What exactly is 'contemporary'?" my friend, the museum manager Andrea Viliani, challenged me one November twenty-four hour period in Naples. The two of us were touring the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, or MADRE, an unlikely arts center embedded in the warren of the ancient city. MADRE occupies an one-time palazzo in the San Lorenzo neighborhood, from whose streets it was separated this cool forenoon past a yellow entry drape made from the kind of vinyl flaps you run across at a car wash.
Behind them, the French artist Daniel Buren had installed a site-specific trompe l'oeil artwork—a jaunty and radical architectural intervention that managed subtly to tweak the rigid lines of the palace past using stone paving to shift its visual axis, introducing disorienting perspectives and so amplified and refracted by mirrors applied to the arches, the ceilings, and the walls. A behemothic's toy set of cylinders and blocks in brilliant saturated colors installed in the secondary galleries fabricated a visitor as mazed as Gulliver in Brobdingnag.
Before my arrival in Naples, I'd received an electronic mail from another friend, the Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli, calling the Buren "amazing." Given the distaste I experience for Mr. Buren'due south work, I was dubious. Yet Francesco was right. With its kiddie colors popping against the somber stone of the palazzo, its mirrors teasingly eliciting an inevitable selfie, the Buren piece functioned as a giddy, conceptual Mail-it reminder of the varied means by which contemporary fine art has insinuated itself into the texture of this former city, and how a deep and settled past is always here in conversation with the lively present.
This dialogue takes the class of, say, the more than 200 commissioned artworks past 100 or so international artists and designers installed in the underground Metro stations as office of the urban center's Fine art Stations program. It is evident at fine contemporary fine art spaces like Giangi Fonti's Galleria Fonti, tucked into a neighborhood-y stretch of the bustling Via Chiaia, just a short stroll from the city's main drag of Via Toledo—where, from the terrace of the storied Gran Caffè Gambrinus coffeehouse, a company has a ringside seat on the Neapolitan life which so overwhelmed Goethe that it made his eyes, as he wrote, "pop out of my head."
Contemporary fine art can exist found at any of the galleries that have emerged there since the visionary dealer Lucio Amelio appeared in the 1960s, seemingly out of nowhere, to institute the Mod Art Agency, a pioneering gallery that served every bit a beachhead in Naples for works first by artists of Italian republic's Arte Povera movement and later by key proponents of the Pop and German language neo-Expressionist schools.
With his impeccable middle and preternatural free energy, the sick-fated Amelio (he died of AIDS-related complications in 1994) lured Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, and others to testify at his renamed Galleria Lucio Amelio. The gallerist acted equally both proselytizer and pied piper for movements that wouldn't be embraced by Italy's richer industrial cities for decades. In Amelio's wake came establishments similar Galleria Lia Rumma, Dino Morra Arte Contemporanea, and Galleria Fonti, with its roster of stars from the international fine art fair excursion.
Just gimmicky art can too be institute in surprising places. For a time, a suite of moody watercolor works by the Naples-built-in creative person Francesco Clemente were slyly interspersed amidst the Farnese Marbles and relics of Pompeii at Naples's Museo Archeologico Nazionale. At the hilltop Museo di Capodimonte i afternoon on my visit, I happened upon brandish cases crammed with rare objects clustered by the eighteenth-century Bourbon rulers of Naples and, stealthily inserted amid them, Fallen Adult female, a woman-headed porcelain baton by the French-built-in American sculptor Louise Bourgeois.
On some other day during an early-winter week in Naples, I climbed the zigzag streets of a sleepy residential hillside to find the place where, in 2008, the Neapolitan philanthropist and collector Giuseppe Morra converted a disused power station into the Museo Hermann Nitsch. Morra filled the museum exclusively with works by the Austrian artist, a cocky-mythologizing cult provocateur and overall nutjob who was among the founders of the transgressive, anti-commodity Viennese Actionism movement of the '60s, generally credited as a precursor of performance art.
The vistas extending in all directions from a terrace exterior this obscure spot were scant preparation for what lay inside: canvases spattered with animal blood; videos of Nitsch'southward adherents blanketed in entrails; films of the heathen rituals that the 78-yr-old artist continues to stage. As information technology happened, though, the shock wore off apace. The eye adapted in no fourth dimension to Nitsch's gore-fest evocations of Christian ritual and martyrdom.
By and then I'd been in Naples for the better part of a calendar week and had adapted, somewhat, to the local ambition for the macabre. I'd seen, for example, the Museo Cappella Sansevero, a privately run museum containing Giuseppe Sanmartino'south Veiled Christ, an eighteenth-century marble often cited as the epitome of the sculptor's fine art. As can happen with official masterpieces, the Veiled Christ left me unmoved, a sight to be checked off on an imaginary list. Down in a crypt below the chapel, notwithstanding, I stumbled upon two grotesque just astonishing sculptures that left me dumbfounded and in a state of mild daze. The Anatomical Machines of Dr. Giuseppe Salerno are a pair of fleshless depictions of a man and a adult female constructed of iron, silk, and beeswax over the armature of human being skeletons. The morbid couple—commissioned in 1763 by a Neapolitan prince—instantly summon up comparisons with Damien Hirst's dead shark eternally adrift in a tank of formaldehyde. Of course, these were scientific studies, not ghoulish memento mori created to amuse the collecting faction of the One Percent.
"Art is always gimmicky in Naples," Andrea Viliani remarked offhandedly to me equally we made our mode through MADRE on that uncommonly warm November morn. He meant that antiquity and modernity are always in dialogue in a city whose nougat layers are embedded with remnants of civilizations that included Greeks, Romans, Normans, Castilian, French, and also Italians, of whose republic Naples tin can sometimes seem simply notionally a part.
The observation stuck with me every bit I left MADRE and lit out through the slot-canyon streets of the aboriginal Spaccanapoli, promptly stumbling upon a wall stenciled by the elusive graffiti wizard Banksy. The enigmatic artist had plainly been through Naples, furtively covering its onetime stones with his culturally pointed imagery. In that location that twenty-four hours was an ascending Madonna, heaven-bound and hands upraised in bafflement or benediction.
I had a date that afternoon to meet the photographer Roberto Salomone at an open up-air market in Forcella, a neighborhood where, I'one thousand told, the local organized crime gangs still quietly concord sway. Roberto had recently returned from Lampedusa, the Italian island where he's documented the immigrant waves that have go the Mediterranean's grim new bounty. After wandering awhile, we exited into the centuries-old grid of streets chosen the Decumani and almost immediately encountered a wall-size mural depicting the urban center's patron saint, San Gennaro.
The portrait, Roberto explained to me, had been commissioned past a local gimmicky arts group. Instead of the usual bland depiction of the saint, this one was intensely soulful. Dressed in a silken chasuble and the customary gilt bishop's miter, this figure had the face of a tough and tender street child.
"Every aspect of Naples has two faces," Roberto said, every bit a motor scooter rounding a corner nearly clipped me. Its passenger was helmetless because, according to Roberto, in Forcella simply assassins cover their faces and heads. "Touch on woods," Roberto said of my near miss. "Or touch something else," he added, motioning toward my groin.
Later that week, I found myself seated at a horseshoe-shaped metal counter in a restaurant whose name in English language translates roughly as "Superstition Pizza." The brick-oven joint was the newest effort of 41-year-former Gino Sorbillo, scion of a justly historic local pizza dynasty. Every so often a male person customer could be seen reflexively borer his crotch to ward off bad luck. I thought of an observation a friend, the designer Allegra Hicks, had made nearly her adopted metropolis. "I never heard of and so many superstitions until I came to Naples," said Allegra. "You have to have a silver or a gold horn because it brings you lot luck. Fifty-fifty the priest has a corno," said the Turin native, now married to a Neapolitan nobleman.
A rapport with the irrational seems perfectly natural in a city located in an earthquake zone and nestled near an active volcano. The prospect of imminent eruption of the sort that cached Pompeii is and so ordinary a part of daily life here that, strolling past the window of the pastry store Scaturchio one afternoon, I happen upon an enormous rum block in the shape of Mount Vesuvius.
Death in life turns upwardly in places like the cemetery of Fontanelle, an ossuary in the Materdei commune that anybody I spoke to in Naples said was a must-see. You detect it in a piece by the American creative person Roni Horn at MADRE, a group of mirrors and wall-mounted bandage-iron skulls that trap the unwary with reflections of themselves alongside the image of their inevitable fate.
That MADRE came into existence only a little over a decade ago seems almost improbable, so vital is the place and already then much similar a permanent civic fixture. Wending my way through it one morning time, I passed Francesco Clemente's Ave Ovo—a multi-story tile and fresco installation—and later Michelangelo Pistoletto'southward wondrous Arte Povera masterpiece Venus of the Rags, on my style to encounter Inflatable Felix. This giant balloon sculpture is by the Turner Prize–winning British artist Mark Leckey, who often incorporates the cartoon cat into his piece of work. "I'thousand hoping people will exit offerings to him," Leckey once said of his Felix, a effigy he considers a sort of tutelary deity.
Slumped and slightly deflated that morning time, Felix looked in need of something potent. And afterwards gazing at art for hours, so did I. Luckily, caffeine fortification is seldom difficult to come up past in Naples, and I chose a caffè shekerato, a frothy shaken blend of espresso, water ice, and simple syrup that makes Red Bull seem similar Enfamil.
Buzzed and prepare, I plunged again into the streets, aware that among the great and abiding gifts which Naples provides a visitor is the opportunity to idle and guiltlessly play the flaneur. Tumultuous, casuistic, muddied, and occasionally a identify of peril (thieves relieved a cruise send passenger of his Rolex during my visit), Naples is above all a vast phase ready, i whose actors seem so entirely consumed by the drama of their own beingness that a stranger registers as petty more than an extra.
This is no small boon to a traveler, and it gave me pleasure to wander nigh in what I retrieve of besides-companioned solitude, unbothered by the hordes that threaten to turn Rome and Venice into Old Earth Disneyland. Throughout the days I spent in Naples, I saw no Seventh Seal gaggles blindly following a flag-waving guide. For that thing, I never saw a selfie stick.
Stopping for a late lunch on the streetside terrace of the raw bar Cru do Rè one afternoon, I ordered what looked like a modest assortment of fish appetizers from a set carte du jour. What appeared was a sequence of imaginative culinary riffs on the possibilities of uncooked fish—elegant preparations to exist expected, perhaps, every bit office of an omakase repast prepared past a sushi master in Tokyo, but altogether a revelation in this place: salmon tartare served on slices of apple tree; scallops with grapefruit; codfish carpaccio; sweet shrimp with capers and caviar, all of it to be done down with straw-colored white from Ischia, the poor-cousin isle whose one advantage over Capri is its wines.
At that hour, the restaurant was empty merely for me and a family that looked to accept been installed there by Mob Central Casting. The couple and their two young sons were dressed in full Dolce & Gabbana regalia. They spoke not i give-and-take to each other as they consumed what appeared to be their terminal meal. It was a hypnotic spectacle, the sight of fifty-fifty the children gorging on courses of oysters followed by clams, after which calamari and four private two-pound lobsters were served.
Every bit I ate and ogled, I idea of something the gallery owner Giangi Fonti remarked to me one day over java at Gran Caffè Gambrinus. "Paradox is cardinal to u.s.a.," he said. "Naples is a city of questions, not answers, and if you are not at home with contradiction, it is not the city for y'all."
Mystified but fortified, I called for the nib and and then set off on foot to run into Giangi at the gallery in Chiaia where he'd mounted a show titled "Veni, Vidi, Napoli." The exhibit featured sculptures of puddles created in cast resin past the Romanian artist Daniel Knorr, along with a serial of acrylic cylinders filled with what seemed to exist colored vapor but was in reality poison gas.
It was a little while later that the droll logic behind Mr. Fonti's recasting of veni, vidi, vici, a scrap of schoolroom Latin invariably attributed to Julius Caesar, hitting me. Information technology is entirely possible that Caesar did announce to the Roman Senate, after swiftly dispatching Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela, that he had come and seen and conquered. The historical attribution is dubious. What is beyond question, nonetheless, is that a visitor to Naples may come and run into but will never truly conquer. That victory the city alone can claim.
Guy'due south Naples Picks
STAY
G Hotel Vesuvio
: A v-star that opened in 1882 with rooms overlooking the Castel Dell'Ovo and the Bay of Naples. I love the slightly faded quality of the identify, the very proficient staff and service and too that it's an piece of cake 15-infinitesimal walk to the Teatro di San Carlo and the Piazza dell Plebescito.
Hotel Excelsior (Luxury Collection), Naples
: One of the original waterfront one thousand dames, with rooms that overlook the gulf and islands.
EAT
Stanza del Gusto: Chef Mario Avallone is ane of the great gods of the Slow Food movement.
Crudorè: A flake expensive, simply very good.
Pizzeria Gino Sorbilo: It has what I approximate to be the best pizza in Naples and certainly the best friend pizza, the local specialty that keeps Neapolitan cardiologists in business.
READ
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Elena Ferrante'due south Neapolitan Novels, of course.
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Shirley Hazzard'due south brilliant Transit of Venus and The Aboriginal Shore
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Norman Lewis' Naples 44
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Susan Sontag's underrated The Volcano Lover
Source: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/seeking-contemporary-art-in-ancient-naples