Naples’ Capodimonte Museum has 126 galleries with a few masterworks- by Masaccio, Bellini, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes- and 10 rooms on the way out dedicated temporarily to the exhibition “Deposito”- salon-hung paintings and vitrine-piled objects from its storerooms- a peek, a “cone of shadow” as the brochure puts it, at some of the 6,000 leftover pieces that are never on view, what everyone usually ignores.
Caravaggio’s Flagellation is the museum’s biggest draw and it hangs at the end of a long hall of connected dimly lit galleries with a spotlight on it so that when you turn the corner you see it from several rooms away telescoped into view. If a person wearing red walks in front of it, Jesus’ white flesh appears from a distance to bleed.
The Deposito exhibit’s brochure- calling the storerooms “closed universes, dusty undergrounds, impenetrable guardians…the cave of Ali Baba, the tomb of Tutankhamun”, in other words, the fine art equivalent of the city’s many many catacombs- goes on to challenge the visitor to make sense of these 1,200 pieces that have made it upstairs from the basement vaults.
The last panel reads “Some of you, already along the exhibition route, will have tried to weave a story, to draw a conclusion; others will have hypothesized new attributions for the works; still others, discouraged, indifferent or lazy, will have decided to abandon the thread of the story in disorder and without plot. Will it not be that history does not exist if not written, organized by historians, philosophers, professors, or museums?”
After walking my dogs off in the museum’s 15,000 square meters, more than the Uffizi which has many more masterpieces than here, I did not need the Capodimonte’s self-important curators to call me lazy if I chose to abandon the thread of their story. I could always refer later, when home, to the the Museum’s joint collection digitization project with Federico II University of Napoli, a school that had been on my mind whenever I drank acqua minerale naturale frizzante in that country.
Every bottle’s label must contain an independent laboratory’s chemical analysis of its contents and Federico II University seems to have that business cornered. Carbs, Protein, Fat, Sodium, Calories…that was the thread of the story I most wanted to follow. I would have loved to knock on the Chemistry Department’s door and ask for a tour of the many bottles- San Benedetto, Sveva, Potenza, Ferrarelle, Benedicta Prestige, etc- that had been sampled, shaken, titrated and tested there.
I had taken to using Tomas Nunez’s way of asking for the bathroom- i servizi idraulici, per favore- when in Italy. That would have been embarrassing, visiting Federico II and waiting to explode like a bottle of frizzante, asking for the toilet and being shown to the laboratorio. A deposito for leftovers, to be sure.
Andy Warhol’s Vesuvius, in the Capodimonte Museum, the same view as from its Belvedere
