Description
The Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts is a museum in Naples housed in the Academy's building, near the Archaeological Museum. It tells above all the story of nineteenth-century Naples, with many paintings and sculptures by masters and pupils of the school.
The collections are varied. There are paintings, drawings and sculptures in marble, bronze and terracotta, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, plus a modern art gallery with almost eight hundred works and the plaster cast gallery.
For the nineteenth century, the highlight is the Posillipo school: landscape views by Giacinto Gigante, Teodoro Duclère, Consalvo Carelli and Anton Sminck van Pitloo. Alongside are the historical paintings of Domenico Morelli, Giuseppe Mancinelli and Francesco Saverio Altamura, and the scenes of everyday life by Michele Cammarano, Teofilo Patini, Edoardo Dalbono and Gioacchino Toma.
The room of Vincenzo Gemito gathers terracotta and bronze busts, including those of Giuseppe Verdi and of Morelli himself, and the Pescatoriello. There are also works by Achille D'Orsi and Tito Angelini.
The oldest core has twenty-eight paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among them are a Saint Catherine by Mattia Preti, a sketch for the Wedding at Cana by Luca Giordano and the Interior of a Cathedral by François Didier Nomé.
Portraits are another strong point, with signatures such as Jean-Baptiste Wicar, Gaetano Forte and Joseph-Boniface Franque. A collection of 206 drawings and watercolors, by masters and pupils of the Academy, completes the picture, with a few sheets by Giandomenico Tiepolo.
The Palizzi donation of 1896 brings works by foreign artists, such as Corot, Decamps and Henri Rousseau. The plaster cast gallery holds hundreds of plaster casts, some of them rare.
The gallery passed from the Real Museo Borbonico to the Academy's building in 1864. It got its final arrangement only in 1891, with Filippo Palizzi as president of the Academy, and was inaugurated in 1916.
Then came difficult years. It was closed because of structural problems, reopened in 1929, closed again by the 1930 earthquake and the Second World War, and emptied by a few thefts in the second half of the twentieth century. The definitive reopening was in 2005.
In 2020 the carabinieri of the Cultural Heritage Protection Unit recovered a painting by Giulio Carpioni, a seventeenth-century Venetian painter, stolen in the 1970s.
Don't miss
• The Posillipo school.
• The Gemito room.
• Preti's Saint Catherine.
• The Palizzi donation.
Did you know?
• The old paintings date from the years when the Academy shared the same rooms with the Real Museo Borbonico.
• The gallery owns an embroidery made of glued threads by the eighteenth-century embroiderer Marianna Elmo.
The collections are varied. There are paintings, drawings and sculptures in marble, bronze and terracotta, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, plus a modern art gallery with almost eight hundred works and the plaster cast gallery.
For the nineteenth century, the highlight is the Posillipo school: landscape views by Giacinto Gigante, Teodoro Duclère, Consalvo Carelli and Anton Sminck van Pitloo. Alongside are the historical paintings of Domenico Morelli, Giuseppe Mancinelli and Francesco Saverio Altamura, and the scenes of everyday life by Michele Cammarano, Teofilo Patini, Edoardo Dalbono and Gioacchino Toma.
The room of Vincenzo Gemito gathers terracotta and bronze busts, including those of Giuseppe Verdi and of Morelli himself, and the Pescatoriello. There are also works by Achille D'Orsi and Tito Angelini.
The oldest core has twenty-eight paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among them are a Saint Catherine by Mattia Preti, a sketch for the Wedding at Cana by Luca Giordano and the Interior of a Cathedral by François Didier Nomé.
Portraits are another strong point, with signatures such as Jean-Baptiste Wicar, Gaetano Forte and Joseph-Boniface Franque. A collection of 206 drawings and watercolors, by masters and pupils of the Academy, completes the picture, with a few sheets by Giandomenico Tiepolo.
The Palizzi donation of 1896 brings works by foreign artists, such as Corot, Decamps and Henri Rousseau. The plaster cast gallery holds hundreds of plaster casts, some of them rare.
The gallery passed from the Real Museo Borbonico to the Academy's building in 1864. It got its final arrangement only in 1891, with Filippo Palizzi as president of the Academy, and was inaugurated in 1916.
Then came difficult years. It was closed because of structural problems, reopened in 1929, closed again by the 1930 earthquake and the Second World War, and emptied by a few thefts in the second half of the twentieth century. The definitive reopening was in 2005.
In 2020 the carabinieri of the Cultural Heritage Protection Unit recovered a painting by Giulio Carpioni, a seventeenth-century Venetian painter, stolen in the 1970s.
Don't miss
• The Posillipo school.
• The Gemito room.
• Preti's Saint Catherine.
• The Palizzi donation.
Did you know?
• The old paintings date from the years when the Academy shared the same rooms with the Real Museo Borbonico.
• The gallery owns an embroidery made of glued threads by the eighteenth-century embroiderer Marianna Elmo.