Description
The Quadreria dei Girolamini is the picture gallery of the Girolamini complex, in the historic center of Naples. It gathers paintings from the early sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth, displayed in chronological order in a few rooms on the convent's first floor.
You reach it through the cloister of the oranges, from which you climb to the gallery's rooms. The route follows the centuries, and the heart of the collection is the Neapolitan Seicento, with its dominant Caravaggism.
Battistello Caracciolo's masterpiece is the Baptism of Christ. To Jusepe de Ribera we owe the series of apostles (Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint James), the Saint Andrew and the Flagellation of Christ: they are the absolute masterpieces of the collection.
Among the oldest paintings is the Adoration of the Magi by Andrea Sabatini da Salerno, from 1513, one of the first painters of the South to show he had absorbed the lesson of Raphael and Leonardo.
The Emilian school is represented by two canvases by Guido Reni: the Flight into Egypt and Christ Meeting the Baptist. There are also the Saint Sebastian by the Cavalier d'Arpino and an Adoration of the Magi by Federico Zuccari.
The eighteenth century is present with Francesco Solimena's sketches for the frescoes of Moses and David in the Girolamini church. In the 1990s a terracotta bust of Saint Philip and two Pietàs by Sanmartino came in.
Naples' first public picture gallery came about thanks to a tailor. In 1622 Domenico Lercaro, a wealthy cloth merchant, left all his furniture and works of art to the Congregation of the Oratory.
He set a condition: the paintings had to be displayed in the church's tribune or in the sacristy. So they remained until the 1961 re-display; the collection had grown with the donation of the Milano family, which arrived in 1631.
The Irpinia earthquake of 1980 closed it for fifteen years: the most recent reopening is from 1995. Today the paintings are in the convent, in a wing reached from the cloister.
You reach it through the cloister of the oranges, from which you climb to the gallery's rooms. The route follows the centuries, and the heart of the collection is the Neapolitan Seicento, with its dominant Caravaggism.
Battistello Caracciolo's masterpiece is the Baptism of Christ. To Jusepe de Ribera we owe the series of apostles (Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint James), the Saint Andrew and the Flagellation of Christ: they are the absolute masterpieces of the collection.
Among the oldest paintings is the Adoration of the Magi by Andrea Sabatini da Salerno, from 1513, one of the first painters of the South to show he had absorbed the lesson of Raphael and Leonardo.
The Emilian school is represented by two canvases by Guido Reni: the Flight into Egypt and Christ Meeting the Baptist. There are also the Saint Sebastian by the Cavalier d'Arpino and an Adoration of the Magi by Federico Zuccari.
The eighteenth century is present with Francesco Solimena's sketches for the frescoes of Moses and David in the Girolamini church. In the 1990s a terracotta bust of Saint Philip and two Pietàs by Sanmartino came in.
Naples' first public picture gallery came about thanks to a tailor. In 1622 Domenico Lercaro, a wealthy cloth merchant, left all his furniture and works of art to the Congregation of the Oratory.
He set a condition: the paintings had to be displayed in the church's tribune or in the sacristy. So they remained until the 1961 re-display; the collection had grown with the donation of the Milano family, which arrived in 1631.
The Irpinia earthquake of 1980 closed it for fifteen years: the most recent reopening is from 1995. Today the paintings are in the convent, in a wing reached from the cloister.