At Capodimonte with Lorenzo Lotto, NAfrica and Sergio Vacchi

We continue our wandering through Naples' accessible locations hosting a wide variety of interesting art exhibitions. One of our favorite destinations is the Capodimonte Museum and Royal Woods (*), a palace transformed into a museum and surrounded by a magnificent forest where it's delightful to stroll by wheelchair.

The museum has long been open to contemporary art (we've covered several exhibitions in the past), and we were able to visit two of them last November, but we'll discuss them later.

In fact, a practice that has become established in recent years is to showcase paintings by a classical artist on loan from major international museums. And it's precisely an exhibition currently being held at Capodimonte that we'll begin with.

Let's talk about LORENZO LOTTO. GUEST LUCINA BREMBATI, FROM BERGAMO, sees this important painting on loan from the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, on display until January 6, 2026, along with another painting by Lotto and two paintings by Parmigianino, all from the Capodimonte collections.

Here are our images:

PORTRAIT OF LUCINA BREMBATI - Lorenzo Lotto

PORTRAIT OF BERNARDO DE ROSSI, BISHOP OF TREVISO - Lorenzo Lotto

PORTRAIT OF GALEAZZO SANVITALE - Parmigianino

PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG WOMAN, ANTEA - Parmigianino

After this immersion in the great art of the 16th century, let's move on to the two contemporary exhibitions. The first we'll discuss is NAFRICA - MASKS, open until January 6, 2026. To illustrate it, it's helpful to quote the introductory text from the museum's website:

The central element of the NAFRICA-MASKS exhibition is the work of a controversial figure, Florentine anthropologist Lidio Cipriani, whose travels to the Horn of Africa, documented between 1923 and 1927—through photographs, texts, and polychrome facial casts—reveal the scientific and cultural construction of the "other," the "different," the "Negro."

These materials, from the Museum of Anthropology at the Federico II University of Naples, are presented not so much as artifacts, but as documents of the ideological violence that helped justify slavery, segregation, and the racial laws of 1938.

"Alongside this disturbing visual archive, twenty-five contemporary artists, both African and European, have been invited to respond with new or existing works, thus establishing a dialogue between two opposing registers: on the one hand, the reduction of the human face to a colonial object; on the other, the reaffirmation of subjectivity through art. This is not a simple denunciation, but a visual confrontation capable of generating in the viewer a profound and unmediated awareness, what Jean-Paul Sartre called 'the shock of being seen.' This exhibition is necessary. It paints a terrible picture of the immobility of history and how we are incapable of learning from it. History does not belong to a single people. It is the explosion of encounter. And if Nazi propaganda claimed that history is always written by the victors, then the time has come to rewrite it. The NAFRICA-MASKS exhibition unfolds like a visual book: each work, each archival document becomes a footnote or illustration in a collective narrative still under construction. The goal is not to propose a moral or a single interpretation, but to open a space of critical resonance, where art can act as a tool of exorcism and rewriting", as curator Simon Njami explains.

Here are the images of the works that struck us most:

We conclude our account of our visit to Capodimonte by describing the exhibition "MEDITERRANEAN DREAM. SERGIO VACCHI," open until January 27, 2026. We present it by once again raiding the museum's website:

Sergio Vacchi (Castenaso, Bologna, April 1, 1925 – Siena, January 15, 2016) was born one hundred years ago. He was one of the most original and significant artists of the Italian twentieth century, moving from Informalism and Naturalism to a highly personal language, unclassifiable by any school definition, and full of historical, mythological, and social references.

Sixty years after his Neapolitan debut, the Capodimonte Museum e Royal Woods is dedicating the exhibition "Mediterranean Dream. Sergio Vacchi" to him, marking the centenary of the artist's birth, with works representative of his production from 1959 to 2006.

Chosen in conjunction with the Vacchi Foundation, the works exhibited for the occasion reveal the disruptive power of the artist's highly original mind, a visionary often far ahead of his time.

[...]

2025 also marks the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of Naples, now more than ever in the international spotlight, reaffirming the open, cosmopolitan nature of this Mediterranean metropolis and its historically avant-garde role. The Bolognese master's exhibition is therefore an opportunity to retrace key years of Neapolitan cultural life in the last century.

Here is a small selection of the master's works:

Iter itineris secondo, 2005, enamel on canvas

For a face of the landscape, 1962, enamel on canvas

The Marble Phone Call, 1966, enamel on canvas

The Lover of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, 1966, enamel on canvas

What else is there to say? Let's just remember that in addition to the Capodimonte Café, located inside the palace building, there are two other refreshment points within the forest: the Stufa dei Fiori and the Giardino Torre (*); we dedicated a post to the latter some time ago.

SEE YOU NEXT TIME!!!

(*) symbol indicating the presence of disabled restrooms