The Ambassador of Italy to Madrid, Riccardo Guariglia, attended the opening of the exhibition entitled “The other Renaissance. Spanish artists in Naples in the early Cinquecento” staged at Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado. The exhibition was organised in collaboration with the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte. Its aim is to illustrate the special way in which some the most important Spanish artists of the 16th century, who had moved to Naples, embraced the artistic revolution of the Italian renaissance as represented by Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo.
“It is with great pride that we are opening this exhibition”, remarked the Italian Ambassador. “It bears further testimony to the fruitful relationship between Naples and Spain. Naples is, without a doubt, the Italian city with the closest ties to Spain, and this exhibition has the merit of analysing one of the most interesting pages in the history of art”. As Guariglia observed, “Naples was particularly fertile terrain in which to devise models that helped establish, in the early 16th century, a particularly Iberian version of the Renaissance, with clearly identifiable stylistic features yet still linked to the great Italian masters.
This exhibition, a brilliant example of cultural diplomacy, most certainly casts light on the historic and artistic bonds between Italy and Spain, which have recently seen a renaissance of their own”.
The exhibition was curated by Andrea Zezza (Department of Arts and Cultural Assets, Università degli Studi della Campania) and Riccardo Naldi (Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Università “L’Orientale”). It focuses on a brief but flourishing period of the Spanish renaissance, from 1504 to 1535, when Italian influence came to the fore in the paintings of Bartolomé Ordóñez, Diego de Siloe, Pedro Machuca or Alonso Berruguete, who had moved to Naples to learn from the great Italian masters of the Rinascimento.
