A total of 112 paintings on
loan from Italian antique dealer Cesare Lampronti will go on
display at the Royal Palace of Caserta in an exhibition opening
Monday and running through January 16, 2020 titled "From
Artemisia to Hackert".
Going on display for the first time in Caserta will be "The
Port of Salerno" by Jakob Philipp Hackert, which is the missing
piece of the artist's port series, commissioned by King
Ferdinand IV of Naples.
Lampronti, whose gallery is located in London, has loaned the
works to the Vanvitelli palace painting gallery for the show's
four-month run.
Italian art critic Vittorio Sgarbi said the inauguration of
the show means that "starting today, antique dealers will no
longer be viewed as delinquents by this country that doesn't
understand artworks are universal assets.
"Lampronti is good and generous; today his work is finally
being recognised, having brought 12,000 paintings to Italy in
his over 50-year career," Sgarbi said.
Lampronti was born to a Jewish family in Rome in 1942 and had
to rebuild his family's entire art collection after it was
"annihilated" by the Fascist racial laws.
In a presentation of the upcoming art show, he said made the
"painful" decision to move his gallery to London in 2012 due to
a "climate of ostracism and mistrust of our work.
"I like to consider my current gallery a cultural window for
our art in the international world," Lampronti said.
Tiziana Maffei, director of the Royal Palace of Caserta, took
over for former director Mauro Felicori just months ago, after
plans for the exhibition were already well underway, and said
she is enthusiastic about the show.
"It was proof of how the Royal Palace must face initiatives
of this type, that is, as a team, overcoming physiological
difficulties in a museum in which the demands linked to
promotion must be tied to those connected with needed upkeep,"
Maffei said.
The show will give visitors a chance to see Hackert's
complete port series, which was recently restored, as well as
works by Artemisia Gentileschi, Pietro da Cortona, Rubens,
Pompeo Batoni, Guercino, and Canaletto, among others.
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