Image: Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
The presentation is part of the ‘Notizie da Capodimonte’ cycle promoted by Amici di Capodimonte ETS. The donation to the museum was made by British art historian and former National Gallery director Sir Nicholas and Lady Penny.
The work entering the collections of the Museo di Capodimonte is ‘Torquato Tasso’, a terracotta effigy made around 1885 by Francesco De Matteis (1852–1917).
The effigy documents a crucial phase in the beginnings of the sculptor. Before showing three bronze works at the 1884 National Exhibition in Turin, De Matteis studied with Stanislao Lista and Gioacchino Toma and spent a short period in Paris. These periods preceded his work on the decoration of the Caffè Gambrinus in 1890 and saw the relationship between De Matteis and Domenico Morelli take shape.
The sculpture came from the collection of Sir Brinley Ford, a scholar and collector of British and Irish artists who visited Italy in the eighteenth century. The donation adds to the museum’s collections a record of late-19th-century Neapolitan and southern Italian sculpture, while creating an opportunity to further study De Matteis’s training and early experiences, as well as the relationships between Neapolitan artistic culture and international patronage and collecting.
Speakers include Capodimonte director Eike Schmidt, museum representative Maria Tamajo Contarini, Diletta Gamberini of Scuola Superiore Meridionale and Massimo Guastella of the University of Salento.
