The Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte (the Royal Palace of Capodimonte and its art collections, on the hill above Naples 3km north of the historic center) is the most important art museum in southern Italy and one of the five or six most important art museums in Italy overall, and it is chronically undervisited by international tourists who come to Naples for the archaeological museum (the MANN. Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli) and the street food and neglect the Bourbon royal palace on the hill above the city. The specific Capodimonte quality: the breadth and depth of the Farnese collection (the art collection assembled by the Farnese family from the 15th century onward, including works got by Pope Paul III, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, and multiple generations of Italian aristocratic collecting, one of the finest private collections in European history before it became state property) combined with the specific Neapolitan painting tradition (the Caravaggio followers. Battistello Caracciolo, Jusepe de Ribera, Artemisia Gentileschi, whose work in Naples represents the most concentrated school of Caravaggesque painting in the world) makes Capodimonte simultaneously a Farnese collection museum and a Naples painting museum.
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Capodimonte: The Highlights
The Farnese Collection: Floor 1
The Farnese collection on the first floor of the palace contains the works assembled by Pope Paul III Farnese (1468-1549) and his descendants: Titian's portraits of Paul III (including the famous group portrait of Paul III with his nephews Alessandro and Ottavio Farnese, the most psychologically revealing group portrait of a papal family in the 16th century), the Danaë (Titian's mythological nude that caused a scandal in Rome and was moved to the Farnese collection for safekeeping), and the extraordinary portrait of Paul III alone (the old man with the trembling hands that Titian painted with a psychological directness that the elderly Pope reportedly recognized with distress, "too real, too real," according to the Vasari anecdote). Raphael's Moses (the cartoon for the fresco of Moses with the Tablets in the Vatican Logge) and Michelangelo's drawing studies round out the Farnese high Renaissance section.
Capodimonte: skip-the-line tickets & guided tours
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The Flagellation of Christ (Caravaggio, 1607-1610, the painting Caravaggio made during his first and second Naples stays, for the church of San Domenico Maggiore) is the specific Capodimonte masterwork: a large canvas (286×213cm) showing Christ being bound to the column and beaten by three soldiers, painted in the specific late Caravaggio style of his flight years (after 1606, when he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni in Rome and spent the remaining four years of his life fleeing across Malta, Syracuse, Messina, and Naples). The specific late Caravaggio quality: the almost complete darkness surrounding the figures, with the light falling only on the skin and the cloth, producing the maximum emotional intensity with the minimum pictorial means. This is one of the five or six paintings in the world that require being seen in the original.
Q&A: Capodimonte Naples
How do I get to Capodimonte from central Naples?
By bus: line R4 from Piazza Dante or Piazza Garibaldi to the Capodimonte museum entrance (approximately 25-30 minutes). By taxi: approximately €10-15 from the historic center. The return by bus can be supplemented by a walk down through the Capodimonte park (the Real Bosco di Capodimonte, the 134-hectare royal hunting ground around the palace, now a public park with the specific quality of a large wooded green space above a dense urban center) to the Porta Grande entrance and then the bus from Via Capodimonte. The Capodimonte park is the least-known and most pleasant outdoor space in Naples.
