Paris (AFP)

It is difficult to conceive of more contrasting works: Giordano, a painter whose spectacular paintings were being pulled out of Europe, and Gemito, a former street child who was sculpting miserable fishermen, synthesized the reality of Naples, a city of sumptuousness, at the Petit Palais. misery.

These concomitant exhibitions respond to a desire of Christophe Leribault, director of the Petit Palais, to discover Vincenzo Gemito (1852-1929), unknown sculptor of the Neapolitan identity, and to show Luca Giordano (1634-1705), painter extremely renowned in the late seventeenth century, who worked ten years in Spain.

He had never had a monograph in France and was the object of a disenchantment: paradoxically Caravaggio the unloved who supplanted in the recognition of the public.

- Giordano: from the religious to the Antique -

"Giordano absorbs all the lessons of painting, makes almost pastiches, draws inspiration from neo-Flemish paintings, works by Dürer, frequents Ribera in Naples, then changes his palette, influenced by Venetian painting (Titian, Veronese) , Florentine, by the Roman Baroque (Cortona) ", analyzes Mr. Leribault.

In Naples, chiaroscuro and Caravaggio influence, flesh and muscles are contorted in spectacular draperies. Churches order allegories where the saints intervene for humans and angels come down from tormented skies. World in battle as in his painting "Saint-Michael archangel chasing rebellious angels".

A striking picture shows "Saint Janvier interceding for the cessation of the plague of 1656", with the pale bodies piled up. Half of the population was decimated by the epidemic in this city, the largest in southern Europe.

Nicknamed "Fa presto" ("done quickly"), demonstrative, virtuoso, prolific (some 1,500 paintings, altarpieces, frescoes made by him and his studio) adapted to all its audiences, from religious painting to bucolic and voluptuous scenes of antiquity.

"We saw his very intense paintings in Naples, which lived then a rather black spirituality, and later, at the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, allegories, naked everywhere, on clear skies, to the glory of the Medici".

He imitates his contemporaries, like Jusepe De Ribera or Mattia Preti, on the same themes. Three paintings "San Sebastian tied up" show it perfectly.

An immersive room recreates the scenery of its immense frescoes, with music and films taken at the Escorial, in Buen Retiro.

Luca Giordano was a fine drawer and incisive portraitist, as shown by his self-portraits (one with glasses) and portraits of several contemporary musicians and philosophers. Portraits reminiscent of the intellectual abundance of Naples.

- Gemito: People's Naples -

Another face, later (late nineteenth / early twentieth centuries), a city this time on the decline: the precariousness of its small fishermen and scugnizzi (street kids), through the gaze of Gemito.

It is a look of realism and empathy by this former abandoned child who made himself alone. He will have early modeled the faces and silhouettes of kids he has rubbed, with an astonishing and moving naturalness. A talent that he expresses at 17 and will be recognized by the royal house.

Ancient films from the port recreate the everyday environment of these children at work.

This work, strong, expressive has been controversial. She suffered, at the time of the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878, the competition of sculptors like Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux who showed smooth and idealized figures. The rough, popular approach was scandalous.

Today, he suffers from being minimized and arranged in a certain folklore of Naples around his santons and his popular picturesque.

Having achieved fame, Gemito will stay in Paris, cross Degas, Rodin and others, but the loss of his first wife will plunge him into fits of madness.

The exhibition, with its 120 works, has borrowed much, like that of Giordano, to the great Neapolitan Museum of Capodimonte where it will then be presented.

These two artists each illustrate in their own way Curzio Malaparte's formula: "Naples is a Pompeii that has never been buried".

--Luca Giordano, until February 24th, and Vincenzo Gemito, until January 26th.

© 2019 AFP