Deployed in three locations – Grand Gallery, Chapel Room and Clock Room – the exhibition entitled "Naples in Paris" includes nearly 70 works of art from the Italian Museum that will be under construction from 2024.

It presents the most beautiful portraits produced between Venice, Rome and Florence, between 1515 and 1535 alongside remarkable nudes and spectacular masterpieces by Caravaggio, Masaccio, Bellini, Ribera or Mazzola, known as Parmigianino, but also by Titian, Carracci or Reni.

The visitor moves from the greatest Italian mannerism and its shades of greens and reds to the chiaroscuro and subversive realism of Caravaggio or the paroxismal violence of Neapolitan Baroque, such as "Judith beheading Holofernes" by Artemisia Gentileschi, a woman painter honored by some museums, art historians and media, in recent years.

The painting "Portrait of a Young Woman" by Italian painter Francesco Mazzola exhibited at the Louvre before the opening of the exhibition "Naples in Paris", June 6, 2023 in Paris © - / AFP

This "dialogue also sheds new light on the collections of the two museums and their history," according to the curators, Sébastien Allard, director of the Department of Paintings at the Louvre Museum, and Sylvain Bellenger, director general of the Capodimonte Museum.

To "the search for balance and grace of the Italian baroque of the Louvre since Mazarin and Louis XIV, focused on the Roman and Bolognese schools," responds the "Neapolitan baroque, based on the dramatic and the spectacular," says Bellenger.

If the Louvre is "very rich in Venetian painting of the sixteenth century like Titian or Veronese, it has a little less Tintoretto and little Bellini", a painter whose Capodimonte Museum brings "one of the most beautiful paintings: +the Transfiguration +", according to Mr. Allard.

A section installed in the chapel room informs about the history of the collection of the Capodimonte Museum, built on a hill overlooking Naples and whose collection was collected, before the unification of Italy, by the Farnese, Bourbon and Bonaparte-Murat families.

The painting "The Madonna of Divine Love" by Italian painter Raphael exhibited at the Louvre before the opening of the exhibition "Naples in Paris", June 6, 2023 in Paris © - / AFP

A last room offers several exceptional "cartoons" (preparatory drawings in charcoal and chalk) by Raphael and Michelangelo.

© 2023 AFP