The Luce e Sangue exhibition currently underway at the Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro has been a huge success . It will be extended until Tuesday, February 13, 2024, to allow anyone who has not yet had the opportunity to visit the exhibition of two site-specific works by artist Nicola Samorì.
The exhibition, curated by Demetrio Paparoni, which was initially scheduled to close in mid-January, presents two large-scale works inspired by Baroque culture and the copper masterpieces kept in the Chapel and Sacristy of the Treasury of San Gennaro by Luca Giordano, Jusepe de Ribera, Domenichino and Massimo Stanzione.
Made on large copper plates (180×141), Samorì’s works are exhibited in the spaces of the Sacristy. They propose a contemporary reinterpretation and a different fruition of classical works, prompting new perceptions and experiences of the paintings kept in the museum. Blood is the key, the symbol that summarizes the bond between the saint and his people, that blood that dies as human and lives again as divine.
Titled The Blood of the Saints, the works are inspired by the paintings Saint Mary of Egypt by Jusepe de Ribera (1641) and Saint Paul the Hermit by Luca Giordano (1644), preserved respectively at the Prado Museum in Madrid and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
The exhibition is part of the intentions of the Deputation that has always had the task and responsibility of guarding the relics and the Treasure of San Gennaro, and of promoting and innovating interest in the cult of the Patron Saint. The aim is to open the Treasury to different forms of art and, in keeping with tradition, renew the spirit of patronage and the bond between the city of Naples and its Saint.
The dialogue between what has been and the present is manifested in new interpretations that open up to modern comparisons on ancient questions. In this sense, the relationship between the research of the works by Luca Giordano present in the sacristy, recently restored, and those specifically created by Nicola Samorì, appears linear, in which the opposing objectives of completeness of the first and the desired incompleteness of the second are reconciled in the techniques and materials, leaving the interpretation of the lives of the saints and the related messages of faith and values to the public.
Light and Blood at the Treasure of San Gennaro in Naples was presented last December at the same time as the exhibition of the artist's work dedicated to Saint Lucia, set up in Syracuse in the church of Santa Lucia alla Badia, an oil painting on Trani stone in which Samorì depicts the torments inflicted on the saint dedicated to the portrait the Martyrdom of Saint Lucia (1579) by Deodato Guinaccia.
