Italian Masterworks from Naples to Houston

Marcello Venusti after Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Last Judgment, 1549, oil tempera on poplar wood, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples

Largely drawn from the renowned collection of the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, Italy, Michelangelo and the Vatican presents some 40 works, many commissioned or completed during the papacy of Alessandro Farnese, Pope Paul III.

 Remembered for his enthusiastic patronage of the arts in general, and Michelangelo in particular, Pope Paul III oversaw the completion of Michelangelo’s stupendous fresco, The Last Judgment, on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. The exhibition features a unique, large-scale copy of The Last Judgment. Additional highlights include two of Michelangelo’s finest monumental drawings: Roman Soldiers and Venus Kissed by Cupid; as well as two iconic portraits of Pope Paul III by Italy’s great Renaissance masters: Raphael and Titian.

 Masterworks by Michelangelo and his contemporaries highlight the artistic legacy of Pope Paul III and the vital role that drawing played in art production throughout Europe in the late 15th and 16th centuries. Michelangelo and the Vatican features drawings, cartoons, paintings, sculpture, and prints by Renaissance master Michelangelo and his predecessors and successors, including Raphael, Rubens, Tintoretto, and Titian.

 Complementing the Capodimonte Museum loans are works from the Vatican, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the University of Chicago Library, private collectors, and the MFAH collection.

 

Michelangelo and the Vatican: Masterworks from the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples, through June 10, 2018, https://www.mfah.org/

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Roman Soldiers, cartoon fragment for part of The Crucifixion of Saint Peter in the Pauline Chapel, Vatican, c. 1546, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
Raphael, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, 1512, oil on panel, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples; photo by Luciano Pedicini, 1999, courtesy of Alinari, Art Resource, NY