Hackert stars at Reggia di Caserta show

(ANSA) - Caserta, September 16 - A total of 112 paintings on loan from Italian antique dealer Cesare Lampronti will go on display at the Royal Palace of Caserta in an exhibition opening Monday and running through January 16, 2020 titled "From Artemisia to Hackert".
    Going on display for the first time in Caserta will be "The Port of Salerno" by Jakob Philipp Hackert, which is the missing piece of the artist's port series, commissioned by King Ferdinand IV of Naples. Lampronti, whose gallery is located in London, has loaned the works to the Vanvitelli palace painting gallery for the show's four-month run.
    Italian art critic Vittorio Sgarbi said the inauguration of the show means that "starting today, antique dealers will no longer be viewed as delinquents by this country that doesn't understand artworks are universal assets.
    "Lampronti is good and generous; today his work is finally being recognised, having brought 12,000 paintings to Italy in his over 50-year career," Sgarbi said.
    Lampronti was born to a Jewish family in Rome in 1942 and had to rebuild his family's entire art collection after it was "annihilated" by the Fascist racial laws. In a presentation of the upcoming art show, he said made the "painful" decision to move his gallery to London in 2012 due to a "climate of ostracism and mistrust of our work.
    "I like to consider my current gallery a cultural window for our art in the international world," Lampronti said.
    Tiziana Maffei, director of the Royal Palace of Caserta, took over for former director Mauro Felicori just months ago, after plans for the exhibition were already well underway, and said she is enthusiastic about the show.
    "It was proof of how the Royal Palace must face initiatives of this type, that is, as a team, overcoming physiological difficulties in a museum in which the demands linked to promotion must be tied to those connected with needed upkeep," Maffei said.
    The show will give visitors a chance to see Hackert's complete port series, which was recently restored, as well as works by Artemisia Gentileschi, Pietro da Cortona, Rubens, Pompeo Batoni, Guercino, and Canaletto, among others.