Noble Dust: History of the Muzeo Nazionale

Noble Dust: History of the Muzeo Nazionale

The museum was conceived in the mind of Charles III who had inherited the various Farnese collections from his mother. Charles originally intended to house the paintings and precious objects in a specially built palace at Capodimonte, which would be at once a dynastic monument and an avant-garde intellectual endeavor of the Enlightenment, but the antiquities collection soon outstripped the available space. In 1738, the same year the definitive project for Capodimonte got underway, excavations began at the site explored by Prince d'Elboeuf -- Resina, in the Herculaneum area -- which yielded a stunning sample of marble and bronze statues. Then, in 1748, a new site opened up that surpassed every archaeologist's dreams: Pompeii. By 1750 a makeshift museum had been set up in the royal palace at Portici to house the rapidly growing finds, and Naples, with its exciting excavations, had become an obligatory stop on travelers' Grand Tour itineraries.

After a time the question of a fitting museum became an international issue, and given the precarious position of Portici (it lies under Vesuvius), a solution was deemed urgent -- even if it did not seem so to the king. (When Vesuvius erupted in 1767 and ministers pleaded with him to find a safe, permanent home for the collection, Charles of Bourbon replied that if the worst happened and they were buried anew, they would be the crowning joy of excavators' digs 2,000 years hence.)

During this time the Farnese collection of ancient sculpture finally arrived. This was totally illegal -- Cardinal Alexander Farnese's will of 1587 specifically stipulated that the collection was to stay in Rome. But Ferdinand IV, son of and successor to Charles III, politely ignored the strident complaints of the pope and various other personages, including Goethe, and calmly packed up the loot for transfer.

The museum, named the Royal Library of Naples, finally opened in 1801 -- perhaps a bit late, given that Ferdinand had just massacred nearly all of his city's intellectual elite in "appreciation" of their Republican ideas. On the whole, however, the museum, if not the Neapolitans themselves, did well from the Napoleonic wars.

The French had already packed up the Farnese Hercules for transport to the new Louvre, but the new king of Naples, Joachim Murat, was able to use his considerable military clout within Napoléon's empire to keep the museum's contents in Naples (the rest of Italy was thoroughly and expertly plundered). Murat's wife, Caroline (who rather usefully happened to be Napoléon's sister), herself collected antiquities; so Ferdinand proudly added her collection to the museum in 1816, once he had reestablished himself on the throne with the help of his friends.

To quell any doubts about who the owner was, or what sort of government had set it up, he renamed it the Royal Bourbon Museum. The building was finally finished in 1822, just in time to house the spectacular mosaics uncovered in the 1830s in the House of the Faun in Pompeii. With the fall of the Bourbons and unification with the emergent Italy, the collection was reorganized as a so-called National Museum.