From Dec. 4, 2025 to April 13, 2026, the Spezieria of the Certosa di San Martino in Naples will host the exhibition It’s not just model, but finished painting, a project of the Vomero National Museums that introduces the public to the preliminary stages of artistic work. The exhibition, curated by acting director Luigi Gallo, focuses on the tools of the inventive process: sketches, drafts, cartoons, stains and models, interpreted as essential steps in the construction of the finished work. The initiative originates in a recently reorganized venue. The Apothecary has seen in recent months a comprehensive intervention on the installations, with a new accrochage system that improves its functionality and allows a continuous programming of temporary exhibitions.
The intervention is part of the ongoing renovation process at the Charterhouse of San Martino, where projects aimed at improving the reception and usability of the historic environments are active. The program also includes the imminent opening of a section devoted to the 19th century in Naples. The exhibition represents the first fully shared project between the three institutions that now make up the National Museums of the Vomero: Castel Sant’Elmo, the Duca di Martina Museum at the Villa Floridiana and the Charterhouse of San Martino. Works from the permanent collections and deposits of the three museums are presented with a unified exhibition language, creating a path that relates materials, techniques and approaches developed between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.
“This exhibition,” says Luigi Gallo, acting director of the National Museums of the Vomero, “marks a significant step in the path of the National Museums of the Vomero: a project that enhances the collections in their complementarity and returns to the public nuclei that are often little visible. The Spezieria thus becomes a living laboratory, where artistic invention and its transformations can be known up close.”
The focus of the project lies in the value attributed to the preparatory stages. Sketches and models are presented as spaces of invention endowed with autonomy. Studies executed with graphite, terracotta or painting reveal an immediacy that often disappears in the final elaboration, showing an inventive quality that is sometimes more intense than the completed outcome. The theme is signaled by continuous historical references: already Giorgio Vasari, in 1568, identified the first sketch as the moment in which the “furor dello artefice” becomes evident, while the letter Sebastiano Ricci wrote in 1731 to Count Giacomo Tassis distinguishes the model from a sketch considered a finished work.
Ricci specifies that the small painting sent to the collector is a finished painting, and that the large-scale work should be understood as his copy. An important part of the exhibition is devoted to the nucleus of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sketches preserved in the Villa Floridiana, formed in the 1970s with works from the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte and the Certosa di San Martino. Francesco De Mura’s small paintings, acquired by the state in the early twentieth century after the artist’s bequest to Pio Monte della Misericordia, represent one of the most articulate examples of research on preliminary form. The works show rapid inventions, luministic settings not yet stabilized, and compositional solutions that, in several cases, are more fluid than the final versions.
The tour continues with materials from the Certosa di San Martino, focusing on the Neapolitan plastic tradition. The terracotta sketches of Andrea Vaccaro, Cosimo Fanzago, and the Virtues of the 18th-century Neapolitan ambit testify to the constant relationship between painting and sculpture. Although working with different techniques and materials, the artists share similar compositional problems, such as the definition of poses, the distribution of volumes or the construction of gestures. The comparison of model and pictorial studies highlights the circulation of formal solutions between the arts, highlighting a network of mutual references and influences. The exhibition constructs a narrative that develops a continuous dialogue between the three Vomero museums.
The works are juxtaposed in a way that highlights complementarities and divergences, highlighting the variety of processes adopted by artists in different eras. The project also aims to make visible materials often relegated to storage, offering a unified reading of the collections. The route intends to present the collections to the public in their complexity, opening a permanent site of study on the techniques and practices of artistic invention.
The itinerary concludes with a nucleus dedicated to the twentieth century, from Castel Sant’Elmo. Emilio Notte’s Drawings under the Bombs, made between 1941 and 1944 in an air-raid shelter in the Materdei district, introduce a marked change from the previous sections. In these sheets the artist records what he observes in extreme conditions, with an essential and immediate stroke that retains a strong testimonial value. The documentary character of the drawings coexists with a marked expressive intensity, which ideally closes the itinerary by emphasizing how even in the most difficult circumstances the creative process maintains its own continuity.
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| Sketches and sketches from the National Museums of Vomero: a unified project in the Spezieria of Naples |
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