Carlo V's Hall

Carlo V's Hall, situated on the first floor of Castel Nuovo - Maschio Angioino hosts from12 December 2015 fiftyeight sculptures of the collection of Francesco Jerace given by the sculptor's heirs to the Municipality of Naples. A conspicuous part of such a collection, previously, was shown in the Antechamber of the Barons and an other one was kept in the deposits of the Civic Museum in Castel Nuovo. The prestigious collection restored and presented in occasion of the Exhibition "Il Bello e il Vero ". The Neapolitan sculpture of the second Eight hundred and the first Nine hundred" - held in the halls of the Monumental Complex of San Domenico Maggiore last year, it has found permanent placing close to the seat of Castel Nuovo and is exposed in its Whole magnificence to so many visitors and tourists who crowd the halls of the Civic Museum. The collection, only one in Italy, and never shown all together, reunites sculptures in marble, chalk and terracotta they testify the Jerace size, sculptor of Calabrian origin, he was born to Polistena in 1853 and dead in Naples in 1937, he has left a wide production in the international field, in fact, as well as the important Neapolitan period, he realised works that are in Italy, Europe, India,
Americhe, Australia.The sculptor, worked in Naples in the golden years of belle époque, testified with his art a Neapolitan world in expansion, rich of culture and of commercial initiatives, sculpturing busts of personages of civic and European relief, who often elected the city as definitive residence, but also significant faces of the people, profound soul of Naples. Busts of men and famous women, they are types of the people, then, the humus of the collection. His works have a strong print of that neoclassic world that came making itself known, in the plasticity and rigour of the shapes, after the opulence of the baroque.
The fiftyeight sculptures have an atemporal charm and at the same time, they are witnesses of an epoch that Jerace could reproduce with great talent, asserting its universality. The works are picked in their intellectual pride, in the hieratic nobility or dense melancholy, before arriving at the incarnation of an archaic womanliness that recovers the own roots on a mythical time, like Nosside di Locri, Myriam o Mistica, the celebrated Victa, marmorean bust of great fascination that marked a decisive turning in the Italian sculpture; beauty female hung between reality and poetry, as the agreement Era di Maggio, inspired to the celebrated song of the poet and coeval writer Salvatore Di Giacomo, or that one more strictly popular like La donna discinta con spallina. In this sense the central soul of the collection is above all dedicated to the female figure with numerous examples of great beauty.