The Farnese Collection of Drawings

Claire van Cleave (Farnese Collection, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples)

Giovanna Garzoni, Compositon of Flowers and Butterflies, black chalk, tempera, and diluted ink on parchment, 361 x 256 mm, Naples, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, GDS 822 — Giovanna Garzoni, *Compositon of Flowers and Butterflies*, black chalk, tempera, and diluted ink on parchment, 361 x 256 mm, Naples, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, GDS 822

Giovanna Garzoni, *Compositon of Flowers and Butterflies*, black chalk, tempera, and diluted ink on parchment, 361 x 256 mm, Naples, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, GDS 822

During the last two years I have been working on the Farnese collection of drawings at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples. The initial purpose of this research, at the outset funded by the American Friends of Capodimonte, was to complete an updated catalogue of each of the drawings in the collection to be published online by the museum as a part of an important museum-wide digitalization project. Subsequently, my work was expanded to include a new assessment of collection from its formation in the Palazzo Farnese, Rome to Naples in the present day and to try to understand how a group of more than six hundred drawings inventoried in the first half of the seventeenth century has shrunk to a mere 53 works on paper with a Farnese provenance in the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe today.
When I arrived in Rome, I still had research to complete on individual drawings. This task was easily accomplished in the first part of the fellowship and my finished catalogue entries are now in the hands of the museum and await editing for publication on their website. My work will become the first comprehensive catalogue of the Farnese drawings since 1994 and, crucially, the very first time that these drawings have been digitally catalogued and made available online. The second part of my research is to try to understand the history of the collection. It is the museum’s intention to publish my catalogue and history of the collection together in a book that will form the first volume of their new systematic catalogue. I am now in a position where, having completed sufficient research, I am preparing to write a full draft of the book in the hope that the museum will publish it within the next year.