Vessels of Value

Photo by Domingo Milella

Francesco Lauro stands before Luca Giordano’s "Nessus and Deianeira."

Photo by Domingo Milella

Mattia Preti’s "Queen Tomyris Plunging the Head of Cyrus into the Basin of Blood" commands the dining room.

Salvator Rosa Bernardo Cavallino Artemisia Gentileschi Giordano Mattia Preti Velasquez House Rules: 1989–1998 Tried and True

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Naples rises steeply from its famously beautiful bay. In a handsome apartment complex on one of the many terraces cut into its hills, the maritime lawyer and Old Masters collector Francesco Lauro lives with his wife, Angela Coletto, a decorative-arts historian, and their daughters, Mariagiulia, 12, and Diletta, 18. From the balcony running the length of the flat, one can see to the left Mount Vesuvius and straight ahead over the treetops a shimmering Capri. The interior view is exceptional too. Old Master paintings are everywhere. More than 50 cover the walls. There are landscapes, battle scenes and, above all, pictures with mythological and religious subjects. Another half dozen large works hang in Lauro’s spacious, high-ceilinged office downtown, among them a lush Artemisia Gentileschi allegory of Luxury as an alluring beauty and a tumultuous Salvator Rosa scene of a pack of dogs attacking a ferocious wild boar. Some 25 others are out on loan to museums from Madrid to Antwerp, at various restorers or with scholars. An exceptional collection, it is known to few outside Naples. But plans are being made to introduce it to a wider audience of art lovers.

The collection contains none of the veduta (view) paintings so popular with Grand Tourists. It does not need them. The descendent of generations of Neapolitan shipowners, Francesco Lauro surveys his homeland and theirs every time he looks across the bay to Sorrento. When he sits with an espresso studying his paintings, he gazes not on evocations of the landscape but of the Neapolitan spirit.

Among the many paintings in the living room is Francesco Solimena’s Ermina Among the Shepherds, hanging near the floor-to-ceiling windows. (Ermina is the Palestinian princess in love with the crusader Tancredi in the epic Jerusalem Delivered by the 16th-century Neapolitan poet Torquato Tasso.) Although small, it is a compelling work. The white horse walking behind Ermina has the mysterious, dreamy allure of a unicorn. In the study, Bernardo Cavallino’s richly colored Adoration of the Magi is an equally magnetic picture. One of the kings stands with his back to the viewer, riveting our attention.

Paintings even line the walls of the bathroom. Although these, bought when Lauro was a neophyte, are kept mainly for sentimental reasons. When his older daughter was little and rode on his shoulders as he looked at his paintings, she kept calling the dog in one of them a cow. Seeing it today, he recalls those early days of fatherhood. “How could I sell it?” he asks. “If you don’t link paintings to your life and to other people, you miss a lot.” It is not surprising, therefore, to find in Lauro’s collection a Luca Giordano bozetto (preliminary sketch) for the altarpiece in the Naples church where his parents were married.

The core of Lauro’s collection is made up of paintings from the Baroque, the golden age of Neapolitan art, encompassing works by such artists as Francesco de Mura and Mattia Preti, in addition to Cavallino, Giordano, Rosa and Solimena. Buying these pictures, he explains, “was an act of sympathy and support for my city, Naples, with its beauty and its many problems.” Deeply personal, his chosen focus is at the same time very Italian. The Paris dealer Maurizio Canesso, who specializes in Italian paintings and is an acquaintance of Lauro’s, observes that in Italy, people’s first loyalty is to their city or region. Every 15 or 20 miles, there are changes in everything from dialect to food and wine to schools of painting. Someone from Parma would be inclined to buy pictures by painters who were born or worked there.

Affection plays a role in how foreigners collect Italian paintings, too. In the 18th century, the English were great patrons of Canaletto because they loved Venice, and today people pay a premium for Venetian scenes for the same reason. In America, the earliest collectors of Old Masters were especially fond of the Neapolitan Baroque. In fact, the first documented Old Master painting to enter an American collection was Giordano’s Calling of Saint Matthew, bought by General George Gordon Meade, commander of the Union forces at Gettysburg, in 1820. Other pictures of this period, many with religious subjects, soon followed across the Atlantic. Some were acquired by collectors; others were gifts to new Roman Catholic parishes. However, when the influential British critic John Ruskin attacked the style’s drama and sensuality, American interest in the paintings plummeted.