This painting and its counterpart were conceived to offer an entire view of the Gulf of Naples. In the foreground they present the parade of the royal procession which was held on 8 September each year along the Riviera di Chiaia towards the church of Santa Maria di Piedigrotta. It was a grandiose military parade, in which among the wings of a cheering crowd, the royal carriages and the entire court paraded against the suggestive background of the Bay of Naples, creating a spectacle of incomparable beauty, of which numerous figurative testimonies remain. The artist who best grasped this extraordinary synthesis of history and nature was Antonio Joli from Modena (circa 1700-1777). Heir to Gaspar van Wittel's lucid Enlightenment landscape painting, Joli enriched and personalized his own language through long stays in the main European capitals, where he made himself appreciated as a scenographer and landscape painter, finally reaching, precisely in Naples, the culmination of a long and successful career. Inside the royal carriage, represented in the first of the two paintings, the figure of the child king Ferdinand IV is clearly recognizable, ascended to the throne in 1759, at the age of eight, following the abdication of his father, Charles of Bourbon, who he had inherited the crown of Spain. Since, however, the latter is still represented next to his son, the parade, in which both sovereigns exceptionally participated, must be that of 8 September 1759, which was immediately held the coronation of Ferdinand and shortly before the departure of Charles for Spain.
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Title:The royal procession of Piedigrotta seen from the east