Il Piccolo principe. Giuseppe Sanmartino alla Reggia di Caserta

The exhibition stems from the recent discovery, in the storerooms of the Royal Palace of Caserta, of a life-size marble portrait of a newborn baby by Giuseppe Sanmartino, identified as the Royal Infant Charles Titus of Bourbon, the firstborn son of King Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina of Austria. The sculpture was created at the instigation of Queen Maria Carolina, who, after giving birth in 1775 to the heir who would consolidate the Bourbon dynasty on the throne of Naples, commissioned Sanmartino, the renowned artist of the Veiled Christ in the Sansevero Chapel and the Kingdom's first sculptor, to create a life-size portrait of the newborn Prince Charles Titus. Subjected to careful diagnostic investigations and meticulous restoration in the museum's laboratories, Giuseppe Sanmartino's Portrait of the Royal Infant Charles Titus of Bourbon is the rediscovery around which the exhibition brings together works of various nature, related to the days that saw the birth of the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Naples.