I Fasti di Elisabetta Farnese Ritratto di una regina

The volume is the catalogue of the exhibition “I Fasti di Elisabetta Farnese. Ritratto di una Regina” presented at the Musei Civici di Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza from 2 December 2023 to 7 April 2024.

Devised and curated by art historians Antonella Gigli and Antonio Iommelli, the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue turn on a core collection of paintings now known as the “Fasti di Elisabetta”, painted in the first half of the 18th century by the court painter Ilario Mercanti known as Spolverini (Parma 1657 – Piacenza 1734). For the first time in the almost three hundred years since they were taken to Naples – the city where Charles of Bourbon, the son of Elisabetta Farnese and Philip V of Spain, transferred the Fasti and most of the artistic treasures belonging to the Farnese family – six paintings, already part of the cycle, will be exhibited in Piacenza, extraordinarily loaned for four months by the Royal Palace of Caserta and the City of Parma. Six important loans, therefore, which in addition to twenty other works – many of them from public and private collections – will enable the public to admire together, for the first time, the Fasti of Caserta and Parma, reunited for this occasion with those already present in Piacenza since 1928.

An ambitious project that will also make it possible to understand the extraordinary greatness and culture of Elisabetta (Parma 1692 – Madrid 1766), a singular woman, whose ambition and intelligence were widely known and appreciated by all her contemporaries, in particular King Philip V, her husband from 1714.