THE Soprintendenza delle Belle Arte of Naples under the direction of Professor Raffaello Causa is organising an exhibition to celebrate the artistic achievements of the Bourbon regime in Naples during the reigns of Charles and Ferdinand IV, Kings of the two Sicilies, that is to say in effect from 1734 when Charles arrived to take over his throne till 1805 when Ferdinand took refuge from the French in Sicily.

FEW Neapolitan painters of the seventeenth or eighteenth century have enjoyed a critical success comparable to the 'rediscovery' of Francesco Solimena in the last twenty years. The frequent additions to the catalogue of his work established by Ferdinando Bologna as long ago as 1958, and the discovery in Neopolitan and foreign archives of numerous documents relating to his activity, call urgently for a second edition of Bologna's excellent monograph.

THE Sculpture Department of the Staatliche Museen, Berlin-Dahlem has recently acquired a sculptural group which represents St Michael, the archangel, casting the rebel Lucifer into the flames of Hell. The group is mounted on an elegant pedestal with an octagonal base, which rests on four winged herms. The two principal figures are executed in silver, the flames of Hell are in bronze painted red, and the pedestal is in a fruit-wood. All the other ornamental parts are in the decoration of the pedestal, which is jasper. The height of the whole complex is 66cm and the width at the broadest diameter of the base is 33cm.

Mauvaise langue, bas bleu, and certainly a member of what we would call today the Radical-Chic, Lady Morgan, so well informed about everything, so prejudiced a partisan, was delighted to criticise most of what she saw during her visit to Naples towards the end of the reign of Ferdinand IV (who had by then become Ferdinand I as decided by the Congress of Vienna). Lady Morgan's main victim was Queen Maria Carolina who had died a few years before, in Vienna.

For Francesco de Mura (1696- 1784), who was in his day the undisputed leader of the Neapolitan School and the favourite of the reigning King, we have neither a monograph nor an oeuvre catalogue nor an article that deals with the whole sweep of his career, though there are some excellent studies that treat individual aspects of it. To the corpus of this still undervalued master we can add four previously unpublished works, all of them in the Molinari Pradelli Collection at Villa Marana near Bologna.

Abilgaard, Barry, Cozens, David, Ehrensvard, Fuseli... one can virtually fill an alphabet with foreign artists who visited Naples in the second half of the eighteenth century. Admittedly less of an acknowledged artistic centre than Rome, Naples was larger and by consensus livelier. Painters and grander tourists alike found the physical glories of the country- side a considerable compensation for the relative lack of an academic artistic tradition, while the treasures of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and the Farnese collection attracted many a burgeoning neo- classicist.