Equestrian statue of King of Naples Ferdinand I in Naples Italy

CountryItaly
Town:Naples
Year of creation:1829
Rider(s):Ferdinand I, King of Naples

Ferdinand I (1423 – 1494) was King of Naples from 1458 to 1494. He was an illegitimate son of Alfonso V of Aragon.
According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, “Ferdinand was gifted with great courage and real political ability, but his method of government was vicious and disastrous. His financial administration was based on oppressive and dishonest monopolies, and he was mercilessly severe and utterly treacherous towards his enemies.”
Ferdinand had many enemies and he was ruthless in response to any perceived slight. He even fiercely plotted against Pope Alexander VI, after he realized that the pontiff could not secure his position.
As further testimony to the latter, Jacob Burckhardt described his recreational activities as follows: “Besides hunting, which he practiced regardless of all rights of property, his pleasures were of two kinds: he liked to have his opponents near him, either alive in well-guarded prisons, or dead and embalmed, dressed in the costume which they wore in their lifetime.” Fearing no one, he would take great pleasure in conducting his guests on a tour of his prized “museum of mummies”.
Sculptor(s):Canova and Cali

Antonio Canova (1757 –1822) was an Italian Neoclassical sculptor, famous for his marble sculptures. Often regarded as the greatest of the Neoclassical artists, his sculpture was inspired by the Baroque and the classical revival, and has been characterised as having avoided the melodramatics of the former, and the cold artificiality of the latter.

Antonio Cali (1788 – 1866) was an Italian sculptor and a pupil of Canova and Thorvaldsen.

Description:

The famous sculptor Antonio Canova designed the equestrian statues of Charles III of Bourbon (1716–1788), the founding father of the Bourbon dynasty in Naples, and his son and successor Ferdinand IV of Naples, later named Ferdinand I (1751–1825), King of Naples and Sicily.

The sculptor Canova died before the completion of the statue of Ferdinand. Antonio Cali completed this work.

The entire project for the statues in the square was not one of Canova’s favourites. He accepted the original French commission when the plan was to dedicate the work to the then Emperor Napoleon. After the Napoleonic wars, as soon as the monarchy was restored, Ferdinand called Canova to Naples to discuss finishing the work and changing the subject of the statue to his father, Charles III, and to commission a comparable equestrian statue for himself. Canova complained to a friend that he had undertaken a long trip to discuss something that just as easily could have been discussed by letter. A statue of a second-rate king sitting on a horse did not quite get his 61-year-old juices flowing anymore: ‘I mean, of course, Ferdinand, is a total dud. His father, Charles III was brilliant and, perhaps the last of the great “benevolent monarchs” in the age of Absolutism in Europe’.

Ferdinand persuaded Canova to agree to do the second statue, but Canova pleaded ‘no time’ when the king tried to get a third statue out of him; of the king’s second and morganatic wife.

A mob threatened both statues in the wake of Garibaldi’s entry into Naples in 1860. Fortunately, a revolutionary priest jumped up on one of the statues and held back the frenzied wrecking crew by saying that they should save the statues because they could afterwards replace the two heads of the monarchs with those of Garibaldi and Victor Emanuel. This calmed the crowd.