UPDATED at 4:35 p.m. March 13: Editor’s note: The museum announced on Friday it will be closed through March 29. Tours and public programs have been canceled through April 15. This exhibition is scheduled to run until June 14.

“Flesh & Blood” is the somewhat gory title of an absolutely superb new exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum, but don’t be put off by it, imagining that you will see lots of blood and wounded flesh. Instead, you will see the most important group of Italian Renaissance and Baroque paintings ever assembled for North Texas art lovers.

The subtitle is more instructive: “Italian Masterpieces from the Capodimonte Museum.” Yet, even it is a little obfuscating because most of us in North Texas have absolutely no idea what the Capodimonte Museum is.

What it is, however, is one of the greatest — and paradoxically among the least known — art museums in the world. Situated in an immense 18th-century royal palace inside an even more immense royal hunting preserve, the museum is named for its site — Capo di Monte — the top of one of the many mountains that ring Naples.

Entering the exhibition, we are introduced to an almost enamel-like 1813 landscape by the French classical painter Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy. It represents a sweeping view from the Capodimonte hunting preserve down the mountain to distant Naples, its immense natural bay and the mountains ringing this fabled body of water, including Mount Vesuvius, whose innocent plume of thin smoke belies its historical danger.

Sadly, this view does not include the massive red stucco and gray granite palace whose hundreds of decorated rooms house the Spanish Bourbon court that ruled Naples and were originally decorated by one of the very greatest private collections of European painting and sculpture ever formed, the Farnese Collection.

The Farnese Collection was assembled most ambitiously by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (a masterful portrait of whom, by Raphael, is in the next space), who went on to become Pope Paul III (with another sublime portrait by the Venetian master Titian facing us as we enter the space). This ambitious, ruthless, supremely intelligent man assembled for a huge private Roman palace, the Farnese Palace (now the French Embassy), a collection of Renaissance and Baroque paintings that were inherited through marriage by the Spanish crown and moved to Naples in the 18th century.

They are the core of a museum collection — later extended by the Spanish royal family, which ruled Naples — that rivals the Uffizi in Florence, the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan and the Vatican Museums. You will see a sublimely subtle Renaissance Adoration of the Christ Child by Lorenzo di Credi, Leonardo da Vinci’s fellow student at the Florentine workshop of Verrocchio, and, nearby, two absolute masterpieces painted by El Greco when he worked under Farnese patronage in Rome before going to Spain.

Florentine master Parmigianino's "Antea" is reputedly a painting of his young mistress. (Luciano Romano)

One is a penetrating portrait of the Renaissance miniaturist Giulio Clovio, studying his completed manuscript called The Farnese Hours (now in the Morgan Library and Museum in New York), while a turbulent, windy landscape roars out the window. Another is the painting that everyone will want to steal, a small, freely painted “re-creation” of a lost Greek painting described by the Roman author Pliny representing a young boy blowing a flame to life from ember — simply heart-stopping.

There are two paintings by the Florentine Mannerist master Parmigianino — one reputedly of his beautiful young mistress nicknamed Antea, whose tiny, perfectly formed head rises above an immense costume on a body that so dominates the painting that it seems to have been made for another, larger woman. Near it is the “cover girl,” the same artist’s Lucrezia — with the young, beautiful, perfectly coifed blond Roman woman, recently raped, stabbing herself in the heart. It is thought to be Parmigianino’s last painting.

The exhibition unfolds from there with masterpiece after masterpiece — indeed, the level of quality is so high that it makes even a jaded viewer of Old Master exhibitions gasp that the museum allowed no fewer than 40 large and important works to leave Naples. But the core of the exhibition is Italian Baroque painting, starting with Caravaggio’s time in Naples until the last decades of the 17th century. There has never been such a gathering in Texas, and, for that reason alone, it is a short crash course in one of the very highest moments in European art history.

At the last minute, the Naples museum was able to send to the Kimbell venue only (the exhibition opened in Seattle) the Flagellation of Christ by Caravaggio, one of that master’s most sublime and moving altarpieces, commissioned for a private family chapel in Naples in 1607. It is surely the greatest painting by Caravaggio ever to have been on exhibition in Texas and worthy of five minutes of quiet contemplation.

Bolognese painter Guido Reni's "Atalanta and Hippomenes" represents the end of a famous foot race recounted in Ovid’s "Metamorphoses." (Luciano Romano)

Next to it is another absolute masterpiece of monumental classical figure painting by the Bolognese painter Guido Reni. With its monumental figures whose white flesh resembles living marble, it represents the end of a famous foot race between the beautiful Atalanta and her would-be-beau Hippomenes recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The swirling lavender drapery and the headlong running pose of Hippomenes are without peer in any Baroque painting in Texas, and the beautiful young man looks back at his future wife as she bends down to pick up one of the three golden apples that he has thrown her way so that he can win both the race and her hand in marriage.

From here, one is only a quarter through the exhibition, and you almost need a rest in the cafe outside to gather strength to tackle the 30 or so paintings that remain. Although the exhibition is small, it is so intense and the level of pictorial accomplishment so high that you will want to give it time. I recommend splitting your visit into two or even three parts to allow sufficient time for your eyes and mind to rest and recalibrate before tackling another section.

I have already listed so many highlights, but there are others, too — the wonderful group of paintings by the Carracci brothers, whose private art academy in Bologna was the model for all future art academies in Europe; two outright masterpieces of the Spanish-born Neapolitan master Jusepe de Ribera, each greater than anything at the Meadows or the Kimbell by that hallowed artist; a truly sublime and complex altarpiece by the Neapolitan master Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, The Virgin of the Souls with Saints Clare and Francis, with an intensely moving figure of a levitating young man, gently held by angels as he reaches toward the heavenly Christ child in the arms of his mother.

Jusepe de Ribera's "Drunken Silenus" is one of two masterpieces by the Spanish-born Neapolitan painter to be included in the exhibition. (Luciano Romano)

For those of us who long to learn more about the contributions of female artists to European Old Master paintings, there is a truly violent and fabulous masterpiece by Artemisia Gentileschi of the young Old Testament woman Judith beheading Holofernes. With the compressed energy of its composition and its almost clinically violent subject, this painting itself might motivate you to get to Fort Worth before the end of March, when the painting will leave the Kimbell to join a full retrospective of Gentileschi’s work to open at the National Gallery in London.

The exhibition has a coda of Neapolitan still-life painting, which seems almost like an afterthought. Yet it, too, is scarcely the “sorbet-course" we might need after all this “flesh and blood,” because even these seemingly innocent pictures are powerful and ambitious in ways unusual for the genre. Indeed, it serves as the bud for a future exhibition devoted to the Baroque still-life in Italy that could rewrite a good deal of the history of that often-overlooked genre. Kudos, Kimbell. Thank you, Capodimonte.

Details

“Flesh & Blood: Italian Masterpieces from the Capodimonte Museum” runs through June 14 at the Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth. kimbell.org.