Publications and Insights

Between 1726 and 1750, Luigi Vanvitelli had committed himself with limited scope projects commissioned by the Papal State or by other religious orders, such as extensions and renovations. The assignment from king Charles of Bourbon, was instead contemplating the construction of a new palace for a new capital, in a royal site of vast proportions and devoid of conditioning as regards the surrounding urban fabric, still formed by small villages such as Torre , Ercole and Sala.

The rich collection of Vanvitellian drawings, preserved at the Royal Palace of Caserta, constitutes eighty percent of the known graphic production of the Vanvitelli family and represents one of the largest collections of the Dutch painter Gaspar Van Wittel, two hundred and sixty drawings by the architect Luigi Vanvitelli and twenty-one by his son Carlo. The drawings arrived in Caserta in 1933, by the will of the then Superintendent Gino Chierici, coming from a larger fund preserved in Naples and acquired by the state in various circumstances.

In the drawings that Vanvitelli presented to the Royal family in 1751, neither the Court Theater nor the helical staircase are present. It is only in the Declaration of Drawings of 1756 that these wonderful works of architecture are included in the blueprint. There is also a version of the Declaration of Drawings owned by the Getty Research Institute, at the Getty Library in Los Angeles where the Theater is present but not the elliptical-based staircase.