Introduction: Directions to Baroque Naples (original) (raw)
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International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 2016
Famously, the historiography of Naples has provided much grist to the scholarly mill. How should historians explain the city's ostensible failure? Should they blame institutions like the Church or, more recently, the Camorra? Did the city's early modern Spanish monarchs lay the seeds of decline, exploiting a unwilling populace? Or are the people themselves the problem, lazy, chaotic and devious? (As Annalisa Marzano reminds us here, Goethe pointed out to his Northern European readers that it was not the case that Neapolitans did not work; instead, he noted, 'they are intent on enjoying themselves even while at work' [p. 273].) Naples's 'failure', of course, is relative; but the fierce debates, the destruction of many archival records in the Second World War and the city's feudal-monarchical past, anomalous in comparison with the northern Italian communal norm, have all tended to encourage historians who are less interested in this teleological question to turn their attentions elsewhere. As a by-product of this neglect, there are relatively few studies of Naples's classical heritage. Typically, the city has been overshadowed by studies of Rome-with the consequent assumption that developments in Naples should resemble those of its northern neighbour-and by accounts of the discovery and influence of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The wider historiographical situation is changing. For historians of the Renaissance, for example, Naples is now seen not as a failed Italian commune, but as a powerful Mediterranean and European city, and as a central node in Spanish
British Library Additional MS 12228, a royal version of the Arthurian Meliadus romance, was begun in Naples after May 1352 by Cristoforo Orimina’s workshop. The Neapolitan Angevins inserted themselves visually into the manuscript to bolster their clams to chivalrous valor and kingly legitimacy. Here Meliadus is a stand-in for Louis of Taranto, husband of Queen Giovanna I. Orimina carried the text throughout the manuscript but illustrations only to folio 259v. Then there is a change in illustration hand and style by a quattrocento artist. I propose that folios 259v–275v depict Naples as the stand-in for Arthurian Leonnois and that these preparatory drawings contain one of the city’s earliest, complete, and detailed perspectives from the Campus Neapolitanus, more accurate than the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Charles III cassone of c.1382. To the right (recto) spreads King Arthur’s camp. To the left, on the facing versos, appears the characteristic combination of Ponte della Maddalena (Guizzardo) crossing over the Sebeto to Porta Maddalena (Carmine), marked throughout by the same high-arched, crenellated, and shallow rectangular form depicted in the Metropolitan’s cassone. Behind them rises the church of Sant’Agostino alla Zecca with its three-tiered tower, turret with its orb and cross, and bifore. In the center Castel Capuano. To the right S. Giovanni a Carbonara, here with a campanile contemporary with the original building. We will compare and verify this topography with the same relationships in the Tavola Strozzi of 1472/73. These illustrations bear a close relationship to a drawing for the eventual program for the triumphal arch of Alfonso I at Castel Nuovo. The drawing (now in Rotterdam) is attributed to Pisanello. Comparing these BL drawings to Pisanello’s known corpus, I note the close correspondences in chivalric subject matter, composition, perspective, drawing style and technique, and individual details of architecture, arms, armor, horses, and combat. Pisanello accepted Alfonso’s invitation to work in Naples between 1449 and the mid-1450s and was appointed court artist to do disegni, including manuscript illustration. I propose that Pisanello’s authorship is supported by the visual evidence and warrants further investigation. If accepted, this thesis would date this view of Naples to c.1450.
Italian Studies, 2007
The growing historiography on the construction of the stereotype of the South in the history of modern Italy has exposed its persistence in the character of the lazzaroni of Naples and its elaboration in Grand Tour accounts of Naples in the late eighteenth century. This article demonstrates that, despite this ethnographic interest in the popular culture of the streets of the city, travellers were unable to escape existing stereotypes of the Neapolitan in their descriptions and, in fact, strengthened them by creating an urban stereotype of the picturesque which survives into the modern period.
Representation and Self-Perception: Plans and Views of Naples in Early Modern Period
A Companion to Early Modern Naples, Brill, 2013
lntroduction Naples rarely represents itself. This simple observation emerges clearly when one studies the iconography of the city in the early modern peri od. Images of the city produced throughout the Renaissance rarely offered any self-celebration of the city or of the powers ruling there; these images were by and large produced by artists from distant areas and cultures who did not participate in the city's Iife. The first Naples perspective pian, an interesting hyhrid of large-scale mapping and vedutlsmo entirely planned, designed, and engraved in Naples, did not appear until16z7, and the first topographic map ofthe city was not produced until1750.1 These dates mark an apparent inability of the Naples elites to represent thernselves. The first great, farnous image of the city, the late Is th-centmy Tavola Strozzi ( , was most Iikely painted in Florence, by an artist who may never have even seen Naples and gave it a northern atmosphere, characterized by steeples and steep roofs, unfit to the Mediterranean reality of Nap les's round domes and terraces.
Journal of Art Historiography, 2023
In Baroquemania, Laura Moure Cecchini takes her readers on a fascinating, lesstravelled journey through Italian art from the fin de siècle to the end of the Second World War, the years when Italy was consolidating its position as a nation state. The book focuses on the Baroque, at a time when the main accepted aesthetic paradigms were first decadent and futurist aesthetics, and later rationalism. How did the Baroque feature within a landscape that intentionally seemed to exclude it? On which grounds-political, economic, social or aesthetic-was the Baroque marginalised from the official artistic history of the new nation state? And why could the Baroque not be an integral part of Italian national identity? These are just some of the questions that naturally arise from the book's main argument that 'by reinventing Baroque forms in their artistic and architectural practices, Italians confronted their fears about the past and imagined the future of their nation.' 1 The Baroque therefore becomes a tool for questioning certain fundamental aspects of the nation-forming process, including some that are not quantifiable historically, socially or economically. Moreover, investigating both the presence of Baroque art and its theorisation calls for a re-evaluation of key discussions about Italian artistic culture: the relationship between regionalism and nationalism, Italy's internationalism, and the development of modernism. In so doing, by re-inscribing the Baroque within Italy's intellectual and artistic landscapes, Baroquemania challenges the alleged hegemony of the classical tradition or of 1930s rationalism in unidirectionally shaping Italian culture. Unlike the consolidated classical tradition and the solid modernity of rationalism, the anti-classical Baroque, with its complex and ambivalent visual repertoire, enabled Italians to question rather than to affirm their newly found national identity, their sense of belonging to a modern nation, and even their faith in a bright future. Or, in the author's own words: 'The afterlives of the Baroque in modern Italy, and its temporal and conceptual destabilisation, allowed Italians to work through a crisis of modernity and develop a distinctively Italian modern approach to visual culture.' 2
THE COMPANIONS TO THE HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE General Editor: Harry Francis Mallgrave Volume I Renaissance and Baroque Architecture Edited by Alina Payne, 2016
On August 19, 1925 Walter Benjamin published in Frankfurter Zeitung a report from Naples, which was the first of a series dedicated to European cities. “Fabulous travel accounts,” he wrote, “attributed colors to a town that is grey instead, a red grey or ochre, a white-grey. It is really grey compared to the sky and the sea. ... The town is built on the rocks. Looking from the top, near Castel San Martino, where the shouts do not reach you, it lies dead in the twilight, one with the rock. You can hardly see a strip of shore and the buildings that throng together behind it.” Why should Naples, a town on the blue Mediterranean, have appeared to Benjamin grey and dead, indistinguishable from the rock on which it stands? The question, and Benjamin’s acute observation, may be answered by considering the long period of Spanish supremacy over Naples between 1503 and 1707 when these conditions were determined. This was the period when the town assumed a new urban configuration that also engendered an architectural development of high quality. It is therefore as the capital city of a vast viceroyalty that Naples occupies us here (in particular architectural developement in Lecce and in L’Aquila). This chapter focuses on this period also because it was precisely at this time that the social and economic contradictions, problems, and tensions emerged that were to affect the city for centuries to come.