Gaining insight through a bird's-eye view. On the chorography of Naples in the Early Modern Era, in: Yannis Hadjinicolaou (ed.): Visual Engagements. Image practices and falconry, Berlin/Boston 2020, pp.272-296 (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Imaging Naples Today. The Urban-Scale Construction of the Visual Image
Proceedings of the International and Interdisciplinary Conference IMMAGINI? Brixen, Italy, 27–28 November 2017., 2017
This paper is part of the disciplinary framework of drawing. The forms of symbolic representation of Naples are explored, with particular attention being given to the construction of the visual image on an urban scale. The theme of the image represented here lies in the risks of the uncritical use of the image and, above all, of technological innovation when it only affects visual communication operations through the vacant mediatic use of the architectural envelope. The consideration between the aim of the image content and the risk of its (as well as the structure's) spectacularization is the ethical goal of this paper. Firstly, the experiences of street art recently carried out in cities, which, renewed in the aesthetic language, have produced significant images aimed at the recovery of abandoned buildings and/or the socio-cultural renewal of degraded suburbs) are discussed. Secondly, the two project proposals in the field of graphic design, aimed at regenerating the historical and/or social roles of specific urban contexts and building visual images capable of building identity and belonging to the community are also described.
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.
2021
With the proliferation of studies on and local programmes of urban regeneration on the one hand and the stereotypes and stigmatisation of peripheries on the other hand, a more comprehensive understanding of urban peripheries is needed today, when urbanisation is proceeding at a dizzying pace. Focusing on the northern peripheries of Naples, this article discusses the ways in which we can renew our understanding of urban peripheries by posing two views of 'the peripheral': a view from the city, which entails a valorisation of the knowledge, know-how and issues related to what is commonly known as urban regeneration, and a view from the periphery, where suburban ways of living raise emerging complexities and peripheral conditions that push towards a reconceptualisation of urban peripheral neighbourhoods. The peripheral area of Scampia was adopted as a research ground for reflecting on this reconceptualisation. In this respect, the northern urban peripheries of Naples were adopted as a case in reflecting on what lies at the urban-suburban intersection, and the conceptual observation was extended from the famed Scampia to the urban outskirts, which are currently undergoing uneven social fragilisation as they have been left behind in the regeneration processes of places such as Scampia. La proliferazione di studi e programmi di rigenerazione urbana su scala locale, ma anche gli stereotipi e le stigmatizzazioni che caratterizzano le periferie, inducono verso il bisogno di definire una comprensione analitica più profonda di cosa oggi è rappresentato con il termine "periferia urbana", in un'epoca in cui il processo di urbanizzazione procede incessante. Con un approfondimento sulle periferie di Napoli nord, l'articolo discute le modalità con cui è possibile ridefinire l'oggetto "periferia urbana" attraverso una duplice osservazione: uno sguardo "dalla città", che prende in considerazione la valorizzazione della conoscenza, delle competenze e delle questioni chiave radicate nel tema che è comunemente noto come rigenerazione urbana, ed uno sguardo "dalla periferia", dove le modalità di vita tipicamente sub-urbane sollevano complessità e condizioni periferiche emergenti che spingono verso una ri-concettualizzazione del quartiere urbano periferico. L'area periferica di Scampia viene adottata come campo di ricerca da cui far partire alcune riflessioni per questo esercizio di ri-concettualizzazione. In tal senso, l'articolo utilizza l'esempio delle periferie a nord di Napoli per una riflessione all'intersezione tra l'urbano e il suburbano, estendendo l'osservazione dalla ben nota Scampia al suo intorno, coinvolto in disordinati processi di fragilità sociali, in quanto lasciati indietro dai processi di rigenerazione che interessano luoghi come Scampia.
2018
Reading and Drawing A drawing (a plan, a section, an elevations, an axonometric projection or a perspective) can express or show the peculiar physical, spatial, technical, anthropic, historic condition of a place. From this statement, we developed the idea of drawing as a research investigating the different qualities of a place, aiming to discover and understand the several hidden stratified layers. Just like overlapping paper, if seen in the correct juxtaposition, they are capable to give new meaning to a project. Drawing and redrawing is a process through which the specific conditions of a place could be synthesized and therefore communicated. Drawing is a tool of knowledge: it allowed us to transpose the visually crowded Palazzo and its sensorially rich physical substance to a two-dimensional support. Some information clearly gets lost through this process, but much more is gained, since the action of drawing is mediated by perception and its influence on thought. A drawing is, in fact, always something more than a simple imitation of an object, including our own interpretation of the built environment translated in lines on paper. Drawing is something similar to reading and remembering, rather than something connected to creative intuition. As an act of memory, drawing implies subtly one's own culture, ideas, attitude, that mixes together with the perception of the physical space that is intended to be represented. All these features come together in what could seem like a trembling line, but containing in itself one's own
Cartography in the Kingdom of Naples during the Early Modern Period
2013
Naples during the early modern period, one encounters a number of “absences”: there are maps that circulated for only a very short time or among a very restricted group of people, maps that have been either forgotten or lost without a trace, and maps that were never completed or never printed. And whether this absence is an accidental or inherent characteristic of the works concerned, it is symptomatic of the cultural and political vassalage that southern Italy suffered from the early years of the sixteenth century right through to 1734 (that crucial year in Neapolitan history that saw the birth of an independent government). The period covered here runs from the founding of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies by Alfonso V of the House of Aragon in 1443 through the periods of viceroys under Spain from 1504 to the middle of the seventeenth century, coinciding almost exactly with the anti-Spanish riots of 1648 that had such severe effects on the city’s economic and social life. Along with...
The heritage of maps and city views (Vienna)
To be published in: S. Zapke/E. Gruber, Medieval Vienna in Context (A Companion to medieval Europe) Brill 2020., 2020
Pictorial traditions, to which we may reckon the products of early cartography as well as cityscapes, are among the witnesses to a distant past that probably most fascinate modern people. First, they allow a more detailed picture of the physical setting, a deeper understanding of the living environment and living conditions in former times. Interest in visual sources has significantly increased with the development of new approaches from cultural studies perspectives. In these, the "iconic" or "pictorial turn" plays a special role, with emphasis on the increased attention given in research to visual sources and to the development of a truly scholarly science of the image. 1 New and deeper insights have provided by efforts to see early pictorial evidence in every case as part of the circumstances of its specific genesis and impact. In so doing, research studies are brought together under the theoretical concept of "mediality", in which the importance of the medial form is considered within the interdisciplinary framework of studies of culture, literature, art, cartography and media. 2 The outer framework, within which the pictorial evidence for cities and landscapes formed and merged, is marked by a series of external as well as technical and intellectual developments. The great breakthrough was undoubtedly the advent of technologies of reproduction in the wake of the invention of printing in the late Middle Ages. Before then, depictions of town and country were limited by the possibilities offered by the graphic and 1 In relation to Vienna see Opll, Bild und Wahrnehmung der Stadt. -This article was completed in spring 2017. 2 See the survey of research in Stercken, "Medien und Vermittlung gesellschaftlicher Ordnung", pp. 212-25.