Review of Eloisa Dodero, Ancient Marbles in Naples in the Eighteenth Century: Findings, collections, dispersals (original) (raw)
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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.
Journal of the History of Collections, 2007
The Museo Mastrilli and the culture of collecting in Naples, 1700–1755
Journal of the History of Collections, 1992
This study reconstructs the private museum of 400 ancient vases and other classical antiquities owned by Felice Maria Mastrilli and displayed in the Palazzo di San Nicandro in Naples. The collection, formed between 1740 and 1755 through purchases and excavations conducted on family properties in Nola, was dispersed following Mastrilli's death. A number of the identifiable vases were acquired by Sir William Hamilton and illuminate his role in encouraging the reception of a Neo-Classkal aesthetic. On the basis of archival documents and an extensive set of unpublished drawings, the original display, narrative programme and iconographic interpretations of the vases are analyzed. The ‘Museo Mastrilli’ is assessed within the local Neapolitan context of antiquarian scholarship and amateur cabinets of the first half of the eighteenth century, a period that witnessed the first scholarly publications of vases, early attempts to systematize theirfigural representations and the emergence of a vigorous market in blackand red-figured pottery.
Materiali da Anzi al Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli: un addendum
SIRIS - Studi e Ricerche della Scuola di Specializzazione in Beni Archeologici di Matera, 2022
Between the late 18th and the first half of the 19th century, Anzi (PZ), a small village situated in the inner part of Basilicata, played a key role in Southern Italy’s archaeology. During that time, this relevant Lucanian site experienced a thriving archaeological phase with massif excavations and trade of antiquities, which led to the dispersion of a huge number of ancient artifact (mostly figured pottery) across public and private collections worldwide. A smaller quantity of them, instead, was gathered into the holdings of the Real Museo Borbonico. Within the Neapolitan Museum’s old funds, a corpus of 46 pieces definitively from Anzi has been recently (2021) identified, studied and published under the aegis of the Chair of Classical Archaeology at the University of Basilicata. In addition, seven more Italiote vases have been discovered through repository rearrangements made in the last two years. The analysis, interpretation, and re-contextualization of these findings constitute the main matter of this article, conceived as an addendum to the previous research conducted by the Lucanian Athenaeum. The aim is to further enhance our knowledge of Anzi’s archaeological heritage within the broader framework of ancient Lucania.
Venice’s international mercantile connections have led many scholars to focus on Venice as the main source for eastern encounters, but the court of Naples has received little attention, which had a steady flow of diplomatic embassies from the Ottoman, Mamluk, and Tunisian sultans throughout the end of the fifteenth century. The Turkish invasion of Otranto within the Neapolitan kingdom in the 1480s, for example, is rarely studied, and diplomatic relations between Turkey and Naples have largely gone unnoticed. Yet such diplomatic entanglements gave rise to encounters, occasions where objects became not only sites of cultural exchange but means through which different identities were performed and observed as well as translated. Already a mix of French, Catalan, and Italian influences, Naples’ relations with Islamic empires also contributed to the formation of this cultural centre. Records show that foreign embassies were recurrent throughout Aragonese rule, proffering gifts of leopards, lions, horses, as well as textiles, silver, and other precious objects. This article will investigate how these occasions gave rise to the performance of cultural identities and how the material objects in the exchanges—clothing, silver, porcelain—not only served as tools in articulating and forming those identities but also acted as material memories of exchanges. Furthermore it will pursue the nature of exchange itself, exploring how foreign goods could both be connected to ‘global’ concerns, while also influencing ‘local’ material culture. While many of the goods exchanged can no longer be traced, and many of the archival evidence in Naples is also obsolete, the daughters of the Aragonese kings who married into ruling families across Europe carried with them documents and objects, which provide the means to trace many of these goods. Ambassadorial reports found in archives across Italy can also be used to construct a lost history. Such artefacts and archival sources provide an important starting point to discuss the wider context of Naples as a centre of cultural interaction. This study will explore how diplomatic and trading networks across the Mediterranean were intrinsically linked to fifteenth-century collecting sensibilities. By doing so, it is possible to re-evaluate the court of Naples, situating it not as a passive consumer of goods from other centres, but as this study will argue, firmly as a centre itself that absorbed, translated and transformed foreign material cultures, artefacts and motifs which in turn were circulated across Italy and further afield.