Toward a history of the Trecento diptych: Format, materiality, and mobility in a corpus of diptychs from Angevin Naples

Abstract

Abstract Laying the groundwork for a larger project, this essay brings together for the first time a working corpus of diptychs connected with the Angevin court in Naples in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Comprising both surviving diptychs and diptychs now lost but recorded in inventories, this body of material reveals that objects of this type were commissioned and collected in significant numbers at the Neapolitan court, in a range of sizes, mediums, and subjects, and were produced by workshops linked not only to Naples but also to central Italy, Genoa, and the Eastern Mediterranean. In turn, diptychs in Naples raise larger questions about the histories, materialities, and meanings of the format in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Europe and the Mediterranean. Above all, the objects brought together here press us to set diptychs in motion through networks of artworks, artists, and patrons on the move across the Mediterranean.