Seventeenth-century Naples Research Articles

Artists and their economic context. A comparison of payments to painters Caravaggio and Luca Giordano at the Pio Monte della Misericordia in seventeenth-century Naples

ABSTRACT Catholic confraternities in early modern Europe adopted detailed accounting practices which reveal their social context. This study applies an accounting [in] history approach to the creative industries. We argue that confraternities' accounting books can help better appreciate prices paid to famous masters by contrasting them with payments to lesser-known artists and skilled craftsmen. After analysing 1118 payments related to a construction project at the Pio Monte della Misericordia (1659–1679), a Catholic confraternity in Naples, we focus on the contemporary acquisition of an altarpiece by the painter Luca Giordano. The analysis shows that its purchase accounted for a minor share of the expenses for the construction project, and that the main contribution of the Pio Monte to the creative industries was the cumulative payments to skilled craftsmen. Nonetheless, the value of Giordano's painting was significantly higher than unitary payments to minor artists. We then make a comparison with the price paid by the Pio Monte in 1606–1607 to Caravaggio for a similar painting, showing that payments to Giordano and Caravaggio were in line with both artists' market rates and those of similar painters in Naples and Rome. The study thus discusses how accounting sources situate artists within the creative industries of the past.

Tax Erosion in Seventeenth-Century Naples: Tommaso Campanella on Causes and Remedies

Writing in the first decade of the seventeenth century, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) studied tax erosion and proposed remedies that he promised would “transform a harm into a benefit.” The factual evolution of tax revenues and prices under the monetary and fiscal systems of his time confirms his diagnosis. A simple model built on his assumptions shows how clipping produces tax erosion in a commodity money system, and it illustrates how Campanella's plan not only eliminates this harm but also produces the benefit of higher government purchases at the expense of rentiers. A broader reading of his work clarifies the distributional implications of his proposal in the light of his radical egalitarianism and his goal of a united, harmonious society.

A Fake Saint and the True Church: The Story of a Forgery in Seventeenth-Century Naples, by Stefania Tutino

In this short, accessible and lively microhistory, Stefania Tutino explores the way early modern Catholic intellectuals navigated the often subtle differences between truth and authenticity. The book centres on an obscure episode in post-Tridentine Catholic history, the attempt of Carlo Calà, the Duke of Diano and a prominent member of the Neapolitan viceregal administration, to promote the canonisation of his ancestor Giovanni Calà. At first glance, the story seems simple enough: Calà hoped to improve his own standing in Neapolitan society by tracing his lineage back to a heroic ancestor, whose social significance would have been divinely sanctioned. But there was just one problem: the stories of Giovanni Calà—and possibly his very existence—were forged. Having discovered traces of this intrigue in the archives, Tutino began tracking down every available source and, à la Carlo Ginzburg, ‘squeezing’ them for every last drop of juicy detail (p. 10). The story begins in Naples, where Carlo Calà is a noted jurist eager to advance his fortune. His opportunity is presented by Ferrante Stocchi, who tells him about an illustrious Calà ancestor from Calabria who had served under the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI before leaving the military to become a hermit. He became a follower of Joachim of Fiore, a famous medieval Italian prophet who himself has long been proposed for canonisation (and whose case has never been completed). Stocchi provided Calà with print and manuscript texts, and helped him to find the grave of his ancestor, which contained gigantic bones and a lead ball containing a vita of Giovanni Calà. As more manuscripts continued to surface, Carlo Calà began to write a book, part history, part vita and part genealogy, to promote his ancestor’s cause and draw a clear connection to himself. This book told of Giovanni’s spectacular feats in secular and religious life; in the former he defeated a hundred mounted soldiers while alone and on foot, fought a duel against ten men and killed them all, and even beheaded a giant (as a giant himself, he was more than capable), before sustaining not one, but three life-threatening wounds in battle. He was miraculously saved, and then left military life to follow Joachim, in the process gaining the gift of prophecy and the ability to perform miracles himself. His miracles included resurrecting five people, stopping a plague, walking on water, and effecting numerous miraculous cures.

Stefania Tutino, A Fake Saint and the True Church: The Story of a Forgery in Seventeenth-Century Naples

Stefania Tutino, A Fake Saint and the True Church: The Story of a Forgery in Seventeenth-Century Naples

THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE CELLO IN NAPLES: GIOVANNI BONONCINI, ROCCO GRECO AND GAETANO FRANCONE IN A FORGOTTEN MANUSCRIPT COLLECTION

ABSTRACTThe analysis of a forgotten source sheds light on the early history of the cello in seventeenth-century Naples. The manuscript MS 2-D-13, held in the library of the Montecassino Abbey, dates from around 1699 and contains two unknown cello sonatas by Giovanni Bononcini, together with passacaglias, sonatas for two ‘violas’ and elaborations over antiphons by Gaetano Francone and Rocco Greco, two prominent string performers and teachers in Naples. A study of this remarkable source helps to clarify the nomenclature of the bass violins in use in the city and offers new evidence on the practice of continuo realization at the cello, as well as on the connections with partimento practice. This collection is thus of critical importance for a discussion of the technical achievements and developments of the cello repertory in Naples before the emergence of the celebrated generation of Neapolitan cello virtuosi in the early years of the eighteenth century.

The Money Doctors of Seventeenth-Century Naples

A collection of texts printed in early seventeenth-century Naples exemplifies the intersection between economic history and the history of thought. A slowly worsening monetary situation led authorities, unsure of what they could and should do, to solicit diagnostics and cures. The unfolding debate is challenging to analyze: participants viewed events through the lenses of their background, training, and interest. Merchant experts competed with university graduates and technical officials. These texts offer us a rich but contradictory set of observations and interpretations in what constitutes an early attempt at applied economic analysis and policy advice.

The Seven Works of Mercy

This article offers a new interpretation of Caravaggio’s The Seven Works of Mercy by reading the seminal baroque painting through the lens of its context of production. Commissioned by the philanthropic association of the Pio Monte del Misericordia, Caravaggio’s artwork is therefore used as a gateway to the philosophical, religious and astrological beliefs of its members. While shedding light on the wider circulation of ideas on caritas and natural magic for which Tommaso Campanella would be a benchmark figure, the article reconciles previous interpretations of the painting that had portrayed Caravaggio as either the painter of nature or the heterodox virtuoso of symbols. By reframing these two levels of analysis as components of a symbiotic, rather than mutually exclusive relationship, the article illuminates the tenacity of pagan references, pauperist religious movements and astrological beliefs in the cultural debate of early seventeenth-century Naples.

From “The Origin” to “The Treasure Chest”: The Short Stories of Soledad Puértolas

From “The Origin” to “The Treasure Chest”: The Short Stories of Soledad Puértolas Francisca González Arias The thematic universe and constellation of motifs of Soledad Puértolas’s short stories remain constant, from her first collection, Una enfermedad moral, published thirty years ago, to her most recent, Compañeras de viaje, five collections comprising seventy-three stories. Apart from Puértolas’s short stories, in the following pages, I will also refer to two of the three loosely connected episodes that compose her second novel, Burdeos. Fortuitous encounters produce meaningful connections that relieve the loneliness of modern urban life, epiphanies ensue upon the dispelling of self-doubt and the reaffirmation of identity, and Michel de Montaigne’s themes of friendship and self-knowledge hover over Burdeos and extend to Puértolas’s most recent stories. A long line of travelers culminates in Compañeras de viaje. The astonishing diversity of locations—France, England, California, Venice, Rome, Norway, Spanish North Africa, Tunisia, seventeenth-century Naples, and Central Europe—abates as the author sets more of her stories in an urban Spain; she newly evokes, in Compañeras de viaje, the last decade of Franco’s Spain, a context that did not appear in the early stories. Travel both instigates and parallels the inner journey. In “Gente que vino a mi boda,” from the collection of the same title, the confined space of the narrator’s dwelling only highlights how far she has come in her attainment of self-esteem, embodied in her mastery of a skill that eluded her as a child: “porque ya mi vida se limita a coser, a sentarme en este rincón del cuarto tan bien provisto de todo lo que necesito, tan cerca de este mueble de cajones en el que se contiene mi universo, los hilos, las telas, las agujas, esta butaca en la que me hundo suavemente . . . y la música de la radio llena el cuarto, la música y la voz del locutor” (206). She is self-contained, but not isolated, mindful of the community of women: “[A]l escuchar esa voz, me siento unida, desde mi rincón solitario, a todas las otras personas a quienes la voz del locutor se dirige también. Somos muchas, me digo” (207). Motifs and descriptions recur. A penchant for the evocation of luminosity: from the sunset reflected on the Pacific in the last episode of Burdeos to the sense of well-being infused by the sunlight of the Galician shore in “Regattas” in Compañeras de viaje, the author’s works celebrate the enjoyment of life as a value in itself. Light as inner clarity, the glimpse of change, an affirmation of the self. The narrator of “Camino a Houmt Souk,” from Adiós a las novias, revels in the light of the Tunisian landscape: “[M]e invadió una gran alegría, una sensación de plenitud, de saberme capaz de recrearme en cada matiz de la luz, la tibieza, la dulce caída de la tarde” (190), enabling the revelation, like the one that dawns on Lilly in the last episode of Burdeos, that she should forge her fate without depending on any man. And so, Enric’s card was lost forever: self-discovery punctuated by the searing light visible from the airplane window on the return trip: “brillante luz blanca, hiriente, entre las nubes” (196). Though the narrator of “Los sueños no son sueños,” also from Adiós a las novias, sought to recreate in her home the light-filled rooms of her childhood, she has yet to shed the insecurities and fears represented by the dark corridor of her nightmares. In a dream, her husband’s rebuke, “Tienes que aprender a vivir sola” (147), motivates her upon waking to place herself in front of the window to receive the sun’s first rays that normally fall upon him, representing her awakening from passivity to action. The motif of wine, central to Burdeos, is highlighted in Pauline’s episode, as she savors the wine sent to her by a woman she barely knew: “Aquel líquido rojo oscuro, lleno de luz, [End Page xvii] de sombras y matices...

Artists, Patrons, and Trust in Seventeenth-Century Naples: The Case of the Certosa di San Martino

The present article explores the theme of trust, as conceived by Paolo Mattia Doria, with reference to the professional relationships forged between artists and patrons at the Carthusian monastery in Naples, the Certosa di San Martino, during the seventeenth century. This specific case study is of particular relevance for several reasons. First, it falls within the chronological scope of Spanish viceregal rule observed by Doria. Second, the Carthusian monks at San Martino employed a large number of painters, sculptors, architects, embroiderers, and silversmiths in redecorating their monastery, and they kept careful records of their payments to these artists. The payments, conserved in the Archivio di Stato in Naples, provide a body of recorded transactions that can rarely be reconstructed in any other industry in the city during this period. Third, the amount of money spent by the Carthusians on refurbishing and redecorating their monastery assumes macro-economic proportions. The Carthusian monks paid the premier sculptor-architect in Naples, Cosimo Fanzago, a total of 57,000 ducats over the course of 33 years of work at San Martino, thereby producing an average of 1,900 ducats worth of architectural sculpture at the monastery per year.

From Propaganda to Science: Looking at the World of Academies in Early Seventeenth-century Naples

Early seventeenth-century Naples was a fragmented society where individual communities had their own religious and secular rulers. Locally deployed confraternities, saints and political representatives granted special protection to single groups, thus becoming symbols of the various districts, corporations, and nationalities settled in the city. The delicate task of managing the spiritual and the political dimension of Neapolitan life favored forms of power interaction between politics and religion that often served a wider need for propaganda. Within this context, academies were commissioned to produce art and choreographed spectacles that provided an idealized and exportable image of Naples, emphasizing symbols of civic unity, political strength and economic stability. In a world where the relationship between people and rulers was far from being peaceful. Contemporary historiography has looked at Italian academies in different ways, though with little attention to those in Naples. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the publication of pioneering works by Carlo Minieri Riccio, Lorenzo Giustiniani, and later on Michele Maylender discovered valuable material on the world of southern Italian academies. By adopting a methodology aimed at collecting data on the number of academies and their members these works became reference tools for scholars. Benedetto Croce’s criticism of seventeenth-century Neapolitan academies as being aspects of the cultural decline that affected Baroque Italy played an important role in cementing a negative perception of this period. These dismissive positions, however, have been cautiously reassessed in view of an increasing scholarly interest in exploring the importance of academies in early modern Italy. Recent scholarship, for example, such as Simone Testa’s work on the transnational impact of Italian academies, has convincingly shown how they were a cultural phenomenon intrinsically linked with the development of a European Republique des Lettres. Moreover, the new Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project - ‘Italian academies 1525-1700: the first intellectual networks of early modern Europe’- has led to a major reassessment of how traditional historiography has looked at early modern Italian academies. By bringing to light hitherto unknown material concerning academies that flourished in Naples and other major Italian centers throughout the Italian peninsula this project has demonstrated that academies were major platforms which, on the one hand, promoted an intellectual debate on science, literature, and visual arts, and on the other, often functioned as institutions promoting political and religious propaganda.

Music in Seventeenth-Century Naples: Francesco Provenzale (1624–1704) (review)

Music in Seventeenth-Century Naples: Francesco (1624-1704). By Dinko Fabris. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. [xx, 310 p. ISBN- 10 0754637212; ISBN-13 9780754637219. $99.95.] Illustrations, music examples, references, index. In spite of central role of Naples in cultural and artistic of seventeenthcentury Europe and evident interest in musical scene, only a few studies on institutions, personalities, and events of music in Naples have been available in English. Hence publication of Music in Seventeenth-Century Naples: Francesco (1624-1704) by Dinko Fabris is a significant addition to literature. Given his deep knowledge and long familiarity with sources of history of music in Naples, Fabris was certainly right person for task. As author points out in preface, however, volume is not a comprehensive history of seventeenthcentury music in Naples; rather it examines activity of city's most representative musician, Francesco Provenzale, whose works are discussed within context of events and institutions of time. The succession of eight chapters does not follow a traditional life and work arrangement, thereby rendering book certainly more readable and entertaining, but also making it harder at times to retrieve essential facts of Provenzale's biography. Fabris favors an anthropological approach which emerges particularly in his first chapter, La citta della festa-this title oddly enough remains untranslated, possibly as an homage to multifaceted anthropological connotations implied in Italian since Gino Stefani's studies on symbolic meanings of ritual celebrations. In chapter author gives a description of countless festivities that marked year through famous account of Jean- Jacques Bourchard's travel in Naples in 1632. It is certainly interesting to browse through month-by month plan of religious and civic events; however, as a result of focusing on Bourchard's account, Fabris overlooks or makes only passing mention of important aspects of political propaganda and public displays of power embodied in these ceremonials. The book originated as Fabris's dissertation (Music in Seventeenth-Century Naples: The Case of Francesco (1624- 1704) [Ph.D. diss., University of London, 2002]) and probably accounts for lack of meticulous revision. In particular, chapter 3 (The Four Conserva toires) and second part of first chapter remain in limbo, at times too speculative or too superficial in their descriptions of main musical institutions in Naples. The author himself seems to be aware of risks, when he warns that this discussion . . . only reveals an over-simplified collection of data which may constitute a danger (p. 17). Disappointingly sketchy is also discussion of Neapolitan Instrumental Music in Age of Provenzale in sixth chapter (Chamber and Instrumental Music) probably due to fact that no pieces of purely instrumental music can with any certainty be attributed to Francesco Provenzale (p. 202). The principal merit of book is extensive archival research done by author and wealth of (most previously unpublished) that he presents to support discussion of Provenzale's activity. We can only regret decision to omit the impressive mass of about 600 documents (p. xvi) that formed appendix of author's dissertation. Notwithstanding large quantity of scrutinized, author does not shed new light on obscure period of Provenzale's training and early activity, to point that he is forced to acknowledge the total absence of information on Pro - ven zale prior to 1658 (p. 35). I would like to mention here a brief document that seems to have slipped by Fabris's scrutiny and might help to partly disperse dense fog surrounding early years of Provenzale. …

Diane Wolfthal. Review of "Fierce Reality: Italian Masters from Seventeenth Century Naples" by Thomas Loughman and "Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Treasures from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam" by Penelope Hunter-Stiebel.

Diane Wolfthal. Review of "Fierce Reality: Italian Masters from Seventeenth Century Naples" by Thomas Loughman and "Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Treasures from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam" by Penelope Hunter-Stiebel.

Spanish Celebrations in Seventeenth-Century Naples

Spanish Celebrations in Seventeenth-Century Naples

From the Baroque to the Postmodern: Notes on a Translation from Giambattista Basile's The Tale of Tales

This contribution offers one of Giambattista Basile's most suggestive, scintillating, and disturbing tales--The Old Woman Who Was Skinned--in full translation. The translation is accompnaied by a commentary in two sets of footnotes. One set of notes explores how Basile revisits fairy-tale form and content, and how his highly original rhetorical strategies become an integral part of this process. These notes also investigate affinities between Basile's aesthetic sensibility and those of our own--postmodern--time, and reflect briefly on the challenges in translating such a text. A second set of notes offers information on social, historical, cultural, and politicals aspects of everyday life in seventeenth-century Naples.

The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution

The Monster in the Machine tracks the ways in which human beings were defined in contrast to supernatural and demonic creatures during the time of the Scientific Revolution. Zakiya Hanafi recreates scenes of Italian life and culture from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries to show how monsters were conceptualized at this particular locale and historical juncture—a period when the sacred was being supplanted by a secular, decidedly nonmagical way of looking at the world. Noting that the word “monster” is derived from the Latin for “omen” or “warning,” Hanafi explores the monster’s early identity as a portent or messenger from God. Although monsters have always been considered “whatever we are not,” they gradually were tranformed into mechanical devices when new discoveries in science and medicine revealed the mechanical nature of the human body. In analyzing the historical literature of monstrosity, magic, and museum collections, Hanafi uses contemporary theory and the philosophy of technology to illuminate the timeless significance of the monster theme. She elaborates the association between women and the monstrous in medical literature and sheds new light on the work of Vico—particularly his notion of the conatus —by relating it to Vico’s own health. By explicating obscure and fascinating texts from such disciplines as medicine and poetics, she invites the reader to the piazzas and pulpits of seventeenth-century Naples, where poets, courtiers, and Jesuit preachers used grotesque figures of speech to captivate audiences with their monstrous wit. Drawing from a variety of texts from medicine, moral philosophy, and poetics, Hanafi’s guided tour through this baroque museum of ideas will interest readers in comparative literature, Italian literature, history of ideas, history of science, art history, poetics, women’s studies, and philosophy.

'Senza il minimo scrupolo': Artists as dealers in seventeenth-century Naples

'Senza il minimo scrupolo': Artists as dealers in seventeenth-century Naples

The Evolution of History Painting: Masaniello's Revolt and other Disasters in Seventeenth-Century Naples

This article focuses on history painting of contemporary events at the mid-seventeenth-century site of its intersection with the development of popular genre and the image and idea of the artist as revolutionary. Analysis of representations of three events in Naples—the eruption of Vesuvius, the plague, and Masaniello's revolt, in which several painters were said to have participated—provides a framework for examining issues surrounding the visualization of history as narrative, the function of such works as documentation and propaganda, their audiences, and subsequent interpretations.

The Evolution of History Painting: Masaniello's Revolt and Other Disasters in Seventeenth-Century Naples

The Evolution of History Painting: Masaniello's Revolt and Other Disasters in Seventeenth-Century Naples