The second largest city in 17th-century Europe, Naples constituted a vital Mediterranean center in which the Spanish Habsburgs, the clergy, and Neapolitan aristocracy, together with the resident merchants, and other members of the growing professional classes jostled for space and prestige. Their competing programs of building and patronage created a booming art market and spurred painters such as Jusepe de Ribera, Massimo Stanzione, Salvator Rosa, and Luca Giordano as well as foreign artists such as Caravaggio, Domenichino, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Giovanni Lanfranco to extraordinary heights of achievement. This new reading of 17th-century Italian Baroque art explores the social, material, and economic history of painting, revealing how artists, agents, and the owners of artworks interacted to form a complex and mutually sustaining art world. Through such topics as artistic rivalry and anti-foreign labor agitation, art dealing and forgery, cultural diplomacy, and the rise of the independently arranged art exhibition, Christopher R. Marshall illuminates the rich interconnections between artistic practice and patronage, business considerations, and the spirit of entrepreneurialism in Baroque Italy.

2011 Winner of the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize of the Renaissance Society of America Naples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries managed to maintain a distinct social character while under Spanish rule. John A. Marino's study explores how the population of the city of Naples constructed their identity in the face of Spanish domination. As Western Europe’s largest city, early modern Naples was a world unto itself. Its politics were decentralized and its neighborhoods diverse. Clergy, nobles, and commoners struggled to assert political and cultural power. Looking at these three groups, Marino unravels their complex interplay to show how such civic rituals as parades and festival days fostered a unified Neapolitan identity through the assimilation of Aragonese customs, Burgundian models, and Spanish governance. He discusses why the relationship between mythical and religious representations in ritual practices allowed Naples's inhabitants to identify themselves as citizens of an illustrious and powerful sovereignty and explains how this semblance of stability and harmony hid the city's political, cultural, and social fissures. In the process, Marino finds that being and becoming Neapolitan meant manipulating the city's rituals until their original content and meaning were lost. The consequent widening of divisions between rich and poor led Naples's vying castes to turn on one another as the Spanish monarchy weakened. Rich in source material and tightly integrated, this nuanced, synthetic overview of the disciplining of ritual life in early modern Naples digs deep into the construction of Neapolitan identity. Scholars of early modern Italy and of Italian and European history in general will find much to ponder in Marino's keen insights and compelling arguments.

"Baroque Naples" presents documents on the history, culture, and art of the city during its golden age of prestige and prosperity under the Spanish Hapsburgs and Bourbons. Texts cover the history of the city and kingdom, contemporary travel guides, descriptions of the city's art, architecture and classical inheritance, its literature, music and theater. There are also chapters that offer texts by the famed Neapolitan economists, legal thinkers and philosophers of the age; a survey of religious thought, and of the Neapolitan contribution to the natural sciences. The selections are preceded by brief introductions to the writers and the ideas presented in the texts. Sixty-nine selections include Enrico Bacco, John Evelyn, Salvator Rosa, Luigi Vanvitelli, the Neapolitan Marinisti, Pietro Trapassi (Metastasio), Giovanni Battista Della Porta, Antonio Serra, Giuseppe Palmieri, Gaetano Filangieri, Tommaso Campanella, Giambattista Vico, Fynes Moryson and many others. The volume also includes brief biographies and chronologies. 60 illustrations, 3 maps, introduction, bibliography, index.

This book provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the Neapolitan Baroque, through original and in-depth interpretations of pivotal masterpieces of Neapolitan art, literature, philosophy, theater. The book also presents the city of Naples as a cultural space in which the body functions as a visual, literary, and urban metaphor. By examining the works of Giordano Bruno, Caravaggio, Giambattista Basile, Silvio Fiorillo and Raimondo di Sangro, Principe di San Severo, the essays comprising this volume show the contribution of these world renowned figures to the Baroque imagery of Naples, but also highlight the impact the city had on their work. Finally, the book stirs reflection on the enduring presence and current revival of the Neapolitan Baroque, by looking at contemporary culture and the cinematic adaptation of baroque works, such as Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales.

"This book is about a book. Its author, Antonio Latini (1642-1696), was an experienced cook, steward, and banquet manager who worked in Rome and central Italy, and then served some of the leading families and individuals in Naples, at the time Italy's largest city and the capital of its largest state. The book is, in large part, what we may call a cookbook, but in fact includes much more (and something less) than we would expect to find today in a cookbook. Its title, in its full Baroque richness and length, is The Modern Steward, or the Art of Preparing Banquets Well, with the Choicest Rules of Stewardship, Taught and Applied to Benefit Professionals, and Other Scholars (Lo scalco alla moderna, overo l'arte di ben disporre li conviti, con le regole più scelte di scalcheria, insegnate e poste in prattica a beneficio de' professori, ed altri studiosi)....Latini's text is massive: about one thousand pages, divided in two volumes....In this work I will offer edited translations of selections from both volumes...with accompanying notes and several short essays on related topics...."--Introduction, p. [1]-2.

Sources include narrative histories, travelers' accounts and diaries; urban descriptions and analyses; letters, newspaper and magazine articles; interviews and surveys; oral histories; official narrative, statistical reports and legislation; political oratory; fiction, poetry, music, urban planning, architecture, and the visual arts."--BOOK JACKET.

The period of the baroque (late sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries) saw extensive reconfiguration of European cities and their public spaces. Yet, this transformation cannot be limited merely to signifying a style of art, architecture, and decor. Rather, the dynamism, emotionality, and potential for grandeur that were inherent in the baroque style developed in close interaction with the need and desire of post-Reformation Europeans to find visual expression for the new political, confessional, and societal realities. Highly illustrated, this volume examines these complex interrelationships among architecture and art, power, religion, and society from a wide range of viewpoints and localities. From Krakow to Madrid and from Naples to Dresden, cities were reconfigured visually as well as politically and socially. Power, in both its political and architectural guises, had to be negotiated among constituents ranging from monarchs and high churchmen to ordinary citizens. Within this process, both rulers and ruled were transformed: Europe left behind the last vestiges of the medieval and arrived on the threshold of the modern.

The Carthusian monks at San Martino began a series of decorative campaigns in the 1580s that continued until 1757, transforming the church of their monastery, the Certosa di San Martino, into a jewel of marble revetment, painting, and sculpture. The aesthetics of the church generate a jarring moral conflict: few religious orders honored the ideals of poverty and simplicity so ardently yet decorated so sumptuously. In this study, Nick Napoli explores the terms of this conflict and of how it sought resolution amidst the social and economic realities and the political and religious culture of early modern Naples. Napoli mines the documentary record of the decorative campaigns at San Martino, revealing the rich testimony it provides relating to both the monks? and the artists? expectations of how practice and payment should transpire. From these documents, the author delivers insight into the ethical and economic foundations of artistic practice in early modern Naples. The first English-language study of a key monument in Naples and the first to situate the complex within the cultural history of the city, The Ethics of Ornament in Early Modern Naples sheds new light on the Neapolitan baroque, industries of art in the age before capitalism, and the relation of art, architecture, and ornament.

Arthur Schwartz, popular radio host, cookbook author, and veteran restaurant critic, invites you to join him as he celebrates the food and people of Naples and Campania. Encompassing the provinces of Avellino, Benevento, Caserta, and Salerno, the internationally famous resorts of the Amalfi Coast, Capri, and Ischia—and, of course, Naples itself, Italy's third largest and most exuberant city—Campania is the cradle of Italian-American cuisine. In Naples at Table, Arthur Schwartz takes a fresh look at the region's major culinary contributions to the world—its pizza, dried pasta, seafood, and vegetable dishes, its sustaining soups and voluptuous desserts—and offers the recipes for some of Campania's lesser-known specialties as well. Always, he provides all the techniques and details you need to make them with authenticity and ease. Naples at Table is the first cookbook in English to survey and document the cooking of this culturally important and gastronomically rich area. Schwartz spent years traveling to Naples and throughout the region, making friends, eating at their tables, working with home cooks and restaurant chefs, researching the origins of each recipe. Here, then, are recipes that reveal the truly subtle, elegant Neapolitan hand with such familiar dishes as baked ziti, eggplant parmigiana, linguine with clam sauce, and tomato sauces of all kinds. This is the Italian food the world knows best, at its best—bold and vibrant flavors made from few ingredients, using the simplest techniques. Think Sophia Loren—and check out her recipe for Chicken Caccistora! Discover the joys of preparing a timballo like the pasta-filled pastry in the popular film Big Night. Or simply rediscover how truly delicious, satisfying, and healthful Campanian favorites can be—from vegetable dished such as stuffed peppers and garlicky greens to pasta sauces you can make while the spaghetti boils or the Neapolitans' famous long-simmered ragu, redolent with the flavors of meat and red wine. Then there's the succulent baked lamb Neapolitans love to serve to company, the lentils and pasta they make for family meals, baked pastas that go well beyond the red-sauce stereotype, their repertoire of deep-fried morsels, the pan of pork and pickled peppers so dear to Italian-American hearts, and the most delicate meatballs on earth. All are wonderfully old-fashioned and familiar, yet in hands of a Neapolitan, strikingly contemporary and ideal for today's busy cooks and nutrition-minded sybarites. Finally, what better way to feed a sweet tooth than with a Neapolitan dessert? Ice cream and other frozen fantasies were brought to their height in Baroque Naples. Baba, the rum-soaked cake, still reigns in every pastry shop. Campamnians invented ricotta cheesecake, and Arthur Schwartz predicts that the region's easily assembled refrigerator cakes—delizie or delights—are soon going to replace tiramisu on America's tables. In any case, one bite of zuppa inglese, a Neapolitan take on English trifle, and you'll be singing "That's Amore." A trip with Arthur Schwartz to Naples and its surrounding regions is the next best thing to being there. Join him as he presents the finest traditional and contemporary foods of the region, and shares myth, legend, history, recipes, and reminiscences with American fans, followers, and fellow lovers of all things Italian.

This book offers the first interpretation of Spanish architectural patronage in Naples during the reigns of Philip II and Philip III of Spain. The principal architecutral protagonists are Domenico Fontana (1543-1607) and his son Giulio Cesare (1580-1627), whose projects in Naples and Spain are set within the context of the cultural politics of the Monarquia Hispànica. Rather than being seen as resistant to habsburg imperialism, Naples (the most loyal city) actually participated, on a number of different levels, in the imperial program of the monarchy. While focusing on engineering and secular architecture, this book also takes related projects into account, such as commissions for major public sculptures and one fresco cycle, as well as the restoration and reuse of existing monuments and spaces. In this book, Sabina de Cavi discusses the evolution of Neapolitan architecture in ca. 1600 in relation to Rome, Palermo and Madrid, and in doing so casts light on the local process behind public commissions, and suggests a tentative explanation for the delayed flowering of Baroque architecture in Naples.