1 INTRODUCTION: DIRECTIONS TO BAROQUE NAPLES Helen Hills Abstract How have place in Naples and the place of Naples been imagined, chartered, explored, and contested in baroque art, history and literature? This special issue revisits baroque Naples in light of its growing fashionability. After more or less ignoring Naples for decades, scholars are now turning from the well-trodden fields of northern and central Italy to the south. This is, therefore, an opportune moment to reconsider the paradigms according to which scholarship has -- often uncritically – unrolled. How has scholarship kept Naples in its place? How might its place be rethought? Keywords: Naples, baroque, meridionalismo, viceregency, colonialism, Spanish empire, architecture, urbanism, excess, ornament, marble, Vesuvius, Neapolitan baroque art, city and body, Jusepe de Ribera, city views, still-life painting, saints and city, place, displacement Full text: http://openartsjournal.org/issue-6/article-0 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2018w00 Biographical note Helen Hills is Professor of History of Art at the University of York. She taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Manchester before being appointed Anniversary Reader at York. Her research focuses on Italian baroque art and architecture in relation to religion, gender, and social class, exploring how architecture and place are productive and discontinuous, even disjunctive. She has published widely on baroque theory, southern Italian baroque art and architecture; religious devotion and social divisions; miracles and materiality; and post-industrial architecture. Her books include: The Matter of Miracles: Neapolitan Baroque Architecture & Sanctity (Manchester University Press, 2016), which investigates the relationship between matter and miracle in baroque Naples; Invisible City: The Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Convents (Oxford University Press, 2004), awarded the Best Book Prize by the Society of Early Modern Women; and Marmi Mischi Siciliani: Invenzione e identità (Società Messinese di Storia Patria, 1999). Edited books include Rethinking the Baroque (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), an exploration of ‘baroque’ at the interstices of history, philosophy, and art. Recent publications include: ‘Taking place: Architecture and holiness in seventeenth-century Italy’, in A. Payne (ed), Renaissance and Baroque Architecture. Companion to the History of Architecture, vol.1, (London: Wiley, 2017). OPEN ARTS JOURNAL, ISSUE 6, WINTER 2017/18 ISSN 2050-3679 www.openartsjournal.org 2 INTRODUCTION: mere expansion? It is important to acknowledge the inability of linear narrative either to accommodate DIRECTIONS TO effectively the spatiality of historical processes or to BAROQUE NAPLES interrogate that spatiality. An assumption that place is a priori tends to occlude the politics of place. If place Helen Hills, University of York is not assumed to be fixed and stable, what part does it play? What happens when place is thought, not only in terms of extension, but in terms of contestation, Introduction discontinuity, and dislocation? What, then, emerges as at This special issue investigates artworks, literature, stake in the place and places of Naples? and histories of baroque Naples through a critical Recent scholarship has provided innovative interrogation of their relationship to place. It aims to approaches to materiality and the processes of consider ‘baroque Naples’ as a critical question, not in transformation in art and architecture (Lloyd Thomas, terms of periodisation, stylistic moment, or place set in 2007; Bennett, 2010; Benjamin, 2011). On the whole, time, as if these things are already known and settled, however, art-historical engagement with the material but in terms of convulsion, shifts, differences, and turn has been limited to objects, materials, and disparities. What are the dislocating effects of baroque techniques (Anderson, Dunlop & Smith, 2015). The interventions? How have place in Naples and the place question of how materiality might relate specifically of Naples been imagined, invented, chartered, explored, to place has fallen out of focus. Historical scholarship and contested in baroque art, history, and literature? and art and architectural history tend to take the place By what means – scholarly, cultural, social, political, and of Naples for granted, treating it as passive backdrop economic – has Naples been kept in its place and with to more spectacular or momentous events that are what consequence for the interpretation of its culture? understood to unfold within it or even on it, such as In what ways might ‘Naples’ be usefully thought, less the ‘arrival’ of Caravaggio which suffices to explain in terms of reassertion of identity or of city as given his ‘influence’. Space and place are thus conceived and place in terms of continuity, than in relation to in terms of measurable extent. Yet, such approaches displacement, difference, and disjunction? What hitherto have been challenged by scholarship in geography obscured aspects of Neapolitan baroque culture might and philosophy (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; De Landa, thereby be allowed to emerge? The aim is not to 2002). Space, by these accounts, is intensive as well interpret the particular in terms of the general, nor as extensive. While such scholarship focuses on film, to essentialise either ‘Naples’ or ‘baroque’. Instead, we maps, and contemporary issues, it has opened the wish to bring the terms ‘baroque’ and ‘Naples’ together question of how place might be thought in intensive percussively and generatively. The term ‘baroque’ is thus terms historically in relation to art, architecture, and not posed as description, style, or period; nor does texts of all kinds. This collection aims to bring place, ‘Naples’ simply designate place as given. Indeed, one displacement, materiality, and transformation into issue explored here is the extent to which ‘baroque’ relation. The city of Naples is approached here as and ‘Naples’ have been held apart or collapsed into provisional, in production, under pressure, contested, each other without sufficient consideration of ellipses and riven with contradiction and conflict, rather than as or friction between them. Baroque Naples and its a fixed, stable place or circumscribed location. forging, discursively, materially, technologically, and The questions raised above are explored in divergent aesthetically are here examined in innovative essays ways in the essays presented here. Below, I introduce by seven scholars. They investigate baroque Naples in those essays, before moving to a wider discussion of relation to architecture, marble, painting, prints, written the salient issues by which the field is riven: excess texts, maps, geology, power, and privilege in order to and ornament, the viceregency and colonialism, and bring the relation between material transformation and meridionalismo. place into focus. An interrogation of the terms ‘Naples’ and ‘baroque’ necessarily foregrounds the problem of place. What Individual Essays possibilities for rethinking baroque Naples are opened, In a brilliant essay Sergius Kodera explores Giovan if one resists assumptions that ‘the city’ is a given, or Battista della Porta’s performative natural philosophy that place secures continuity or is a passive container in relation to the topography of Naples in which the that accommodates interventions that take place within fate of human beings is inscribed topographically, it while leaving the ‘container’ unchanged, apart from physiologically, and somatically. Della Porta’s OPEN ARTS JOURNAL, ISSUE 6, WINTER 2017/18 ISSN 2050-3679 www.openartsjournal.org 3 Chirophysiognomia (1677), an extraordinary treatise on Naples. Rather than treating these artworks as if they palmistry, probably written between 1599 and 1608, is represent a pre-existing political contract (viceregency), interpreted via Naples’ topographies and geographies. it is argued that they interrogate the legitimacy of what Body and place are seen to be co-implicated, not in is held in place. Hence the fracturing and scattering of terms of embodiment, but in terms of metonymy and place is related in the essays by both Kodera and Hills the unravelling of fate. Della Porta’s treatise purports to the fracturing of bodies and their regulation. Both to make sense of the palms of hands and soles of feet Kodera and Hills are concerned with place in terms of of criminals, a process of discerning the hidden laws metonym, edges, limits, and what is posited as beyond of nature that Kodera relates to Naples’ theatrical the edge of representability. It is the margins from topography of criminal management, by tracing the which things are defined. Early modern maps of Naples ways in which bodies, texts, and places were produced do not show the gallows outside the city, observes relationally and topographically. He relates the upper- Kodera. The place falls off maps. The Ponte della class discussions that took place in della Porta’s Maddelena represents the furthest limit of the city, but palace to the stages and traces of criminalisation and the stinking corpses at the gallows on its further side cadaverisation of bodies across the city. Convicted showcased a first and unforgettable view for forestieri criminals were paraded through the streets of Naples on their way into Naples. The festering pit and gallows before their execution in Piazza Mercato; corpses were in Kodera’s essay find a counterpart