PS05 Architecture of Spanish Italy 12:30 - 2:40pm Wednesday, 14th April, 2021 Category Paper Session - Track 2 Session Chair(s) Jesús Escobar
12:35 - 12:55pm
Isabella of Aragon´s Project for the Castello at Bari
Maria Elisa Navarro Morales Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Abstract
Isabella of Aragon was born in Naples in 1470. As the granddaughter of King Ferdinand I, she was married by proxy to Gian Galeazzo Sforza Duke of Milan in 1488 and a few months later she left the Kingdom of Naples for the Duchy of Milan. After Gian Galeazzo´s death in 1494 Isabella´s legitimate right to the duchy was usurped by Ludovico Maria Sforza who instead made her duchess of Bari. To protect herself both from Ludovico Maria and a possible French occupation, Isabella sought the protection of Spanish general Gonzalo Fernandez de Córdoba, who after taking Naples in 1501 became viceroy. By then Bari was part of the French-dominated Dukedom of Milan, yet due to Isabella´s allegiance with the viceroy, a strong link was formed between Bari and the Spanish crown. During Isabella´s rule (1501 -1523) Bari went through a period of urban renewal. Isabella restored and expanded the port, the custom house and the main city square, she allocated properties along a prominent street for the nobles that accompanied her and transformed the old Angevin castle into her ducal residence. Her works evoke both those of her father King Alfonso II in Naples and those she witnessed as Duchess of Milan. Moreover, Isabella undertook civic projects including the construction of waterways and the reinforcement of the city wall and castle with state of the art technology, a type of intervention characteristic of Milanese rulers. This presentation will look at the project for the Castello at Bari where spaces to host a Neapolitan Court were combined with military architecture technologies advanced by the Sforza. In the integration of Aragonese and Milanese building practices, the castle at Bari epitomizes the rich encounters taking place in Spanish Italy during the sixteenth century.
Categories
Architecture of Spanish Italy 12:55 - 1:15pm
Architecture, Local Identities and Imperial Power in Spanish Milan
Carlos Plaza University of Seville, Spain
Abstract
In 1526 Charles V arrived at the gates of Seville and before entering he had to swear to respect the privileges and autonomy of the city. After the siege of Florence, four years later, the Emperor signed the capitulation agreement by which he respected the ancient republican organs of government when founding the new medicean Duchy. In Naples in 1535 Charles V guaranteed the ancient privileges of the cities to the Neapolitan baroni and the representatives of the Seggi.
The enormous power of Emperor Charles V throughout the empire was in constant conflict with the ancient municipal privileges and the old local urban elites. Architecture is the most important visual manifestation of this conflict between the establishment of a global imperial culture and the reactions of local identities. Research on the relationship between architecture, antiquity and local identities in different cities is producing new interpretations of the meanings of Renaissance in Europe (De Divitiis-Christian 2019), and especially the influence of local models on the modern architecture in each local context, from Spain (Marías 2019) to Southern Italy (De Divitiis 2013, 2019) and beyond. The Spanish power in Italy and its relationship with the old local elites had a lot of influence on architecture and urban landscape, where the palaces of nobles and the main public works manifested this political conflict: such as Florence in the days of Cosimo I, the urban renewal linked to Marino palace in Milan, Naples in the days of Pedro de Toledo and even the Valmarana palace by Andrea Palladio in Vicenza (Marías 2012). The aim of this research is to understand how political harmony or conflict between the imperial power and the local elites were reflected in the architecture of one the main Italian urban centers as Milan.
Categories
Architecture of Spanish Italy 1:15 - 1:35pm
Architecture, Sculpture and Politics in Spanish Naples: Manglione and Nola
Fernando Marías Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Abstract
Writing notes on the pages of an exemplar of Leone Battista Alberti’s De architettura (1550, p. 216), its Spanish reader, who had lived in Naples and Rome and traveled in France, put among the best architects of his age (ca. 1555) Bramante (ca. 1444-1514), Raphael (1483-1520), Baldassare Peruzzi (1481-1536), Sebastiano Serlio (ca. 1475-ca. 1553/1557), Michele Sanmicheli (1484-1559), Antonio da Sangallo il Giovane (1484-1546), Pietro Cataneo (ca. 1510-ca. 1569/1574) and also the Neapolitan Giovanni da Nola (1488-1558), besides an unidentifiable Zenón Elnyo/Elmo. This Giovanni da Nola is presented by our reader -an architect and civil engineer, maybe Jerónimo Bustamante de Herrera- as an architect too, although the current historiography has considered him only as an sculptor, author of two fundamental masterpieces as the sepulchres for the viceroys of Naples Ramón Folch de Cardona (at Bellpuig, Lérida) and Pedro de Toledo (San Giacomo degli Spagnoli). The study of the architectural relations between Spain (Castile and Catalonia) and Italy (Naples) has focused on figures as the Italians who had worked in Spain and the Castilian who, Diego de Siloé and Pedro Machuca mainly, learned the language of the New Antiquity between the two cited towns. Nevertheless, other masters and their works have been neglected. The architectural lesson of the two tombs by Giovanni da Nola (1532- 1539), and the fabric of the national church of San Giacomo (1540-1547/1558, by architect Ferrante Maglione - and not only the Viceroy’s Palazzo Vecchio- had been put aside, despite their twofold interest: on the one hand, because of their peculiar and eloquent linguistical morphology and typology; on the other, because they became by its identitarian character cause of hot debates of politic nature, confronting Spanish and Neapolitan groups.
Categories
Architecture of Spanish Italy 1:35 - 1:55pm
The Memory of Empire: Palermo and the Architecture of Habsburg Power
Elizabeth Kassler-Taub Dartmouth College, USA
Abstract
The Habsburg viceroys dispatched to Palermo in the early sixteenth century encountered a cityscape crowded with the built remains of empires past. The monumental architecture of the Normans, including the crown’s former seat at the westernmost edge of the urban fabric, loomed especially large in the Palermitan imaginary. This local memory and material legacy proved to be a double-edged sword: Spanish authorities straining to assert Habsburg supremacy amidst entrenched systems of local political power were slow to appropriate Norman monuments, which nonetheless presented a familiar opportunity for imperial legitimation. Using viceregal interventions in Palazzo Reale in the latter half of the sixteenth century as a case study, this paper argues that the Habsburg practice and ideology of architectural re-use on early modern Sicily bears the influence of models from beyond the echo-chamber of the Mediterranean. Parallels with contemporary urban centers in the Americas like Cuzco raise broader questions about Palermo’s place in the global landscape of Spanish colonialism. Building on foundational scholarship that draws a distinction between “viceregal” and “colonial” models of Spanish power, this paper proposes a new approach to the architecture of empire in an expanded field – one that bridges the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
Categories
Architecture of Spanish Italy 1:55 - 2:15pm
Crown and Cloister in the Spanish Habsburg Dominions
J. Nicholas Napoli GKV Architects, USA
Abstract
Founded by its monarchs, granted royal privileges, and featured in the pageantry of royal visits, convents and monasteries played an integral role in establishing and representing the spiritual and temporal dominion of Spain across the Iberian peninsula and beyond, especially in Spanish Italy. My proposed talk considers the underside of monastic presence in the cityscapes and territories of Imperial Spain. It grows from a manuscript conserved in the British Library (Papeles Varios de Religiones) – an anonymous diplomatic dispatch dating from the late seventeenth century addressed to “His Majesty” that airs concerns about the Carthusian order on the Iberian Peninsula and in Spanish Italy. While the dispatch acknowledged the importance of the order as a spiritual intercessor for the Crown, it observed that the administration and finances of the order were controlled by the general chapter at La Grande Chartreuse near Grenoble, beyond the geopolitical confines of the Empire. The France-based administration of the order represented lost revenue for the Empire; and for the charterhouse of S. Martino in Naples, it was even a military liability. The dispatch observed that during the 1647 Revolt of Masaniello in Naples, S. Martino’s topographic proximity to the Spanish hilltop fortress, the Castel Sant’Elmo, presented France with the opportunity to house troops in the monastery and potentially breach the critical stronghold that guaranteed the security of the viceregal capital. My talk will assess the geopolitical, financial, topographic, and architectural implications of the concerns voiced in the British-Library manuscript. Its concern about the order’s fidelity to the chapter general and to its home nation, France, acknowledged the geopolitical complexity of Spanish dominions as a patchwork of institutions whose cultural and religious networks extended beyond the Empire’s geographical boundaries and could serve interests contrary to the Crown’s prerogative.
Categories
Architecture of Spanish Italy