The city of Naples has been a major centre for more than two millennia. It's natural harbour and position on the southwest coast of Italy made it important in trade relations between Italy, Greece,Byzantium, North Africa, Spain, Holland, Flanders and Germany. Its strategic importance and resulting prosperity resulted in fierce competition for control of Naples and the surrounding area. During the period discussed by the various contributors to this collection of essays, 1266– 1713, Naples and its surrounding territory was ruled successively by the French Angevins (1266–1442), the Aragonese (1442–1501), the French (1501–04), and the Spanish Hapsburgs (1504–1713).
Throughout, Naples was an important artistic centre yet it has suffered in art-historical literature. One of the issues that has affected perception of the city is that Naples defies art-historical definitions of a cultural centre. Traditionally, artists and styles have been linked to their geographic locations of origin.
The conventional view of Naples is that it did not produce many famous artists or innovative artistic styles which influenced the art of other major centres; rather, it imported more art and artists than it exported. Another factor is that many art historians have followed the historiographical model of Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists concentrates on the work of Florentine artists.
The result is that Naples has been overshadowed by other Italian centres, most especially in this period by Florence and Rome. Physical destruction has also taken its toll. Damage to Neapolitan archives during the 1939–1945 war resulted in a substantial loss of historical documents and significant damage to the artistic patrimony of the area.
The imposing, partially poly-chromed, mid-fourteenth-century tomb of Robert of Anjou (d. 1343), for example, was badly damaged in a fire following an air raid on 4 August 1943. However, even before this, the work of modern historiographers reflected the attitude of northern Italy towards the south, applying to the past the twentieth-century view of Naples as underdeveloped and culturally deficient, something explored by Bianca de Divitiis in her chapter on Diomede Carafa’s fifteenth-century palace in Naples.
* Generously illustrated with some illustrations specifically commissioned for this book
* Questions the traditional definitions of 'cultural centres' which have led to the neglect of Naples as a centre of artistic importance
* A significant addition to the English-language scholarship on art in Naples