The Neapolitan Renaissance indicates the declination of Renaissance art developed in Naples between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In architecture it was characterized by exuberant and solemn ways, with a wide appeal to the decorations in piperno and white marble for the facades of the sacred buildings and the palaces. With the advent of the baroque in the seventeenth century the Renaissance experience was shelved.
15th century
The first half
The first half of the fifteenth century, in Naples and the rest of the Kingdom, Renaissance art, in the sense of Tuscan influences, is found in some very illustrative examples as the funeral monument of Cardinal Rainaldo Brancaccio (1426 – 1428) in Sant’Angelo in Nilo, by Donatello and Michelozzo, or in the Caracciolo del Sole chapel, in San Giovanni a Carbonara, in which Andrea Ciccione, Leonardo da Besozzo and the Perinetto have worked.
The artistic scene dominated essentially the Franco-Flemish influences, linked to political and, in part, commercial routes. The numerous foreign artists made the city a point of exchange and artistic contamination, in the context of the so-called “North-South conjuncture”, that is the mixture of Mediterranean and Flemish ways that affected a large part of the western Mediterranean basin, including the non-coastal regions of transit, and which had its epicenter in Naples.
This happy situation already manifested itself from the reign of Renato d’Angiò (1438 – 1442), who brought his taste to the city from the broad cultural horizons, culminating in the activity of Barthélemy d’Eyck.
The political change, with the establishment of Alfonso V of Aragon (from 1444), amplified the network of cultural exchanges in the Mediterranean, involving the Neapolitan territories in the tight exchange with the other territories of the Aragonese crown and calling in the city Catalan artists and Spaniards, including the presence of the Valencian leader Jaume Baço, in the city on several occasions from 1442 to 1446. In those same years, the French master Jean Fouquet and the Veronese Pisanello were in town. The main local artist of the first half of the century was Colantonio, whose works reveal the ability to absorb and assimilate the different languages present in the city: if a work such as the San Girolamo in the studio (about 1444) shows references to Flemish painting in the realistic “still life” of books and other objects that fill the shelves, in the Delivery of the Franciscan rule, a little later (about 1445), there are already the different Catalan influences, as shown by the vertical floor, the expressive physiognomy and the rigid and geometric folds of the garments.
The second half
Among the interests of King Alfonso there was also humanism, as evidenced by the presence at court of famous intellectuals such as Panormita, Francesco Filelfo, Bartolomeo Facio and Lorenzo Valla, as well as the important library that he founded. The new knowledge, however, remained essentially confined to the court, for example lacking the attention of the sovereign to the University, which could spread the new culture in the kingdom. The same literature had a predominantly encomiastic character.
Architecture
The first architectural commissions were entrusted to Spanish artists, still far from the renewed problems of the Renaissance, but linked to various addresses. The heterogeneity of the royal clientele is evident in the reconstruction of Castel Nuovo, where from 1451 Iberian craftsmen led by Guillén Sagrera, responsible for creating a residence suitable for the sovereign and a fortress able to resist the artillery. The general scheme refers to the Gothic tradition, purified however by the excessive decoration enhancing the structural clarity. The Sala dei Baroni, for example, has no space for sculpture, with the ribs of the vaults that sink directly into the thickness of the walls, without shelves orpeducci. The same keystone is an oculus, which is also found in its Mallorcan constructions.
In 1453, when the real power could be defined as solid, Alfonso decided to provide the castle with a monumental entrance, inspired by the Roman triumphal arches. The Triumphal Arch of the Castel Nuovo, designed perhaps by a collaboration between Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Luciano Laurana and Guillem Sagrera, is composed of two overlapping arches, flanked by twin columns and crowned by a curvilinear tympanum. On the first atticthere is a frieze with the triumphal entry of Alfonso V in Naples, inspired by the triumphal Roman marches, while on the second there are four niches with statues. This structure testifies to a very free use of the classical model, subordinated to the celebratory needs.
At the end of the century, thanks to the political alliance with Lorenzo the Magnificent, there was a direct entry of Florentine works and craftsmen, which involved a more homogeneous adoption of the Renaissance style. An important construction of the period was the church of Sant’Anna dei Lombardi, where Antonio Rossellino and Benedetto da Maiano worked, creating three chapels (Piccolomini, Toledo and Mastroianni-Terranova). Especially the Piccolomini Chapel, where Maria of Aragon was buried, was interesting for the revival of the forms of the Florentine chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal, but updated to a more opulent taste, to meet the needs of the client.
Giuliano da Maiano, brother of Benedetto, worked in the defense of the city with the attached doors, such as Porta Capuana and Porta Nolana and he is attributed the design of Palazzo Como, but especially the design of the royal residence of the Villa di Poggioreale, started between the 1487 and 1490 and completed by Francesco di Giorgio, which can be considered the culmination of the gradual conversion of the Renaissance Aragonese capital. Although it was then destroyed, one can still get an idea thanks to the reproduction in the treatise of Sebastiano Serlioand thanks to his critical fortune that made it exemplary for the architecture of the sixteenth century. The building was characterized by an original structure with references to the ancient adapted to contemporary needs. The basic type was in fact the ancient villacontaminated with the defensive needs of a medieval castle and with environments specially designed for residence, leisure and representation, linked to the needs of the courts of the century. The result was a small-sized building with a quadrangular base, with four bodies protruding at the corners, similar to corner towers, but of the same height as the rest of the building. The central body was porticoed both on the outside and on the inside, where there was a courtyard sunken for five steps, which recalled ancient models such as the theater and the thermal baths. The courtyard, according to a model of Vitruvius, could be covered with a wooden floor to be used for parties and performances.
Meanwhile, Giuliano also started a school where they trained architects who promoted the Renaissance style throughout the kingdom, including Pietro and Ippolito del Donzello.
In the Poggioreale shipyard, around 1490, Fra Giovanni Giocondo worked to whom the Pontano Chapel in Via dei Tribunali was attributed with uncertainties, with the exterior marked by Corinthian pilasters, built for the Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano. In 1495 Charles VIII of France invaded the kingdom and occupied Naples temporarily. At his departure he brought with him, directly from the construction site of the villa of Poggioreale, Fra Giocondo and the Gardener Pacello da Mercogliano, who brought the new conception of the garden to the French courtwho was maturing in Italy, as well as other artisans and artists working in Naples, including the sculptor Guido Mazzoni, who contributed to the spread of Italian classicist culture and the development of the French Renaissance.
The rest of the Aragonese kingdom, on the other hand, showed a very traditionalist tendency towards the arts, due to the social structure (still linked to Feudalism) and the lack of dialectic with the capital’s court. For example, the courtyard of Castello di Fondi, renovated in 1436, is still influenced by Gothic and Spanish forms, which make it look like a patio. In Sicily, after the flowering under the Angioinians, it was necessary to wait until the end of the 15th century to find a local interpretation of the Renaissance, linked above all to architecture in Palermo by Matteo Carnelivari (Church of Santa Maria della Catena).
Urban planning
Alfonso II of Naples had planned for the city a vast urban plan, which would unify the interventions of his predecessor in isolation, regularizing the Roman route and clearing out the medieval superfetazioni. This would have resulted in a checkered street plan, which would have made Naples the “most necta and polite city […] of all Europe”. The plan was not implemented for the brevity of the reign of the sovereign (1494 – 1495) and his successors, pressed by the instability for the recurring baronial revolts, preferred to devote themselves to military works, expanding the walls, on the initiative of Alfonso when he was still Duke of Calabria, and building castles in the territory. The appearance of Naples at the end of the century is testified by the Tavola Strozzi (1472 circa, National Museum of San Martino), where you can see the city from the sea completely surrounded by turreted walls that connect the two fortresses of Castel Nuovo to the west and Castelcarmine to East. The gates of the city were strictly functional to the defense, with the exception of Porta Capuana, inspired by an arch of triumph, which led to Poggioreale.
Sculpture
Also in sculpture the arch of Castel Nuovo was a fundamental episode. A heterogeneous group of sculptors worked there, which was the origin of the disorganity of the whole. To a first team of artists linked to the Catalan-Burgundian ways, a more composite one took place, in which the personalities of Domenico Gagini and Francesco Laurana stood out, and after the end of the works they remained in the kingdom for a long time. Gaggini was the progenitor of an authentic dynasty, active above all in Sicily, where he merged local points with the decorative richness of Lombard origin; Laurana instead specialized in more synthetic forms, especially in portraits of evocative and polished beauty that were her most appreciated specialty. For example in thePortrait of Eleonora d’Aragona (1468, Palermo, Palazzo Abatellis), the face has a stereometric shape, which transfigures the physiognomic data.
Among them in Naples, key points of the local renaissance, we remember the two Madonna enthroned with the Child of Laurana, one for the church of Sant’Agostino alla Zecca, performed during the first Neapolitan stay of the artist, and the other, sculpted during the second stay in the city, for the Palatine Chapel. Del Gagini, instead, there are two Tabernacles with the Madonna and the Child always for the Palatine Chapel, and a sculpture of the same subject for the Basilica of the Santissima Annunziata Maggiore.
Painting
Even in painting, the approach to Renaissance styles is gradual and can be fully felt in the greatest master of southern Italy of the fifteenth century, Antonello da Messina, who also trained in Naples, near Colantonio. His early works, like the Salvator mundi, show an adherence to the Flandro-Burgundian ways, especially with regard to iconography, the executive technique and the physical types of the characters, while the monumental setting of the figures and the spatial values are typically Italian.. Gradually Antonello approached the spatial and luminous research of Piero della Francesca, as well as the research of the Flemish painters, such as Jan van Eyck and the contemporary Petrus Christus. Fleminghi imported in Italy the type of portraits of three quarters, rather than profile, accentuating at the same time the psychological and human components of the effigies. The best example of this extraordinary synthesis between different pictorial schools was perhaps the San Girolamo in the studio, painted in Sicily, where the Flemish wealth of details and the multiplication of sources of light added, in addition to the humanistic interpretation of the theme with the saint represented as one scholar, a complex spatial construction, with a false frame that acts as a link between the spectator and the saint. The light that enters from the window in the foreground follows the perspective lines, allowing the measurement of the space and making the attention converge towards the nucleus of the painting.
Among the last works produced in the confines of the Aragonese kingdom there is also the Annunciata of Palermo, where there is an extraordinary synthesis between geometry and naturalism, with a very sweet use of light.
Later Antonello, thanks to his travels, spread his conquests in the peninsula, especially in Venice, where the comparison with Giovanni Bellini was the origin of a renewal in the painting of sacred subjects. In Venice the example of formal synthesis and bright “binder” was understood and developed, in Naples and in Sicily there was a following of the artist with his son Jacobello and local artists.
16th century
The first quarter
The first quarter of the sixteenth century saw architects with various cultural formations committed to renew the face of the capital. Novello from San Lucano, who was a disciple of Angelo Aniello Fiore, went to Rome to study better the ancient architecture in order to better proportion his works, creating on his return the facade of the then Palazzo Sanseverino (later Church of Gesù Nuovo), where he used for the first time the diamond – tipped ashlar in piperno.
Gabriele d’Agnolo conceived with Palazzo Gravina the construction of a noble palace according to the dictates of Roman classicism; its are also Palazzo Carafa di Nocera and the rebuilding in Renaissance ways of the church of Santa Maria Egiziaca all’Olmo.
Giovanni Francesco Mormando designed and rebuilt various city buildings, inspired by classical architecture and Leon Battista Alberti. His pupil Giovanni Francesco di Palma contributed to the completion of the master’s unfinished works.
While the Renaissance buildings were growing in the city, architects of training outside the local area continued to arrive, as was the case in the Caracciolo di Vico chapel in San Giovanni a Carbonara, an architect of the Bramante school. The Cappella del Succorpo in the Duomo may have been designed, according to some sources, by Bramante himself or by the Lombard Tommaso Malvito.
In the second decade of the century the Settignanese Romolo Balsimelli arrived in the city, who was in charge of the construction of the church of Santa Caterina in Formiello, where an innovative plant was used, with a cross inscribed in a quadrilateral, to keep small dimensions. From nearby Nola Giovanni da Nola arrived, already a scholar in Rome of classical sculpture and architecture. He, as an architect, designed two buildings in Roman style but with strong southern influences.
The second quarter
In the second quarter Ferdinando Manlio showed up with the construction of the Basilica of the Santissima Annunziata Maggiore and, with Giovanni Benincasa, he made the transformation from castle to court of Castel Capuano. Of the two architects is also the urban plan of Via Toledo and the Quartieri Spagnoli), commissioned by the Viceroy Pedro de Toledo, who allowed the expansion of the city towards the Vomero hill. In the meantime, after the Counter-Reformation, sacred buildings are created with a single hall and without protruding transects, taking as a model the church of Santa Caterina.
The last fifty years
After 1550 the purely Renaissance architecture fell into the background with the advent of mannerism. However, the construction sites of the ancient center that began in the previous fifty years continued, like the church of the Gesù delle Monache, with a façade reminiscent of a triumphal arch. In this period in the civil building the use of white marble decorations developed in contrast to the piperno.
Towards the end of the century architecture was enriched by classical influences brought by the architects Domenico Fontana, Giovanni Antonio Dosio and Gian Battista Cavagni. The last Renaissance work can be said to be a reworking project by Giovanni Cola di Franco of the church of Santa Maria la Nova.
Source from Wikipedia