Naples as Laboratory / Laboratorium Neapel

Seventeenth-Century painting in Naples distinguishes itself from that of other artistic capitals for its immense variety of coexisting styles and, in turn, for the rivalry this inspired among artists living in the principal city of the Spanish viceroys. The various tendencies, in fact, might best be described as the manifestation of these rivalries among predominant artists in and around Naples, known in the annals of art history as the great reformers of painting at the turn of the 17th century: Caravaggio, who on his travels to and from Malta left behind a number of highly influential paintings; two pupils of Annibale Carracci, Domenichino and Giovanni Lanfranco, who left their individual marks on the city for nearly a decade; the Spaniard Jusepe de Ribera, who lived and worked in Naples and was visited by Velázquez as he journeyed through Italy. Under Spanish rule and closely tied to the Papal States, this major center of trade on the gulf presented a highly unique point of convergence for these heterogeneous cultural currents.

This conference volume brings together contributions on painters such as Caravaggio and Jusepe de Ribera, as well as Aniello Falcone, Artemisia Gentileschi, Salvator Rosa, and Francesco Solimena. The recurring subject throughout the texts is self-promotion and self-fashioning, as well as the artists’ social and intellectual situation ‘in situ’.

A Laboratorio of Painting: Style, Self-Fashioning and Competition in Neapolitan Baroque
Elisabeth Oy-Marra and Heiko Damm

Caravaggios Sieben Werke der Barmherzigkeit: Zur Frage devianter Details
Rudolf Preimesberger

After the Fall of Osuna: Ribera’s Work of the 1620s in the Context of Artistic Rivalry, Patronage and Stylistic Currents 
Justus Lange

Riberas Self-Fashioning als Naturalista
Elisabeth Oy-Marra

Portents of Nature: Jusepe de Ribera and the Bearded Woman
Carlo Avilio

The Fame Game: A Business Analysis of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Neapolitan Career
Christopher R. Marshall

Beyond Naples: The Self Fashioning of Salvator Rosa
Helen Langdon

The Clock, the Court, and the Canvas: Luca Giordano and the Virtue of Productivity
Tiffany A. Racco

Francesco Solimena zwischen Egologie und Eusozialität
Salvatore Pisani

Aniello Falcone? Der tote Soldat in der National Gallery in London. Annäherungen an ein kunsthistorisches Methodenproblem
Stefan Albl

Die Kunst der Macht: Die spanischen Vizekönige als Auftraggeber neapolitanischer Barockmalerei am Beispiel des Conde de Monterrey (1631–1637)
Katrin Zimmermann