Enfilade

The Arts and Sciences in 17th- and 18th-Century Naples: Discovering the Past, Inventing the Future
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 26-27 February 2010

Organized by John A. Marino (UC San Diego)

In the past year Melissa Calaresu (University of Cambridge) and Helen Hills (University of York) organized three workshops in England on Exoticizing Vesuvius? Formations of Naples circa 1500–Present that explored Neapolitan historiography, topography and piety, and collecting. The aims of the workshops were “to critically examine the principal historiographical currents that have operated and that continue to operate within scholarship on Naples, particularly in relation to visual and literary representations of Naples from circa 1500 to the present” and “to encourage the rethinking of Neapolitan history across chronological and disciplinary divides; to resist reinscribing Neapolitan cultural history into the familiar and over-worn paradigms of modernity and nationhood (the failure of the south), the Grand Tour (as seen from northern Europe, especially aristocratic Britain), periodization that serves to draw an apparently unbridgeable gulf between the early modern period and the nineteenth century.”

This conference on The Arts and Sciences in Naples: Discovering the Past, Inventing the Future continues this rethinking of early modern Naples from the theory and practice of representation and knowledge as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Topics will focus on the disciplines and practices of the arts and sciences—their origins, development, and contributions—within Naples itself during this period. Topics include the practice and institutions in Naples of the arts (painting, architecture, music, vernacular literature), the social sciences (ethnography, political economy), the natural sciences, and the art of cooking and entertaining. (more…)