Issue 6 out now

We are delighted to announce the publication of our Winter 2017/8 issue:

Baroque Naples: place and displacement

Edited by Helen Hills, Professor of History of Art, University of York.

Download Open Arts Journal, Issue 6, Winter 2017/8 from our website:

Extract from Helen Hills’ introduction to issue 6:

This special issue investigates artworks, literature, and histories of baroque Naples through a critical interrogation of their relationship to place. It aims to consider ‘baroque Naples’ as a critical question, not in terms of periodisation, stylistic moment, or place set in time, as if these things are already known and settled, but in terms of convulsion, shifts, differences, and disparities.

What are the dislocating effects of baroque interventions? How have place in Naples and the place of Naples been imagined, invented, chartered, explored, and contested in baroque art, history, and literature? By what means – scholarly, cultural, social, political, and economic – has Naples been kept in its place and with what consequence for the interpretation of its culture? In what ways might ‘Naples’ be usefully thought, less in terms of reassertion of identity or of city as given and place in terms of continuity, than in relation to displacement, difference, and disjunction? What hitherto obscured aspects of Neapolitan baroque culture might thereby be allowed to emerge?

Baroque Naples and its forging, discursively, materially, technologically, and aesthetically are here examined in innovative essays by eight scholars. They investigate baroque Naples in relation to architecture, marble, painting, prints, written texts, maps, geology, power, and privilege in order to bring the relation between material transformation and place into focus.

Issue 6 contents

· INTRODUCTION: DIRECTIONS TO BAROQUE NAPLES

Helen Hills

· FROM PIAZZA MERCATO TO PONTE RICCIARDO, AND ON TO VIA TOLEDO: GIOVAN BATTISTA DELLA PORTA’S TRANSLATIONS OF HANDS AND FEET OF EXECUTED CRIMINALS ACROSS EARLY MODERN NAPLES
Sergius Kodera

· DISLOCATING HOLINESS: CITY, SAINT AND THE PRODUCTION OF FLESH
Helen Hills

· THE MATERIALITY OF ENCHANTMENT: RETHINKING NEAPOLITAN MARBLE INTARSIA
Joris van Gastel

· BAROQUE TECTONICS: ERUPTIONS AND DISRUPTIONS IN THE VESUVIAN CITY
Sean Cocco and Alfonso Tortora

· NAPLES IN FLESH AND BONES: RIBERA’S DRUNKEN SILENUS AND SAINT JEROME
Edward Payne

· FLAYING THE IMAGE: SKIN AND FLESH IN JUSEPE DE RIBERA’S MARTYRDOMS OF SAINT BARTHOLOMEW
Bogdan Cornea

· ‘MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN NATURE ITSELF’: THE EARLY COMMERCIAL AND CRITICAL FORTUNES OF NEAPOLITAN BAROQUE STILL-LIFE PAINTING
Christopher R. Marshall