This paper will present the results of longstanding projects of interdisciplinary research that have attempted to overturn the enduring and deeply rooted image of Southern Italy as a uniformly backward and rural region at the margins of the Renaissance. While confronting historiographical questions to rethink the peculiar character of Renaissance artistic culture in this vast area, the seminar will approach Southern Italy as part of a polycentric and ‘Global’ Renaissance. It will thus attempt to re-establish the multiple relations in which actual objects and monuments were entangled, as well as to re-connect the broken threads which linked Southern Italy to other parts of the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic, in terms of the circulations of knowledge and objects, as well as the cultural-artistic responses and re-uses of the past.
The paper will also provide insights into debates on wider themes, such as the definition of the early modern city, continuity and discontinuity at the turn of the sixteenth century, and the effects of dynastic changes in the transition from the Aragonese Kingdom to the global system of the Iberian monarchy.
Bianca de Divitiis is Full Professor in History of Modern Art at the University of Naples Federico II, where she also serves as Deputy Director of the Department of Humanistic Studies and member of the Research Commission. After receiving several research grants from national (IUAV) and international institutions (The Warburg Institute, Villa I Tatti, The Paul Mellon Centre), she was PI of the ERC project Historical Memory, Antiquarian Culture, Artistic Patronage in Renaissance Southern Italy (2011-2016) and of the project PRIN Renaissance in southern Italy and the Islands: Cultural Heritage and Technology (2017-2023). She has participated to the international projects funded by the KNAW and the Getty Connected Art Histories Program. She is member of the several international scientific boards (KHI, Palladio Museum, La Capraia, Pio Monte and Palazzo Reale in Naples). She has published articles in international journals and co-edited works on antiquarian culture in Europe. She has published a book on the fifteenth century patronage of the Carafa family (Marsilio 2007) and edited The Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy (Brill 2023). She is currently completing the monograph The Renaissance and the Kingdom.
