The Arts and Sciences in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Naples: Discovering the Past, Inventing the Future

—a conference organized by John A. Marino, University of California, 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), [and] periodization that serves to draw an apparently unbridgeable gulf between the early modern period and the nineteenth century.”

This conference, 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 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.

Program

Session I: The Arts
Chair: Margaret Murata, University of California, Irvine

Helen Hills, University of York
“Architectural Writing and Architectural Working in Baroque Naples”

J. Nicholas Napoli, Pratt Institute, Dalton School
“Artists as Entrepreneurs in Early-Modern Naples”

Dinko Fabris, Università degli Studi della Basilicata, Potenza
The Invention of the “Neapolitan School”

Session II: From the Humanities to the Social Sciences
Chair: Anthony Pagden, University of California, Los Angeles

Melissa Calaresu, University of Cambridge
Fish, Snow, and Enlightenment: Material Culture and Reform in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples

Nancy L. Canepa, Dartmouth College
“Initiations of the Modern: Crisis of Exemplarity and Generic Innovation in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Literature”

Filippo Sabetti, McGill University
“Public Happiness as the Wealth of Nations: The Rise of Political Economy in Naples in a Comparative Perspective”

Session III: From Arts de faire to Science
Chair: John A. Marino, University of California, San Diego

Tommaso Astarita, Georgetown University
“Cooking and Entertaining in Late Spanish Naples”

Sean Fidalgo Cocco, Trinity College
“History, Learned Empiricism, and Natural Vernacular in the Aftermath of Disaster”

Round Table Discussion

Anthony Pagden, University of California, Los Angeles
Margaret Murata, University of California, Irvine
John A. Marino, University of California, San Diego