Naples and Southern Italy

Naples was by far the largest urban center on the Italian peninsula during the early modern period, and in the years covered by this book, from the early 1300s to the early 1600s, its inhabitants witnessed vast programs of building and decoration spurred by the cultural needs of royal, ecclesiastical, and baronial elites. Yet the city's many beautiful churches and palaces, stone sculptures, fresco cycles, and altarpieces have not received the sustained attention in Anglophone scholarship that has been lavished for generations on other major centers of artistic production, such as Florence, Rome, or Venice. This book surveys the visual arts in Renaissance Naples, offering diachronic overviews of urban design, ecclesiastical architecture, painting, tomb sculpture, and palaces, along with a substantial introduction to the complex social and political history of the city.

Marcia B. Hall is Carnell Professor of Renaissance Art at Temple University. She is the series editor of Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance and editor of the first volume in the series, Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2005). She is the author of Renovation and Counter-Reformation; Color and Meaning; After Raphael; Michelangelo: The Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel; and The Sacred Image in the Age of Art. She is the editor of volumes including Color and Technique in Renaissance Painting; The Princeton Raphael Symposium (with John Shearman); Raphael's 'School of Athens' (Cambridge University Press, 1997); The Cambridge Companion to Raphael (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Michelangelo's 'Last Judgment' (Cambridge University Press, 2004); and, most recently, The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church (with Tracy E. Cooper, Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Thomas Willette is Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Massimo Stanzione (with Sebastian Schütze) and the editor of Art History in the Age of Bellori (with Janis Bell, Cambridge University Press, 2008). He has contributed essays on Neapolitan painting and art historiography to various periodicals and anthologies, including Ricerche sul'600 napoletano, Napoli nobilissima, New Vico Studies, the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, and the volume Re-Reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe. He was awarded an NEH fellowship for his current research on the reception history of the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini.