431 research outputs found
The Four Engravings : between word and image
No full textThis essay is part of a volume which offers the first comprehensive study of the De Nola (Venice 1514), a hitherto underappreciated Latin text written by the Nolan humanist and physician Ambrogio Leone. Divided into three books and enriched by four engravings, De Nola is an extraordinary historical, chorographical and topographical treatise celebrating the city of Nola in the Kingdom of Naples. Its author was the Nolan physician and humanist Ambrogio Leone, who dedicated the work to Enrico Orsini count of Nola, while its publisher was Joannes Rubeus, or Giovanni Rosso from Vercelli. The volume would mark an important advance in European humanistic and antiquarian debates. Leone’s description of a seemingly minor urban centre in the peninsula is an innovative and ground-breaking work of Renaissance scholarship. Several decades after Biondo Flavio’s studies of Rome and Italy had appeared in print, De Nola marked a shift in antiquarian publications, and opened the way to a new approach to the description of cities. Its fame was enduring, reaching beyond the borders of the Italian peninsula to the main centres of Renaissance European culture. Despite its profound originality and its early and widespread circulation, De Nola has remained at the margins of Renaissance studies.
The chapter written by Fulvio Lenzo discusses the four engravings, which help to make Leone’s book an early sixteenth century masterpiece of humanist literature. His analysis of the engravings clarifies the important role played by Leone himself in planning and drawing the illustrations, and reduces the role of the Venetian painter and engraver Girolamo Mocetto to little more than an executor of Leone’s ideas.
Leone relied, at a first level, on a massive use of written sources relating to a wide range of disciplines. He appears as a reader (and certainly also an owner) of manuscripts and above all of printed editions, like those published by his friend Aldo and composed in Greek characters with the support of Grifo’s renewed Greek typeset; but also as a tireless ‘devourer’ of mathematical and geometrical treatises, like Luca Pacioli’s edition of Euclid. He certainly consulted (or even possibly possessed) illustrated books like the famous Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or the 1511 edition of Ptolemy’s geographical work (edited by another émigré from the Kingdom of Naples, namely Bernardo Silvano of Eboli), or architectural treatises like Fra Giocondo’s edition of Vitruvius, all printing products which displayed an impressive iconic apparatus; but he also studied a deliberately aniconic book as Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, a real bestseller at the time, where mental images were created by the power of words. Ambrogio Leone considered his book not only a medium for the publication of his text, but also a valuable art object, in which renewed illustrations play a relevant role
Ambrogio Leone’s De Nola, Venice 1514. Humanism and Antiquarian Culture in Renaissance Southern Italy
No full textThis volume offers the first comprehensive study of the De Nola (Venice 1514), a hitherto underappreciated Latin text written by the Nolan humanist and physician Ambrogio Leone. Furnished with four pioneering engravings made with the help of the Venetian artist Girolamo Mocetto, the De Nola is an impressively rich and multifaceted text, which contains an antiquarian (and celebratory) study of the city of Nola in the Kingdom of Naples. By describing antiquities, inscriptions, and buildings, as well as social and religious phenomena, the De Nola offers a precious window into a southern Italian Renaissance city, and constitutes a refined example of sixteenth-century antiquarianism. The work is analysed in a multidisciplinary approach, encompassing art and architectural history, antiquarianism, literature, social history, and anthropology
Mario Cartaro e il perduto affresco della Capua Vetus di Cesare Costa (1595)
No full textThis article deals with the bird-eye view of the ancient city of Capua, now Santa Maria Capua Vetere, made paint in 1595 by Cesare Costa, archbishop of the new Capua, in his palace. The painting disappeared during the restoration of the palace in 1759, but some engraved copies realized before this date still survive. The study of such copies, together with the exams of printed and manuscript written sources, allows now to reconstruct the complexity of such a story, which during the centuries involved also international scholars such as Lucas Holstenius, Cassiano Dal Pozzo, Scipione Maffei and Bernard de Montfaucon. Thanks to new researches it has been possible to find a drawing representing the ancient Roman amphitheater of Capua, possibly related to the execution of the fresco, and to identify the author of the reconstruction as the painter and mapmaker Mario Cartaro
Da Messina a Venezia. Domenico Paternò, Guarino Guarini e il battistero di Santa Maria del Giglio
No full textThe article deals with the chapel in the baptistery of the church of Santa Maria del Giglio in Venice. The chapel was built in 1690 by the architect Domenico Paternò from Messina, and it is worth of note because of the use of a 'Solomonic' architectural order, having two twisted columns featuring an ondulated entablature. Comparison between literary sources and archival documents has allowed to ascertain the date and the author of the chapel. Given the origin of Paternò it is now possible to conjecture that the architectural model for his work in Venice was the now disappeared chapel of St. Antonio built by Guarino Guarino around 1660 in the church of the Annunziata dei Teatini, Messina. A new analysis of the sources relating the Annunziata, hitherto overlooked, clarifies that the chapel which acted as a model should not be identified with the octagonal space at the base of the bell tower depicted in the corresponding plate of the 'Architettura Civile' by Guarini
Introduction
No full textIntroduzione al volume "Ambrogio Leone’s De Nola, Venice 1514: Humanism and Antiquarian Culture in Renaissance Southern Italy", con biografia aggiornata dell'autore Ambrogio Leone e problematizzazione del suo contesto, incentrata sulla rilevanza del De Nola nell'ambito degli studi rinascimentali
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