Between Counter-Reformation Rigour and the Staging of the Baroque city (1572-1622): Notes on Architecture in Naples in the post-Tridentine Age

Abstract

At the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, Naples was undergoing a period of profound change that would rapidly transform its urban landscape and social reality. Among the main causes were unstoppable population growth, widespread poverty among the people, and the central role played in society by charitable organisations which, together with religious orders, also functioned as highly active artistic hotbeds. This contribution focuses on the years between 1572 and 1622, a period that begins with a local event and ends with a historic event in Catholicism: respectively, the first contact with Naples by the Roman painter and architect Giovan Battista Cavagna and the canonisation, on 12 March 1622, of the heroes of reformed Catholicism, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Filippo Neri and Francesco Saverio, a worldwide triumph for the Counter-Reformation Church, in which Wittkower already recognised the departure of sacred architecture from the reformist rigour of Trent. Assessing the Roman influence introduced into the architecture of the southern peninsular capital by Giovan Battista Cavagna, the first of a generation of artists to intervene decisively in the continuing stagnation of Florentine classicism in Naples, this essay focuses on the social reality and transformations of architecture and the urban image during the period examined. This was an intense period that saw the transition from the poverty of the early Counter-Reformation to the beginnings of Neapolitan Baroque experimentation against the backdrop of a city and society marked by the contrast between magnificence and misery, between the shining splendour of Baroque churches and the insurmountable gloom of an invincible sense of death.