Topics of the Urban Landscape of Naples in Saint-Non’s Work. The City - Myth and Nature

Abstract

At the beginning of the 18th century, there was a new interest in the knowledge and representation of the territory of Southern Italy, with many iconographies of some previously unknown urban centers being produced, where local contexts and landscapes were very much emphasized.
In the second half of the century, on the one hand, with significant progress in the fields of surveying and mapping, only the description of urban details remained as a role for the traditional “views”; on the other hand, there was an increasing focus on anthropological and social aspects, on natural phenomena and on archaeological findings., This was also recorded in the iconography of Southern Italy with the first representations of many undeveloped parts of the Neapolitan Kingdom. In this way, a largely unexplored horizon had just opened for the abbot Saint-Non.
Yet is was in the capital of that Kingdom that the French traveler, impressed by the charm of a city suspended between myth and nature, best approached the theme of urban landscape, interpreting it for the first time according to the idea of “picturesque”, that is of a primordial synthesis between man and natural environment. Indeed, while Saint-Non did not fail to consider the pristine nature of the southern landscapes compared to the advances of industrial civilization, in the Bourbon capital he grasped, more than anywhere else, several “mythical” signs throughout the urban territory and its suburbs.