Architectural Patronage and Networks

The examples presented in this essay, although far from exhaustive, form part of an initial attempt to construct a balanced picture of the region of southern Italy in the period between the fifteenth and sixteenth century, as a diverse territory, invigorated by a network of urban centres, where members of the royal family and heterogenous elite invested in all’antica works of art and architecture to display their social prominence and to adorn their cities and the surrounding landscape. Few of the artists and architects who were involved in such projects have been identified, but the works themselves make us rethink our normal parameters of evaluation and attribution, and explore new ways of understanding and appreciating them, centred on the patrons who commissioned them and the cultural contexts and social networks in which they were created. In particular, an attempt will be made to to bring out the specific nature of Renaissance culture in southern Italy as another Renaissance, which is to say a type of culture that was fully aware of the new ideas and trends that were emerging in other parts of Italy, but at the same time was autonomous and alternative in the ways in which such ideas were developed.