Napoli dalle colline: città e campagna, cultura e natura nella veduta di Jan van Stinemolen (1582)

Abstract

In 1582, the Dutch draughtsman Jan van Stinemolen completed a monumental panorama of the city of Naples. The distinctive feature of this work in ink on paper, which is now kept in the Albertina in Vienna, is that it does not show the conventional view of the city from the gulf, but rather from the mainland. Surprisingly, however, this original work – well known both to scholars of Neapolitan topography and to those studying Dutch drawing – has not yet received the scholarly attention nor inspired the efforts at interpretation that it merits. The contributions gathered in this issue seek to fill this gap, not least by employing new analytical tools to present fresh perspectives on the work and to highlight its distinctive qualities. They are the fruit of a collaborative research project whose distinctive hallmark is the use it makes of the digitized maps annotated at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, which were fundamental to the approach followed and exemplified in this volume. The aim was twofold: to identify as many of the sites visualized in Stinemolen's monumental drawing as possible, and to investigate its artistic composition and intermedial construction, which revealed how this work is far from a simple snapshot of Naples in 1582.