Objects of Collecting in Naples and Naples as Object of Collecting, 18 September 2009 (Cambridge, CRASSH)

This workshop will consider ‘Naples’ and ‘Neapolitans’ as subjects of collecting and of dispersal. Thus material culture in Naples, export of goods, and exile of persons, tourism, treasures and trade are considered in relation to each other. We will seek to address the ways in which Neapolitan culture has been orientalized and exoticized through discourses of collecting, to trace how Naples developed as object of fascination for collectors and visitors, Grand Tourists, ‘Orientalizers’ and ‘primitivizers’ from the days of the Grand Tour to the present, and to examine how spectacle — whether theatre, music, dance, or their visual or verbal representations — might be studied without exoticization or orientalization. Studies of particular objects of fascination and their representational and museological fortunes will be interwoven with these diasporic critical histories.

Programme

9.30-10.00 Registration

10.00-10.15 Introduction by Helen Hills & Melissa Calaresu

Chair: John Robertson (Oxford)

10.15-10.30: Cesare de Seta (University of Naples 'Federico II')
Reflections on pre-circulated paper: The image of Naples from the Tavola Strozzi to Giovan Battista Lusieri

10.30-10.45: Helena Hammond (University of Surrey)
Reflections on pre-circulated paper: 'Landed identity and the Bourbon Neapolitan state: Claude-Joseph Vernet and the politics of the Siti reali’

10.45-11.15: Discussion

11.15-11.45: Coffee

Chair: David Irving (Cambridge)

11.45-12.00: Dinko Fabris (University of Salento at Lecce)
Reflections on pre-circulated paper: Collections and dissemination of Neapolitan music in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

12.15-12.30: Paola Bertucci (Yale University)
Reflections on pre-circulated paper: Science, Luxury, and the Grand Tour: Mariangela Ardinghelli, the Tarsia Museum and the display of natural knowledge in 18th -century Naples

12.30-1.00: Discussion

1.00-2.00: Lunch

Chair: John Marino (University of California at San Diego)

2.00-2.15: Barbara Naddeo (CUNY: The City College of New York)
Reflections on pre-circulated paper: Neapolitan Itineraries: Re-collecting the City in Histories and Guides to Naples

2.15-2.30: Melissa Calaresu (University of Cambridge)
Reflections on pre-circulated paper: Collecting napoletanità: The representation of street-sellers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Naples

2.30-2.45: Martin Deasy (University of Oxford)
Reflections on pre-circulated paper: Così fan tutte and Naples: lyric beauty as couleur locale

2.45-3.30: Discussion

3.30-4.00: Tea

4.00-5.00: Discussion & reflections on the work of the day led by John Robertson (Oxford) and Rose Marie San Juan (UCL)

This workshop is sponsored by the AHRC; we also acknowledge the financial support of the Trevelyan Fund of the University of Cambridge and the administrative assistance and hospitality of CRASSH.

Convenors: Melissa Calaresu & Helen Hills.

For administrative enquiries please contact: Simon Macdonald.