Naples: Discrepant Profiles of a City

Tanja Michalsky

Today more than ever, Naples appears to be a city whose image is disintegrating into disparate, seemingly irreconcilable aspects, structures, and attributions of meaning. This also applies to the field of its scientific exploration, be it through the study of history or art history. The research, which is becoming ever more differentiated, but also more heterogeneous and diverse, is contrasted with conventional overviews, international and multidisciplinary approaches alternate with local, monographic, or microhistorical perspectives, without entering into a fruitful exchange or resulting in a consistent overall picture, and different ideas, clichés and narratives overlap in layers that are difficult to rectify and straighten out. If for a long time Naples was the “paradise inhabited by devils”, today it is the Benjaminian concept of “porosity” that articulates unease in the city’s social space in a more subtle way. The first emphasizes the discrepancy between a beautiful location and a problematic society, the second the interpenetration of public and private space. 
Art history, which in both the national and international contexts has increasingly turned to Naples in recent decades, can counter these routinized conceptualizations by no longer analyzing the urban and aesthetic characteristics of Naples as ‘the Other’ in the context of canonized models, but rather by explaining them more strongly in terms of local history. The aim of the project is to develop new narratives for understanding the city that can integrate disparate perceptions. In order to meet the challenge of combining detailed art-historical analysis with an overview, of questioning clichés and of giving the city not just one, but several profiles, the following approach will be taken: representative depictions and representations of the city (such as the maps that were the focus of my research recently) will be scrutinized in order to tease out features that exemplify urban structures. Starting from the model of scaling, one can then zoom in. Zooming in topographically on individual places and buildings allows characteristics of social space to be analyzed (e.g., phenomena such as the special facades in narrow alleys and innovative stairwells that open up from the courtyards). In a complementary manner, zooming in chronologically illuminates individual periods, which in part are oriented towards the various ruling houses but which also take social developments into account. This large-scale project can only be realized through case studies that highlight the exemplary character of structures, objects, and actors, whereby the diversity of media (in the broadest sense, from the palace to the square and its fountain, andfrom the map and to the film) simultaneously enables a combination of heuristics and a reflection upon them.