Among the Cracks, Beyond the Biases: Investigating Art Patronage in L’Aquila and its contado, 1461–1529

Rossella Monopoli

Saturnino Gatti (attr.), Adoration of the Shepherds, fresco and secco painting, late 15th–early 16th century. Church of San Pietro Apostolo, Coppito, L’Aquila, Italy — Saturnino Gatti (attr.), *Adoration of the Shepherds*, fresco and secco painting, late 15th–early 16th century. Church of San Pietro Apostolo, Coppito, L’Aquila, Italy

Saturnino Gatti (attr.), *Adoration of the Shepherds*, fresco and secco painting, late 15th–early 16th century. Church of San Pietro Apostolo, Coppito, L’Aquila, Italy

This project investigates artistic patronage in L’Aquila, the northern outpost of the Kingdom of Naples, in a period marked by the devastating earthquake of 1461 and in an environment permeated by Franciscan Observant preaching. The earthquake caused extensive losses, but it also prompted an extensive reconstruction of the building fabric and a flowering of the arts in the territory. The Observants made the city a crucial pilgrimage site among the so-called Terra Sancta Seraphica and the European routes of Christian devotion and contributed to creating opportunities for artists, while also influencing the nature of artistic production. Because of a complex combination of causes, there is very little visual and written material on L’Aquila, a fact that poses significant challenges to scholarship. Today the state of studies and the survival of sources remain dramatically deficient, especially when compared to other Italian centers. The dissertation considers links among production, patronage, politics, and religious orders and seeks to provide a different and complementary angle of analysis to shed further light on the dynamics of patronage and of art production in L’Aquila in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The approach also aims to take into account the active impact of loss and considers the complexity of the history of a place that has been hit hard by natural catastrophes, confined to the margins of the artistic historiography as part of the so called “periphery”, and adversely affected by other interconnected historical events, which acted as further caesurae in the life of the territory.