Art and Identity in the Church of Spirito Santo dei Napoletani in Via Giulia

Gaia Mazzacane

This research project aims to investigate the role of the Neapolitan community in Baroque Rome by probing into the art and material culture in the church of Spirito Santo dei Napoletani, with particular attention to the 17th- and 18th-century building sites, which played a central role in defining identitarian values for the Neapolitan nation in Rome.
The church, built in the last quarter of the 16th century, is located on Via Giulia and was run by an archconfraternity. Today it appears in its late 19th-century neo-Renaissance guise. Prominent personalities of the Roman artistic scene were involved in the refurbishments, making the Neapolitan church in Rome a hub for the elaboration of an artistic language that was continuously pulled between the demand to honor Neapolitan identity and the need to adapt to Roman dictates. The study is based on surviving art works but also on printed documents and archival sources. Defining lines of inquiry included the relationships first between the artists and their patrons and second between the Neapolitan community and Roman as well as Neapolitan networks. The attempt to reconstruct these relationships and networks takes into account the urban context of Via Giulia, characterized as it was by the presence of numerous foreign institutions. 
This project is part of the PhD program of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. It is supervised by Lucia Simonato and co-supervised by Susanne Kubersky-Piredda.