Stable Images of Instability: Architecture as Represented in the Vedute of Largo di Palazzo, 1707–1848

Linda Stagni, Ph.D.

This research interrogates visual representations of Naples’s Largo di Palazzo (1707–1848) as manifestations of the active political, social, cultural, scientific, and environmental context of instability. It considers the way in which the architectural background of Largo di Palazzo was treated in the representations as capable of circulating ideas of stability. The project scrutinizes approximately fifty vedute - cityscapes produced by a range of artists for the benefit of diverse authorities and purposes - to examine how and to what ends this stability is constructed in images of architecture. Urban images have long served as instruments capable of codifying, normalizing, and propagating political structures, ultimately endorsing stability. This project aims to expand this postulate further and apply it to a more variable context: an unstable Bourbon Naples exposed to global geopolitical changes during a time of profound cultural turns.
By testing the images of Largo di Palazzo through the lens of Neapolitan instability, my objective is to explore the complex codification of the urban space as represented by the blossoming visual culture of the vedute. With the help of digital tools, the vedute are compared to select events and the physical transformations of the Largo di Palazzo.