Bianca de Divitiis
The Renaissance in Southern Italy:
A Global Matter

The scholarship on Southern Italy is a telling example of how inadequate categories, national approaches, and anachronistic interpretations, can gradually lead to the loss of a central element of the ‘Global’ Renaissance, to the point of turning a vast area, accounting for over a third of the Italian peninsula and a central node in a vast geographic network, into something marginal, vernacular, and even exotic.
This lecture will present the results of a longstanding project of interdisciplinary research that has attempted to overturn the enduring and deeply rooted image of Southern Italy as a uniformly backward and rural region, by restoring the multiple relations in which the works produced or related to this area were immersed.
While confronting methodological and historiographical questions to rethink the peculiar character of Renaissance culture in Southern Italy, the paper will also explore forms of cultural exchange, circulation of people, ideas, and objects, to re-establish the broken threads which linked Southern Italy to distant areas. It will thus broaden the picture beyond the borders of the Kingdom of Naples to other parts of the Mediterranean, such as Sicily and Sardinia, and across the Atlantic to the Iberian Americas, and beyond.
Approaching Southern Italy as part of a polycentric, interconnected and ‘Global’ Renaissance, the paper will also provide insight into ground-breaking debates on wider themes, such as the definition of the early modern city, continuity and discontinuity at the turn of the sixteenth century, and the effects of dynastic changes in the transition from the Aragonese Kingdom to the planetary system of the Iberian monarchy.
Furthermore, it will try to address key contemporary issues such as the fragility and commercialization of heritage, the communication of new scientific methods and results at various cultural levels, and the engagement of citizens and local communities.

Bianca de Divitiis is Full Professor in History of Modern Art at the University of Naples Federico II, where she also serves as Deputy Director of the Department of Humanistic Studies and member of the Research Commission. After receiving several research grants from national (IUAV) and international institutions (The Warburg Institute, Villa I Tatti, The Paul Mellon Centre), she was PI of the ERC project Historical Memory, Antiquarian Culture, Artistic Patronage in Renaissance Southern Italy (2011-2016). She is currently PI of the project PRIN Renaissance in southern Italy and the Islands: Culutural Heritage and Technology and has participated in several international projects (KNAW Getty Connected Art Histories). She is member of the several international scientific boards (KHI, Palladio Museum, La Capraia, Pio Monte and Palazzo Reale in Naples). She has published several articles in international journals and co-edited works on antiquarian culture in Europe. She published a book on the fifteenth century patronage of the Carafa family (Marsilio 2007) and edited The Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy (Brill 2023). She is currently completing the monograph The Renaissance and the Kingdom.