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baroque itinerary |
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itineraries: |
| romanesque and medieval | renaissance | baroque | rococo | |
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In the seventeenth century Baroque style, which is identified with the Spanish domination, besides creating autonomous works that gave to the city a particular aspect, still recognizable, it decided to hide the works of art of the sixteenth century, and those ones of previous stratifications, so in some churches is possible to admire the signs of the passage of the centuries till the eighteenth century. An example can be the Duomo where from the medieval church of S. Restituta you can go, nearly inadvertently, to the silver statues of the XVIII century, kept in the treasure of San Gennaro. The monuments, the paintings and the works of artistic handicraft which are admired in the Baroque itinerary, represent the peculiarity of a style characterized by the research of beautiful shapes, colours and lights, of profusions of golden stuccoes, of marble objects in the altars, in the pilasters: all elements that give the measure of the extraordinary level of Neapolitan artistic handicraft, as well as the creativity of architects who created the styles. The Neapolitan Baroque, whose signs go back to 1610, shows not only in the exasperated fancy and ostentation of every form its particular style, but also in the application of the turgid volutes, present in every ornament as resonance chamber of a living and vital feeling in spite of the repressive climate of Spanish domination ( 1506-1707 ), the Counter-Reformation with the inquisition and the natural disasters. The painting, decorative and with the easel, became the symbol of Neapolitan art all over the Europe , and invaded every corner of the churches and of the huge baronial palaces which occupied the whole “insule”. Text of Gennaro Borrelli |
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