City of skulls : art, ritual, and the afterlife in early modern Naples
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- "City of Skulls" explores the visual culture of death in early modern Naples, examining art, architecture, devotional texts, and ritual objects to reconstruct what anthropologists and social geographers call a "deathscape." During the period considered, Naples endured volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, popular revolt, and plague. As the city's crypts filled with corpses, its inhabitants were bombarded with evidence of human frailty. The seventeenth century is especially dense in morbid art for a study of Neapolitan death culture. This study is composed as three sets of two chapters. The first pair considers the death of an individual, introducing the notion of "the good death" (ben morire) and examining the translation of ben morire devotional practices to a sculptural format. The next pair exposes a surprising overlap between the fields of religious history and environmental humanities, together arguing that the omnipresence of volcanic activity intensified religious imagination of the underworld. The final two chapters consider the burial practices that took hold in an increasingly urbanized Naples, when construction of new buildings and roads supplanted the traditional courtyard cemetery. The Neapolitans found their solution in the subsoil, and there they made space for the practical and spiritual matters of death—that is, burial as well as commemoration through art and ritual.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2024; ©2024 |
| Publication date | 2024; 2024 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Harrison, Graylin Whitney |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Barry, Fabio |
| Degree supervisor | Lugli, Emanuele |
| Thesis advisor | Barry, Fabio |
| Thesis advisor | Lugli, Emanuele |
| Thesis advisor | Findlen, Paula |
| Degree committee member | Findlen, Paula |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art and Art History |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Graylin Harrison. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art and Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2024. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/qb067dj7483 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2024 by Graylin Whitney Harrison
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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