By Caroline Bruzelius
While I was preparing for my oral exams at Yale University, I encountered a couple of references to the architecture of the French conquest of South Italy and the churches built in the years of French domination. The first was a short paragraph or two in Robert Branner’s Saint Louis and the Court Style in Gothic Architecture, the other Camille Enlart’s Origines françaises de l’architecture gothique en Italie. Branner mentioned the ground plan of San Lorenzo Maggiore in Naples (a building to which I would come to dedicate a great deal of time in later decades) and Enlart included brief considerations of the Cathedral of Lucera and Sta. Maria Maggiore in Barletta, but not much more. This, I said to myself, this is what I want to do!
But things got in the way. I had committed myself to a dissertation on the Cistercian Gothic monuments northeast of Paris. When that was complete, and on its way to publication, Sumner McKnight Crosby, my advisor, asked me if I would be interested in taking on the thirteenth-century reconstruction of St.-Denis: how could I refuse that invitation? During the year in Paris working on that book (1979-1980), I saw that there was a scaffolding up to the height of the vaults at Notre-Dame Cathedral, and discovered that nobody else was taking advantage of the unique opportunity that the scaffolding offered for study (as it seemed in the 1970’s, at least!), and that work was to occupy my attention for the next six or seven years. The involvement with Naples began with a bang: the terrible earthquake of 1980. I was on a postdoc at Harvard at the time, and decided to go to Naples to see if there was still an intact topic for study. On that short trip, I also discovered the Angevin Registers, documents that, although reconstituted after the destruction of the originals in the Second World War, nonetheless provided more information about medieval construction practices and the organization of labor than survived for monuments in France.
And construction methods and labor were deeply interesting to me. No analogous documents survived in France, not for the Cistercians, not for St.-Denis, and not for Notre-Dame. The work I had been doing on French monuments was entirely based on the physical facts of the buildings themselves: the shaping of the masonry and moldings, the modifications in details as work progressed, and sometimes even the radical new ideas that were introduced while construction was in process. So once the St.-Denis book (1986) was off to the press, and the article on Notre-Dame (1987) on its way, I could finally turn to the topic of South Italian Gothic. With grants from the Fulbright Foundation and the American Academy in Rome (1985-1986), I spent a year in Rome and Naples in the buildings, libraries and archives. (I also gave birth to a son.)
But what was the topic? It had become clear that structures in a “Frenchifying” style had been constructed all over South Italy. Yet there was no list. No survey. No corpus of monuments. There were few if any images, and certainly not of the details that had begun to interest me. It seemed impossible to connect the dots of this topic. I began by compiling a master list of sites mentioned in the documents as well as in the secondary literature—this included the many thick and dense little red guide books published by the Touring Club Italiano (known as the TCI guides): anywhere there was mention of a pointed arch (arco acuto) or stile gotico, I made a point on a map. In time, there were hundreds and hundreds of dots. The master list of sites is included in the back of The Stones of Naples (2004).
In the days prior to digital photography, however, obtaining good and publishable photographs was a challenge, and would have represented a vast expense for me. The photograph archivists at the Getty Foundation, however, encouraged me to apply for funding to undertake a series of photographic campaigns throughout the south, long and sometimes arduous trips with professional photographers to visit and photograph every site we could get into—which itself could become a complicated undertaking. The staff at the American Academy in Rome helped in obtaining permissions for indoor photography where required, as well as scheduling appointments to enter the churches that were locked. The first photographer I worked with was Barbara Bini (we traveled through Campania, Puglia and the Abruzzo), an American woman who lived in Rome. In Naples I hired Massimo Velo and his assistant Salvatore, whose main purpose was to watch over the equipment so that it would not be stolen while Massimo and I worked. The third photographer, Chester Brummel, traveled with me through Calabria and Basilicata. With all of them, we worked with natural light, and not always in optimal conditions. With rare exceptions (Lagopesole, Melfi), we did not include fortifications. There were many remarkable episodes along the way, including flat tires, meetings with curious and interesting people (in those days in some areas of South Italy it was exceptional that two women would travel together for work), conversations, invitations to spend the night (not always with disinterested intent) and even a heated exchange with the nuns of Tricarico when I showed them the letter of permission from the Soprintendenza: Not even if you yourself were the President of Italy would we let you into our church!
The photographic archive includes a number of ground plans, elevations and sections, most of which were obtained from various Superintendencies in different regions: Potenza, L’Aquila, Naples, etc. These are an important supplement to the photographs, and on occasion include pre- and post-restoration images (especially striking for the dramatic restoration of Sta. Chiara in Naples).
Although there may be some minor sites that were missed, the photographic archive constituted a primary resource for understanding the larger question of South Italian Gothic architecture, not only for the book of 2004, The Stones of Naples (published in Italian in 2005 as Le Pietre di Napoli), but also for many subsequent articles and scholarly papers. Without necessarily having had a conscious plan to do so, it became clear to me that the photographic archive created the topic by offering a body of material, material that hitherto had received only cursory overviews or purely local perspectives. While the churches of Naples had of course been studied (most notably in a series of articles in Napoli Nobilissima and the splendid chapters of Arnaldo Venditti in Storia di Napoli), these focused on the Neapolitan context without examining the broader phenomenon of the spread of Gothic, not only under the aegis of the royal administration, but also through the great magnates of the kingdom: the del Balzo, Aquino, Sanseverino and Orsini families, to name a few. Indeed, as I observed in my book and still believe, in forging an identity for their newly-acquired feudal domains, the nobility was often more innovative than the royal family itself: it was not simply a matter of “Frenchness” trickling down from the court to the provinces, but instead a phenomenon of prestigious architectural innovations “drifting up” to influence the royal court.
In retrospect, I realize that my instincts were good: it was important to study Naples in relation to the entire kingdom (Sicily was excluded from the archive because the War of the Vespers of 1282 lost the island to the Crown of Aragon). The creation of the archive also revealed that it was essential to understand the patronage of the court in the context of an ever-more powerful baronial class that emerged when Charles of Anjou endowed properties and fiefs to his loyal retainers after the conquest of 1266 (Benevento) and the battle of 1268 (Tagliacozzo). Land and property had become a medium of exchange and reward, but also, over time, a method through which the barons came to assert their power and authority in the form of churches, castles, and burial monuments. The “big picture” was therefore important in understanding the role of architectural gestures on the part of both the royalty and the nobility: only a systematic survey could enable an understanding of this phenomenon. An additional part of the picture includes the particular importance of the Mendicant Orders, especially the Franciscans and Dominicans, in helping to shape an architectural identity in the Kingdom (particularly significant for the Dominicans), a phenomenon that also included many convents for women religious. Twenty years after the book, it is deeply gratifying to me in 2024 to see the explosion of remarkable new work that is emerging on this wide variety of topics by young scholars, historians and art and architectural historians.
Learn more about The Caroline Bruzelius Photographic Archive.