Pino, Domenico; (2025) Printmaking in eighteenth-century Naples: Picturing, recording, communicating in the Southern Italian Enlightenment (1734-1799). Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This study explores the production of prints in Naples between 1734 and 1799, a period in large part coinciding with the Neapolitan Enlightenment. Following the collapse of the Spanish Empire and the wars of succession to the Spanish and Polish thrones, in 1734 southern Italy was created an independent kingdom (Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) with Naples as its capital. With independence, printmaking was seen as an instrument to implement political and economic reforms and, ultimately, to improve the social conditions of the new nation. King Charles of Bourbon (1710–88) and his successor Ferdinand (1751–1825), state officials, and local reformers actively engaged with the medium to this end. This thesis is not about the variety of images produced in Naples in the 1700s, but about the culturally loaded instrumentalization of the technology. Case studies include Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte (Naples, Stamperia Reale, 1757–92), the monumental publication commissioned by the crown illustrating the finds of Herculaneum and Pompeii, the publishing activities of Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero (1710–71) and of the printmaker-turned-publisher Filippo Morghen (1730–1807), vulcanological treatises, and the production of views of the last quarter of the century. These objects are analysed in the context of centre-periphery debates, cultural contact, the rise of the modern nation, the relationship between art and science in the early modern period, and the southern question in Italy. The dissertation shows how in eighteenth-century Naples prints were used to close the perceived cultural and temporal gap between Naples and other European nations. This dissertation thus aims to complicate and expand narratives of printmaking as a central element in the development of modernity, shedding light on the little-examined play of cultural relations among European countries and broadening our understanding of the Enlightenment.

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