Joris van Gastel
Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1
20146 Hamburg
Room: 116 (Main Building)
Tel.: +49 40 42838 8135
E-Mail: joris.gastel@uni-hamburg.de(joris.gastel"AT"uni-hamburg.de")
Research project
“In Naples, they like nothing but trifles and gilding…” Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s negative verdict on the city of his birth is symptomatic of the city’s critical reception. Even if often described as the baroque city pur sang, textbooks consider the Neapolitan baroque as not more than a footnote, a mere derivative of what happens in Rome. Affirming the significance of the Neapolitan baroque, this project aims to understand it in a non-derivative manner, presenting it as an alternative for, rather than a derivation of, the Roman baroque. It proposes to do this by making productive precisely that quality which, arguably, is the ground for its negligence: the material richness of its visual culture.
In order to arrive at an alternative account, this project argues, three “pillars” of art history need to be sacrificed: the individual “genius” artist, the isolated work of art, and the traditional canon of art literature. Conversely, it will be argued that the Neapolitan baroque is characterized by the collective and the assemblage, grounded in a discourse that is thoroughly involved with materials: that of the natural sciences. This grounding is perceived to function in two ways. On the one hand, scientific discussions about stones, precious metals, organic materials and so forth – often ranging from morphology to medical virtues – indicate that materials are neither free of associations nor passive recipients of the forms imposed on them by the people who work them. On the other hand, artists, and craftsman more generally, actively contributed to such debates as their direct knowledge of the materials created a significant addition to scientific experiment.
Vita
Joris van Gastel studied Psychology and Art History at the VU University Amsterdam and the Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice. Between 2006 and 2011 he was part of the interdisciplinary research project Art, Agency and Living Presence in Early Modern Italy based at Leiden University, in the context of which he wrote his PhD thesis Il Marmo Spirante: Sculpture and Experience in Seventeenth-Century Rome. He has held fellowships at the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome, the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, the Fondazione Ermitage Italia, Ferrara, the Kolleg-Forschergruppe Bildakt und Verkörperung, also in Berlin, and the University of Warwick.
Relevant publications
"Paragone als Mitstreit" [Paragone as comradeship], ed. with Jannis Hadjinicolaou and Markus Rath, Berlin 2013.
"Geology and Imagery in the Kingdom of Naples. A Letter on the Origins of Alabaster (1696)", in: Kritische Berichte 40/3, 2012, 64–77.
"Celano’s Naples. Itineraries through a Material City", in: Incontri. Rivista europea di studi italiani 1, 2014, forthcoming.