New Approaches to Naples c.1500-c.1800 by Helen Hills Melissa Calaresu

Author:Helen Hills, Melissa Calaresu [Helen Hills, Melissa Calaresu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 16th Century, Literary Collections, European, General, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781409429432
Google: Wk9eLwEACAAJ
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2013-01-15T16:14:44+00:00

Figure 6.2 Gabriele Ricciardelli, A View of the Bay of Naples, with Vesuvius beyond, seen from the North, 63 × 168 cm, oil on canvas, 1747, Calke Abbey, Derbyshire. © National Trust Images/John Hammond

Figure 6.3 Gabriele Ricciardelli, A View of the Bay of Naples from San Martino with a Fleet at anchor, Vesuvius beyond and the Palazzo di Capodimonte to the left, 63 × 168 cm, oil on canvas, 1747, Calke Abbey, Derbyshire. © National Trust Images/Christopher Hurst

The Hunting Park

In its material conditions and recent history the site represented in the painting of the royal hunt was far removed from the bucolic landscape of the Roman campagna. Identified as Lake Patria, or alternatively as the lake at Fusaro, Vernet’s subject was one of the many hunting reserves that functioned as dominant landscape features of the recently appropriated royal territories arranged as the estates of the siti reali. The new royal estates played a very real role in the re-organization of the kingdom’s territory, even if historians of the siti reali have tended not to consider their development in general, and that of the constituent hunting parks especially, in light of the enclosure movement which, as has been demonstrated, was well under way in the kingdom.33 Almost all the royal building projects, from the acquisition of the first sito reale at Procida to the foundation of the palace complex designed by Luigi Vanvitelli at Caserta, were involved in a royal policy of annexation and appropriation of land from feudal landowners with known Austrian Habsburg sympathies or associations.34 Other siti reali were the outcome of new legislation through which rural territory left intestate automatically reverted to royal patrimony. In 1751 the Giunta delle ricompre (Council of Requisitions) was founded to channel land acquired from both sources to the new royal estates.35

This legislation was strategically important. As a kind of devoluzione (transfer) which meant that in many territories the ‘feudal lord was now the king himself’, the legislation offered ‘a sort of “natural way” to the abolition of feudalism’.36 In 1754 this desire to maximize the crown’s territorial holdings and erode those belonging to the feudal barons motivated the king to insist that as ‘baronial possessions were more often than not the result of usurpation’, the ‘original deed of transfer [should] be produced in any legal dispute over land between barons and local communities’.37 Writing to his brother about the construction of the Royal Palace at Caserta in 1751 Vanvitelli declared:

When I design Caserta, I shall see to it to make piazzas, churches, monasteries and so on, but right now I cannot do so. The King, before leaving Caserta, ordered Cavalier Neroni to have estimates made of some lands that are included in the area of the garden and the piazza, and to offer the corresponding proprietors other lands or payment in cash, but not to do violence to anyone.38

Even if, as Vanvitelli’s letter suggests, not all the crown’s territorial needs were met through the harsh process of transfer outlined above, the acquisition

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