Capua and Tzintzuntzán: Negotiating Privileges, Writing Histories, Moving Stones in the 16th-Century Spanish Empire

Bianca de Divitiis

doi:10.6092/issn.2240-7251/18931

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Bianca de Divitiis Università degli studi di Napoli Federico II

Bianca de Divitiis is full professor in History of Modern Art at the University of Naples Federico II. After receiving several research grants from national (IUAV) and international institutions (The Warburg Institute, I Tatti | The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance, and the Paul Mellon Centre), she was PI of the ERC project Historical Memory, Antiquarian Culture, Artistic Patronage in Renaissance Southern Italy (2011-2016). She is currently head of the national research project PRIN Renaissance in Southern Italy and the Islands: Cultural Heritage and Technology. She has participated in several international projects (EAHN and Getty Research Institute - Columbia University). She is a member of the scientific council of the Max Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut di Firenze, the Palladio Museum in Vicenza, the Center for the Art History of Port Cities - La Capraia, Naples - Houston, the Pio Monte della Misericordia, and the Museum of the Royal Palace in Naples. She is currently Deputy Director of the Department of Humanistic Studies and delegate member of the Research Commission of the University of Naples. She has published articles in international journals and a book on the patronage of the Carafa family in Naples in the fifteenth century (Venice, Marsilio, 2007); she was co-editor of a monographic issue on antiquarian culture in Europe (with Alessandro Nova and Samuel Vitali, «Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorische Institutes in Florenz», 2018), of the volume Local Antiquities, Local Identities (with Kathleen Christian, Manchester University Press, 2019) and of a work on De Nola by Ambrogio Leone (with Fulvio Lenzo and Lorenzo Miletti, Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2018). She has also edited for Brill The Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy (Leiden-Boston, 2023) and is currently completing the monograph The Renaissance and the Kingdom.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2240-7251/18931

Keywords:

Petitioning, Redeployment, spolia, New Antiquities, Loyalty, Recognition, Local Identities

Abstract

This essay examines the southern Italian city of Capua and the Mexican city of Tzintzuntzán in parallel. Both cities existed within the polycentric system of the Iberian monarchy. When faced with the deprivation of their privileges, the threat of losing their historical memory (enclosed within monuments from the past), and the forfeiture of their local identity within a broader empire, local elites from these two sides of the globe each responded with the same administrative procedure (petitioning) and the same cultural tools. These actions included the invention of local histories, the transfer of spolia, and the construction of modern buildings that incorporated “ancient” stones.

Capua and Tzintzuntzán: Negotiating Privileges, Writing Histories, Moving Stones in the 16th-Century Spanish Empire

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