California Italian Studies

This paper is a consideration of problems encountered in attempting an art historical analysis of the complex baroque forms of architecture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Naples, specifically when confronted on the one hand by the rather bald, roughly contemporaneous accounts thereof and, on the other and more especially, by the thrilling experience of entering these buildings today -- experiences that leave one overwhelmed and at a loss, at a loss for words sufficient to them and at a loss in their regard. To look at these buildings today in terms of their affective material productivity, even if they can only be articulated incompletely, is to ask historians to undertake the kind of visual work that they are seldom accustomed to. It means staying the customary hastiness that sees architecture as mere instantiation of idea, and instead – while resisting the temptation to interpret architecture as merely the sum of its parts -- requires a willingness to inquire into the materiality of aspects of architecture and objects which yield ‘nothing’ to see (such as dark areas within sculpture, non-figurative passages within architecture, the shine of silver, illegible letters of unknowable alphabets). Simultaneously we need also to widen our usual scope of vision to restore to architecture its affective elements that make it work. This is to require the mobility of architecture’s affect to engage us fully and temporally, rather than to dissect architecture into a “document”of a “social,” “political,” “cultural,” or “material” history, supposedly capable of embracing it fully, but to which it is, in fact, subordinated.