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- Title
Cities and Virgins: Female Aristocratic Convents in Early Modern Naples and Palermo.
- Authors
Hills, Helen
- Abstract
Vast swathes of the urban fabric of Naples svere swallowed up by female aristocratic convents during the seventeenth century. Grand conventS consumed secular buildings, including even aristocratic palaces, and thes towered over city squares and cast lung shadows across important thoroughfares. Inside their public churches frescoes, paintings, caned wuud, and marble made brilliant display; and, must spectacularly, virginal platforms, the nuns' choirs, came to dominate the site of the miracle of transubstantiation, the high altar itself. Yet even while these developments clamoured for attention, an outward rhetoric uf modesty, enclosure, and restraint was signalled through the architecture of plain walls, grates, and grilles. This article seeks to illuminate the paradoxes at the heart of these phenomena, to explore the presence of virginity in the early modem city through an examinatiun of the opportunities and constraints experienced by aristocratic convents in seventeenth-century Naples.
- Subjects
PALERMO (Italy); NAPLES (Italy); PARADOX; TRANSUBSTANTIATION; CITIES &; towns; KINGS &; rulers; ARISTOCRACY (Social class); VIRGINITY in literature; REAL presence in Holy Communion
- Publication
Oxford Art Journal, 1999, Vol 22, Issue 1, p29
- ISSN
0142-6540
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/oxartj/22.1.29