Beginning this month, team member Giovanni Merola will embark on a year-long project sponsored by the Swarovski Foundation. Selected as the only humanities researcher at the annual prize giving of the “Aktion D. Swarovski KG 2019 – Förderungsbeiträge für die Leopold-Franzens Universität Innsbruck” July 2019, Merola’s project is entitled Digitised Iconography – Political Communication via Portraits and Monuments ca. 1800: Maria Carolina of Naples-Sicily and her political-familial Networks. It seeks to deepen our understanding of political symbology at the court of Naples and to explore how this symbolism was communicated to and received from other European courts via portraiture and monuments.
Merola’s work functions as an ancillary project to our main FWF project with the intended goal of supplementing the online database with a visual component designed to enhance the digital corpus for users interested in Bourbon, Habsburg, art, and political history. It will include coded entries for commission portraits, monuments, ceremonies, rituals and other iconographic artefacts relating to Maria Carolina of Naples-Sicily. In order to complete his research, Merola will undertake several research trips to archival locations in Italy, Spain and France where material relating to this iconographic is held.
More widely, this additional material will contribute to the growing historiography surrounding political communication. By linking together data about the origins and destinations of certain objects and images (through commissions, requests, gifts etc.), this project advances traditional studies of political and symbolic communication which have up to now considered portraits and monuments as self-contained units, isolated from their respective court. Merola’s study into the networks behind this iconography will shed light onto the mutual influences and interdependencies underlying this communication.
At the same time, Merola’s focus reflects the broader approach of the main FWF project. As royal consort in an age of revolutionary strife, Maria Carolina’s iconography, like her letters, served as a medium for processing the political turmoil and changing concepts of political order around her. Royal portraiture could display strength and resilience to the outside world and foreign allies as much as it could reassure relatives through its intimacy and sentiment. Such were the motivations behind Angelica Kaufman’s portraits of the queen or the wax busts exchanged between the Neapolitan and Habsburg families.[1] Through a combination of historical approaches (history of art, material culture, political history) and in-depth archival research, Merola adds a necessary element to our overall research into political order in the times of Maria Carolina.
Merola’s project is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year; with major archival travel finished by late summer and the incorporation of the results into the online database by December 2020. He will publish his findings on political communication in a relevant scholarly journal.
[1] Allison Goudie, “The Wax Portrait Bust as Trompe-l'oeil? A Case Study of Queen Maria Carolina of Naples,” Oxford Art Journal, Volume 36, Issue 1, March 2013, 55–74: here 65.