The Tavola Strozziis an oil-on-wood painting of medieval Naples as seen
from above and in front of the main port of the city. It
is the oldest depiction of the medieval city. It measures
82 x 245 cm (32 x 96 inches) and is in the collection of
the San Martino museum. The
painting was discovered in the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence
in 1901 by archaeologist and art historian, Corrado Ricci.
A first interpretation of
the scene depicted was offered by Benedetto
Croce, who at first thought that the painting
showed the arrival of the fleet of Lorenzo de’ Medici in
Naples in 1479 for the signing of a peace treaty with
the Aragonese rulers of the kingdom, a treaty worked out
through the mediation of Filippo Strozzi the Elder, the
Florentine banker and statesman.
Some subsequent
interpretations hold that the scene is really the
triumphant re-entry of the Neapolitan fleet after a
naval victory against the Angevin
pretenders to the throne of Naples, a battle that took
place off of Ischia on July 7, 1465. In any event, the
painting was apparently done for Filippo Strozzi as a
gift to him by the Aragonese in thanks for his
diplomatic efforts. He took it back to Florence with him
and used it as a head-board for a bed!
The painting has been dated
to about 1472-3, but certainly before 1487, the year in
which a new lighthouse —not the one on the left in the tavola— was added
to the main pier.* There are various claims as to the
authorship of the painting; they range from one
Francesco Rosselli, a Florentine cartographer and
miniaturist all the way to the very ambitious claim that
the tavola is
the work of Leonardo da Vinci. (The obvious L-shape of
the pier in the painting is supposed to be his
signature; however, clever Leonardo usually signed his
stuff in upside-down encrypted mirror-script, in which
case you might expect a much weirder-looking pier than
the one in the painting. It just looks like a pier to
me.)
The detail is
amazing. You see the San Martino
hill with the monastery and adjacent Angevin Belforte
fortification before it was transformed by the Spanish
into the mammoth Sant’Elmo
fortress. Many of the major landmarks of the city are also
quite visible: Santa Chiara,
San Domenico Maggiore, San Lorenzo, San Giovanni
a Carbonara, Sant’Eligio,
etc. The city wall at water’s edge is also detailed even
down to the rendering of gates that allowed passage to the
beach. The large Maschio Angioino
(Angevin Fortress) (then only 170 years old) is as it was
before the Spanish rebuilt it; the Castel
dell’Ovo is at the far left and seen without the
interposition of the vast new (from 1900) area along the
sea-side.
*The dating is problematic. Croce's
original interpretation of 1479 looks sound since
there is credible documentation (see both Colombo and
Spadetta in the bibliography of "The Lighthouses in
Naples") that the lighthouse in the painting is
the Tower of San Vincenzo, built in 1477. A new
lighthouse was built on the main pier in 1487. Since
that new one is not in the Tavola Strozzi, the painting has to
have been done between 1477 and 1487, unless the
lighthouse shown is an earlier version of the Tower of
San Vincenzo from 1477. to architecture & urban
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