Revival dell’antico e citazioni mantegnesche nella Napoli di età aragonese: i codici in pergamena tinta commissionati da Diomede Carafa

This article considers the manuscripts made with stained membrane pages that Diomede Carafa, Count of Maddaloni (†1487), commissioned or owned, with the aim of identifying their foreign cultural models and the ways in which they were implemented. Together with Diomede’s monumental patronage, these manuscripts reveal a modern taste informed by the antiquarian trends that flourished in Tuscany, Veneto, and Rome. At the same time, this study shows that they also express his conscious and original adaptation of such models. The idea of Diomede’s personal involvement as a concepteur is supported by the analysis of the impressive heraldic presentation of the Libro de la Spera (New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, M.426), one of the at least three manuscripts with stained membrane pages that he commissioned. Among the new contributions offered by this study is the identification of the model behind the group of Hercules and Antaeus illuminated in the opening page of the De regimine principum (Saint Petersburg, Hermitage, ORN 26), a manuscript that Diomede offered to Eleonora d’Aragona, the wife of Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, in 1477. Close iconographic affinities indicate that the prototype was the group frescoed by Andrea Mantegna on the entrance vault of the Camera picta in the Mantua’s Ducal Palace. A likely intermediary for such reprise is further identified with Leon Battista Alberti, who sojourned in Naples in the spring of 1465, or with Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, the third-born of Marquis Ludovico III for whom Mantegna was painting the Camera picta in the same years.