southern Italy, formerly capital of the kingdom of Naples.
Originally colonized by Greeks, Naples was in turn
Roman, Byzantine, and Norman before it was ruled by the
Angevins (1282–1442), the king of Aragon (1442–58),
and the illegitimate Aragonese line (1458–95). Much of
the political turmoil that afflicted Naples in the later years
of Angevin rule was due to the fact that two of the legiti-
mate rulers were queens—Joanna (Giovanna) I of Anjou
(reigned 1343–81) and Joanna II of Durazzo (reigned
1414–35)—with no clear candidate to succeed them. In
pursuit of the Angevin claim, CHARLES VIII of France
briefly took over Naples (1495–96); after a period of con-
fusion the city and kingdom of Naples were restored to
Aragonese and Spanish rule (1504). Naples was then
ruled by Spanish governors until the early 18th century.
During the 14th and 15th centuries Naples was the
capital of a kingdom still organized largely on feudal lines;
it lacked a substantial middle class and its commercial and
economic development lagged behind that of cities in
northern Italy. The prosperity of the city depended on the
presence of the royal court and on the agriculture of the
region. Yet, the growth of the city’s population in the Re-
naissance era was remarkable, rising from about 30,000 in
1300 to about 60,000 in 1400 and close to 300,000 in
1600.
Royal patronage made Naples an important center of
learning and the arts. ALFONSO I“the Magnanimous”, who
resided permanently in Naples after 1443 set the trend
with his patronage of, among others, Lorenzo VALLAand
Antonio BECCADELLI. His successor FERDINAND I(Fer-
rante) continued to support the arts and scholarship, with
the humanist PONTANOas his secretary of state. In the
1480s Ferdinand’s son, the future Alfonso II (reigned
1494–95), oversaw building works that transformed Na-
ples into a Renaissance city. The city had a fine university
(founded 1224), schools of humanist studies in the sec-
ond half of the 15th century (see also NEAPOLITAN ACAD-
EMY), printing presses (from 1471), and one of the oldest
conservatories of music (founded 1537). In the 1530s the
influential religious thinker and reformer, Juan de VALDÉS,
studied and wrote in Naples. The composer Philippe de
MONTEworked in Naples in the 1540s, as did GESUALDO
later in the century. CARAVAGGIOpainted for the Neapoli-
tan court in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
Neapolitan monarchs encouraged grand public works in
their capital city; the Castel Nuovo (1279–82), the cath-
edral (1294–1333), and the Castel Sant Elmo (rebuilt
1537–46) are among the buildings that have survived. Al-
fonso I’s triumphal arch erected (1453–66) by Pietro da
Milano at the Castel Nuovo is adorned with reliefs by
Francesco LAURANA; later sculptors to work in the city in-
cluded the Spaniards Diego de SILOEand Bartolomé OR-
DÓÑEZ.
Further reading: Jerry H. Bentley, Politics and Culture
in Renaissance Naples (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1999).Nardi, Jacopo (1476–1563) Italian politician and
historian
Nardi was born in Florence and belonged to the intellec-
tual circle of the ORTI ORICELLARI. His earliest works were
two comedies based on tales in Boccaccio: L’Amicizia
(written between 1502 and 1512) and I due felici rivali
(performed in 1513). A committed republican, he held
various offices after the exiling of the Medici in 1494 and
played an active role in their second expulsion in 1527.
On their return in 1530 Nardi himself was exiled. Most of
the rest of his life was spent in Venice. His chief work Is-
torie della città di Firenze (1582), covering the period
1498–1537, is mainly valuable for the period 1512–30,
when Nardi was in the thick of political events on the anti-
Medicean side.Nashe, Thomas (Thomas Nash) (1567–c. 1601) English
writer
Nashe was born in Lowestoft, went to Cambridge univer-
sity (1582), and then traveled in France and Italy before
settling (c. 1588) in London. There he quickly embroiled
himself in literary feuds, publishing his Anatomie of absur-
ditie (1589) in which he attacked recent writers, and
under the pseudonym of Pasquil he contributed pro-
bishop pamphlets to the MARPRELATE CONTROVERSY. The
Cambridge pedant Gabriel HARVEYwas a special target of
Nashe’s lively satire until, after the publication of Nashe’s
Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596), officialdom inter-
vened to terminate the dispute. The picaresque novel The
Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton (1594)
shows Nashe’s narrative and inventive powers at their
best, while Lenten Stuffe (1599), a mock panegyric on
Yarmouth herrings, is a bravura performance in burlesque.
Nashe also wrote for the stage; in 1597 he was imprisoned
for his share in the lost comedy The Isle of Dogs. Another
comedy, Summers Last Will and Testament, was published
in 1600, and he completed MARLOWE’s Dido, Queen of
Carthage (1594) after Marlowe’s death.natural philosophy Throughout the Renaissance, and
indeed long after, this was the term widely used to refer to
the systematic investigation of nature. Science, as we
know it today, emerged in the 17th century but its roots
lay in Renaissance thought. This is most clearly seen in as-
tronomy. The work of COPERNICUShad shown that the
universe is heliocentric and was followed by KEPLER’s dis-
covery of the three laws of planetary motion. What,
though, of motion itself? Two problems faced the Renais-
sance natural philosopher: to develop techniques to de-
scribe and analyse all kinds of motion and to explain its
various forms. On the first issue scholars began with thennaattuurraall pphhiilloossoopphhyy 3 33355