ARAGON IN ITALY AND SPAIN, 14.~H-94sculptor Guido Mazzoni, whose life-size terracotta depiction
of the entombment of Christ in the church of Monteoliveto
in Naples incorporates portraits of the royal family.^1 H The
sculptured triumphal gateway to the Castelnuovo in Naples
was completed under Ferrante, who commissioned portrayals
in this complex of his own escape from the rebellious barons
and of his coronation; Duke Alfonso of Calabria initiated
plans for the rebuilding of Naples which promised to make
the town into a model city, furnished with fountains, streams
and straight streets, which 'would, besides giving the city
beautiful proportions, have turned it into the cleanest and
most elegant in Europe', to cite the Neapolitan humanist
Summonte, a figure who gave the Aragonese kings of Naples
an unusually good press.^1 q Important innovations in court
music resulted from the arrival in Naples of Flemish com-
posers such as the royal cantor Johannes Tinctoris, who spent
twenty years at Ferrante's court, and whose influence lay
not merely in his compositions and his performances, but
also in his treatises on the art of music. Tinctoris, according
to the major authority on Neapolitan Renaissance music,
'put Naples in the centre of the musical mainstream'; he
was 'one of the seminal figures in Renaissance music theory'.
Ferrante's policy was to offer salaries to the best musicians
he could find in Europe.^20
Distinguished literary figures at court included the eminent
poet and administrator Giovanni Gioviano Pantano, who was
active in the literary circle that still persists as the Accademia
Pontaniana of Naples/^1 Antonio Beccadelli, or Panormita,
a reformed pornographer, wrote an elegant history of
Ferrante's life up to his assumption of the crown;^22 the royal
- On Antonello see: S. Tramontana, Antonello e la sua cittii (Palermo,
1981); L. Arb ace, A ntonello da Messina. Catalogo completo dei dipinti
(Florence, 1993); D. Thiebaut, Le Christ ii la colonne d'Antonello de
Messine (Paris, 1993). - G.L. Hersey, Alfonso II and the artistic renewal of Naples, 1485-95 (New
Haven, Conn., 1969). - A. Atlas, Music at the Aragonese court of Naples (Cambridge, 1985);
Guglielmo Ebreo of Pesaro, De pratica seu arte tripudii. On the practice
or art of dancing, ed. and trans!. B. Sparti (Oxford, 1993). - Kidwell, Pantano, passim, and the items mentioned in Chapter 9, note
23. - Antonius Panhormita, Liber rerum gestarum Ferdinandi regis; A. Ryder,
'Antonio Beccadelli: a humanist in government', in C.H. Clough, ed.,