Rex Utriusque Siciliae: Neo-Medievalism and Revolution

By considering reaction to revolution in Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in relation to the rise of the Gothic Revival, this article offers a bold assessment of the interplay between responses to the Middle Ages and political culture. It examines the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie (1801–05) at the Vaccheria of the royal site of San Leucio, Caserta, in southern Italy, with a view to exploring the reciprocity between what can be seen as a neo-Gothic ’revolution’, wider political and industrial upheaval, and the historic ties between southern Italy and Sicily within the Mezzogiorno. In focusing on this neglected church, which was commissioned by Ferdinand IV of Naples and III of Sicily, the article aims to transcend the tendency in modern scholarship to discount the Gothic Revival in Italy as merely a superficial matter of taste. Recognising revivalism’s political agency, it is argued that Santa Maria delle Grazie bore witness to a profound stylistic crisis as classicism’s absolutist hegemony waned amid the epochal crisis of monarchical absolutism during the period. In tracing architectural and urban experimentation with respect to reactionism, proto-industrialism and medievalism in southern Italy, both before and after late eighteenth-century revolutionary activity, the Gothic Revival is situated within its proper revolutionary context. By extending considerations to Sicily and situating Santa Maria delle Grazie within the Mezzogiorno — through resonances with its medieval histories, including Norman and Swabian rule, and with contemporary ambitions for cohesion between the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily — the article argues for the reactionary yet transnational visual and political dimensions of neo-medievalism. In so doing, it elucidates a symbiosis between architecture and medievalism as a formidable conduit for expressing and enacting power in the Age of Revolutions.