Claire Barron Jensen

My dissertation focuses on fresco wall paintings from around the turn of the fifteenth century in the hospital church of SS. Annunziata in the town of Sant’Agata de’ Goti. Located approximately forty kilometers northeast of Naples, this small rural church was modeled on the larger Neapolitan Casa Santa dell’Annunziata and similarly functioned as an orphanage, poorhouse, and bank from the later middle ages until the end of the Baroque period. I argue that the Sant’Agata frescoes were part of an artistic culture shared among many Annunziata sites in the Kingdom of Naples. Focusing specifically on the time of the “black legend” of the last Angevin rulers (ca 1343–1435), I show that the media, artists, and iconography of Annunziata art contradict preconceived notions of social and artistic decay in this period and evoke Trecento ideals of charity, care, and civic identity a small town in the rural interior of Naples.