Resumen de Giovanna Il d'Angiò Durazzo e il 'Codice di Santa Marta'
The Codice di Santa Marta is a collection of seventy-three illuminated coats of arms of the most distinguished personalities enrolled in the homonym Neapolitan confratemity. The carrying out of the miniatures goes through two centuries of history, as the first sheets date back to the first half of the fifieenth century and the last to the beginning of the seventeenth.
Scholars generally separate eight main units within the codex, related to the chronology of the single sheets. A heated debate concems the two most ancient groups of folia, since to them are linked the problematic knots of the genesis, the dating and the patronage of the initiative. The issue involves the coats of arms of the Durazzo family, cadet branch of the Angevins of Naples, sovereigns between 1381 and 1435, and the insignia of the relatives of Renato of Anjou, king of Sicily from 1438 to 1442, to which it has to be added the codex’s front page with the image of Santa Marta. To shed light on the dating and the patronage of these first sheets, recent scholarship leaned mainly on stylistic data, which nevertheless are the most complicated to analyze, given the few comparable elements which are still recognizable in the bare overview of Neapolitan miniature of the first part of the fiftheenth century.
The purpose of this essay is, thus, to face the matter of the genesis of the Codice di Santa Marta from another point of view, namely starting from the historical data implied in the realization of the miniatures with the coats of arms. Some inedited documentary sources conceming the confratemity, the choice – sometime surprising – to insert the coats of arms of some personalities and, on the other side, to exclude others, and obviously the reconsideration of some stylistics data, induce to acknowledge Giovanna II of Anjou-Durazzo at the origin of the decoration. The queen should have donated the coats of arms of herself and her family to the brotherhood after reorganizing the intemal order in 1426. The brethren should have continued the initiative, commissioning the opening page and the coats of arms of king Renato’s relatives, giving birth to what would later become the Codice di Santa Marta.
