Guido Cappelli’s carefully reasoned argument for the Aragonese state as a work of conscious construction has a long pedigree. Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy contextualized “the state as a work of art” in the same open-ended flux of material and political turmoil that Cappelli attributes to the rise of the modern state in the Regno of Naples. With both imperial and papal claims to legitimacy discredited and actively defeated, political entities throughout Italy sought new means of expressing and reinforcing legitimacy. By the late Trecento, royal blood, beata stirps, and divine will no longer held potency, and the emergence of a new humanist discourse, based not on medieval categories but directly on the works of the ancients, provided the framework for this new kingship expressed by Alfonso the Magnanimous and his successors.

Cappelli traces how the virtues of the ruler embodied in Alfonso I now became identified with the well-being of the emerging nation-state. Working within the parameters of the “education of the prince,” Neapolitan humanists harnessed the political wisdom of the ancients to bolster a consistent concept of political majesty based upon justice and equity in a realm bound by consensus. Cappelli analyzes Panormita’s De Dictis et Factis Alfonsi Regis, Giovanni Brancato’s Orationes ad Ferdinandum, Diomede Carafa’s I doveri del principe, and Francesco Patrizi’s De Regno (the most read political text of the Cinquecento after Aristotle and Machiavelli). He then focuses primarily on Giovanni Pontano’s De Principe, De Obedientia, and De Fortuna.

Scholars of Naples will recognize similarities to Samantha Kelly’s The New Solomon. Cappelli initially organizes his material around the key virtues of the ruler: litterae, religio, fortitudo, gravitas, clementia, iustitia. But, as Kelly established for Robert of Anjou, exaltation of the ruler’s virtues was nothing new in Neapolitan thought, and even Trecento iterations go back to classical rhetorical traditions of epideixis and biography. Aquinas himself had spoken of the state (civitas) as an “opus artis” (131). What then justifies Cappelli’s assertions that Aragonese kingship and its humanist apologists constituted a new departure for both the Regno and European political thought?

Relying on a thorough knowledge of the texts, new editions, and studies (including his own), Cappelli makes the convincing argument that Neapolitan humanists created an innovative model of enlightened rule, thoroughly based on classical exempla; keenly attuned to the political realities of the Regno, the rest of Italy, and Northern Europe; and fully cognizant of the need of the ruler to both exercise power and to display and exemplify the majesty of the state in his own person and behavior. While Aristotle, Cicero, and the Bible could still provide foundations for the religious and civic wisdom for which Robert of Anjou was eponymous—and early modern religious and civic virtues remained closely identified—Neapolitan humanists turned to the secular, civic exempla of the Romans to guide the royal family and the state. In what Fulvio Delle Donne has termed “umanesimo monarchico,” secular considerations of state outweighed any lingering traditions of medieval rule.

Cappelli also joins a growing body of scholars, including Delle Donne and Francesco Senatore, who reexamine the retrospectively normative stature of Florentine civic humanism, and question the denigration of Neapolitan forms of humanism as peripheral and secondhand, wedded too closely to monarchical developments and thus out of sync with the development of Western political thought and institutions. Cappelli stresses that Naples and its new monarchy were at the forefront of European political and intellectual trends that led not to modern democratic government but rather to the ancien régime. The key to Neapolitan concepts of maiestas is the consistent humanist program that the all-powerful state must include the ideas of justice, “mutual charity,” equity, and consensus. Chapter 6, on the collapse of the Aragonese, vividly recounts Pontano’s and other humanists’ disillusion over the failings of this program.

Cappelli’s organization is sometimes inelegant and artificial, and his claims of Aragonese political originality may be met with skepticism; but his book provides both a refreshing synthesis of new research on Neapolitan political and intellectual life in the Quattrocento and another necessary corrective to the threadbare consensus that Neapolitan developments lay outside the mainstream of Western political thought and life.