Empire of the sun: Lelio Guidiccioni and Pope Urban VIII

Abstract

In 1633 and again in 1639, Lelio Guidiccioni, a priest and poet of the day, published in Rome poems celebrating the dedication of Bernini's baldacchino over the Tomb of St. Peter, and generally setting out the claims to pre-eminence as sun-king of Bernini's patron, Urban VIII. Just a few weeks before the first of these poems was published, Urban's inquisitors had condemned Galileo, and the later piece was written in the very year that the English Puritan poet, John Milton, visited the Palazzo Barberini. The protests of Galileo and Milton against a dying ideology are familiar. Guidiccioni's poems are valuable for the light they throw on the other side of the case, and for the clash they illustrate between two views of truth.