Baroque Rome Research Articles

A Very “Distilled” Emblem in Baroque Rome: Natural Philosophy, Alchemy, and Atomism in the Academy of the Umoristi

Created and published in a printed volume in 1611, the emblem chosen by the literary Academy of the Umoristi is intriguing at multiple levels. At a time when the water cycle was still unknown, the image engaged the thorny question of how the evaporation of salty seawater, condensed into clouds, could subsequently pour down as sweet rain. Additionally, the Lucretian motto “Redit agmine dulci” audaciously evoked the philosophy of atoms. The combination of the image and the motto suggested looking at the meteorological phenomenon on display as a sort of natural distillation process, not different from the circulations taking place in the alembic. This enquiry will document how the Academy of the Umoristi was influenced in the choice of its emblem by the scientific Academy of the Lincei and how, towards the end of the seventeenth century, under the patronage of Christina of Sweden, the interconnection of alchemy and atomism alluded to in the academic emblem was reclaimed as a distinctive philosophical banner.

Inquisition, Conversion, and Foreigners in Baroque Rome by Irene Fosi (review)

Inquisition, Conversion, and Foreigners in Baroque Rome by Irene Fosi (review)

Laurie Nussdorfer, City of Men. Service and Servants in Baroque Rome

Laurie Nussdorfer, City of Men. Service and Servants in Baroque Rome

Jorge Caron y la cultura arquitectónica de São Paulo

Towers, like obelisks, stand out from a distance, signal places and guide directions in cities, like the Roman Baroque, in a way analogous to dolmens that order and qualify mystical and representative areas. Without covering or protecting, they are typical of the dominant and recognized architecture, they are landmarks of formalistic urbanism. Furthermore, the tower corresponds to a bold construction, to a critical structural problem, whose appropriate complementarity between configuration and construction reveals intelligence and imagination of conceptual, formal and structural options. Architect Jorge Caron does not neglect architectural, permanent and historical aspects in the design of the transmission antenna for TV Cultura. He anticipates the presence of the tower and proposes the metallic geometry that establishes the lattice system, reductive and homogeneous, or uniform. The design of the antenna is related to the discussion of architecture at the end of the 20th century.

Louis XIV’s “The City of the Sun”

The Versailles Park is a synthesis of the utopian fantasies of Tommaso Campanella and the urban baroque transformations of Rome, expressed through landscape architecture. Imbued with Campanella’s “mystical imperialism,” Louis XIV relegates the care of the palace to the background, building first and foremost a man-made landscape as a metaphor for the representation of absolute power. If the Baroque transformations of Rome are projections of private manorial spatial structures onto the layout of the city, the Park of Versailles is the opposite phase of this process initiated by the Roman pontiffs, that is, the projection of Roman Baroque urban structures onto the only truly private property in France at the time. The layouts of Versailles are an essence of Baroque, which could not be obtained either in Rome itself or in Paris with their dense buildings. Louis XIV contrasts Versailles with the capital of the Catholic world and the restless capital of his own kingdom. The park is saturated with didactic symbolism, expressing his concern for the education of worthy successors. The king himself draws up guidebooks and orders the publication of plans of Versailles in which the south is at the top, so that no one dares to look at his residence from the side of the sun he has appropriated. The appearance and semantics of the bosquets and fountains allegorically represent the spheres of interest without which power can be neither enlightened nor universal. However, the grandiose planning structures are only the skeleton; the flesh of the Versailles Park is the walls of trembling foliage, the marble and gilding of statues and decorations, the sparkling and hissing of fountain jets, bursts of sunlight in shadow, the contrasts of cosmic and obscure spaces that are playfully comfortable. The Park of Versailles is a center of sensual pleasures, reaching the peak of ingenuity in the extravagant day-and-night revelries. Through a sophisticated and unconventional stage direction, earth, air, fire and water — all four elements — stir the imagination, memory and thought in the Baroque Gesamtkunstwerk, which glorifies the Sun King.

Did Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa cross a seventeenth-century line of decorum?

The Ecstasy of St. Teresa is arguably the most controversial work created by the Roman Baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). The debate surrounding the statue centers on the question: did the artist’s radically non-traditional depiction of Teresa’s transverberation transgress the boundaries of decorum as understood by seventeenth-century Catholicism? This debate has lasted for many years and is likely to endure for many more to come, for, as the mass of, at times, contradictory documentation leads us to conclude, the line of decorum that Bernini did, or did not, cross would seem to resist any firm pinpointing, that is was, indeed, fluid and subjective, even when seen through seventeenth-century eyes. The aim of this article is not to deny the subjective fluidity of that line of decorum, but rather to propose that it was perhaps far less fluid and subjective than some examiners of the issue today seem inclined to believe. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, its aim is also to disabuse the staunch defenders of Bernini’s decorum of the belief that no matter where that line of decorum might have been located in the seventeenth century, there cannot possibly be any reasonable grounds for suggesting that Bernini may have crossed it. Defenses of Bernini’s decorum rest on three claims: (1) Bernini faithfully followed the literal description of Teresa’s transverberation as described by the saint herself; (2) the Church understood that mystical union often entailed erotic elements and thus had no problem with religious art depicting that reality; and (3) since there is no nudity in Bernini’s statue, it cannot be accused of violating decorum. Through detailed analysis of Roman Catholic catechetical teaching (from Augustine to Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino), Teresa’s writings and other primary texts relating to the saint’s transverberation, and an extremely close examination of the statue itself, this article argues that none of these defenses is completely accurate and thus unassailable in its conclusion, while, however, not claiming to resolve the decorum debate once and for all.

The Daily Life of Nuns in Seventeenth-century Papal Rome: Prayers, Supernatural Events, Everyday Concerns and Violence

The paper aims to examine the daily life of Italian Catholic nuns in Baroque Rome. During the seventeenth century, several important nunneries were founded in the Papal City. Many were established especially for women from the most important or wealthy families. Almost all of these religious communities were compelled to observe the strict enclosure. The nuns' daily life alternated between prayer, work, and visits (more or less intrusive) by aristocratic noblewomen, princesses and foreign queens; but the nunneries were also witness to events perceived as being supernatural, such as spiritual fights with the devil, along with more or less severe penances and self-flagellation. More than a few were the sisters whose holiness and excellence were celebrated by contemporary chroniclers. Nevertheless, the repetitive nature of the life in a restricted space could cause concerns, troubles, escape attempts which occasionally exploded with brutal consequences, such as brawls and even murders. This was specially linked to those nuns who were forced to profess religious vows but also to rival and opposing factions existing inside the nunneries. However, such inconveniences were carefully hidden by the ecclesiastical authorities so as not to alter the image of Roman monasteries as terrestrial paradises, in opposition to Protestants who had abolished monasticism. The paper reconstructs such a scenario looking through various documentary sources: from monastic chronicles to city chronicles; and to reports written by those who were in charge of controlling nuns, especially cardinals and Roman Curia.

1656년의 페스트와 산타 체칠리아의 수녀들

In the late 17th and the early 18th centuries, the Monastery of Saint Cecilia in Trastevere, founded on the site of the birthplace of a Roman martyr Saint Cecilia, was a representitive site of Roman Baroque culture. The plague in Rome in 1656 was one of main factors that enhanced the monastery’s prestige. The chronicler of the Chronicle of Saint Cecilia intentionally connected the its success in tackling the plague to the “cloisters of nuns”, one of the precepts of the Counter-Reformation. This study utilizes the Chronicle of Saint Cecilia as a primary source and aims to investigate how the benedictine nuns of the monastery of Santa Cecilia responded to the plague on a personal and institutional level and, in doing so, tries to reconsider the chronicler’s intention.

Emperor Nicholas I, collector and philanthropist. Days 9/22 and 10/23 December 1845 in Bologna

Bologna with its eldest university in Europe was an important point of Emperor Nicholas I’s grand tour of Italy in 1845. In Rome the tsar talked with the Pope on problems of inter-church relations, then the rest of the time in the eternal city and along the entire route (from Palermo to Naples, from Florence to Bologna and Venice) he showed himself as a prominent collector, patron of the arts, who adopted his parents love for Italian art. The tsar had a special reverence for the Bologna painting school, the Bolognese Baroque style, which, along with the Roman Baroque, was refl ected in his purchases for the New Hermitage. Only in Bologna he acquired the originals of classical painting (Guercino, Agostino Caracci). There he practically completed the formation of his famous collection of Italian neoclassical sculpture (C. Baruzzi) and ordered copies from the local Pinacoteca of such a high level that they, having partially reached our time, were honored to enter the GE painting collection. Russian monarch’s visit is commemorated only in Rome and Bologna by commemorative plaques, the fi rst of which is offi cial, and the second is an “ordinary” Bolognese marquis, who considered it an honor to visit his palace by the Russian tsar.

A magyar építész és a lengyel falusiak

The church building can be described as neo baroque with a historicizing facade formally referring to the early Roman Baroque, for example the Diocletian "therma" windows. On the other hand, the cross-gable dates to the 18th century like St. Anthony's Church in Lviv (Lember) from the 19th century. All in all, the building shows the stylistic features of Kováts' unique work as outlined in his theoretical manifestos as "the basic principles of modern architecture". Even now, surveys have revealed that after more than 100 years this building is in good condition, which stands as a testament to the villagers who built it.

Fosi, Irene. Inquisition, Conversion, and Foreigners in Baroque Rome

Fosi, Irene. Inquisition, Conversion, and Foreigners in Baroque Rome

ARRHYTHMIA OF COLONNADES IN ROMAN BAROQUE ARCHITECTURE

The article considers the special rhythmic structure inherent in the facades of Roman baroque churches of the late 16th – 17th centuries. Select examples illustrate the relations typical of such architecture between the bottom diameter of columns (embates), intercolumniation, and column height. These relations include the classical ones, which are consistent with the theory of proportions of Pythagoras and the rules of Vitruvius, but the unusual arrhythmic techniques of the composition create a special dissonant resonance with human biorhythms and mental states within the space of Baroque architecture.

Balsdon Fellowships: An Iberian diaspora in Baroque Rome (1610–50)

Balsdon Fellowships: An Iberian diaspora in Baroque Rome (1610–50)

The Labor Market in the Seventeenth-Century Italian Art Sector

We analyze the labor market for painters in Baroque Rome using unique panel data on primary sales of still lifes, portraits, genre paintings, landscapes and figurative paintings. In line with the traditional artistic hierarchy of genres, average price differentials between them were high. We identify supply and demand factors related to prices of paintings. The panel dimension of the dataset and its matched painter-patron nature allows us to evaluate the extent to which price heterogeneity is related to unobservable characteristics of painters and patrons. We find that most of the inter-genre price differential is explained by the variation in average artist heterogeneity across genres. This suggests that the market allocated artists between artistic genres to the point of equalizing the marginal return of each genre. We also explain residual price differences in terms of efficiency wage, signalling and incentive mechanisms to induce effort in the production of artistic quality.

Innocent X Pamphilj's Architectural Network in Rome

This study employs network analysis and microhistory to challenge the standard narrative about architecture and patronage in Baroque Rome, that of celebrity patron-artist relationships. It investigates the artists and artisans below this elite team and the plurality of relationships that developed among them. The subject is Innocent X Pamphilj's monumental works of art and architecture, at the Vatican, Piazza Navona, Campidoglio, Lateran, and Janiculum Hill, commissioned for the 1650 Holy Year. It argues that competent artisans and their relationships influenced the operation of building sites and presents Innocent X as the patron of an industrious architectural enterprise.

Jan Reisner w Akademii św. Łukasza. Artysta a polityka króla Jana III i papieża Innocentego XI

Jan Reisner w Akademii św. Łukasza. Artysta a polityka króla Jana III i papieża Innocentego XI

Celebrating the Invisible: Aqueduct Display Fountains in Rome and America

Celebrating the Invisible: Aqueduct Display Fountains in Rome and America PETER AICHER Some of the most famous monuments in Rome are fountains that explicitly commemorate the construction of the aqueducts that supply them. The Italian term for these special fountains is mostra, the same word that designates an art exhibit. Key to the term as applied by the Romans to a type of fountain is that the fountain be conceived of and inaugurated as a celebration of the aqueduct behind it. While the tradition continued somewhat less grandly with Rome’s 20th century aqueducts, its most famous and rhetorically explicit examples are three papal showpieces that culminate in the Trevi Fountain. After a brief review of these fountains and the Fountain of the Naiads, I will discuss the legacy of this tradition, and departures from it, in commemorations of the monumental aqueducts of New York City and California. This comparative approach will not only reveal the role of Rome in presenting American waterworks to the public, but explore the social, political, and environmental differences that complicate the continuation of display traditions on American shores.1 I have argued elsewhere against the still prevalent conception that the tradition of the grand mostre began in ancient Rome.2 In the face of the abundant evidence for a host of monumental fountains in ancient Rome and the empire, my argument relies on the important distinction, made above, between a mostra and a monumental fountain, however grand the latter may be. To complicate matters, there is some evidence that papal builders of mostre indeed imagined they were continuing an ancient tradition, and many modern comarion 27.3 winter 2020 68 celebrating the invisible mentaries on ancient Roman fountains follow in their fallible footsteps. There are scattered examples throughout antiquity of a fountain commemorating its aqueduct and its builder, but the practice wasn’t common and certainly not frequent enough to warrant the assumption of a standard practice that the popes simply continued. In fact, the papal mostre, for all their splendor and contribution to the charm of Rome, would, at least in terms of resources, expense, and scale, all be side-shows in comparison to the aquatic extravaganzas of the ancient imperial baths and their wall fountains. A more substantial connection between Baroque Rome’s mostre with antiquity exists in the papal aqueducts themselves, which, in varying degrees, all reused or refurbished sections of ancient channels and re-tapped sources that had been lost to the city for centuries. Another connection between the papal aqueducts and their ancient Roman counterparts involves the rediscovery of Frontinus’s handbook on the city’s nine aqueducts of his day (c. 100 ce). A century after a lone manuscript of his text resurfaced at Monte Cassino in 1429, Frontinus’s description of aqueduct routes helped a papal librarian, guided in addition by the piles of deposits removed from the ancient channel in antiquity, rediscover the original sources of the Aqua Virgo.3 Though copious and only eight miles from center city, the low-lying nature of these springs made them difficult to find—a geographical feature that will be memorialized by Trevi Fountain sculpture. Earlier papal work on the aqueduct (called by then the Acqua Vergine, the city’s sole ancient aqueduct that never entirely ceased running) had occasioned a humble commemorative fountain in a small square where three streets met—hence Trevi. But the aqueduct’s 16th century renovation and reconnection to the ancient springs called for something grander. It would take another two centuries until that spectacular display was created. In the meantime, within fifty years of the Vergine’s restoration, two other papal aqueducts, the Acqua Felice of 1587 and the Ac- Peter Aicher 69 qua Paola of 1612, were completed, reconnecting the city to sources tapped by two other ancient aqueducts, the Aqua Alexandrina and the Aqua Traiana respectively. Sadly, the Acqua Felice’s gloomy arcade cannibalized many of the fine cut-stone arches of the ancient Fig. 1: The mostra of the Acqua Felice near the Baths of Diocletian . Note the central Moses statue, the inscription commemorating Sixtus V and his aqueduct, and the ornamental obelisks that figured so prominently in Sixtus V...

‚Space, Privacy and Gender in the Roman Baroque Palace‘

‚Space, Privacy and Gender in the Roman Baroque Palace‘

D’Annunzio, Bernini, and the Baroque prelude of Il Piacere

This essay investigates the early rediscovery of Bernini and the Roman Baroque in D’Annunzio’s Il piacere. Starting from the analysis of the few explicit textual references and the many implicit allusions to the Baroque artist in the novel, the present study documents Bernini’s impact on Sperelli’s persona, poetic method, and artistic projects. At the same time, based on the protagonist’s radical re-evaluation of Bernini—after two centuries of critical dismissal—this article also sheds light on the deep and substantial relationship connecting the Roman Baroque and D’Annunzio’s aesthetics. The rediscovered culture of the 17th century indeed constitutes not only a key element in Il piacere, but also an important poetic prelude for D’Annunzio’s hoped-for renaissance of the arts, and for the scholarly re-appreciation of the genius of Bernini (from Riegl to Wittkower). In light of the later success of dannunzianesimo, the novel’s Baroque vein can also be read as the first historical spark of the fervent Italian debate known as the questione barocca.

Gaspare Berti’s Legacy

Documentation regarding the practical mathematicians in the early modern age is as rare as it is precious. In fact, where it exists, it permits us to document the culture of mathematics at a time of strong interchanges between the ‘artisan epistemology’ and erudite scientific culture. This paper will present a complete edition of the post-mortem inventory of the Roman mathematician Gaspare Berti (1601–1643), which was discovered among the notary papers of the Roman Court of Auditor Camerae. This document is of great interest, both generally and in particular. On the one hand, it sheds light on a figure who has remained unknown for centuries, except for his pioneering work on the vacuum in the early 17th century. On the other hand, thanks to an exceptional wealth of details, through the inventory we are given a deeper look from within at the ‘trading zone’ between practical and theoretical mathematics in the particular context of Baroque Rome. This almost photographic documentation contextualizes the lively world of practical mathematics, allowing comparison with the ‘big narrative’ of its alleged decline after Galileo’s condemnation.