Urban VIII Barberini

Carlotta Sylos Calò (/users/cscalo) Tanto, tanto tempo fa, nell'antica Grecia, il dio dei fiumi, Cefiso, rapì la ninfa Liriope e dalla loro unione nacque Narciso. L'astrologo Tiresia predisse che il bellissimo bambino avrebbe vissuto fino a tarda età, mantenendo intatta la sua straordinaria bellezza, solo se non si fosse mai guardato in volto. E così fu. Narciso restò per sempre giovane e bello, ma superbo e solitario. Ignorava tutte le ninfe e i giovinetti che si innamoravano di lui, anche la bella Eco, la più spensierata delle naiadi, che chiamandolo e chiamandolo, senza ottenere risposta, venne consumata dall'amore per lui, divenendo sola voce (da allora essa risponde ai viandanti ripetendo solo l'ultima sillaba delle loro parole). Narciso rimase indifferente al dramma; gli dei, per punire la sua vanità, fecero in modo che il giovane vedesse la propria immagine riflessa nell'acqua. Il ragazzo si innamorò di se stesso e rimase a guardarsi e a guardarsi finché, sporgendosi per toccare la propria immagine, perse l'equilibrio e cadde nell'acqua. Il suo corpo fu allora trasformato in un fiore dal profumo intenso. Questo sito utilizza cookie per fornirti la migliore esperienza di navigazione. Se continui nella navigazione acconsenti all'uso dei cookie.

Between 2001 and 2010, the REQUIEM research project explored the Roman papal and cardinal tombs in the context of the history of art and persons. The introductory essay of the anthology summarises the results of the art historical and socio-historical research and gives an outlook on open questions and desiderata.

Seventh-Century Barberini Documents and Inventories of Art, New York University Press, 1975. The Barberini family was a ruling force in 17th-century Rome. Its most prominent member, Maffeo Barberini, who became Pope Urban VIII (1623-1644), and his three nephews, Cardinal Francesco, Cardinal Antonio, and Prince Taddeo, were not only official religious and civic leaders, but prime movers in the art and cultural activities as well. Together they amassed collections of paintings, sculpture, antiquities, and decorative arts, legendary in their own time in terms of quality and quantity. This volume documents their patronage and describes in detail the " Galleria Barberini " in its age of glory. Transcribed in these pages are some five hundred documents of payments, contracts, orders, bills, and memoranda of various sorts, and more than twenty inventories dating from 1608 to 1704. The material was gathered from the manuscript records of the Barberini family archive, housed today in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, and not previously available for public consultation. The advantages of treating so large a chronological span of a private archive as a unit include fuller pictures of the careers of certain artists than available before, and recognitions of works of a considerable number of heretofore unknown artists. Frequently the documents produce as many as five or six references to one object, each adding precious fragments of new information, defining shifts in taste, views of attribution, repairs, copies, and even monetary value. Besides transcribing the actual documents, the author has created a summary inventory (Master Index) for the whole century in which every reference to a given object is brought together with dates, dimensions, and other data in abbreviated form. Here the reader may ascertain quickly where the object is mentioned and see at a glance its 17th-century history. The primary function of the publication is as a research tool for art historians who specialize in problems of identifying, attributing and dating Baroque paintings and sculpture. Because of the scope of the material published, plus indications of further unpublished information in the Barberini Archive, archaeologists, social and economic historians, musicologists, and theater and costume historians, will also find much that is useful. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, 1973 I wrote this overly long abstract in 1973 to explain the intent and structure of the original publication. Somewhere in the 1990s the Getty Provenance Index took over the material, rearranged and renumbered it and entered it into the Getty Provenance database system. Several years later the ACLS Humanities E-Book project (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI) scanned the book itself and made it available for licensing. With restrictions, the electronic PDF can be found in the catalogs of institutions that have paid the fee. The current 742 page PDF was made from the first copy I received from the press. It is presented here, of course, free of charge, down loadable and OCR-ed and therefore is (or should be) fully word-searchable. MAL, February, 2016

I finally finished writing the index of names and I made some corrections to the book that comes out in the 2nd edition.
I hope you appreciate my book and mention it where necessary.
Roma, 7 may, 2018

For citation:
Fortuzzi Cinzia, La biblioteca Barberina : La raccolta libraria di Urbano VIII e Francesco Barberini. 7 maggio 2018, https://www.academia.edu/36580655/La_Biblioteca_Barberina_la_raccolta_libraria_di_Urbano_VIII_e_Francesco_Barberini>. (ultima consultazione: ¬¬--/--/----)

Dato di cultura saliente del governo di Francesco I (1610-1658), terzo duca estense del ramo di Modena, è che con lui la recentissima capitale dei suoi Stati divenga un polo d'attrazione per artisti delle più varie aree geografiche. Notevolissimo l'impulso culturale impresso dalla forte personalità del duca, che fece di Modena un centro propulsivo della civiltà barocca. Artisti fra i maggiori furono coinvolti nei numerosi cantieri chiesastici e civili, o impegnati in commissioni dalla corte e dallo stesso principe. Tale politica di magnificenza in campo artistico è espressa anche nell'altissima qualità del collezionismo ducale. Inoltre, si è voluto tratteggiare un breve profilo di Francesco I d'Este accennando ai temi emergenti dalla sua biografia: i luoghi della sua corte, le grandi imprese edilizie, le scelte politiche, le campagne militari, la diplomazia matrimoniale.

This paper discusses the first laudatory ode addressed to the Polish Jesuit poet Mathias Casimirus Sarbievius (Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, 1595-1640), by the Frenchman Gilbertus Joninus (Gilbert Jonin, 1596-1638), originally published in 1630. The composition is an appraisal of the many different topics which Sarbievius' poetry covers, beginning with his odes to the pope, followed by patriotic lyrics, poems with an aeronautocal theme, compositions about chaste, heavenly love, and finally that which the Pole wisely omits. In the ode's conclusion, Sarbievius is compared to Horace, probably for the first time. The article also makes a comparison between the 1630 and 1632 editions of Joninus' eulogy.

This panel is the first of a series of seminars planned to present studies and researches on the art and cultural patronage of the Barberini family in Rome and Europe, between the last quarter of the XVIth century and the end of the XVIIth.
Prepared in decades of alliances and diplomatic agreements, with the support of family finances, the reign of Pope Urban VIII, born Maffeo Barberini (Florence  1568 – Rome 1644) lasted twenty-one years and determined the political future of the Papacy in Europe as well as the diffusion of a new artistic style and taste throughout the Continent. Born in a noble Florentine family of merchants and bankers, Maffeo was formed in Pisa by illustrious scholars, he soon went to Rome where he was destined to the ecclesiastical career. Helped by his uncle Monsignor Francesco (Florence 1528 – Rome 1600) an apostolic notary, the young and bright cleric entered the entourage of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini (Rome 1571 - 1621), nephew of the ruling Pope Clement VIII (Reg. 1592 – 1605). Educated by those prodigious politicians and diplomats, Maffeo himself a distinguished writer and  poet, elaborated an amazingly detailed programme to cover all aspects of the Government of the Church. Differently from the less structured and organized reign of Paul V Borghese (Reg. 1605 – 1622), who made him a Cardinal in 1606, Maffeo’s political project involved all the Arts, architecture, painting and sculpture, as well as the literary and historical studies, the erudite disciplines, the new research in the natural world promoted by the “scientists“ of the Accademia dei Lincei. From 1623, and especially throughout the first decade of his reign, Pope Urban VIII, his nephews Cardinals Francesco (Florence 1597 – Rome 1679) and Antonio Barberini (Rome 1607 – Nemi 1671) along with their ministers, clever agents and talented artists formed an extraordinarily resourceful government which used all the Arts and the Letters to attract and seduce the rest of the world to the Roman Catholic faith. In a famous letter written to Galileo Galilei (Pisa 1564 – Arcetri 1642), the historian Agostino Mascardi (Sarzana 1590 - 1640) defines the election of Maffeo Barberini to the Papacy as a Mirabil Congiuntura. As a renovated Mirabilia Urbis Romae of the High Renaissance papacies, the new marvel of the Roma Barberina sparkled throughout Europe with the objective of diffusing the arts of the newly created Propaganda Fide (1622).
This panel has been called to testimony the liveliness of “Barberini studies” after the major colloquium organised in Rome in December 2004 and its proceedings published in 2008

In the first half of the Seventeenth century the Spanish Monarchy employed massive diplomatic energies towards the Holy See in favour of the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. In particular, starting from the pontificates of Urban VIII and Innocent X, the article analyses the path that led to the emanation of the Papal bull "Sollicitudo omnium Ecclesiarum" (1661, under Alexander VII). In the two decades here examined it appears clear both the ductility of the indications that Philip IV gave to his extraordinary ambassadors, and the importance of the political and ecclesiological implications of the arguments used by the Habsburg Monarchy in favour of the proclamation of the dogma: the concept of orthodoxy, the role of the general council, the uniformity of liturgy, cults and devotions within the catholicity, the possibilities of intervention of the secular powers in matters of doctrine.

It is impossible to think of art as of a distant creation, something unrelated to the world and its society. On the contrary, I believe art is a product of the world, perhaps its most valuable product.
I am deeply convinced that studying the works of art of a specific historic period can bring some crucial aspects of it to light, sometimes in mysterious ways: this is all the more true in the case of artists such as Titian, Bernini, Rubens, and Van Dyck, who lived in close contact with the powerful figures of their times. Through their images, they offer us a narrative of history that sometimes not even the pen of historians is able to represent in all its depth and complexity. Through a brilliant iconographic composition, through skilfully arranged poses, through the depiction of a single glance, artists can portray the human aspects that often drive crucial historical events. Historians, on the contrary, are tied to verifiable scientific data. Such data rarely allows human impulses and emotions to come to light.
An Artist is always the son of his time. His works absorb the influence of those who came before him and those who work around him, and they will influence future generations of artists.
Art is like an ever flowing river. Everything has an origin and a continuation.
This is why I chose to write this book. It is the story of Anthony Van Dyck, of his art, but also of the world he lived in and the society that shaped him: the first four decades of the 17th century.
The works of the great artists of that time, including those of Van Dyck, were and still are particularly intriguing and mysterious.
All works of art have multiple reading levels, and I would like to mention three in particular.
The first level is purely aesthetic. It is a highly subjective and at the same time universal level. Everybody has a reaction at front a work of art: even indifference counts as a reaction. I like it, I don't like it, I don't understand it, it means nothing to me: these are the main types of reaction we have when looking at art. Everybody has a different perception of what is beautiful, fascinating, interesting. Everybody, in short, has a personal taste that evolves following personal patterns of creation and development and is influenced by the surrounding society.
The second reading level of a work of art is purely technical, and it is not for everybody to understand: only those who have studied the evolution of artistic currents over time with their peculiar techniques can fully grasp it. This second, smaller category of people is able to appreciate the technical quality of a work, its position among the artistic movements of its time, its degree of maturity and its originality compared to other artists of the same period. It will be a pleasure for these expert observers to asses which influence the work may have had in the history of art.
The third reading level is open to those who know the historical context in which the artist lived.
With a deep knowledge of the artist's environment, I will be able to recognize the apparent and concealed messages his work wanted to convey to the public, or even to single individuals. Seen from this perspective, the study of a work of art becomes really challenging, fascinating and intriguing.
The last pages of this book will dwell on the historical and biographic events that took place during the last two years of Van Dyck's life. A key figure of these years is the future cardinal Mazarin: it will be interesting to examine what kind of relationship connected the artist and the statesman. Not only was Mazarin one of the most powerful figures of his time, he was also a refined art connoisseur and collector. It is also important to mention that Mazarin, according to numerous sources, was going to be the next patron of Van Dyck after the forced interruption of the artist's career at the court of the British King Charles I. I will try to give a clear account of the interactions between the painter and the future cardinal, with the help of solid historical-scientific documentation. This story still presents some relatively unknown elements that are really worth studying: in addition to being fascinating, these elements shed new light on the artist's work, his reputation, and the real position he could have occupied in the history of art.
It is the opinion of numerous scholars that Van Dyck's art would have flourished at its best at the court of France thanks to Mazarin's patronage. This is why the last two years of his life could have had a crucial importance, if only his premature death hadn't decided otherwise.
He was a rose broken before fully giving all of its scent.
This would show even more clearly today if Van Dyck had managed to realize a great work of art, similar to the one created by his master Rubens for Marie de' Medici in her palace in Paris. The great work I am talking about was going to be a majestic cycle of paintings for the Gallery Du Louvre. This was the main reason for his relationship with Mazarin. This work would have allowed Van Dyck to prove his mastery as a complete artist to his contemporaries as well as to the generations to come. Such a vast cycle of paintings could have been the long wished for, long awaited turning point of his artistic career.
The main historical-artistic differences between Rubens and Van Dyck clearly come to light through the observation of their religious paintings. Van Dyck's work in this field has mostly been considered as an appendix of Rubens'. However, a substantial, although subtle difference can be observed between their styles. Rubens' works are powerful, awe-inspiring, with a mighty, imposing composition. They resound like war drums, they mirror the religious passion that inflamed the Catholics of the Hispanic-Flemish world in his times, the years of the Counter-Reformation. Van Dyck's painting, on the contrary, was sweeter, softer, perhaps more naïve. It was a soul-caressing painting, one that would make hearts beat, rather than unchain burning passions. In fact, with the end of the internal wars within the Christian world and the modern tendency towards ecumenism, Rubens' strong, energetic and vigorous painting has lost some of its original meaning, which was a sort of religious-political call to arms. Its work only remains as a testimony of a time gone by. Van Dyck's religious painting, on the contrary, still calls to the soul of its observers with sweetness, elegance, sobriety: its meaning is fully understandable even for today's perception. Both Rubens and Van Dyck were exponents of the Spanish-Flemish artistic world that supported the Counter-Reformation. Rubens had lived in Spain, at the Spanish court, the political heart of the Counter-Reformation, one of the strictest and most polemic promoters of the whole movement. This was the vision he fought for with his vigorous religious painting. Van Dyck was never in Spain. He knew that world only by reflection, from his life in Flanders and his journey to Italy, especially in the South, to Sicily. When he travelled to Sicily, the island was suffering from a terrible plague epidemic. Under those circumstances, religion was perceived as a personal thing, rather than as a political issue: it was first of all the relationship between the suffering man and God, who became man's only hope and strength. The young Fleming, aged only 25, was deeply impressed by the violence of that experience: his stay in Sicily during the plague decisively shaped his emotions, his sensitive soul and his feeling for religion. All of this mirrors in his painting: although his whole activity can be interpreted in the light of the Counter-Reformation, it does not consist of roaring, passionate incitements to take sides in the religious fight of the time. He had a subtler, more intimate aim: evangelization. He pursued it in a charming, gentle, elegant way, without shouting, sometimes with a certain naivety. Rather than fiery passions, he levered personal feelings of love and compassion, feelings that can touch the most intimate strings of one's heart with moving sweetness.
In short, Van Dyck's technical and conceptual autonomy make him a real master in his art, not just a perennial disciple.
His unique value and his difference from Rubens would have fully come to light in the following years, thanks to the patronage of Mazarin and the greater freedom that the court of Louis XIII of France would have allowed him.
The second thesis I sustain is that the professional image of Van Dyck was obscured by Rubens' booming, vigorous fame. This is not a critic to Rubens' artistic quality: this situation can be explained with the historical circumstances in which the two painters lived, their age difference, their different attitudes towards public relations and also with the extremely short time that passed between their deaths, only eighteen months.
I rather tried to express, to narrate, to “write” the story of Van Dyck in his context, using both words and images. This is why I included not only Van Dick's paintings, but also those of the contemporary artists who were his direct models and the past masters who were his ideal references. In addition to that, I also considered works that, in my opinion, help to better “visualize” the story I mean to tell.
I will try to visually show how art is able to narrate history. It does so with a complex system of shades, atmospheres, expressions, “scents”, that unveil people and stories immersed in the spirit of their time, sometime revealing ancient mysteries.
This book rather aims at studying the peculiar, independent characteristics of Van Dyck's art, and offering a somewhat different perspective on his life and works: the perspective of his own times.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/anton-van-dyck-in-his-century/id1069979749?ls=1&mt=11

The article analyses in chronological order forty four unpublished manuscripts by pope Urban VIII and his successor and, through cross-reference with lists of books, inventories and letters by librarians of the time, reconstructs the story of one of the Barberini's librarie.

Eine Bilanz – diesen Vorsatz verfolgte die von Alexander Koller organisierte und zu Ehren von Rotraud Becker veranstaltete internationale Tagung „Der Papst und der Krieg. Kuriale Diplomatie am Kaiserhof 1628-1635“, die am 05. und 06. Dezember 2016 am Deutschen Historischen Institut in Rom stattfand. Insgesamt elf Referenten widmeten sich mit ihren Studien der Zielsetzung der Konferenz die Beziehungen zwischen dem Papst und dem Kaiserhof in Wien bzw. dem Reich auf dem Höhepunkt des Dreißigjährigen Krieges auf der Grundlage der neuesten Publikationen der 4. Abteilung der Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland neu zu definieren und den Quellenwert für Forschung und Lehre in den Blick zu nehmen.
in: Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken (2017), 96(1), pp. 516-524.

In his 1646 will, Cardinal Antonio Marcello Barberini allocated necessary sums to several projects around the city, including the funds necessary for the completion, in two months from his death, of renovations of the church of Santi Sergio e Bacco and its adjacent hospice – both run by the “Monaci Ruteni” – Ruthenian Greek-Catholic monks, known as Basilians. The project, as the dying Capuchin cardinal specified, was to be done according to the design of “Padre Valerio Teatino” – the Theatine cleric Valerio Poggi, known to have been involved, often as the soprintendente alla fabbrica, in a variety of Barberini architectural projects: Palazzo Barberini, San’Andrea della Valle, and Palazzo di Propaganda Fide, to name just a few. This fact makes Poggi a coworker and a collaborator with an impressive array of Baroque geniuses: Bernini, Borromini, Cortona, Rainaldi, and others. Although mentioned in a variety of documents that span decades, Poggi, like many other similar people in the shadows of their acclaimed contemporaries, remained largely unknown. Despite our lack of knowledge, Poggi’s case might shed some light on the very process of creating architecture that was largely anonymous, typologically ubiquitous, yet one that proliferated Roman neighborhoods as a result of the rebuilding of the city under the Barberini papacy of Urban VIII, largely sponsored and spearheaded by the Pope’s brothers and nephews, and overseen on the ground by their agents, such as Padre Valerio Teatino.
In this context, the figure of Valerio Poggi, a lesser-known architect, comes with numerous layers of connections to overlapping networks of artistic, architectural, and educational patronage exercised by the Barberini family. The Theatine Order was intimately involved in the eastward missionary efforts of the Post-Tridentine papacy, with specific expertise in Armenia and Georgia. The Armenian connection brought them also in close contacts with the Armenians of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where, in Lviv (Leopolis), the Theatines oversaw formation of the new Armenian clergy in union with Rome at the Collegio Armeno that also included numbers of Ruthenian Uniate seminarians. This paper also looks closely at the reports from Lviv to Rome by Fr. Trombetti the Theatine, reports that include his sketches of the newly expanded college building.
Because of the involvement in the missions, Theatines were often members of the Propaganda Fide, and it comes as no surprise that the two Theatine architects were involved in the project for the Congregation’s new home, sponsored by the Barberini papacy. The leadership of the actual project by the celebrated figures such as Francesco Borromini and Gian Lorenzo Bernini obscures the fact that the architects, patronized by the Barberini family and its extension, the papacy, were aided by the architects with a pedigree of particular institutional patronage. Unlike the later architects that worked on SS. Sergio e Bacco during the course of late 1600s and early 1700s who tended to be connected first and foremost to the neighborhoods, the city, and then to papacy, the involvement of the Theatine Valerio Poggi signals that the project for the 1640s rebuilding of the national Ruthenian church of SS. Sergio e Bacco had been spearheaded primarily by the Propaganda Fide and the Barberini family.

Poster presentato al convegno "Theatroeideis. L'immagine della città, la città delle immagini": Politecnico di Bari - DICAR - 15 - 19 giugno 2016
As of Pope Urban VIII, thanks to the transformation of Castel Gandolfo in suburban apostolic residence, the area in the south of Rome suffers the effects of urban and building momentum leading to the rationalization of the internal structure to neighboring estates, but also mesh road link between the same. This is done largely through imports from neighboring capital of the scenic prototype of roads Trident, declined in forms ranging from a territorial scale to the architectural one. Therefore occurs a doubling of the original model into two distinct and cohabiting categories: on one side the green tridents, great signs of territorial control and measuring dominated by the Apostolic Camera and the noble families; on the other hand the stone tridents, which instead take on the role of regulating lines of construction development of the ancient castles according to the ways of living imprinted by the seventeenth-century culture. This is primarily the case of Albano and Genzano, property of the Savelli, respectively, and Cesarini, where the two meanings of the trident are compared in a constant dialogue between " micro city palnning " and macroarchitecture. Examples that increase its value, when compared to similar episodes of Ville Tuscolane system and at least one of the founding cities in northern Lazio Oriolo. A separate consideration also deserve the baronial gardens-often setted on the archetype of the Sistine villa near Termini-and the internal devo-tional paths to convents and hermit structures on the Alban Hills, where they are still Albano and Frascati to provide the most interesting cases of study. To contradict the episodic and independent appearance of such installations are involved the tables of the magister viarum Domenico Jacovacci,, where is possible to highlight unequivocally a unit design-ceremonial and symbolic-that reached its peak between the Papacy Barberini and Chigi (1623-67).