L Ultimo Maestro

According to legend the Constantinian Order is the oldest chivalric institution, founded by Emperor Constantine the Great and governed by successive Byzantine Emperors and their descendants. While this chronology was supported by multiple writers even into the twentieth century, it has little historical basis. Nonetheless, the Angeli, Farnese and Bourbon families which held the Grand Mastership could legitimately claim Byzantine imperial descent, albeit in the female line, and the Order’s cross replicates that seen by Constantine in the vision recorded by both Lactantius and Eusebius, writing very soon after Maximian’s defeat at the battle of the Milvian Bridge. The Order’s emergence in the middle of the sixteenth century, when Christian Europe was under assault from a militant Ottoman empire, gained Papal support almost immediately and by the end of the seventeenth century the Order had mem-bers across the Italian peninsular, in Spain, Bavaria, Austria and Bohemia, Croatia and Poland. Today the majority of the Order’s members are found in Italy and Spain but there are also members in Portugal, France, Belgium, Great Britain and Luxembourg, with smaller groups in the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden as well as an expanding membership in the United States. This work examines the conversion of Constantine and the histories of the Angeli, Farnese and Bourbon Grand Masterships, with extensive reference to hitherto unpub-lished documents in the Vatican archives and in the Farnese and Bourbon archives in Naples. These serve to confirm the close relationship the Order had with the Church and the high regard in which it was held by successive Popes, as well as its autonomy as a subject of canon law independent from any crown or temporal sovereignty. This unique status has enabled its hereditary Grand Masters to maintain this dignity after the absorption of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies into a united Italy. The Order’s autonomy, coupled with the Grand Master’s close links to the Spanish Crown, has meant that Spanish and Italian citizens (as well as the citizens of several other states which have accorded the Order recognition) may obtain official permission to wear the Order’s decorations. 2018 is the three hundredth anniversary of the Papal Bull Militantis Ecclesiae which confirmed and approved the previous Papal acts concerning the Order and laid out the rights and privileges of the Order, its Grand Masters and members. In the early 20th century Pope Saint Pius X and Benedict XV conferred further privileges on the Order, ap-proving the statutes, while the then future Pope Pius XII had been admitted to the Order in 1913. Today the Order is engaged in works of charity, in conformity with the Church’s teachings, and includes among its members some thirteen Cardinals as well as some thirty members of reign-ing or former reigning families.

Linguæ & is a peer-reviewed journal which provides a new outlet for interdisciplinary research on language and literature, giving voice to a cross-cultural and multi-genre koine. While the idea for the journal was developed in the ambit of the post-graduate programme in European Intercultural Studies at the University of Urbino, Italy, its scope goes far beyond that of exploring pre-established cultural paradigms. Indeed, its strongly experimental and dialogic approach to the ongoing debate should serve as encouragement for the submission of new work by young researchers.

The celebrated French artist Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762) is primarily known as a sculptor today, but his contemporaries widely lauded him as a draftsman as well. Talented, highly innovative, and deeply invested in the medium, Bouchardon made an important contribution to the European art and culture of his time, and in particular to the history of drawing. Around two thousand of his drawings survive—most of which bear no relation, conceptual or practical, to his sculpture—yet, remarkably, little scholarly attention has been paid to this aspect of his oeuvre. This is the first book-length work devoted to the artist’s draftsmanship since 1910. Ambitious in scope, this volume offers a compelling narrative that effectively covers four decades of Bouchardon’s activity as a draftsman—from his departure for Rome in 1723 as an aspiring student to his death in Paris in 1762, by which time he was one of the most renowned artists in Europe. His accomplished and dynamic style is analyzed and copiously illustrated in a series of five interrelated chapters that serve as case studies, each of which focuses on a coherent group of drawings from a particular period of Bouchardon’s career.

La «trama nascosta» è quella che emerge dalla ricostruzione delle vicende di alcuni personaggi qui osservati, pur nell’ambito delle specifiche competenze, nelle vesti di tramiti di trasferimenti “culturali”. In uno spazio che è quello dell’Europa meno fittamente abitata, che nei suoi confini dilatati si apre a est. A ben vedere, più o meno, l’Europa entrata con il nuovo millennio nell’Unione Europea.