Seventeenth Century Roman Palaces

"Buildings have lives in time," observes Patricia Waddy in this pioneering study of the relation between plan and use in the palaces of the Borghese, Barberini, and Chigi families.

The Baroque palaces of seventeenth-century Rome were centers for much of the artistic and cultural activities of the city. This book presents some of the magnificent furnishings from these palaces and explains what they reveal of the social life and art patronage of the major families of the Eternal City during this period. This book is the catalogue for an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts from March 10 through June 13, the show then travels to the Nelson-Arkins Museum in Kansas City, where it will appear from July 25 through October 3, 1999.

This book explores the principles of the display of art in the magnificent Roman palaces of the early modern period, focusing attention on how the parts function to convey multiple artistic, social, and political messages, all within a splendid environment that provided a model for aristocratic residences throughout Europe. Many of the objects exhibited in museums today once graced the interior of a Roman Baroque palazzo or a setting inspired by one. In fact, the very convention of a paintings gallery— the mainstay of museums—traces its ancestry to prototypes in the palaces of Rome. Inside Roman palaces, the display of art was calibrated to an increasingly accentuated dynamism of social and official life, activated by the moving bodies and the attention of residents and visitors. Display unfolded in space in a purposeful narrative that reflected rank, honor, privilege, and intimacy. With a contextual approach that encompasses the full range of media, from textiles to stucco, this study traces the influential emerging concept of a unified interior. It argues that art history—even the emergence of the modern category of fine art—was worked out as much in the rooms of palaces as in the printed pages of Vasari and other early writers on art.

Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome offers a new perspective on the world of painting in Rome at the beginning of the Baroque, from both an artistic and a socioeconomic point of view. Biased by the accounts of seventeenth-century biographers, who were often academic painters concerned about elevating the status of their profession, art historians have long believed that in Italy, and in Rome in particular, paintings were largely produced by major artists working on commission for the most important patrons of the time. Patrizia Cavazzini&’s extensive archival research reveals a substantially different situation. Cavazzini presents lively and colorful accounts of Roman artists&’ daily lives and apprenticeships and investigates the vast popular art market that served the aesthetic, devotional, and economic needs of artisans and professionals and of the laboring class. Painting as Business reconstructs the complex universe of painters, collectors, and merchants and irrevocably alters our understanding of the production, collecting, and merchandising of painting during a key period in Italian art history.

Baroque Garden Cultures proposes a new approach to the study of baroque gardens, examining the social reception of gardens as a means to understand garden culture in general and exploring baroque gardens as a feature of baroque cultures in particular.

Drawing on rich archival research and focusing on works by leading artists including Guido Reni and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Karen J. Lloyd demonstrates that cardinal nephews in seventeenth-century Rome – those nephews who were raised to the cardinalate as princes of the Church – used the arts to cultivate more than splendid social status. Through politically savvy frescos and emotionally evocative displays of paintings, sculptures, and curiosities, cardinal nephews aimed to define nepotism as good Catholic rule. Their commissions took advantage of their unique position close to the pope, embedding the defense of their role into the physical fabric of authority, from the storied vaults of the Vatican Palace to the sensuous garden villas that fused business and pleasure in the Eternal City. This book uncovers how cardinal nephews crafted a seductively potent dialogue on the nature of power, fuelling the development of innovative visual forms that championed themselves as the indispensable heart of papal politics. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, early modern studies, religious history, and political history.

The early modern Roman countryside was a site of contestation between great aristocratic families and an expanding papal political regime. Rarely has the role of the inhabitants of this landscape--the villagers--been considered as part of that power struggle. As Caroline Castiglione shows in this compelling revisionist work, one Roman aristocratic family, the Barberini, was not squeezed out of governing by the extension of the papal bureaucracy, but rather became increasingly engaged with it during the long eighteenth century. Through their participation in the rural commune, villagers in an extensive territory belonging to the Barberini became active participants in the governing of the countryside. Villagers cultivated and exploited interference from the aristocratic family and the papal government, but they also kept urban elites at bay, defending their rights through the strategies of adversarial literacy. Such literate practices drew on village mastery of local constitutions, debates in the village assembly, and brilliant use of the legal system of the papacy to thwart the designs of the Barberini. Later villagers created and interpreted sources for themselves, effectively challenging the elite monopoly on making and interpreting texts. A lost world of increasingly savvy villagers, irate nobles, and exasperated bureaucrats emerges here in an engaging narrative that chronicles how seemingly marginalized villagers challenged the pragmatic control of the Roman countryside, using texts and ideas that urban elites had exported to the countryside for other purposes.

Renaissance Italy’s art, literature, and culture continue to fascinate. The domestic life has been examined more in recent years, and this book reveals the preparation, eating, and the sociability of dining in Renaissance Italy. It takes readers behind the scenes to the Renaissance kitchen and dining room, where everyday meals as well as lavish banquets were prepared and consumed. Katherine McIver considers the design, equipment, and location of the kitchen and food prep and storage rooms in both middle-class homes and grand country estates. The diner’s room, the orchestration of dining, and the theatrical experience of dining are detailed as well, all in the context of the renowned food and architectural scholars of the day.