Bernini’s masterpieces, Van Dyck, Poussin and Pietro da Cortona in dialogue with works from distant and exotic places. One hundred works, on loan from the most important museums in the world, which testify to the links that the Rome Rome managed to intertwine with cultural realities very distant also from a geographical point of view. Ties that reveal the role that the city played in the realization of an artistic universe open to the influence of other sensitivity and cosmopolitan. A context well represented in the exhibition ‘Global Baroque. The world in Rome in the century of Bernini‘, in program all Quirinale stables from 4 April to 13 July.
The sense of the initiative – curated by Francesca Cappelletti, general director of the Borghese and Ordinary Gallery of Art History at the University of Ferrara and Francesco Fredolini, associated with art history at ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome – finds its most explicit synthesis in the masterpiece located at the beginning of the exhibition itinerary. It is the bust in polychrome marbles of ANTONIO MANUEL NE VENU, Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Congo, granted exceptionally on loan from the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore at the express will of Pope Francis. The exhibition, explains Cappelletti, presents “a new way of looking at the Baroque. The works we have brought together help us understand how famous works can be read in a different context animated by global relationships”.
The proposed painters do not carry out their works “only by looking at the painting or history of the art of previous centuries, but have suggestions that depend on the political and intellectual climate of the time”. In this perspective, “they become points of reference for this global thought” presenting “characters in a new and unpublished way. A vision that shows how Rome – in its universalistic dimension due to the Church – was the generator of new artistic elements”. A reality to which Pope Paolo V bourgeois gave a lot of force with “his opening beyond Europe”. A drawing that put Rome at the center of a complex network of global relationships.
The exhibition itinerary therefore opens with the bust of Manuel Nor Vunda that leads to the first section, entitled ‘Africa, Egypt, the ancient’. The section is conceived as a specific focus on the African continent in the various cultural meanings with which it was interpreted during the seventeenth century. The journey to cosmopolitan Rome, at the center of a dense network of relationships that exceed national and cultural borders, continues – room after room – to discover works of art signed by great masters of the time, such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Pietro da Cortona.
In this sense, the work ‘Caesar that puts Cleopatra on the throne’ (about 1637) by Pietro da Cortona lent to the exhibition by the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Lyon is worth mentioning, which mythical evokes Egypt in a mythical way. Of particular interest is the ‘Rome and global diplomacy’ section in which the relationship with Islamic cultures, from Persia to the Ottoman Empire, to relations with Christian communities in Japan of the early seventeenth century, is declined. Reality testified by the portrait of Ali-Qoli Beg, Persian ambassador to Rome in 1609 of the painter Lavia Fontana. It is a recently rediscovered masterpiece and never presented to the public before this occasion. Ample space is also dedicated to Bernini. To stand out is the commission of the Fountain of the rivers in Piazza Navona, the most famous ‘global’ subject of all the Baroque iconography. The presentation model in terracotta, carved wood, slate, gold and silver of 1647-50, from the Forti Bernini-Eredi Bernini collection, is exposed.
The last section, ‘Rome crossroads of cultures’, is dedicated to the portraits of Robert Shirley, the English Catholic Ambassador of Persia and his wife, Teresia Sampsonia, a stainless woman, also Catholic, married by Shirley in Persia. The two portraits, painted by Anthony Van Dyck in Rome in 1622 but never returned to Italy before, are a loan from the English National Trust. The last work on display is the painting ‘Annibale who crosses the Alps’ by Nicolas Poussin of about 1630, which narrates an all -Roman story, yet eminently transnational. Also this work, returned for the first time in the city where it was built, is actually considered as a portrait: in fact it represents the effigy of the elephant Don Diego who, born in India, crossed two continents to get to Rome. “With this exhibition, entirely dedicated to the global dimension of pontifical policies in the seventeenth century, the stables of the Quirinale intend to contribute to the cultural programming of the city in the year of the Jubilee, proposing a reading of the universal and cosmopolitan mission of the Eternal City capable of crossing the compartments of the history and, together, to be a precious element of reflection for the present”, underlines Matteo Lafranconi, director of the stables of the stables of the Quirinale.