RKD STUDIES

It is well known to Early Modern art historians that Rome played a pivotal role in the 17th century. Seat of the Catholic authority, whose power extended to the so-called Legazioni (Legations), Rome was a cosmopolitan meeting point for various artistic trends. Artists came to the città eterna mainly attracted by the possibility of seeing the antiquities and works by the masters of the Renaissance.¹ They were fascinated by the glory of the papal court and of the noble roman families, and by the great opportunities provided by the high level patronage of the arts, especially during the reign of Pope Urban VIII (1568–1644) and his successors Innocent X (1574–1655) and Alessandro VII (1599–1667).² Many foreign artists as well as Italians went to Rome in those times, because they saw the journey as offering training and a chance for improvement. Here they spent some years in guilds, such as the Schildersbent, a society of mostly Dutch and Flemish artists – known as Bentveughels – active in northern Roman parishes such as Santa Maria del Popolo and San Lorenzo in Lucina in the 17th and 18th centuries.³

The presence of these associations in cities like Rome led to the production of documents and their collection in archives, from which it is possible to discover several aspects of the artists’ professional and social life in that period. The Italian art historian Rossella Vodret, for instance, conducted accurate research in the Archivio Storico del Vicariato di Roma (Historical Archive of the Vicariate, Rome) on the registers of the 70 Roman parishes that existed at the time, covering the period between 1600 and 1630.⁴ More than 6,600 documents containing almost 2,000 names of artists including painters, sculptors and architects surfaced among the parish registers called Stati delle Anime or Status Animarum, Libri dei Battesimi (Baptism Registers), Libri dei Matrimoni (Marriages Registers), and Libri dei Morti (Burials Registers). This research gave us the opportunity to find specific details of the daily lives of many foreign artists, often unknown to both the general public and scholars. ‘Ghiongrat’, the legendary figure examined by Vodret and used by the Italian art historian to title her book, explained in just one word the pleasures and sorrows of archival research. This strange and mysterious name which emerged from the documents is the incorrect transcription of the name of a Dutch painter from Gouda, Wouter Crabeth II (c. 1594–1644), made by a Roman parish officer who was trying to make it ‘understandable’ to Romans.

Map of Italy around 1650

This process – aimed at extending the ‘macro’ art historical approach to the ‘micro’ – could be successfully applied when reconstructing the itineraries of some minor artists, as in the case of the Dutch and Flemish painters moving from Rome towards the hinterland of the Papal States.⁵ When accepting new commissions from cardinals or noblemen who lived, collected, and acted as patrons both in Rome and in its peripheral territories, artists left city centres for the hinterland in order to find the ‘provincial scene’, which presented, most of the time, a suitable environment for their artistic production.⁶

The hinterland of the Church States consisted of a number of territories which were variously distributed in the Italian peninsula, all strictly connected with Rome and governed by the Pope from 756 until 1870. The Italian term Legazioni refers to the various provinces under the rule of the Papal States that at the beginning of the 17th century covered most of the modern Italian regions of Lazio (including Rome), Marche, Umbria, Romagna, and a large portion of Emilia. Each of them was administered by a governor, except for the four major ones – Bologna, Ferrara, Romagna and Urbino – which were ruled by a ‘cardinal legate’ and were marked by high social mobility.⁷ It was quite common for Flemish and Dutch artists to move from Rome to the hinterland in order to respond to appealing proposals from new clients outside the city centre.

This is the case of the Flemish painter Lodewijk or Louis Cousin (c. 1606–1667/8), known as Luigi Primo and Luigi Gentile. Trained in Brussels, he was a member of the Roman Schildersbent from 1626, before relocating to the peripheral Legation of Urbino,⁸ where he worked for several years before returning to Brussels. Through strong relationships with some Flemish patrons – such as the merchant Balthasar van der Goes, who operated between Rome and Ancona – he created some interesting and celebratory paintings between Ancona and Pesaro.⁹ This is also the case of some anonymous Flemish artists who worked in other cities around Urbino, such as Camerino, where Cardinal Angelo Giori (1586–1662) was active as patron, contributing to the connection between Rome, the centre of his affairs, and the ‘peripheral’ territory where he grew up.¹⁰

Research in Flemish and Italian archives shows that work on the anonymous or ‘minor’ artists operating in the hinterland of the Italian art cities is significant. The stories of these mainly unknown masters of mobility demonstrate the artistic appeal of the courts and cities of Northern Italy, including those which, after the Renaissance, were subjugated to the pontifical power and transformed into Legations. In this context clients played a crucial role: it was then common for members of the most important families of patrons and collectors both to own big estates and to have great artistic ambitions, leading them to imitate the wealth of ancient Roman buildings in their peripheral residences.

This is the case, for instance, of the Legation of Ferrara (1598–1796), one of the most accessible territories of Northern Italy, which extended for more than a thousand square kilometres south of the lower Po River, and which included the ancient city of Ferrara, a Renaissance jewel ruled by the house of Este from 1146 to 1597.¹¹ The Legation was established by Pope Clement VIII (1536–1605) after the devolution of the Duchy of Ferrara to the Pope in 1597, following the death of Duke Alfonso II d’Este (1533–1597) without legitimate male heirs. It had great artistic and cultural allure in the Baroque age, thanks to patrons such as the Bentivoglio family of cardinals, theatrical entrepreneurs and refined collectors that attracted the attention of Francis Haskell.¹²