Images of Nepotism

Book excerpt: This book explores the impact of papal nepotism on the visual arts of seventeenth-century Rome through an examination of the painted vaults of Palazzo Barberini, the family palace of the foremost patron of the High Baroque, Pope Urban VIII (1623-1644). The study focuses on the intersection of art and power in the ceiling paintings commissioned by Urban's nephews in the 1620s and 1630s to adorn their new palace. Viewed against the backdrop of the changing social codes and power relationships that characterized the ferment of Rome in this period, Palazzo Barberini stands as a remarkable document asserting the divine sanction of that family's emergence. The author presents a new analytical approach for appraising the form and content of ceiling imagery, allowing for a thorough assessment of the painted scenes that functioned as vehicles of the social and political agenda of the Barberini. The vast fresco painted by Pietro da Cortona in the palace salone--the largest ceiling painting in Rome since Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling--and Andrea Sacchi's Divine Wisdom fresco receive major consideration for their novel pictorial illusionism and their poetic symbolism. These principal components of the Barberini Palace cycle embody the definitive statement of Baroque allegory as a mode of optical and intellectual persuasion. Propagandistic purpose here finds exalted theo-political expression. In sum, this study undertakes to define the linkage between art patronage and social aspirations in the last great age of papal nepotism and to establish within this societal context a new means for grasping the technical and iconographic novelties of Roman Baroque ceiling painting.