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The Art of Religion
Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory

in Bernini’s Rome
Maarten Delbeke
An Ashgate Book
the art of religion
Bernini and Pallavicino, the artist and the Jesuit cardinal, are closely related
figures at the papal courts of Urban VIII and Alexander VII, at which Bernini
was the principal artist. The analysis of Pallavicino’s writings offers a new
perspective on Bernini’s art and artistry and allow us to understand the visual
arts in papal Rome as a “making manifest” of the fundamental truths of faith.
Pallavicino’s views on art and its effects differ fundamentally from the
perspective developed in Bernini’s biographies offering a perspective on
the tension between artist and patron, work and message. In Pallavicino’s
writings the visual arts emerge as being intrinsically bound up with the very
core of religion involving questions of idolatry, mimesis and illusionism that
would prove central to the aesthetic debates of the eighteenth century.
Maarten Delbeke, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning,

Ghent University, Belgium; Department of Art History,
University of Leiden, The Netherlands
The Art of Religion is published in the series
histories of vision
edited by Caroline van Eck, University of Leiden, The Netherlands
in the same series
Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism

Cordula Grewe
At the Edges of Vision

A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Contemporary Spectatorship
Renée van de Vall
The Look of Van Dyck

The Self-Portrait with a Sunflower and the Vision of the Painter
John Peacock
The Beholder
The Experience of Art in Early Modern Europe
edited by Thomas Frangenberg and Robert Williams
Presence
The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects
edited by Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd
Time and Place

The Geohistory of Art
edited by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Elizabeth Pilliod
Dealing with the Visual

Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture
edited by Caroline van Eck and Edward Winters
Modernism and the Mediterranean

The Maeght Foundation
Jan K. Birksted
Grasping the World

The Idea of the Museum
edited by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago
Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto

Liturgy, Poetry and a Vision of the End Time
Sara Nair James
The Art of Religion
Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory
in Bernini’s Rome
Maarten Delbeke
First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2012 Maarten Delbeke.
Maarten Delbeke has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
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without permission in writing from the publishers.
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Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Delbeke, Maarten.
The art of religion : Sforza Pallavicino and art theory in Bernini’s Rome.
-- (Histories of vision)
1. Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 1598-1680--Criticism and interpretation--History--
17th century. 2. Pallavicino, Sforza, 1607-1667--Knowledge--Art. 3. Pallavicino,
Sforza, 1607-1667--Art patronage. 4. Artists and patrons--Italy--Rome--History--
17th century. 5. Christian art and symbolism--Italy--Rome--History--17th century--
Sources. 6. Art and religion--Italy--Rome--History--17th century--Sources.
7. Portrait sculpture, Baroque--Italy--Rome--Sources. 8. Art--Early works to 1800.
I. Title II. Series
730.9’2-dc23
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Delbeke, Maarten.
The art of religion : Sforza Pallavicino and art theory in Bernini’s Rome /
Maarten Delbeke.
p. cm. -- (Histories of vision)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-3485-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-5884-5 (ebook)
1. Pallavicino, Sforza, 1607-1667. 2. Christianity and art--Italy--Rome. 3. Bernini, Gian
Lorenzo, 1598-1680--Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Title: Sforza Pallavicino
and art theory in Bernini’s Rome.
N7483.P27D45 2012
261.5’70945632--dc23
2011041728
ISBN 978-0-754-63485-0 (hbk)

ISBN 978-1-315-61264-5 (ebk)
Contents
List of Illustrations vii

Note on the Translations ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction: Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome 1
1 Sforza Pallavicino and Roman Baroque 9
2 The Pope, the Bust, the Sculptor and the Fly 29
3 Art as Revelation: The Revelation of Art 63
4 The Image of the Pope 97
5 The Composite Work 135
6 Sacred Art 173
Conclusion: Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome 203
Bibliography 207
Index 233
This page has been left blank intentionally
List of Illustrations
1 Sforza Pallavicino and 1.6 Pietro da Cortona, frontispiece of

Roman Baroque Sforza Pallavicino, Storia del Concilio di
Trento (Rome, 1656–57) (author)
1.1 Engraving based on the medal
issued at the funeral of Virginio
2 The Pope, the Bust, the Sculptor
Cesarini, from Virginio Cesarini,
and the Fly
Carmine (Rome, 1658) (Biblioteca
Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele, Rome) 2.1 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Bust of
Alexander VII, marble, 1657, private
1.2 Albertus Clouwet, after Giovanni
collection, Siena and Rome (Lensini
Battista Gaulli, Portrait of Sforza
Photography)
Pallavicino, from Effigies insignia nomina
cognomina patriae et dies promotionis ac
obitus summorum pontificium et S.R.E. 3 Art as Revelation: The Revelation
cardinalium defunctorum. Ab anno of Art
MDC(L)VIII (Rome, 1690) (Biblioteca
3.1 Giovanni Battista Falda,
Casanatense, Rome)
Triumphal arch erected on the Capitol
1.3 Workshop of Gianlorenzo for the possesso of Clement X, designed
Bernini, Tomb of Sforza Pallavicino, by Carlo Rainaldi (ICCD)
Sant’Andrea al’Quirinale, Rome, ca.
1670 (Soprintendenza dei beni culturali 4 The Image of the Pope
del Lazio)
4.1 Inscription commemorating the
1.4 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Portrait refusal by Alexander VII of his honorific
of Sforza Pallavicino, pencil and red statue, Rome, palazzo dei Conservatori
wash on paper (Yale University Art (Fabio Barry)
Gallery)
4.2a–c Gianlorenzo Bernini and
1.5 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Crucifix, Gioacchino Francesco Travani (?): (a)
bronze, ca. 1659, Art Gallery of Ontario, Medal struck in honor of Alexander
Toronto (Maggie Nimkin Photography) VII; (b) with Androcles and the Lion
viii the art of religion
on the reverse; (c) the two sides cast 4.7 Foundation medal of Saint Peter’s
separately, set into decorative borders Square (obverse), bronze, 1656 (Royal
and made into a hinged case with Library, Brussels)
internal inscriptions; bronze, 1659/60
(Soprintendenza dei beni culturali di 5 The Composite Work
Roma)
5.1 Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco
4.3 “Capitoline statue of Sixtus Borromini, Baldacchino, 1624–33, Saint
V,” from [Girolamo Franzini], Icones Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City (ICCD)
statuarum antiquarum urbis romae
hieronymi franzini bibliopolae ad signum 5.2 Sebastién Leclerc, “Allegoria
fontis opera (Rome, 1589) (Royal Library, dell’arte di Gian Lorenzo Bernini,” from
Brussels) Pierre Cureau de la Chambre, Préface
pour servir à l’histoire de la vie et des
4.4 Giovanni Battista Bonacina after ouvrages du Cavalier Bernini (Paris, ca.
Pietro da Cortona, Allegory with the 1686) (Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome)
Medal of Androcles and the Lion, Rome,
1660 (Royal Library, Brussels) 5.3 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Bust of Urban
VIII, marble, 1632, Palazzo Barberini,
4.5 Lazarus Baldus and François Galleria nazionale d’arte antica (ICCD)
Spierre, frontispiece of Giovanni
Andrea Borboni, Delle statue (Rome, 5.4 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Bust of
1661) (Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Scipione Borghese, marble, 1632, Galleria
Emanuele, Rome) Borghese, Rome (ICCD)
4.6 Giambattista Falda, “Scala 6 Sacred Art

interiore che conduce alla cappella
pontifica,” from Il nuovo teatro delle 6.1 Pope Urban VIII Consecrates the
fabriche, et edificii, in prospettiva di Roma Basilica of Saint Peter, tapestry in silk
moderna (Rome, 1665–69), vol. 1 (Ghent and wool, 1671–73, Musei Vaticani
University) (Inv. no. 3923)
Note on the Translations
Because the argument developed here hinges on a close reading and

comparison of texts, as much as possible of the original Italian is given in
the body of the main text, either between brackets for short citations or as a
block after longer citations. In some cases, when the argument emerges from
a reading of a source, the main text is interspersed with Italian block citations
without an English translation, as such translation would be redundant. By
providing the Italian in the main text, it is hoped that those interested in the
source text will be able to examine it more easily than if it were included
in the endnotes, without interrupting the flow of the text. Unless otherwise
noted, all translations are mine. Franco Mormando’s benchmark translation
and commentary of Domenico Bernini’s Vita of his father Gianlorenzo became
available too late to be taken into consideration.
List of Abbreviations
BAV Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
BNF Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time in the making, composed from material and
ideas arising as often from unexpected discoveries and accidental occasions
as from clear-cut questions or an overall design. Solitary as this process was
it has received invaluable guidance from many people. First among them
are Bert Treffers and Bart Verschaffel, who as my supervisors have helped
in many ways to shape the argument of my dissertation, the now-distant
starting point of this book. Caroline van Eck invited me to submit a book
proposal to Ashgate; more importantly, our ongoing conversations were a
continuous source of inspiration.
A crucial moment in the development of this book was the conference
on the early modern biographies of Gianlorenzo Bernini that I organized
with Evonne Levy and Steven Ostrow in Rome in May 2002. The generous
exchange of ideas at the conference and in the subsequent publication,
Bernini’s Biographies. Critical Essays, has contributed much to my thinking.
I am especially grateful to Eraldo Bellini, Tomaso Montanari and Rudolf
Preimesberger for their suggestions and encouragement. Most of all, my
collaboration with Evonne and Steven has turned into an exhilarating
partnership that continues to stimulate me.
Among the many colleagues and friends who have shared their insights
and knowledge with me, I would like to acknowledge Fabio Barry, for
our wide-ranging conversations and extensive walks in Rome, also Simon
Ditchfield, Una D’Elia, Frank Fehrenbach, Ingo Herklotz, Joseph Imorde,
Martin Kemp, Andrew Leach, Carolina Mangone, Jon Snyder, Tristan
Weddigen and Chris Wood. Kathleen Christian, Luc Duerloo, Anthony
Gerbino, Anthony Grafton and Alexander Roose kindly answered sometimes
arcane queries.
Since 2005 I have worked in two institutions. This brings its own
inconveniences but also doubles the opportunities for exchange. When
I started work on this topic, the Department of Architecture and Urban
Planning at Ghent University was young and small. I have been blessed with
xiv the art of religion
the companionship of fellow explorers in the realm of historical research and

academia: Kris Coremans, Wouter Davidts, Lionel Devlieger and Johan Lagae.
Dirk De Meyer gave an important impetus to this endeavor. Guy Châtel’s
ability to combine erudition, intellectual rigor and an architect’s sense of
possibility continues to serve as a model. At the Art History Department
of Leiden University I was made welcome by Reindert Falkenburg, Louk
Tilanus, Edward Grasman, also by my colleagues at the Chair of Architectural
History, Elizabeth Den Hartog and Juliette Roding. The VICI research project
headed by Caroline van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence in Early Modern
Europe, formed an ideal environment in which to develop my own work on
closely related topics, and I have benefited greatly from my exchanges with
Joris van Gastel, Stijn Bussels, Lex Hermans and Minou Schraven.
I am keen to acknowledge my debt to the various institutions that have
supported this work. The Belgian Historical Institute in Rome and its then
director Ludo Milis granted me their confidence when I proposed a far
from well-defined research project back in 1995. The BHIR has generously
continued to support my research and published the first results in their
Bulletin of 2000; Chapter 2 of this book is an eponymous revision of that
article. Over the years the Academia Belgica in Rome has never failed to
provide me with hospitality, an excellent library and much friendship.
The Scott Opler Fellowship in architectural history at Worcester College,
Oxford offered ample opportunity to expand upon my dissertation. During
a subsequent Visiting Scholarship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture,
Caroline Dionne has assisted me assiduously in exploring a vast amount
of new source material. The Study Centre there stimulated exchange and
discussion. The bulk of the manuscript was written while I was a post-
doctoral researcher with the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO).
Apart from the institutions just mentioned, research for this book was
conducted mainly at the Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Biblioteca Angelica,
Biblioteca Casanatense, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Biblioteca
Vaticana and the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, as well as the Bibliothèque
Nationale de France, the Bodleian Library, the Warburg Institute, the British
Library and the Royal Library of Belgium. I sincerely thank the staff of these
institutions for their unfaltering helpfulness.
Much of this book was tested on various occasions, and I wish to thank
Tod Marder, Werner Oechslin, Sarah McPhee and C. Jean Campbell, Helen
Langdon, Sarah Bonnemaison and Christine Macy, Dirk Sacré, Maria Pia
Donato, Walter Stephens and Julia Hairston, Jill Burke and Michael Bury,
Helen Hills, Ralph Dekoninck and Agnès Guiderdoni, Claudia Lehmann
and Karen Lloyd, and Genevieve Warwick for their invitations to present my
work. Sebastian Schütze invited me to the conference Estetica barocca (Rome,
2002) and the first part of Chapter 3 was first published in the conference
proceedings.
acknowledgements xv
Valerie Van de Velde assisted with exemplary commitment in editing the

whole structure and securing the images. Anne-Françoise Morel checked
the final draft of the manuscript. Pamela Edwardes shepherded my original
book proposal, and Emily Yates and Sophie Lumley from Ashgate did a
great job ushering the manuscript into print.
Writing this book has been but one aspect of an adventure that started
in Rome and encompasses ever new and unexpected forms of liveliness; I
dedicate it to Victor, Norma, Sofia and Caroline.
Introduction:
Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome
“This worldly, emotional, anti-intellectual kind of religion produced its

equivalent in the arts.” These words concluded Anthony Blunt’s brief sketch
of the artistic climate in Rome in the years 1605 to 1644, the time of Popes Paul
V, Gregory XV and Urban VIII, in his Art and Theory in Italy 1450–1600 (first
published in 1940).1 Voiced in a book that Blunt himself dubbed a product
of “the rashness of youth,”2 they imply that baroque architecture, sculpture
and painting are first and foremost a product, the self-evident expression of a
particular body of ideas. This notion of baroque art has long been abandoned,
even by Blunt himself. In seventeenth-century Rome, too, works of art
resulted from considerable and often collective intellectual labor, embedded
in institutions and social networks. They called upon artistic, technical and
economic forms of knowledge and practice. Moreover, “religion” was not an
isolated and clear-cut given which readily let itself convert into “art.”
Still, there remains the question of whether identifiable and recurrent
theoretical principles were at work in this process. Were such principles
formulated and if so, where? It has been emphasized that the period
produced relatively few treatises on art compared to the second half of the
sixteenth century.3 The art of seventeenth-century Rome has not given rise
to prescriptive art theory, so it seems, exactly because it sought the instant
effect, astonishment and persuasion. For that same reason, historians of
literature have inspired art historians to mine the poetry and prose, literary
theory and especially contemporary theories of rhetoric in view of extracting
the theoretical principles that pertained to an art of persuasion. In L’âge de
l’éloquence (1980) Marc Fumaroli called Urban VIII the “Cicéron Pape” and
suggested that Jesuit rhetoric provided a model for artistic expression in
Urban’s Rome. Rhetoric, a theory of communication, implies an aesthetic,
and this aesthetic steered papal patronage.4 Italian literary historians such
as Ezio Raimondi and Mario Costanzo had already suggested that the
2 the art of religion
poetics of the 1620s, which were deeply influenced by rhetoric, set up a

model for baroque expression.5 In his contribution to the congress Retorica e
barocco (1955), Giulio Argan approached this idea by proposing rhetoric, or
rather rhetoricality, as the central feature of all baroque: the arts assumed
the character of a technique, a method, a type of persuasion.6 In Argan’s
view, the real concern of baroque art in any medium is not religion or
Catholicism per se, but rather its very instrumentality. The purpose of this
instrumentality, Argan argued, is to mediate the new and complex social
structures of the seventeenth century.
The notion of Roman baroque as a form of rhetoric has fostered attention
for baroque spectacle and festival architecture, crucial negotiations of
political, social and religious agendas.7 Theories of rhetoric and especially the
concetto, the witty thought and expression, have been shown to encapsulate an
aesthetic that extends from art theory into metaphysics.8 Finally, art historians
have argued that principles of painting may be explained in relation to
literary concepts.9 The linking of the literature and art of seventeenth-century
Rome opens one theoretical avenue for defining the principles underlying
artistic production within a larger cultural context, but the question remains
of how such principles relate to the ideas found in the most important body
of seventeenth-century art literature, artists’ biographies.10 This is not a mere
matter of historiography. Biographies formulate views on art not confined
to matters of technique, attribution, creativity or patronage. They often
encompass the social and religious functions of art and sketch an entire
era with the artist at its center. This is the case especially for Gianlorenzo
Bernini (1598–1680) whose two monographic biographies, written by Filippo
Baldinucci (1682) and Domenico Bernini (1713), conjure up fully fledged
portraits of seventeenth-century papal Rome.11 Precisely because these Lives
present the reader with a coherent narrative of how Bernini’s work existed in
that particular context, they promise to reveal the principles of Bernini’s art.
And because the biographies necessarily cast Bernini’s art as the pre-eminent
representative of the artistic production of his day and age, these principles
appear to embody the essence of Roman baroque itself. In Bernini’s case,
the allure of the ultimately paradoxical claim that the artistic principles of
an era are embodied in the work of an exceptional individual is reinforced
by the scarcity of art theoretical writings connected to the artist other than
biographical sources.12
The preponderance of biography in art historical studies of Bernini has
engendered a close identification of the artist’s art, his life and its cultural
context. A limited set of theoretical notions hinted at in the biographies
have been isolated as the defining features of Bernini’s art, in particular
the “speaking likeness” of his sculpted portraits and the bel composto of his
architectural ensembles, the unified application of the three visual arts. These
categories have stimulated the merging of Bernini’s art with his persona and
introduction: art theory in bernini’s rome 3
of the persona with his age, promising an exhaustive explanation of Bernini’s

art and times. For instance, Irving Lavin’s Bernini and the Unity of Visual Arts
(1980) presents the bel composto as the guiding principle of Bernini’s entire
oeuvre in order to characterize his art as an all-encompassing “existential
happening.”13 Lavin’s notion of the bel composto has proven productive for
the art historical interpretation of Bernini’s work, but it also incurs the risk of
reproducing the early modern biographical approach to the artist. After all,
the “art theory” of the biography is not confined to those isolated passages
that boast art theoretical vocabulary, but permeates the entire text. Passages
explaining Bernini’s ideas on art interlock with the biographical narrative
and its general themes, most notably the truthfulness and virtue of the artist.
Bernini’s biographies are specific interpretations of a historical persona that
encapsulates an oeuvre rather than repositories of a presumed set of artistic
principles that explain the workings of Bernini’s art.
If Bernini’s biographies are viewed as intentional interpretations of the
artist exemplified in the work rather than the historical record of an oeuvre,
they also suggest a different notion of art theory itself. Such theory is less
concerned with the poetics of art (the methods and principles guiding
its production) than with the place of the artist and his art in a particular
historical moment. After all, this moment is reflected as clearly in the fabric
of the biographical text as in the vicissitudes of the artist they describe.
This view of artistic theory also grants the biography its own identity as a
complex text, open to connections and comparisons with other texts. The first
critical assessment of Bernini’s Vite, in Angelo Comolli’s Bibliografia storico-
critica dell’architettura civile (1788), already weighed the biographies against
other historical sources such as the description of the Four Rivers Fountain
in Giuseppe Gualdi’s diaries or the then still unpublished biography of
Alexander VII by Sforza Pallavicino (1607–67), a Jesuit made Cardinal by that
same pope.14 If Comolli’s comparison intended to caution his reader about
the accuracy of the biographies and subsequent histories of Bernini’s oeuvre,
it also recognized the common ground between the Lives and contemporary
texts drawn from other genres. The intertextuality of the biographies, first
hinted at by Comolli, has directed art historians towards literary theory,
poetry and ekphrasis as forms of art theory related to Bernini’s work.15
Moreover, the writing of artists’ biographies is often a collective endeavor
and Bernini’s case is no different. Reconsidering suggestions put forward
by Cesare D’Onofrio in the 1960s, Tomaso Montanari has documented
how the books by Filippo Baldinucci and Domenico Bernini resulted from
a biographical enterprise instigated by Gianlorenzo himself. Montanari’s
analysis of this process has identified a number of important actors such as
Gianlorenzo’s eldest son Pietro Filippo as well as other Roman intellectuals,
most notably Sforza Pallavicino.16 The latter’s role in guiding the creators
of Bernini’s earliest biographical record is reflected in his own prominent
appearances in, especially, Domenico’s Life, where he repeatedly grants

intellectual authority to Bernini’s practice and art theoretical pronuncements.
Pallavicino’s presence in the biographies becomes all the more intriguing
when his own writings are taken into consideration. Like the biographies of
Domenico and Baldinucci, Pallavicino’s work enfolds an image of the artist. This
image does not exclusively concern Bernini, however. Pallavicino references
Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Pietro da Cortona, Alessandro Algardi or
Guido Reni as well when he wishes to quote an example of an excellent artist
or a highly esteemed masterpiece. Pallavicino avails himself of these names
when he writes about “the artist” or “the arts.” This occurs within a broader
philosophical, theological or literary theoretical context. After all, Pallavicino
is not an art theoretician but a clergyman, and a historian, biographer,
philosopher and theologian. As a poet and writer he is interested in literary
theory and involved in the intellectual life of Rome, where especially in the
1620s a number of vehement literary controversies were raging. The memory
of these controversies is visibly present in Pallavicino’s oeuvre (published for
the most between 1640 and 1665) when, as a moral philosopher and theologian,
he probes the place of art and aesthetics in the human cognitive system. Still,
if Pallavicino deals with artistic or aesthetic questions only indirectly, by way
of ethical and epistemological issues, he does develop a coherent theory about
art and its function. What Pallavicino theorizes in great detail is precisely the
obvious quality of baroque architecture, painting and sculpture: its function
as animated expression. The excellence of a work of art, the liberty of the artist,
are entirely determined by what art can display or demonstrate; the efficiency
and the success of art are measured by its effect on the viewer.
Pallavicino appears in Bernini’s Lives when concepts central to his own
ideas about art’s expressivity are discussed, such as liveliness, formal
complexity or illusionism. The exchange between the Lives and Pallavicino’s
writings unfolds in a shared body of anecdotes, topoi and terminology,
drawn from the amalgam of art and literary theory amassed in previous
centuries, and examined with philosophical rigor in Pallavicino’s oeuvre
while accruing meaning in the Lives as part of the biographical narrative.
This body of anecdotes stakes out a common ground between the biographies
and Pallavicino’s oeuvre that invites further exploration. Is it the case, then,
that Pallavicino developed and refined Bernini’s own views on art and
thus reflected on Bernini’s own ideas and practice? There is little evidence
to support this hypothesis. In fact, chronology, too, suggests that it makes
more sense to ask whether Pallavicino’s ideas were consciously adopted in
Bernini’s biographies and, if so, why. This question has been examined with
regard to the motives that shaped Bernini’s biographies.17 What the reception
of Pallavicino’s theories in the Lives tells us about art theory in Bernini’s
Rome—whether and why his ideas were important, and what exactly they
pertain to—is the topic of this book.
The dislocation of art theory from the treatise and the biography
towards the written oeuvre of a clergyman of itself indicates what issues
were central to that theory, to whom it appealed, and how it may have
affected contemporary art. The hypothesis that the “art of expression” was
indeed theorized with great sophistication leads to the inference, on the
one hand, that several debates from the Cinquecento still influenced the
artistic discourse of the Seicento and, on the other hand, that art takes on
an unsuspected significance within a stringent religious framework. The
visual arts are put into the service of the faith, not as a simple instrument
but as a privileged conduit to man’s salvation. Tracing this form of theory
also demands a shift in perspective. The discourse on art steps over the
boundaries of art literature and literary theory to encompass many topics
and debates emerging in relation to various manifestations of contemporary
art.18 In fact, “theory” is produced in a continuous exchange not confined
to Bernini’s biographies and Pallavicino’s oeuvre. Teasing out what this
exchange tells about art, its principles or its role in society calls for a close
and comparative reading of a variety of intertexts.
As a consequence of this approach, the argument developed here moves
away from Gianlorenzo Bernini as a historical actor towards Bernini as the
exemplary artist of the Roman papacy as it emerges from Sforza Pallavicino’s
writings. In other words, this book concerns a discourse that is concerned
with the practicalities and economic dimension of art, the actual distribution
of authorship, the social identity of artists and viewers, or the politics of
culture only insofar these elements contribute to the expressiveness expected
of art within this particular and partially ideal setting. That said, the following
chapters do argue that these views did not exist in isolation but reflected and
influenced artistic production. They shed light on what the art of seventeenth-
century Rome was supposed to do.
Selecting one particular written oeuvre to open up the perspective on
art in Bernini’s Rome theory runs the substantial risk of substituting one
“closed” body of art theoretical texts (treatises and biographies) for another
(the writings of an exceptional author). The next chapter will argue why
Pallavicino’s work provides a legitimate approach to the topic. It will also
make clear that Pallavicino’s work is as interrelated with other texts and ideas
as Bernini’s biographies. This strongly suggests that other authors could serve
as an equally fruitful starting point for similar explorations of ideas on art. In
fact, since the 1980s art historians have taken just that approach to some of
Pallavicino’s contemporaries such as Agostino Mascardi, Matteo Pellegrini,
Emanuele Tesauro or Daniele Bartoli.19 With the newly invigorated attention
for the seventeenth-century sources, published and unpublished, other voices
and perspectives are bound to emerge as well. The very abundance of this
material is an open invitation to further broaden the history of art theory in
seventeenth-century Rome.
Notes
1. Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy (1st edn 1940) (Oxford, 1962), p. 134.
2. Ibid., “Preface to the second impression.”
3. See Julius von Schlosser Magnino, La letteratura artistica: manuale delle fonti della storia dell’arte
moderna, 4th edn of the trans. by Filippo Rossi (Florence, 1996), pp. 611–21.
4. Marc Fumaroli, “Cicero Pontifex Romanus. La tradition rhétorique du Collège Romain et les
principes inspirateurs du mécénat des Barberini,” Mélanges de l’école Française à Rome. Moyen
Age. Temps Moderne, 40 (1978): 797–835; idem, L’âge de l’éloquence. Rhétorique et res literaria de la
Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva, 1980); idem, L’école du silence. Le sentiment des
images au XVII siècle (Paris, 1994); idem, “Retorica sacra, retorica divina: les souches-mères de l’art
dit Baroque,” in Sebastian Schütze (ed.), Estetica barocca (Rome, 2004), pp. 13–30.
5. See, for instance, Ezio Raimondi, Il colore eloquente. Letteratura e arte barocca (Bologna, 1995), a
synthesis of views developed since the 1950s; Mario Costanzo, Critica e poetica del primo Seicento
(3 vols, Rome, 1969–71).
6. Giulio Carlo Argan, “La ‘rettorica’ e l’arte barocca,” in Enrico Castelli (ed.), Atti del III Congresso
internazionale di Studi Umanistici: Retorica e barocco (Rome, 1955), p. 13. See Evonne Levy,
Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley, 2004), pp. 50–52.
7. This is best exemplified by the work of Marcello and Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco; see for instance
Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, La festa barocca (Rome, 1997).
8. Jon Snyder, L’estetica del barocco (Bologna, 2005).
9. See, for instance, Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin. Friendship and the Love
of Painting (Princeton, 1996), esp. pp. 253–78; Anthony Colantuono, Guido Reni’s “Abduction of
Helen”: The Politics and Rhetoric of Painting in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 1997); and
Colantuono’s later studies of motifs like the scherzo.
10. See, for instance, the preponderance of biography in Luigi Grassi, Teorici e storia della critica
dell’arte. L’età moderna: il Seicento (1st edn 1973) (Rome, 1997).
11. Here I reiterate points that have been developed more fully in Maarten Delbeke, Evonne Levy
and Steven F. Ostrow, “Prolegomena to the Interdisciplinary Study of Bernini’s Biographies,” in
Maarten Delbeke, Evonne Levy and Steven F. Ostrow (eds), Bernini’s Biographies. Critical Essays
(University Park, 2006), pp. 1–72.
12. These sources include, besides the Vite, Chantelou’s journal of Bernini’s French trip of 1665 and
Pierre Cureau de la Chambre’s biographical sketches of the artist. One of the rare non-biographical
theoretical statements of Bernini is a short note on the Duomo of Milan, for which see Maria Grazia
Bernardini and Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco (eds), Gianlorenzo Bernini. Regista del Barocco (Milan,
1999), cat. no. 170.
13. Irving Lavin, Bernini e l’unità delle arti visive (Rome, 1980), with the quote on p. 151.
14. Angelo Comolli, Bibliografia storico-critica dell’architettura civile (Rome, 1788), vol. 2, p. 297, note
(a). The descriptions of buildings by Gualdi have been published in Ingo Herklotz, “Fabriche
di Roma nel 1651, 1652, 1653: kunst- und baugeschichtliche Nachrichten aus dem Diario des
Giuseppe Gualdi,” Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, 29 (2003): 193–233, with this description on
p. 204.
15. Rudolf Preimesberger, “Themes from Art Theory in the Early Works of Bernini,” in Irving Lavin
(ed.), Bernini. New Aspects of his Art and Thought (University Park, 1985), pp. 1–24; idem, “Berninis
Cappella Cornaro: eine Bild-Wort-Synthese des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts?,” Zeitschrift für
Kunstgeschichte, 49 (1986): 190–219; Gerhart Schröder, “Das freche Feuer der Moderne und das
Heilige: zu Berninis Cappella Cornaro,” in Herbert Beck and Sabine Schulze (eds), Antikenrezeption
im Hochbarock (Berlin, 1989), pp. 193–204; and Preimesberger’s contributions to the same volume.
See also Oreste Ferrari, “Poeti e scultori nella Roma seicentesca: i difficili rapporti tra due culture,”
Storia dell’arte, 90 (1997): 151–61; Tomaso Montanari, “Sulla fortuna poetica di Bernini. Frammenti
del tempo di Alessandro VII e di Sforza Pallavicino,” Studi secenteschi, 39 (1998): 127–64; Thomas
Frangenberg (ed.), Poetry on Art: Renaissance to Romanticism (Donington, 2003); Claudia Lehmann,
“Un pien teatro di meraviglie”. Gian Lorenzo Bernini vor dem Hintergrund konzepistischer Emblematik
(Bern, 2010).
16. See the references in Chapter 1, note 39.
17. See especially Eraldo Bellini, “From Mascardi to Pallavicino: The Biographies of Bernini and
Seventeenth-Century Roman Culture,” in Delbeke et al., Bernini’s Biographies, pp. 275–313.
18. Grassi, Teorici e storia, has already pointed out the great variety of genres that deal with art in the
Seicento.
19. See, for instance, Genevieve Warwick, “Poussin and the Arts of History,” Word & Image, 12 (1996):
333–48; Lehmann, “Un pien teatro di meraviglie.”
1
Sforza Pallavicino and Roman Baroque
When, on 3 September 1625, Sforza Pallavicino publicly disputed his doctorate

in philosophy, the lustrous event radiated far beyond the confines of the Jesuit
Collegio Romano where he had studied. Organized under the auspices of
Cardinal Maurizio di Savoia, who decorated the salone with tapestries and
provided four choirs of singers, the defense was attended by the Roman elite.1
The Jesuit Vincenzo Guinigi wrote an oration in honor of the recently elected
pontiff Urban VIII Barberini (1623–44), whose nipote Antonio attended the
celebration; it was delivered by the renowned orator Mauro Albrizio. The
fact that Pallavicino was not even 18 years old (he was born in Rome on 28
November 1607) only enhanced the brilliance of his defense in the face of
his examiners, and reinforced the impression that his disputation signaled an
intellectual renovatio under Urban VIII. In his idiosyncratic treatise L’Hoggidì
overo gl’ingegni non inferiori à passati …, the Olivetan monk Secondo Lancellotti
described the event in exactly these terms, casting Pallavicino’s performance
as a display of superiority over the thinkers of old.
It has only been twenty years, that is in 1613, when an Italian prince who would
become most unlucky performed a public display of his most elevated INGEGNO
by proposing to dispute in one large volume more than 2000 questions pertaining
to all of science. The same has done Monsignor Sforza Marquis Pallavicino in Rome
for three continuing days, a youngster less than 20 years old, my (and I vaunt myself
for it) particular Lord, and he may well be called the PHOENIX of the INGENIOUS
ONES of our times. With this fame lived and died at a most fresh age Virginio
Cesarini, chamberlain of Our Lord Urban VIII.
[Vent’anni sono cioè nel 1613. un Prencipe Italiano poi infelicissimo fece publica
esperienza del suo elevatissimo INGEGNO proponendo a disputare in un grande
volume più di 2000. questioni d’ogni scienza. L’istesso hà fatto ultimamente in Roma
per tre giorni continoui Monsignore Sforza Marchese Pallavicini giovanetto di meno
di vent’anni, mio (e soglio gloriarmene) Signore particolare, e ben FENICE può
chiamarsi de gl’INGEGNI de’nostri tempi. Con questa fama è visuto e morto nella più
fresca età sua Virginio Cesarino Maestro di Camera di N.S. Urbano VIII.]2
Similar sentiments prevailed in 1628 when Pallavicino defended his

doctorate in theology.3 Maurizio di Savoia did not sponsor this defense,
because persistent financial problems had forced him to leave Rome, but
the success of the otherwise equally spectacular occasion inspired the man
of letters Antonio Querenghi to write in a letter of 28 December 1628 how
“the phoenix Pallavicino” had begun the public defense of his theological
theses, and that “neither Pico della Mirandola nor Carneades could have
done better.”4
The luster of the two defenses testifies to Pallavicino’s status in the
literary, intellectual and scientific milieu blossoming in Rome during
the first decade of Urban’s pontificate. The epithet and exempla that
Querenghi selected in praise of his achievement also characterize that
milieu and designate the young prelate as part of a group of similar
movers and thinkers. In fact, Querenghi’s letter draws upon a body of
texts that from the late 1620s onwards identified Pallavicino with the
phoenix. As an epithet denoting a brilliant and unique thinker, the image
has its own classical pedigree, and it carried quite particular connotations
in Pallavicino’s times.5 As becomes apparent in Lancellotti’s praise of
Pallavicino, the image likened him to a select group of illustrious exempla
and contemporaries who carried the same badge of honor, like Pico della
Mirandola, Ferdinando Gonzaga, the unfortunate duke of Mantua, and
the Roman Virginio Cesarini, a prodigious intellectual who died at the age
of 29 in 1624.6 Lancellotti even suggested that Pallavicino had inherited
the epithet from Cesarini. In 1631 the poet Alessandro Adimari explained
the familiarity between Cesarini’s and Pallavicino’s persona, writing how
both men
are of such a great merit for the Muses, and for the fine arts, that God has
taken one of them to crown him in heaven with eternal glory, to keep the other
one on earth to allow us to admire unremittingly a compendium of every virtue,
a new Pico della Mirandola ….7
Some thirteen years after Adimari, Pallavicino himself would refer to Gonzaga
and Cesarini as the flowers of youthful Italy, and praise Cesarini for renewing
the glory of Italy’s “Pichi mirandolani.”8
The identification of Cesarini with the fifteenth-century philosopher
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola by comparing both men to the phoenix
explains the meaning of the epithet. It was frequently used during
Cesarini’s lifetime and after his untimely death. 9 A medal, reproduced on
the frontispiece of the Jesuit Alessandro Gottifredi’s funerary oration for
Cesarini delivered in Santa Maria in Aracoeli, shows portraits of Pico and
Cesarini on recto and verso. Another medal, published in 1658, displays
the two men in profile, with on the verso two phoenixes rising from the
flames and the inscription “ALTERA ROMAE,” “the other [phoenix] of
sforza pallavicino and roman baroque 11
1.1 Engraving based on the medal issued at the funeral of Virginio Cesarini,

from Virginio Cesarini, Carmine (Rome, 1658) (Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio
Emanuele, Rome)
Rome,”10 transferring Pico della Mirandola’s emblematic epithet, la fenice

degli ingegni to Cesarini (Fig. 1.1). 11
Portraying Cesarini as a phoenix emphasizes his uniqueness and
idiosyncrasy. According to the most widespread version of the phoenix’s
tale, the miraculous bird regenerates from its own ashes, three days after
its nest, built from Arabic spices, is set ablaze by the sun. This process
repeats itself eternally, but, as a consequence of its singular reproduction
mechanism, the bird is always one of its kind.12 The epithet thus casts
Cesarini as an ingegno unequaled by any of his contemporaries. The implicit
reference to cyclical rebirth suggests that he inherited his innate brilliance
from a chain of exceptional individuals, each of them unique in their day and
age. Eraldo Bellini has argued that the particular achievement of Cesarini,
who paired a talent for Latin and vernacular poetry with a keen scientific
interest, consisted of fusing on the one hand Platonic and Aristotelian
doctrine, and on the other Christian religion and scientific endeavor. Just
like Pico della Mirandola more than a century earlier, Cesarini strove to
establish a philosophical peace that would permit a new era for science,
philosophy and religion, where young and uninhibited thinkers would
stretch the established limits of the different sciences.13
If Pallavicino inherited and assumed a similar reputation, he too became
cast as one of those prodigies who astound their contemporaries with
prodigious demonstrations of ingegno. And as was the case with Pico,

Pallavicino’s demonstrations took on the form of a publication and defense
of rather controversial theses. Just like Cesarini, his fame as a prodigy
brought him into contact with the Accademia dei Lincei and earned him
an important role in the dissemination of Galileo Galileo’s ideas in Rome.
Pallavicino would become a member on 27 January 1629, together with the
Protestant convert Lucas Holstenius and the explorer Pietro della Valle.
Finally, like Cesarini, Pallavicino coupled an interest in science, philosophy
and theology with a literary talent that sought to align itself with the ideals
of the new sacred poetry as practised and theorized by their protector, Pope
Urban VIII.14
A Life in Papal Rome
Pallavicino greatly benefited from Urban’s protection in his early years.15

The Barberini intervened on his behalf in a long-standing dispute between
Pallavicino’s family and Odoardo Farnese regarding the property rights
over the family seat of Grosseto.16 In turn, it was Pallavicino who alerted
Urban VIII to a young prelate with modest means yet of illustrious name,
Fabio Chigi, who would become Pope Alexander VII and one of Pallavicino’s
closest friends.17 Pallavicino’s standing is still reflected in the generous entry
he received in Leone Allacci’s Apes Urbanae, the intellectual bio-bibliography
of Barberini Rome published in 1633.18 By that time, however, Pallavicino
lived in the far less glamorous surroundings of Jesi, a small town in the
Marche where he served as governor. The young man had left Rome on 24
June 1632 in the wake of the turmoil caused by Galileo’s second trial and its
repercussions on the scientific milieu of Rome, most notably the Accademia
del Lincei.19 It is not entirely clear whether Pallavicino’s removal was an
immediate consequence of his own involvement in the propagation and
dissemination of Galileo’s ideas or resulted from his loyalty to his friend
Giovanni Ciampoli, whose own fall from grace was precipitated, if not
caused, by his idiosyncratic take on international diplomacy as much by as
his involvement with the new science.20
Nevertheless, it was as a Jesuit that Pallavicino returned to Rome in 1637
and, as Bellini has argued, probably only under strict conditions.21 There
are traces of Pallavicino’s activities at the Collegio Romano, where he
started to teach in 1639, not only because he probably authored a detailed
and laudatory description of the festive decorations in the Collegio on the
occasion of the Jesuits’ centenary of 1640, the Relazione scritto ad un’Amico
delle feste celebrate nel Collegio Romano, but also because Pallavicino became
embroiled in internal doctrinal disputes.22 Pallavicino’s first learned books
since the publication of his dissertations and a couple of shorter treatises
in the 1620s, however, only saw the light of day after Urban’s death and
the disgrace of the Barberini, under Pope Innocent X (1644–55). The sheer
quantity of Pallavicino’s production after 1644 suggests strongly that the
Barberini had banned him from publishing. Those same years saw the
publication of Del Bene Libri Quattro (1644), Considerazioni dello stile (1646),
the Vindicationes Societatis Iesu (1649), and a Latin theological treatise,
Assertionum Theologicarum (1649), dedicated to his former teacher Juan de
Lugo, whose Responsa moralia he would edit in 1651. Other publications,
such as the Theses Theologicae de Fide, Spe, Charitate et Poenitentia (1647)
and Conclusiones theologicae de Deotrino et Uno (1648) attest to Pallavicino’s
involvement in teaching at the Collegio Romano.23 Another professor at the
Collegio, Antonio Perez, together with Virgilio Malvezzi, Matteo Pellegrini
and Pallavicino himself, would act as an interlocutor in the unfinished
dialogue on divine providence, probably written in those same years but
published only in the nineteenth century.24 In 1644, Pallavicino’s tragedy
Ermenegildo martire was staged for the first time.
Pallavicino’s publications remain intimately tied to the first years of
Urban’s pontificate. In 1648–49, Pallavicino edited and published the
literary heritage of his friend Giovanni Ciampoli, as the Rime and the
Prose.25 His treatise on ethics, Del Bene, is written as a dialogue in four
books between prominent members of the Barberini circles, with Cardinal
Alessandro Orsini hosting Gherardo Saraceni, Antonio Querenghi and the
Jesuit Andrea Eudimonio. The latter’s death in 1625 situates the dialogue
in the first years of Urban’s reign, and by recalling Orsini and some of his
closest friends, Pallavicino pays tribute to the circles that most actively
supported Galileo.26 At the same time, Del Bene predicts the continuity
between the reign of Urban VIII and the pontificates of Alexander VII
and Clement IX, as two books are dedicated to Fabio Chigi and Giulio
Rospigliosi.
The election of Alexander VII restored Pallavicino to the center of papal
Rome. Actively involved in shaping papal politics under Innocent X,
specifically with regard to the Jansenist controversies, he became one of
Alexander’s closest advisers. Very soon Alexander desired to make him a
cardinal. Pallavicino’s early biographers stress his reluctance to embrace
this supreme honor, but on 11 November 1659 he received the purple, with
his titular church San Salvatore in Lauro, after a nomination in petto of 30
April 1657 (Fig. 1.2).27 The nomination was at least in part to reward the
publication of Pallavicino’s Storia del Concilio di Trento, a monumental task
begun by Terenzio Alciati (who died in 1651) and Agostino Orreggi, one of
the major historiographical undertakings sponsored by Francesco Barberini,
and directed against Paolo Sarpi’s earlier Historia del Concilio Tridentino
(1619).28 In close collaboration with Alexander himself, Pallavicino also
started work on a biography of the pope.29 The manuscript, published in
1.2 Albertus Clouwet, after Giovanni Battista Gaulli, Portrait of Sforza Pallavicino, from
Effigies insignia nomina cognomina patriae et dies promotionis ac obitus summorum
pontificium et S.R.E. cardinalium defunctorum. Ab anno MDC(L)VIII
(Rome, 1690) (Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome)
1.3 Workshop of Gianlorenzo Bernini, Tomb of Sforza Pallavicino, Sant’Andrea

al’Quirinale, Rome, ca. 1670 (Soprintendenza dei beni culturali del Lazio)
1839–40 as Della vita di Alessandro VII, only covers the years up to 1659, and
several authors have argued that Pallavicino interrupted the project because
Alexander abandoned his original resistance to nepotism and called his
family from Siena to Rome. The issue of nepotism was one of the many topics
where Alexander sought advice from his friend, and Pallavicino seems to
have been less than enthusiastic about the idea, whether on purely ethical
grounds or because he remembered the excesses of Barberini nepotism and
their consequences.30
As documentary and literary sources attest, in these years Pallavicino
also fully reassumed his central position in the cultural life of Rome.31 He
frequently appears in the diary of Alexander when meetings with artists
and letterati are recorded, and as the master of the Jesuit novitiate on the
Quirinal he was closely involved in planning the church of Sant’Andrea
al Quirinale, designed by Gianlorenzo Bernini from 1658 onwards.32 Only
a few months after Alexander’s demise, Pallavicino died on 5 June 1667.
According the provisions of his last will and testament, he was buried
in the church.33 The Jesuits, Pallavicino’s heirs, paid for the monumental
floor tomb that was installed in 1670 and still today greets the visitor to the
Sant’Andrea (Fig. 1.3).34
Pallavicino’s Legacies
If Sforza Pallavicino’s exceptional reputation of the 1620s revived in the

1650s, it was also profoundly modified. In fact, his posthumous fame
rested much less, if at all, on his rise to prominence in the effervescent
1620s than on his most visible achievement, the Storia del Concilio di Trento.
The explicitly controversial blend of historiography practised in its pages
for a long time sealed Pallavicino’s reputation as less of a phoenix than
as a simultaneously typical and radical exponent of the Roman Counter-
Reformation.35 Since the appreciation of the kind of scholarship practised
in the Storia has varied over time, it is in Jesuit historiography that
Pallavicino retained the most constant and appreciated presence.36
Today Pallavicino is known to a less restricted audience because in the
last decade he has emerged as an intellectual who not only formed part of
the very same circles as Gianlorenzo Bernini, but also played a crucial role in
securing and disseminating his posthumous reputation. In Pallavicino, the
enduring quest for Bernini’s Jesuit connection, initiated at the beginning of
the twentieth century and first focused on Bernini’s acquaintance with the
Jesuit General Gianpaolo Oliva, for whom he designed the frontispiece for
the second volume of the Prediche dette nel Palazzo Apostolico (1664), finally
seems to have met with success.37 The close friendship between the two
men was already attested in print shortly after Pallavicino’s death, when
a selection of his letters published in 1668 dropped various hints about
exchanges with the artist during Bernini’s stay in Paris three years earlier.38
These references, together with the quite prominent position of Pallavicino
in Domenico Bernini’s biography of his father, published in 1713, have led
Tomaso Montanari to reconstruct Pallavicino’s role in the cultural life of
Rome and especially his involvement in the biographical campaign that
Gianlorenzo Bernini himself initiated in the 1670s, uncovering the prelate’s
close connections with Bernini’s oldest son and with the main organizer of
the first phases of that campaign, Pier Filippo.39
Pallavicino’s presence in Bernini’s biography, both as an actor and, to
a certain extent, as an author, is reinforced by their analogous reputation
in their shared circles: both were prodigies discovered in the early 1620s,
acquired the patronage of Urban VIII and the Barberini, and were celebrated
as exceptionally gifted men, whose talents far exceeded the limits of their
chosen occupations. Each was a “compendium of every virtue,” and the
mirroring of their personae is attested by Domenico Bernini’s adoption of
the epithet fenice degl’ingegni for his own father.40 What, of course, in this
sense distinguishes Pallavicino and Bernini is the latter’s relative immunity
from the Galileo affair—even if a contemporary dialogue written by Lelio
Guidiccioni only half-jokingly likens Bernini’s artistic innovations to the
discovery of sunspots41—and the former’s return to grace under Innocent
X, at a time when Bernini briefly paid a heavy price for his association with
the Barberini.
Bernini’s and Pallavicino’s shared presence in the intellectual and
cultural fulcrum of seventeenth-century Rome has led to another important
insight as well, now (however) more speculative. In his history of aesthetics,
Benedetto Croce singled out Pallavicino as a major Italian seventeenth-
century literary theorist and argued that Pallavicino’s writings contained
a historically important kernel of aesthetic considerations that suggested
that mimetic art is concerned with its expressive qualities rather than the
constraint of verosimilitude imposed by the legacy of Aristotle.42 Croce’s
suggestions were already developed in the first decades of the twentieth
century.43 When authors like Giovanni Getto, Carlo Calcattera, Guido
Morburgo-Tagliabue, Franco Croce, Ezio Raimondi and Mario Costanzo
took seriously the previously derided baroque literature and its taste for
metaphor and concetti, Pallavicino’s oeuvre emerged as a point of reference
for the so-called barocchi moderati, authors who attempted to ground the
formal innovations of poets like Giambattista Marino in a more reasoned
and religiously inspired approach to literary invention.44 Eraldo Bellini has
provided the quintessential analysis of Pallavicino’s thought along these
lines.45
The historical vicinity of Bernini and Pallavicino, and the multiple
affinities between literary and artistic theory in the early modern period,
positioned Pallavicino’s work as a theoretical perspective on Bernini’s art.
In fact, in a brief but suggestive passage, the trigger of my own interest
in Pallavicino’s thought, Marco Collareta intimated that Pallavicino’s
work probably provides the best theoretical justification of the baroque
fascination with marvel and illusionism, two key components of Bernini’s
art.46 Anthony Blunt made similar suggestions in one of his last articles
and other art historians have approached baroque art through the prism of
Pallavicino’s work.47 The relationship between Pallavicino and Bernini thus
promises to specify the formative role of literary or rhetorical principles
for baroque culture and visual arts.
Still, Pallavicino’s own direct involvement with art and architecture
seems to have been limited, both as a patron and a member of the public. His
role in the design and construction of the Sant’Andrea al Quirinale church
involved the practical side of the project; he seems not to have taken part in
the discussions about the cost and splendor of the building.48 Bernini drew
his portrait (Fig. 1.4), and from his will it can be gleaned that he owned
drawings and works by the artist, most notably a monumental crucifix (Fig.
1.5), but these objects were unsolicited gifts from the artist to the prelate.49
Indeed, as will be discussed in detail, Pallavicino may have been quite
wary of owning art, because he had limited faith in its value and abilities.
With the exception of the lavish and highly significant frontispiece of the
1.4 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Portrait of Sforza Pallavicino, pencil
and red wash on paper (Yale University Art Gallery)
1.5 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Crucifix, bronze, ca. 1659, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
(Maggie Nimkin Photography)
1.6 Pietro da Cortona, frontispiece of Sforza Pallavicino,
Storia del Concilio di Trento (Rome, 1656–57) (author)
Storia del concilio di Trento, designed by Pietro da Cortona and casting the
author as an eagle battling the snake of heresy (Fig. 1.6), a figure certainly
reminiscent of but also fundamentally different from the phoenix, artists
have had very little direct contact with Pallavicino’s work.50 Furthermore,
Pallavicino never expressed his views on art in a treatise or essay on the
subject. The main body of his work consists of theology, philosophy and
historiography, together with important and intimately related texts on
language, literary style and devotion. As mentioned before, Pallavicino
probably authored an extensive description of the decorations installed in
the cortile of the Collegio Romano on the occasion of the Jesuits’ centenary
celebrations in 1640, wrote poetry and the tragedy Ermenegildo Martire that
included a short treatise on the genre of Christian tragedy.51 While these
texts touch upon themes related to the visual arts, they hardly constitute
artistic treatises.
Pallavicino and Art Theory?
As in many early modern texts on a variety of subjects, art and artists do

appear as examples and metaphors in Pallavicino’s works. These references
are compelling because they occur within an oeuvre that, as Croce argued,
proposes important aesthetic ideas, and because Pallavicino’s persona,
representing those ideas, is reflected in the early biographies of Bernini. Still,
as pointed out in the introduction, Pallavicino develops his ideas on art from
the perspective of religion; religiosity defines the modalities of art and the
artist or artistry it implies, and produces the ethical, epistemological and
psychological considerations that in turn define his aesthetic ideas. These
considerations can be found in his works Del Bene (1644), the treatise on
Christian tragedy added to Ermenegildo martire (1644–55), the Trattato dello stile
e del dialogo (1646–62), the Storia del Concilio di Trento (1656–57), the Arte della
Perfezion Cristiana (1665) and the Trattato sulla provvidenza, written probably
around 1650, and they result in a coherent set of art theoretical tenets.52
The art that concerns Pallavicino always addresses a believer who, despite
their human weakness, searches for the right path. This quest takes place
within a universe created by a beneficent God. Since the laws of the universe
reveal the operations of the ultimate author, Creation also provides the
seeking believer with a model for their own actions and creations. Within this
soteriological perspective on humanity the imitative arts—the arts producing
representations or images—occupy a prominent position. To Pallavicino,
they even fulfill a necessary, threefold task. First, every thought needs to be
expressed or stated; naked truth is inconceivable. Since no expression is natural
or self-evident, every representation is an artifice. Within the representation,
artifice processes a number of contingencies, concerning language or other
codes of representation, social conventions, historical circumstances and

specific conditions with regard to what needs to be represented and to whom
the expression is addressed. Second, since every representation relates to
man and mankind it has a soteriological dimension. Man, as a free being,
is required to seek happiness. Everything that addresses mankind should
therefore incite people to exercise their free will and to choose, just as Creation
does. This implies that every representation appeals to human desire. Choice
is possible when one is presented with a multitude of options. A good product
of human artifice, like for instance a work of art, will therefore proffer a well-
ordered multiplicity. If a work lacks either order or multiplicity, it is ethically
reprehensible, because it produces heretic arbitrariness or reduces man to a
near animal state of unfreedom. Third, an image can show truths that are
in fact beyond the grasp of human rationality. It can reveal what God has
imprinted in the human heart, avoiding the long and treacherous path of
reasoning. In the image, the believer encounters an imperfect adumbration of
the true seeing of the perfect Christian. This seeing is stimulated by the affetto.
These considerations prescribe specific qualities of the image, which can be
classed under two headings, varietà and vivacità. Varietà means that the attractive
representation is a composite. This composite processes the contingencies of
different objects, their representation and the reactions they entice in such a
manner as to generate a unity that, by means of its own particular coherence,
reveals something of the universal laws governing Creation. Vivacità indicates
that representing is first and for all understood as rendering visible. The inner
or outer eye is the privileged sense to touch the beholder. As a consequence,
the representation should be adorned with those elements that attract the eye:
detail, luster, color, abundance. These qualities generate a general expression
of majesty and splendor.
The two categories of varietà and vivacità are thus determined by the effect
they generate on a beholder; the aesthetics implied in Pallavicino’s work are
first and foremost the aesthetics of perception. The vicissitudes of perception
also establish the possible analogies between the different mimetic arts: they do
not share the same rules but seek similar effects, which are ultimately grounded
in human behavior and Creation. Finally, as will be examined in detail in the
next two chapters, Pallavicino very clearly distinguishes representation and
reality. The image can only show that which cannot be understood because
it is nothing but representation. The image is fundamentally untrue, in the
literal sense of the word, and always recognized as such. It can never claim a
status on a par with Creation itself.
Pallavicino’s ideas on art engage with two contemporary debates. The
first pertains to the role of art in the Church, the second concerns artistry and
the artist. As becomes explicit in the Storia del Concilio di Trento, Pallavicino
enters in the footsteps of a long list of apologists of ecclesiastical splendor.
This earned the Storia and its author a lot of criticism, both from within
and without the Catholic Church. An acerbic pamphlet written by Jean Le

Noir attacking the Concilio latched onto Pallavicino’s persistent defense and
justification of the material side of ecclesiastical institutions.53 Nonetheless,
as will be examined in Chapter 4, Pallavicino is aware of the limitations and
risks that ecclesiastical splendor entails. It is precisely this awareness that
defines his contribution to the second debate. In Pallavicino’s view of art
conformity plays a central role, be it in the learning process of the artist, the
process of creation, or in the way the beholder addresses an artistic object.
Art is in essence and in all its different aspects a form of imitation and this
becomes explicit when Pallavicino discusses the imitation of the saints, the
function of theater or the nature of meditation. If Pallavicino ascribes certain
qualities to all these “art forms,” specifically vivacità and varietà, he assigns
them a different origin and status than in contemporary art literature, such as
treatises and artists’ biographies, where they appear as emblems of an artistic
calling propelled by genius. The exact definition not only of the nature and
status of the artist, but also what art can communicate and achieve by dint of
artistry, is the issue that distinguishes Pallavicino’s ideas most clearly from
contemporary art theory and poetics. On these topics the prelate appears to
challenge intentionally the views held by some of his contemporaries.
Many of these ideas are not new, some are commonplace. It is not the
ambition of this book to retrace the origin of each component of Pallavicino’s
thought. What seems pertinent is their circulation in the epicenter of baroque
Rome as well as their particular constellation in Pallavicino’s writings, where
they became enriched with two original intuitions: the recognition of the
untruth of art, a fundamental criticism of Aristotelian verisimilitude, and
the connection of variegated style to the ethical condition of man, a cross-
fertilization of ethics and aesthetics. In order to explain these intuitions in
rather more detail and to gauge their relevance for seventeenth-century art,
the next chapters will present a series of interconnected case studies, each
involving an aspect of Pallavicino’s theories and a particular set of historical
examples.
My examination takes as its starting point a “small” artistic genre deemed
emblematic of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s creativity, the sculpted portrait, and
expand towards ever more public art forms. In the next chapter, Pallavicino’s
views on portraiture will be compared with those embedded in Domenico’s
biography of Bernini. This comparison will establish a number of distinctions
within Pallavicino’s view of the arts, and between Pallavicino’s views and the
ideas held in art literature. They concern the relationship between divine and
man-made creations, and how this relationship determines the ontological
status of art works and their effect on the viewer. In Chapter 3 this examination
extends into the truth claims that art is able to embody: if art is of a different
nature from that of divine Creation, what do works of art allow one to see
and understand, and why? The test case is prophecy and its application in
art and pageantry, which involves the use of art as propaganda in the public
sphere. Pallavicino’s views on that matter are the subject of Chapter 4, which
examines his ideas on the role of art and architecture in the representation of
the papal persona and the Catholic Church. If art can only lay claim to certain
forms of truth, what aspects of this peculiar persona and the institution it
embodies are within its purview? What “part” of the papacy is art able to
represent legitimately and effectively? As Chapter 5 argues, this question
involves a notion of style: stylistic features, such as the contrapposto or visual
complexity are interpreted by Bernini’s biographers and literary theorists
alike as the index of whether ideas are of a more or less elevated nature. This
nature is closely associated with the persona of both the pope and the artist.
On these questions emerges not just a divergence between Pallavicino’s ideas
and artistic discourse as detected in the discussion of portraiture, but also a
historical evolution in the interpretation of stylistic features. The final chapter
argues that Pallavicino’s ideas on good style apply to meditation as well,
because they are founded upon the relationship of the human believer with
God and Creation. Since this relation plays out in history, the stylistic features
of single objects will also characterize the historical evolution of artistic forms:
both any work of art on its own and the sum of all works produced over
time exploit and reveal the contingency of historical reality with regard to the
unchanging realm of the divine.
Notes
1. Gabriele Baroncini, “L’insegnamento della filosofia naturale nei collegi italiani dei Gesuiti
(1610–1670): un esempio di nuovo aristotelismo,” in Gian Paolo Brizzi (ed.), La “Ratio
Studiorum.” Modelli culturali e pratiche educative dei Gesuiti in Italia tra Cinque e Seicento (Rome,
1981), pp. 202–7; Ireneo Affò, Memorie della vita e degli studi di Sforza Cardinale Pallavicino
(Parma, 1794), p. 5; Riccardo Garcia Villoslada, Storia del Collegio Romano dal suoinizio, 1551, alla
soppressione della Compagnia di Gesù, 1773 (Rome, 1954), p. 223, gives a “Memoria del Collegio
Romano” dated 3 September 1625: “Il sig. Marchese Sforza Pallavicino difese in un salone le
sue Conclusione [de universa philosophia] dedicandole al Papa, e il salone era apparato da
alto abbasso con le tapezzarie del sig. Card. Di Savoia, con l’intervento di 20 Cardinali, e del
Sig. D. Antonio, Nipote del Papa, con musica solenne a quattro cori. Alli 7 del detto mese prese
il grado del Dottorato nel salone del Collegio con lo stesso apparato di 28 Cardinali sotto gli
auspici del Sig. Cardinal di Savoia.” See also Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic (Princeton, 1989),
pp. 100–101, 201, n. 54.
2. Secondo Lancellotti, L’Hoggidi, o vero Il mondo non peggiore nè più calamitoso del passato … Parte
Seconda (Venice, 1646), p. 260. This passage introduced the epithet to the subsequent Pallavicino
biography; see Girolamo Amati (ed.), Bibliografia romana. Notizie della vita e delle opere degli scrittori
romani dal secolo xi (Rome, 1880), pp. 196–200. The first volume of L’Hoggidi was written in 1623;
when the second volume was written is not entirely clear, but it was probably finished around
1633. On p. 457 Lancellotti refers to “quest’anno 1633,” and the passage quoted here refers to 1613
as “twenty years ago.” Bellini has shown that Lancellotti only refers to works published before
1632; see Eraldo Bellini, Agostino Mascardi tra “ars poetica” e “ars historica” (Milan, 2002), pp. 206–7,
n. 168.
3. Affò, Memorie, pp. 7–8.
4. Umberto Motta, Antonio Querenghi (1546–1633). Un letterato padovano nella Roma del tardo
Rinascimento (Milan, 1997), pp. 333–4. The letter is addressed to Paganino Gaudenzio, who already
had devoted 26 “Considerazioni” to this “Fenice degl’ingegni”; see Alois de Backer and Carlos
Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la compagnie de Jésus (Heverlee, 1960), vol. 6, c. 141, a. Carneades is a

Greek skeptic philosopher.
5. Lancellotti suggests that Pallavicino inherited the epithet from Cesarini. See Peter N. Miller,
Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven and London, 2000),
p. 17, who points to Seneca, Epistulae Morales, Letter 17.1, ed. Loeb Classical Library (1st edn
1917), trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge MA, 1979), vol. 1, p. 279, as the source for the
epithet.
6. Gonzaga is Lancellotti’s “Prencipe Italiano poi infelicissimo”; see David S. Chambers, “The
‘Bellissimo Ingegno’ of Ferdinando Gonzaga (1587–1626) Cardinal and Duke of Mantua,” Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 50 (1987): 113–47. On Cesarini, see below.
7. Eraldo Bellini, Umanisti e Lincei: letteratura e scienza a Roma nell’età di Galileo (Padua, 1997),
pp. 301–2.
8. Sforza Pallavicino, Del Bene Libri Quattro del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino, bk IV, ch. 12, in Opere del
Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino (Milan, 1834), vol. 2, p. 542a: “Una tale adolescenza si vide gli anni
addietro fiorire (non voglio parlar di chi m’ascolta) in due personaggi molto cospicui. Fra’principi
assoluti D. Ferdinando Gonzaga, ora poco affortunato duca di Mantova, quando in tenera età
comparve un prodigio d’ogni letteratura e nelle camere di vostro padre, illustrissimo cardinale
[Alessandro Orsini], fece spiccare a Pisa con pubbliche conclusioni tutte quelle doti d’ingegno e
d’erudizione e di grazia che potrebbon rappresentare un angelo vestito di carne. Fra i cavalieri
soggetti D. Virginio Cesarino, il quale gli anni addietro rinnovò le glorie de’Pichi mirandolani
all’Italia e fu oggetto di nobil curiosità eziandio alle nazioni straniere, che per una delle maraviglie
di Roma volean conoscerlo.”
9. Most famously by Roberto Bellarmino, see Lorenzo Crasso, Elogii d’huomini letterati (Venice, 1666),
vol. 1, p. 273; Leone Allacci, Apes Urbanae sive De viris illustribus. Qui ab anno MDCXXX, per totam
MDCXXXI (1st edn Rome, 1633), reprint ed. and intro. Michel-Pierre Lerner (Lecce, 1998), p. 174,
who lists a “Parallelo fra Virginio Cesarini en Giovanni Pico” by Lelio Guidiccioni; and Carlo
Bartolomeo Piazza, Evsevologio Romano; overo, Delle opere pie di Roma. Accresciuto, con 2 trattati delle
accademie e librerie celebri di Roma (Rome, 1698), bk XII, ch. 31, pp. 70–72: “[Accademia] De’Lincei. In
casa già di Don Virginio Cesarini”; see also Bellini, Umanisti e Lincei, pp. 249–60, especially p. 254,
n. 12.
10. Giuseppe Gabrieli, “Una gara di precedenza accademica nel Seicento fra ‘Umoristi’ e ‘Lincei,’”
Rendiconti della R. Accademia dei Lincei. Classe di Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche, s. 6, 9 (1935),
p. 247.
11. William G. Craven, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Symbol of his Age. Modern Interpretations of a
Renaissance Philosopher, Travaux d’humanisme et renaissance, 135 (Geneva, 1981), p. 1, nn. 1 and
2. See, for instance, Riccardo Bartoli, Elogio al principe Giovanni Pico detto la Fenice degli Ingegni
(Guastalla, 1791).
12. See Lactantius, De Ave Phoenice, ed. Mary C. Fitzpatrick (Philadelphia, 1933), pp. 16–30; Jean
Hubaux and Maxime Leroy, Le mythe du Phénix dans les littératures grecque et latine (Liège and
Paris, 1939); Roelof Van den Broek, The Myth of the Phoenix according to Classical and Early Christian
Traditions (Leiden, 1972).
13. Redondi, Galileo Heretic, pp. 90–95; Bellini, Umanisti e Lincei, pp. 249–56.
14. On this milieu, and its intertwined interests in literature and sciences, see Ingo Herklotz, Cassiano
Dal Pozzo und die Archäologie des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1999), pp. 33–52; Lorenzo Mochi Onori,
Sebastian Schütze and Francesco Salinas (eds), I Barberini e la cultura Europea del Seicento (Rome,
2007); Eraldo Bellini, Stili di pensiero nel Seicento italiano. Galileo, i Lincei, i Barberini (Pisa, 2009), esp.
pp. 67–234.
15. See the letters published in Antonio De Luca, “Lettere inedite di Sforza Pallavicino a Fabio Chigi,”
Rassegna della letteratura italiana, 78 (1974): 31–42. On patronage, see also Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk
IV, ch. 50, p. 570a–b: “Quando un Avicenna, quando un Ticone, quando un Pico sarebbonsi tanto
avanzati o nelle specolazioni medicinali o nelle osservazioni celesti o nelle più recondite dottrine
di tutte le antiche sette, se i loro ingegni non avesser potuto volare con ali d’oro?”
16. Carlo Soliani, Gianandrea Allegri and Paolo Cappelli, Nelle Terre dei Pallavicino. I—parte seconda: il
feudo di Zibello e i suoi signori tra XV e XVIII secolo (Busseto, 1989), pp. 75–97 and docs 165–78 give a
detailed reconstruction of the heritage issues.
17. For the intimate friendship between Pallavicino and Chigi, see Sforza Pallavicino, Della vita di
Alessandro VII. Libri Cinque. Opera inedita del P. Sforza Pallavicino della Compagnia di Gesù. Accademico
della Crusca e poi Cardinale di S. Chiesa (Prato, 1839–40), vol. 1, Proemio; Sforza Pallavicino, Storia
del Concilio di Trento del cardinale Sforza Pallavicino, in Opere del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino (Milan,
1834); Affò, Memorie, pp. 10–11, 27, 30. See the comments at the election of Fabio Chigi to Pope
as Alexander VII, in Lucien Ceyssens, “La fin de la première période du jansénisme. 1654–1660,”
Bibliothèque de l’Institut historique belge de Rome, 12–13 (Brussels and Rome, 1963–65), docs 323 and
330. See also Silvia Bulletta, Virgilio Malvezzi e la storiografia classica (Milan, 1995), pp. 1–50; Irene
Fosi, “Fabio Chigi und der Hof der Barberini. Beiträge zu einer vernetzten Lebensgeschichte,” in
Peter Burschel and Mark Häberlein (eds), Historische Anstöße: Festschrift für Wolfgang Reinhard zum
65. Geburtstag am 10. April (Berlin, 2002), pp. 179–96.
18. Allacci, Apes Urbanae, pp. 233–4.
19. Affò, Memorie, pp. 14–15; Bellini, Stili di pensiero nel Seicento italiano, pp. 140–43. See also the letters
in Ida Macchia, Relazioni fra il padre gesuita Sforza Pallavicino con Fabio Chigi (pontefice Alessandro VII)
(Turin, 1907), pp. 57–8, letters XIII and XIV; and Maria Catarina Crisafulli, Virgilio Malvezzi. Lettere
a Fabio Chigi (Farano di Brindisi, 1990), p. 117.
20. Federica Favino, “‘Quel petardo di mia fortuna’. Riconsiderando la ‘caduta’ di Giovan Battista
Ciampoli,” in José Montesinos and Carlos Solís (eds), Largo campo di filosofare. Eurosymposium
Galileo 2001 (La Orotava, 2001), pp. 863–82; Bellini, Stili di pensiero nel Seicento italiano, pp. 120–21
and 140.
21. Bellini, Stili di pensiero nel Seicento italiano, pp. 152–3.
22. Claudio Costantini, Baliani e i Gesuiti. Annotazioni in margine alla corrispondenza del Baliani con Gio.
Luigi Confalonieri e Orazio Grassi (Florence, 1969), pp. 98–108; Federica Favino, “Sforza Pallavicino
editore e ‘Galileista ad un modo,’” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, s. 6, 20 (2000): pp. 298–9,
308–15. For the prehistory of these disputes, see Ugo Baldini, Legem impone subactis. Studi su filosofia
e scienza dei gesuiti in Italia 1540–1632 (Rome, 1992), pp. 9–14 and pp. 19–73.
23. De Backer and Sommervogel, Bibliothèque, vol. 6, c. 122–6, n. 9–19.
24. Sforza Pallavicino, Trattato del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino sulla Provvidenza, in Ottavio Gigli (ed.),
Opere edite ed inedite (Rome, 1844–48), vol. 1, pp. 39–114. Antonio Perez (1599–1649) was a Jesuit
and taught philosophy at the Collegio Romano. Matteo Pellegrini (or Peregrini) (1595–1652) was
an intellectual from Bologna, who was under the protection of Cardinal Antonio Barberini until
1637. After a stay in Genoa and Bologna he became second custode of the Biblioteca Vaticana, at the
instigation of Pallavicino; see Ezio Raimondi, Trattatisti e narratori del Seicento (Milan and Naples,
1960), pp. 109–12, for a short biography and bibliography. Virgilio Malvezzi (1595–1654), an uncle
of Pallavicino, was a political historian famed for his “senecan” style; see Bulletta, Virgilio Malvezzi
e la storiografia classica, and the dedication of the second book of Del Bene to Malvezzi.
25. On Pallavicino’s editorial interventions, see Ezio Raimondi, Anatomie secentesche (Pisa, 1966), pp.
114–18; Favino, “Sforza Pallavicino editore e ‘Galileista ad un modo,’” On the close relationship
between Ciampoli and Pallavicino, see Giovanni Baffetti, “Giovanni Ciampoli e Sforza Pallavicino:
un problema storiografico,” in La retorica, l’ingegno e l’anima. Studi sul Seicento (Pisa, 2006), pp.
59–74. See also Chapter 6.
26. Sven Knebel, “Die früheste Axiomatisierung des Induktionsprincip: Pietro Sforza Pallavicino,”
Salzburger Jahrbuch für Philosophie, 41 (1996), pp. 100–102, argues that Alessandro Orsini (1593–
1626), Gherardo Saraceni (d. 1641), Antonio Querenghi (1546–1633) and Andrea Eudimonio
(1566–1625) had all been involved with Galileo or his ideas in some capacity. Virginia Cox, The
Renaissance Dialogue (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 77–81, suggests that Pallavicino’s choice for the genre
of the dialogue pays homage to Galileo as well. Giovanni Ghilli, “Strutture ritmico-sintattiche nella
prosa di Pallavicino,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 143/444 (1966): 518–56, proposes that
Pallavicino adopts and propagates Galileo’s style in scientific writings. On Pallavicino’s use of a
Galilean topos, see Chapter 2, n. 5.
27. See the honorific publication Effigies insignia nomina cognomina patriae et dies promotionis ac obitus
summorum pontificium et S.R.E. cardinalium defunctorum. Ab anno MDC(L)VIII (Rome, 1690). See
also Patritium Gauchat, Hierarchia catholica medii et recentioris aevi sive summorum pontificium, s.r.e.
cardinalium, ecclesiarum antistitum series (Regensburg, 1935), VII, no. 10.
28. Alciati had taught Pallavicino in the Collegio Romano. For the history of the commission, see
Hubert Jedin, Der Quellenapparat der Konziliengeschichte Pallavicinos, Miscellanea Historia Pontificiae,
vol. 4 (Rome, 1940), pp. 7–20, 42–3.
29. Giovanni Incisa della Rocchetta, “Gli appunti autobiografici d’Alessandro VII nell’archivio Chigi,”
in Mélanges Eugène Tisserant, vol. 6 (Studi e testi, 236, part 1) (Vatican City, 1964), pp. 439–57.
30. On the discussion of nepotism under Alexander VII, and Pallavicino’s opinione on the matter, see
Antonio Menniti Ippolito, Il tramonto della Curia nepotista: papi, nipoti e burocrazia curiale tra XVI e
XVII secolo (Rome, 1999), pp. 80–93. See also Chapter 4. It should be noted that authors hostile to
the papacy eagerly stressed Pallavicino’s alleged dismay; see Gregorio Leti, Il cardinalisme di Santa
Chiesa. Parte seconda (Amsterdam, 1668), pp. 89–94.
31. Tomaso Montanari, “Sulla fortuna poetica di Bernini. Frammenti del tempo di Alessandro VII e di
Sforza Pallavicino,” Studi secenteschi, 39 (1998): 127–64.
32. Christoph Leopold Frommel, “S. Andrea al Quirnale: genesi e struttura,” in Gianfranco Spagnesi
and Marcello Fagiolo (eds), Gian Lorenzo Bernini architetto e l’architettura europea del Sei–Settecento
(Rome, 1983), pp. 247–51, Appendix I: “Racconto della Fabrica della Chiesa di S. Andrea a Monte
Cavallo della Compagnia di Gesù (1672).”
33. See Tomaso Montanari, “Gian Lorenzo Bernini e Sforza Pallavicino,” Prospettiva, 87/88 (1997): 55
and n. 89.
34. Frommel, “S. Andrea al Quirnale,” p. 236 and fig. 19.
35. See, for instance, Sergio Bertelli, Ribelli, libertini e ortodossi nella storiografia barocca (Florence, 1973),
pp. 109–16.
36. In an oratio from 1734, the Cardinal is seen as an eminent example. See Jozef Ijsewijn, “Rome en de
humanistische literatuur,” Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie … van België. Klasse der Letteren,
47/1 (1985): 60.
37. See Rudolf Kuhn, “Gian Lorenzo Bernini und Ignatius van Loyola,” in Martin Gosebruch and
Lorenz Dittman (eds), Argo. Festschrift für Kurt Badt (Cologne, 1970), pp. 297–323.
38. Sforza Pallavicino, Lettere dettate dal Card. Sforza Pallavicino di gloriosa memoria, raccolte ed dedicate
alla Santità di Nostro Signore Clemente IX da Giambattista Galli Pavarelli (Rome, 1668), pp. 136–7,
179–80. First signaled by Valentino Martinelli in 1956, see now his Gian Lorenzo Bernini e la sua
cerchia. Studi e contributi (1950–1990) (Naples, 1994), pp. 161–84. For a discussion of these letters,
see Chapter 2.
39. Montanari, “Gian Lorenzo Bernini e Sforza Pallavicino,” pp. 42–68; Montanari, “Sulla fortuna
poetica di Bernini”; Tomaso Montanari, “Bernini e Cristina di Svezia: alle origini della storiografia
berniniana,” in Alessandro Angelini (ed.), Gianlorenzo Bernini e i Chigi tra Roma e Siena (Siena,
1998), pp. 331–477.
40. Domenico Bernini, Vita del Cavalier Gio. Lorenzo Bernino descritta da Domenico Bernino suo figlio (1st
edn Rome, 1713) (photographic reprint, Perugia, 1999), p. 97: “In confermazione di che era solito
dire il dottissimo Cardinal Pallavicino, che Nel trattar col Cavaliere non solamente rimaneva sodisfatto, e
pago, mà che si sentiva allora in un certo modo come maggiormente infiammato nella sottigliezza de’discorsi,
stimolato eziamdio dall’acutezza de’suoi. Onde un giorno entrando il Cavaliere nelle stanze di lui,
nelle quali, come che esso se ne dilettava, esalava in gran copia fumo, & odore di preziose droghe,
graziosamente disse, Signor Cardinale mi pare di entrare nelle Selve dell’Arabia: Rispose subbito il
Cardinale, Sì adesso, che vi è giunta la fenice degl’ingegni.” See also Chapter 5.
41. Cesare D’Onofrio, “Un dialogo-recita di Gian Lorenzo Bernini e Lelio Guidiccioni,” Palatino, 10
(1966): 130. The dialogue is discussed in Chapter 5.
42. This idea appears for the first time in Benedetto Croce, “I trattatisti italiani del ‘concettismo’ e
Baltasar Graciàn,” in Atti e memorie dell’Accademia Pontaniana (Naples, 1899); see also Benedetto
Croce, Storia dell’età barocca in Italia (Milan, 1993), pp. 240–51. On page 101 we read: “… il
pregevole libro Del bene del Pallavicino, che abbraccia sotto questo titolo la trattazione della logica,
dell’etica, della politica e della poetica, e come ha principale intento letterario-divulgativo, così
anche offre il suo meglio in quel che dice della poesia e non già nell’investigazione dei problemi
della coscienza morale.” Croce sets the tone for the interpretation of Pallavicino’s work; see also
Mario Costanzo, Critica e poetica del primo Seicento, vol. 3 (Rome, 1969–71), pp. 13–32.
43. Laura Volpe, Le idee esthetiche del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino (Castelvetrano, 1930); Calogero
Marrocco, Un precursore dell’estetica moderna: il card. Sforza Pallavicino (Palermo, 1930).
44. Giovanni Getto, Il barocco letterario in Italia (Milan, 2000); Carlo Calcattera, Il Parnaso in rivolta
(Milan, 1940); Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue, “Aristotelismo e barocco,” in Atti del III Congresso
internazionale di Studi Umanistici: retorica e barocco (Rome, 1955), pp. 119–95; Franco Croce, Tre
momenti del barocco letterario italiano (Florence, 1966); Ezio Raimondi, Letteratura barocca. Studi sul
Seicento italiana (1st edn 1961) (Florence, 1982); idem, Anatomie secentesche.
45. Eraldo Bellini, “Scrittura letteraria e scrittura filosofica in Sforza Pallavicino,” in Carlo Scarpati
and Eraldo Bellini, Il vero e il falso dei poeti. Tasso, Tesauro, Pallavicino, Muratori (Milan, 1990),
pp. 73–189.
46. Marco Collareta, “La Chiesa cattolica e l’arte in età moderna. Un itinerario,” in Pietro Caiazza,
Marco Collareta, Angelomichele De Spirito, Gabriele De Rosa and Tullio Gregory, Storia dell’Italia
religiosa, vol. 2, L’età moderna (Rome, 1994), pp. 185–6.
47. Anthony Blunt, “Gianlorenzo Bernini: Illusionism and Mysticism,” Art History, 1 (1978): 67–89.
This article is discussed extensively in Chapter 3; see also the literature listed there under n. 43.
48. On these discussions, see Francis Haskell, “The Role of Patrons: Baroque Style Changes,” in
Rudolf Wittkower and Irma B. Jaffé (eds), Baroque Art. The Jesuit Contribution (New York, 1972),
pp. 51–62. Another example of Pallavicino’s involvement in practical matters of architecture are
his interventions to arrange the sale of palazzo Salviati in order to complete the piazza of the
Collegio Romano; see Dorothy Metzger Habel, The Urban Development in the Age of Alexander VII
(Cambridge and New York, 2002), pp. 293–8.
49. On the drawing and the crucifix, see Tomaso Montanari, “Bernini per Bernini: il secondo
Crocifisso monumentale; con una digressione su Domenico Guidi,” Prospettiva, 139 (2009): 2–25,
and the literature in Chapter 2, n. 132.
50. On the frontispiece, see Tomaso Montanari, “Bernini, Pietro da Cortona e un frontespizio per
Sforza Pallavicino,” Studi in onore del Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz per il suo centenario
(1897–1997): Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, s. 4, 1/2 (1996): 339–59.
51. Sforza Pallavicino, Ermenegildo Martire Tragedia recitata da’Giovani del Seminario Romano, e da
loro data in luce, e dedicata all’ementiss.mo Signor Card. Francesco Barberini con un breve discorso in
fine (Rome, 1644). See Giovanna Zanlonghi, “La tragedia fra ludus e festa. Rassegna dei nodi
problematici delle teoriche secentesche sulla tragedia in Italia,” Communicazioni sociali, 15/2–3
(1993), pp. 209–10; Daniela Quarta, “Drammaturgia gesuita nel Collegio Romano: dalla tragedia
di soggetto biblico al dramma martirologico (1560–1644),” in Maria Chiabò and Federico Doglio
(eds), I gesuiti e i primordi del teatro barocco in Europa. Atti del convegno internazionale del Centro studi
sul teatro medievale e rinascimentale (Rome, 1995), pp. 155–60.
52. See Maarten Delbeke, La fenice degl’ingegni. Een alternatief perspectief op Gianlorenzo Bernini en zijn
werk in de geschriften van Sforza Pallavicino (Ghent, 2002), chs 3 and 4.
53. Jean Le Noir, Les nouvelles lumières politiques pour le gouvernement de l’Eglise, ou l’evangile nouveau du
Cardinal Pallavicin (Paris, 1676).
2
The Pope, the Bust, the Sculptor and the Fly
In order to flesh out the ideas introduced in the previous chapter, we

should turn to the body of anecdotes shared between Pallavicino’s work
and Bernini’s biographies. A first anecdote occurs in Domenico’s biography
of his father, where he describes a gathering of virtuosos and artists at
the court of Pope Alexander VII.1 The company, which included Sforza
Pallavicino, was comparing a series of painted and drawn portraits of the
pope on the basis of their resemblance to the model. When a fly landed on
the prelate’s table, Gianlorenzo cried out that this miserable creature was
more like Alexander, in power and beauty, than any “mute portrait by even
the most skillful of painters” [“Questa, disse il Bernino, è più simile al Papa
nel più forte, e nel più bello, che ogni qualunque muto Ritratto di virtuosissimo
Pittore”]. Alexander and Pallavicino immediately knew what the sculptor
meant, and the cardinal launched into a long philosophical explanation to
prove Bernini’s point: there was a much greater affinity between the pope
and the fly in terms of movement, posture, gesture, and the sensitivity of
internal and external organs, than between the model and a canvas covered
with carefully arranged but nevertheless dead colors [“essendo troppo più
simigliante al corpo di qualunque huomo quello di qual si sia difforme
animale per l’organizzazion delle membra, in moltissime delle quali tutti
i viventi sensitivi convengono; che una massa di pietra solo articolata
nell’esterior superficie”].
Pallavicino had used the same anecdote nearly fifty years earlier.2 A
passage in the first book of the Arte della Perfezion Cristiana recounts how
he once saw Bernini, “the greatest sculptor of his time,” present the bust of
Alexander VII he had just finished to the pope. The cardinal immediately
praised the work for the astonishing skill with which Bernini had managed
to carve the likeness of Alexander out of a piece of stone. In order to make
the pope forget about the exceptional heat for a moment, “in a manner
befitting his high ingegno,” Pallavicino asked Bernini “whether the image he
had made—with such inestimable skill—was not less like the pope than the
fly that was circling it” [“E pure, signor Bernino, questo simulacro di Papa
Alessandro formato da voi con inestimabile diligenza, quanto gli è meno
simile eziando nella visibile corporatura, che quella mosca la qual ci si gira
d’intorno?”]. The pope, soon backed up by Bernini—“a man of quick and
sharp ingegno”—acknowledged the truth in Pallavicino’s remark: the body
of any man is more like that of an animal, no matter how deformed, than
a block of stone that has only been worked on from the outside. Man and
animal, and by extension all living, sensitive beings, share the arrangement
of their limbs [“essendo troppo più simigliante al corpo di qualunque huomo
quello di qual si sia difforme animale per l’organizzazion delle membra, in
moltissime delle quali tutti i viventi sensitivi convengono; che una massa di
pietra solo articolata nell’esterior superficie”].
In outline at least, this anecdote resembles Domenico Bernini’s, but there
are important differences. First of all, Domenico reversed the roles: in the
older version it is Pallavicino who compares the fly, the pope and the work
of art and Bernini who—again through his ingegno—acknowledges the truth
of the remark. Secondly, Pallavicino measures the fly only against a marble
bust by Bernini. The insect does not figure among a series of comparable
paintings, but serves to question directly the resemblance between the pope
and the wonderfully sculpted bust. Finally, the story is told in a treatise that
aims to teach Christian perfection, not in an artist’s biography. Pallavicino
wants to prove that God is the creator of the universe; Domenico uses the
anecdote to show his father’s high esteem at the court of Alexander VII.
It is unclear whether any of the two versions is historically accurate.
The incident does not appear as such in the published sections of the diary
of Alexander VII; the entry for 2 October 1657 reads “today the Cavaliere
Bernini brings the large marble of our portrait and many see it.” It is quite
possible that Sforza Pallavicino, a confidant of Alexander VII, was present
at such a gathering.3 The notes do not mention a comparison of painted and
drawn portraits and the anecdote does not appear in Filippo Baldinucci’s
biography of Bernini.4 The anecdote has a literary precedent in Galileo’s
Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi of 1632, where the “making of a statue”
is unfavorably compared with “the formation of the lowest worm.”5 The
exaltation of the insect perhaps derives from the tradition to bestow mock
praise upon small and even annoying animals.6 The bust that is central to
Domenico’s anecdote still exists in a private collection in Siena (Fig. 2.1).7
The difference between the two versions is significant and arises
from the function of the anecdote in the two texts. Within Pallavicino’s
epistemology and ethics the incident serves to emphasize the subservience
and limitations of the visual arts. In Domenico’s account, the cardinal’s
“lungo discorso” facilitates a philosophically sound paragone statement by
Gianlorenzo Bernini, which attests to the value and superiority of the artist
and his art.
the pope, the bust, the sculptor and the fly 31
2.1 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Bust of Alexander VII, marble, 1657, private collection,

Siena and Rome (Lensini Photography)
The Art of Christian Perfection
As indicated by its title, the Arte della Perfezion Cristiana is a treatise prescribing
the rules and models for becoming a good Christian. Our author feels that
such a general treatise will bear more fruit than the individual efforts of the
most zealous “educator of the soul,” just like the work of Vitruvius yields
more dividends than the oeuvre of Michelangelo or Bernini [“avrei ottenuto
di formar’in ogni età maggior moltitudine di perfetti cristiani, e con più di
cooperazione, che non fanno i più infaticabili e zelanti allevatori dell’anime:
come più quantità d’eccellenti edifici, e in più efficace maniera ha fabbricati, e

và fabricando ad ognora Vitruvio, che’l Bonarroto ò ’l Bernino”].8 Composed
in three books, the first part explains the method or arte underlying the
treatise, in order to argue that Catholicism is the only true religion. The second
book enumerates the different sins and how they should be purified, and the
third attempts to lift the human soul to perfection by means of prayer and
meditation. The account of the fly is in the first book, when Pallavicino explains
that real conversion requires convincing, rational arguments. The truth of
Catholicism has to be proven, and the exposition proceeds by demonstrating
to “each intellect” that “there is a divine author of the universe.”9 First,
Pallavicino shows that the maker of reality is a spiritual being, which implies
that no orderly chain of cause and effect is imaginable without a prime cause.
Consequently, the world was created at a specific moment in time and is not
eternal.10 Once the existence of God is established, it can be derived that only
Catholicism is true to His being.
The anecdote belongs to the first part of the argument. The activity of an
invisible Author within Creation is proven on the basis of the characteristics of
His creations. A work of art is not just the result of visible and material causes
but also and primarily of a mental process. By way of example Pallavicino
compares the divine work with Michelangelo’s creations. If we can not
imagine the work of Michelangelo without some kind of mental capacity that
shaped the initial concept and subsequently directed the movements of his
arms, an even greater intellect must surely be responsible for the creation
of, for example, a pomegranate, which in itself shows greater artistry.11 This
comparison, whose locus classicus is Saint Augustine’s city of God, is perhaps
based on Athanasius of Alexandria’s Contra Gentes, which argues that the
presence of the Creator can be gleaned from the perfection of Creation just
like Phidias’ authorship is visible in his sculpted works, a point made after
rejecting the idolatrous ways of knowing God through the adoration of
inanimate objects.12 Pallavicino introduces the comparison between human
and divine art with a reference to the Old Testament story of the mother of
the Maccabees, who comforted her tortured sons by reminding them that
their bodies did not belong to their torturers but to God, their Creator.13 His
argument concludes, after the Bernini anecdote, with the proposition that the
perfection of the human body described by Galen cannot but testify to the
divine art.14
Pallavicino admits at the beginning of the chapter that his argument is a
compilation of the writings of respectable authors, from which he has selected
those elements that are most likely to convince the reader.15 What he aims to
prove with the anecdote of the fly, however, can be found in his own work
as well. In the Arte, the incident is primarily a stylistic means to make the
argument more vivid. This device introduces a theme that does not really
belong in Pallavicino’s line of reasoning but is picked up later by Domenico
Bernini. After all, Pallavicino does not just propose that any work of art,
human or divine, is the product of arte, with the implication that human art
is comparable and inferior to God’s art. He also points out the unbridgeable
gap between the lifeless and the living, which contrasts sharply with the
fundamental resemblance between all living things. Therefore, on the basis of
Bernini’s sculpture, Pallavicino formulates a clear statement about the status
of the mimetic arts, which is later reversed by Domenico Bernini.
The Superiority of Divine Art
By adding the anecdote to the Arte, Pallavicino connects different aspects of

his work that are not explicitly related to each other elsewhere. The first aspect
is developed in the third chapter of the first and only finished book of his
Trattato sulla Provvidenza, a dialogue on the workings of divine providence,
and concerns the comparison between divine and human art. In the dialogue,
the interlocutors aim to prove that all organized causality derives from the
liberty of God’s creatures and therefore cannot possibly be the result of
chance.16 In order to do this, they intend to use Pallavicino’s proof from Del
Bene, which showed that a large and well-organized whole can never be the
product of chance.17 We know, it is stated, that there are three kinds of causes,
namely Nature (la Natura), chance (il Caso) and human art or skill (l’arte).
Arte covers “any considered [free] choice” [“intendo per arte generalmente
ogni consigliata elezione”].18 The difference between these causes is the
degree of predictability of their effects. Anything produced by Nature, “the
first and wisest of all arts,” is the same whenever the cause is the same; this
sameness allows human beings to gather knowledge through induction.19
Because of human limitation and contingency, the arti are not capable of
always producing the same things under the same conditions. This mutability
therefore immediately raises the question of the relationship between chance
and the arti. After all, it is not unthinkable that good and structured work
might arise from chance, as when someone carelessly strikes a good chord on
a lute.20 Still, this simple possibility will never lift the fundamental distinction
between art and chance, nor will chance and art ever be confused. Even if it
is hypothetically possible that one day the Last Judgment could be produced
by simply throwing paint at the Sistine walls, Pallavicino points out that even
an “Indian” visiting Rome and who is utterly ignorant in the art of painting
would never think that Michelangelo’s masterpiece was made by chance.21
This inviolable distinction raises the question of how an artist can make a good
painting without restricting human freedom? How does the intentionality of
human arte, free from chance as it is, relate to human liberty?
The distance, but also the potential connection between the uniform,
organized deformation of art and formless chance lies in the way in which
humanity uses the freedom entrusted to it by God. God can “lead souls quietly
in the direction that He feels is suitable to them, because they turn to one thing
rather than another in complete freedom.”22 Consequently, when humanity
follows its natural inclinations the latter will coincide with God’s will. This
conformity between divine and human will is guaranteed by the “primary
truths” that are etched in the heart of humanity. What these truths are will be
discussed in rather more detail below, but for now it is important to note their
foundational role in human epistemology; to deny these truths is to deny the
possibility of human existence. They allow us to act purposefully and to gather
knowledge. One of the principles fundamental to humanity is the awareness
that a “great and well-organized work, like the Vatican basilica or the piazza
in Madrid, both in its parts and as a whole, is artful, not accidental” [“… che
un’opera grande e ben regolata sì nelle parti, come nel tutto, qual’è la Basilica
Vaticana, o la piazza di Madrid … è artificiale, non casuale”].23 Order and
arrangement are the result of the application of arte, of artificio. The operation
of arte, the considered use of orderly knowledge, shows the workings of will
and intellect, of consiglio. The Trattato, too, makes a distinction between the
capabilities of human and divine intellect.
If we discern in the making of an ear of wheat or of a fly considerably more artistry

than in the work of anyone who according to the Greeks was rightfully called
Dedalos, or artist, we should not fear that the maker of these things is either devoid of
design, intendimento, or that he makes them by chance, without his knowledge.
[Poichè veggendosi nella produzione d’una spiga, o d’una mosca assai maggior
artificio che in quanti lavori mai fe colui, il qual per antonomasia appo i Greci fu
chiamato Dedalo, cioè Artefice, non può dubitarsi che’l facitore di quelle o sia privo
d’intendimento, o le formi a sorte, e fuor del suo intendimento.]24
Human art is therefore not inferior because Dedalos is “deprived of

understanding” but because he possesses only a part of that which God
possesses in full, namely the art of creation. This arte does not lie in the
material means of the artist, “which do [not] know what they do.” It would be
nonsense to say that the chisel is the maker of a piece of sculpture, the earth
of fruit, or parents of their child. Arte consists of the purposeful knowledge
the maker needs to apply to create a good piece of work. The source of this
knowledge is God, who gave humanity its first principles.
This argument is resumed in its entirety, in a different arrangement and
with Bernini in the role of Dedalos, in the anecdote of the fly.25 The fact
that any human act is in the end founded on the workings of divine art is
announced from the start and extensively dealt with in the first chapters of
the Arte. All arts are subservient to the general good, la felicità civile. The art of
Christian perfection is the queen of the arts. It not only guarantees happiness
in the transitory state, where life is mortal, but also in the eternal state, heaven,
where life is immortal. The greatest master of this eternal art is God, just as He
is also the maker of all human creations. “It is God rather than Apelles who
colors the paintings of Apelles, who embroiders Arachne’s cloth rather than
Arachne, who carves Miron’s waxes more artfully than Miron”:
Tutte l’Arti sono ministre della retta Politica, più ò meno pregiate in quanto
promuovono, qual più, qual meno la felicità civile; ch’è l’intento di quella sublime
disciplina. … Pertanto quest’Arte la qual’io mi pongo à divisare, dee reputarsi la
Reina di tutte; come quella che sopra tutte può conferire per noi e ciascun’altro alla
vera felicità civile, non in una Città ove la nostra vita debba esser mortale, e la qual
Città medesima sia mortale; mà nella Città e verso di sè e verso di noi eterna, del
Cielo. Onde il supremo Artefice di quest’Arte è lo stesso Idio. … Ed in verità Idio è
il vero Artefice di tutti i lavori che fa l’huomo, assai più che non è l’uomo. Più Idio
colorì le dipinture d’Apelle, che Apelle; più ricamò le tele d’Aracne, che Aracne; più
artificiosamente incise le cere di Mirone, che Mirone ….26
The third chapter of the Trattato sulla Provvidenza thus clarifies why even
Michelangelo’s work cannot compete with a simple pomegranate, why
Bernini’s is inferior to a fly. The ultimate art is God’s and it can be read from
His work, Nature. Its perfection is testimony to the superiority of divine
creativity, in contrast to the limitations of human consigliata elezione.27 But at
this point it is not yet clear why a fly is more like the pope than a Bernini
bust or, in the other version, than the paintings displayed before the pope.
For the greater affinity between pope and fly is not just expressed as shared
perfection but also as greater likeness.
The Divine Artifex versus the Anima Formatrice
The superficial likeness between work of art and model is attributed in both
anecdotes to the difference between living and lifeless matter. This touches
upon the traditional problem of the lifelike nature of mimetic representation.
This aspect is implicitly indicated by the similar positions of Bernini and
Dedalos in Pallavicino’s two accounts. After all, Dedalos was deemed the
founding father of the art of sculpture, as he was believed to have been the
first to give life to his statues (which also placed him at the origin of idolatry).28
Pallavicino’s explanation of the difference between the living and the lifeless
in the Trattato sulla Provvidenza can be connected with his argument about the
human system of knowledge in Del Bene, which devotes special attention to
the problem of the vivacità of the work of art.
The Trattato deals with the distinction between the living and the lifeless
in the argumentation for the presence of divine providence in ethics.
According to the Trattato, an often-used but reprehensible concept sees
the relationship between God and the world as one between spirit and
body, which is supposedly apparent from the organic order among all the
elements of creation.29 This order guarantees that each part is best suited to
its appointed task. A non-gratuitous relationship between the components

of creation and the effects of their actions would point to the presence of a
guiding principle. In order to explain the order of creation without reverting
to deism, the Trattato defines the difference between the living and the
lifeless. Each element of creation strives for perfection. Living creatures
do this by acting more or less independently. We know the independence
of action through our experience and through “direct knowledge” of the
kinds of acts that derive entirely or in part from the spiritual or intellectual
faculties.30 This is primarily the case for independent motion or moto. We
see no difference between the several ways in which a hand may be moved,
but we immediately notice the distinction between a hand that is moved
and a hand that moves. Moto is therefore the first sign of animal or human
faculties.31 The presence of these faculties is even more apparent in the
activity of the senses and the intellect.
The spiritual and intellectual faculties of living beings are at the service
of the preservation and perfection of the life they have been granted by
God.32 The way in which living beings perfect themselves positions them in a
hierarchy. A being is more perfect—resembles God more closely—if it is less
dependent on external principles for its perfection. The autonomy of a creature
is determined by the faculties at its disposal. For example, the human intellect
does not use things themselves to attain insight but the fantasmi provided by
the imagination. Therefore humanity not only gathers knowledge through
what comes from outside but also through its own gifts and capabilities. In
this hierarchy the moto progressivo is the elementary faculty shared by all non-
vegetable living beings.33
That God is the creator of the world and not its anima follows from the
distinction between the constitutions of living and lifeless beings. In living
creatures the connection between the parts shows the unity of a forma
sustanziale; in lifeless creatures this connection shows the unity of author and
director.34 This distinction is clear from the difference between life and death
in living beings: the transformation of their connection in death testifies to the
presence of a forma. The lifeless, on the other hand, has no internally supported
form and therefore does not know the difference between life and death. It is
directed and preserved by a powerful and immortal external principle. As
counterargument to the remark that precisely this external principle might
be considered a forma that supports the world, Pallavicino mentions the—
rarely noted—difference between human and divine art. Human art is violent
and changes things in ways not foreseen by Nature. Divine art follows the
natural inclinations of things and serves their essence. In this way an innate
connection occurs, even between intrinsically different things. They are, after
all, made and perfected by one and the same artist.35
Consequently, the coherence of Creation lies in the unity of its Creator.
In order to understand the different degrees of kinship between the living
and the lifeless, as in the anecdote, it is necessary to consider the form of this
coherence. There are two kinds of unity of different things in creation. There
is a unity supported by a single forma sustanziale, which partakes of a higher
category of being: that of living beings. Even if considered more valuable,
it is, however, less attractive to behold than unity through proportion,
correspondenza. No quality gives more delight to perception than varietà,
“the imperfect unity that results from different perfect and mutually related
things,” which reaches its pinnacle in contrarietà:
Or dopo Iddio, il quale comprende in se tutta la pienezza e però tutta la bellezza

dell’essere, niuna cosa è più dilettevole a vaghessiarsi, che la varietà, come quella che
in se contiene divisamente ciò che non può ritrovarsi unitamente in creature per la
sua limitazione: e però anche niuna cosa è più dilettevole che la contrarietà, la quale è
il sommo della varietà.
Things that are contrary or even hostile according to their “real and actual
being” turn out to be “related” according to their “knowable and intentional
being”:
Ma per vagheggiarsi è migliore fra gli oggetti creati quello che ha l’unità imperfetta
risultante da varie perfette cose tra loro acconce. … È bella [la contrarietà] a mirarsi,
però che le cose fra loro contrarie secondo l’esser vero e reale non sono contrarie ma
compagnevoli secondo l’esser conoscibile ed intenzionale, come il chiaman le scuole.36
Black and white cannot appear together in the being of the same object, but
they can make a pleasant appearance together. A varied whole combines a
multitude of different but related things. Varietà is therefore characteristic
of wholes that are more than the sum of their parts: it not only reveals the
qualities of things in themselves but also the relationships between them.
Because it allows us to see many things at once, varietà contributes to the
perfection of the intellect. The more the intellect sees and knows, the more it
resembles God. God, who can see all things at once, has complete and perfect
knowledge of Creation. Because creation is at the service of sentient beings,
we can conclude that there is a unity of correspondenza, “the supreme beauty
below God.” It is a unity that forms a “stairway of the most comfortable and
appropriate steps to reach God”:
Dunque acciò che le potenze conoscitive e specialmente l’intelletto, in cui grazia al

fine son fabbricate tutte le cose, godan l’aspetto del sommo loro dilettevole, cioè della
contrarietà, fu mestiero che l’essenze possibili non avesser fra loro unità di sostanza,
ma solo di corrispondenza, essendo ciò il sommo del bello sotto a Dio; e però anche
essendo una scala de’più acconci ed agiati gradini per salire ad conoscimento di Dio.37
Although this passage does not literally suggest that a human being resembles
a fly more than a piece of stone, it becomes clear what Pallavicino says by
means of the anecdote. The fly and the pope, as living beings, share a number
of faculties that dead matter does not possess: moto, external and internal
senses. They also share the unity of forma and are not unione accidentale like the
sculpture, which is created through the violent treatment of a block of stone.38
Internally they are one, which implies order and proportion. Finally, both
are products of divine art and therefore have “this almost innate knowledge
and friendship,” “a perfect harmony of operations” and an “innate friendly
familiarity” [“tal quasi conoscenza e familiarità innata … una perfetta armonia
di operazioni … innata amistà compagnevole”].39
Vivacità and the Prima Apprensione
The Trattato sulla Provvidenza clarifies the circumstances of human arte,

human creation. The anecdote also questions human perception: likeness and
difference are, after all, perceptible. In the third book of Del Bene Libri Quattro
Pallavicino explains how human beings can see the difference between
the living and the lifeless. The intelletto, humanity’s characteristic faculty,
knows in three ways: first, it observes an object in the prima apprensione,
“as between its hands” [“L’uno dunque di questi tre modi si chiama prima
apprensione perciocchè apprende quasi l’oggetto fra le sue mani, senza però
autenticarlo per vero nè riprovarlo per falso …”].40 The apprensione can be
understood as a primary cognition, a pre-rational observation. According
to Pallavicino, the apprensione does not judge the truth or falseness of an
object. At first, for example, we do not know what part of the Aeneas is
true and what part is made up. Then the intellect pronounces the giudicio
or judgment on the apprensioni. The giudicio judges the appearance of the
object, not the preconceptions of the intellect. It passes a limited number of
judgments, which have to do with life, movement, how the whole relates to
its parts. These kinds of judgments are manifest and natural: they are the
first principles of human knowledge:
Il secondo modo con cui conosciamo ha nome giudicio, perchè come il giudice dal
tribunale, così egli proferisce sentenza intorno alla verità o falsità dell’oggetto. E
benchè il far ciò sia comune a tutti i conoscimenti che non sono prima apprensione,
tuttavia, in quanto questa seconda specie distinguesi dalla terza, contien solo
que’giudicj non che da noi son formati per lume recatoci da un altro precedente
giudicio, ma che alla sola apparenza dell’obbietto sorgono in noi: come allora ch’io
affermo di esser vivo, di muovermi, che il tutto è maggior della parte; …41
In a third step, the discorso, the judgments of the giudico are refined
and connected with previously gained knowledge. In the discorso, new
observations link themselves “from hand to hand” with everything that is
stored in memory. Thus we arrive at complete and manageable knowledge of
the observed object:
… così nel suo argomentar l’intelletto per mezzo di quelle proposizioni immediate
e postegli quasi a canto dalla natura, discorre di mano in mano ad altre verità più
remote. Ed a questa terza specie riduconsi quasi tutti i giudicj nostri; perciocchè le
verità immediate son rare di numero ma fertili di progenie.42
This system indicates where in the process of observation and cognition

the difference between the living and the lifeless will be established. In the
giudicio the observer sees whether something moves and lives; the apprensione
can be misleading. As will be examined in more detail in the next chapter,
Pallavicino develops this explanation of human perception and cognition to
explain how mankind can attain knowledge of truths that lie beyond their
grasp. Almost as a side effect, this refinement clarifies the role and value of
inganno or deception in the process of knowledge. Poetry, for example, shows
that what is not true can also have epistemological value: “the embellishment
of our intellect with images, or should we say sumptuous, new, admirable,
brilliant observations” [“l’adornar l’intelletto nostro d’immagini, ò vogliam
dire, d’apprensioni sontuose, nuove, mirabili, splendide”].43 The purpose of
poetry—and, by implication, of the mimetic arts associated with poetry—is to
stimulate the apprensione, not the giudicio.44
If Pallavicino’s introduction of an act indifferent to the veracity of a perceived
object has received quite a lot of attention in the history of literature and art, it is
less because it fits artistic imitation within a larger epistemological argument.
Rather, Pallavicino’s digression is generally considered as an art theoretical
attempt to free art from the restraints of verisimilitude. Indeed, if there exists
an act of knowing that does not pronounce judgments on truthfulness, the
prima apprensione, and if Pallavicino considers it the aim of imitative arts to
appeal to the apprensione, he seems to allow that these arts produce images
that no longer act as if they were true. Pallavicino himself raises this very
question as an ostensible objection against this theory. “If compassionare
means to have a passion together; who will ever be compassionate with the
miseries of another, knowing that he does not feel, and isn’t miserable?”45
After all, imitation is indeed the purpose of painting; does not its merit consist
entirely in “resembling the lineamenti, the colors, the acts and finally the
internal passions of the painted object?”46 Still, no one believes that what he
sees in a painting or a scene is true. Furthermore, these representations are not
intended to be truthful. Only an animal, because it lacks giudicio, is deceived
by perfect imitation, like the birds that swooped down on the grapes painted
by Zeuxis.47 And yet representations that are revealed to be false stimulate the
passions, or affetti.48
The more like the real object, the stories of poetry or the figures of the brush are,
down to the tiniest details, the more efficiently they will awaken the movable
simulacra that rest in the different chambers of memory. This results in livelier
knowledge and more fervent passion. The kindling [of passion] therefore does not
require belief in the truthfulness of the object.
[Quanto più vivace è la cognizione, tanto è ella più perfetta, più

dilettevole, e più feritrice dell’apetito. … Ora quanto più simili in ogni
minutissima circostanza son le favole della poesia, ò le figure del pennello
all’oggetto vero, ed altre volte sperimentato da chi ode l’une, e mira l’altre,
con tanto maggior efficacia destano elle que’mobili simolacri che ne giacevano
dispersi per le varie stanze della memoria. E quindi risulta e più vivace
l’apprensione e più fervida la passione. All’accendimento di questo non
richiedesi, … che si creda la verità dell’oggetto.]49
A lifelike representation is so detailed that the observer can conjure up

a vivid mental image of an older notion of a similar object.50 The purpose
of verisimilitude is not to keep up the appearance of truth, which is only
transitory. Verisimilitude is the carrier of vivacità and a work that has vivacità
has great impact on the audience. Pallavicino does not use the concept of
vivacità to qualify the degree to which a representation seems alive and real.
The quoted passage suggests that the liveliness of a representation serves
to convey an affetto. The degree to which a representation succeeds in doing
this, thereby directing the appetite of the audience, corresponds to its vivacità.
In other words, the concept is used rhetorically, as the affective quality of
mimetic representation. It is closely related to the oratorical actio, the lively
presentation that enhances the efficiency of a speech. This is clear from
Pallavicino’s examples: he refers to Quintilian, who explains that an orator
should show his subject rather than tell it,51 and the captivating effect of fables
and theatrical performances, which are capable of driving even the most
restrained audiences to delight, anger or despair. And this effect has nothing
to do with whether the audience thinks that what it sees is actually true, even
if (Pallavicino stresses) “many learned men” think otherwise: “Nol veggiamo
noi nei favoleggiamenti poetici? Ogni età, ogni sesso, ogni condizion di
mortali si lascia con diletto incantar dalla favola, imprigionar dalla scena.
Nè ciò interviene perchè si stimino veri quei prodigiosi ritrovamenti, come
si persuasero molti uomini dotti.”52 Still, if Pallavicino considers vivacità in
rhetorical terms, the question remains as to how the vivace representation
relates to the copied original. In order to create vivacità a representation must
be embellished with all kinds of details, so that it will have greater impact
on the imagination of the observer as it more forcefully appeals to earlier
knowledge and experience. But does the demand of liveliness not put undue
pressure on the verisimilitude of the representation? If vivacità does not
require that a representation conform to the real, living model, where do the
limits of invenzione lie? In order to establish these limits, Pallavicino refers to
the difference between poetry and historiography, which he compares with
the relationship between pittura d’invenzione and portraiture.53 Pallavicino
explicitly contradicts Lodovico Castelvetro’s Poetica d’Aristotile vulgarizzata
e sposta (1576) here, which claims that knowledge of history is a necessary
prerequisite for writing poetry. Whereas a portrait must represent things as
they are, regardless of beauty, an “invented” painting might not appear to

be a good likeness on the whole but only in parts, which can be considered
separately. Most important is that they are pleasing to the eye, not whether
they refer to an historical reality.54
Consequently, there are two kinds or practices of mimesis. Pallavicino’s
definition of the concept of vivacità implies that liveliness is not the
prerequisite quality of the portrait. The portrait is truthful and demands
different rules than the fruits of invenzione. To Pallavicino the powerful
conveyance of an affetto is therefore not accomplished by adhering as closely
as possible to the kind of event that is the object of history. The conveyance
is guaranteed by an evocative representation which communicates an object
or an idea so that the whole range of our cognitive apparatus becomes
fully engaged. In other words, when a portrait of the tortured Redeemer
moves us to tears it is not because He appears to be standing in front of us
as a historical reality and we relive His suffering as an actual and present
event, but because the painting recalls His suffering in an overwhelming
way.
With this distinction, Pallavicino quite neatly defines two registers of artistic
imitation, one aimed at arousing the affetto, the other at reproducing ideas or
realities in a lifelike and convincing way. The first register exists because of
the relationship between the prima apprensione and the giudicio. The giudicio,
the faculty that elevates humanity beyond the natural, registers the visible
difference between the living and the lifeless, the original and the copy, moto.55
Thanks to the apprensione, however, the pleasure of observing a successful
imitation can be combined immediately with the observation of its falseness.
The liveliness or vivacità of the imitation is not meant to make the audience
think that what it sees is alive and moves, while it is actually lifeless, but to
move the audience. The primary function of lifelike representation is therefore
didactic: the stimulation of the affetti is the first step towards addressing and
influencing the observer.
The Didactic Function of Imitation
Pallavicino’s conception of vivacità and its role within human cognition

separates different aspects of artistic imitation that are generally not only
linked but deeply conflated: formulated in general terms, in art theory the
expression of a truth, especially with regard to the inner virtue and character of
a person is intimately tied to the successful establishment of a lifelike likeness.
This conflation and its relation to Pallavicino’s views is well illustrated by the
way the Trattato della Pittura e Scultura. Usa et abuso loro of 1652 avails itself
of two quotations taken from Pallavicino’s chapter on the vivacità of poetry
and the other imitative arts. The Trattato is published under the barely veiled
names of the Jesuit Gian Domenico Ottonelli and the artist Pietro da Cortona,
yet written largely by Ottonelli.56 In fact, this moralistic treatise on painting
and sculpture is an outgrowth of Ottonelli’s monumental, five-volume
Della Christiana Moderatione del Theatro, published between 1646 and 1652.57
Da Cortona’s role in the composition of the treatise may have consisted in
providing Ottonelli with examples, but above all, as Sparti has argued, the
painter served as a living example of the “pictor christianus” whose life and
practice the Trattato prescribes.
The relation between expressiveness and lifelikeness is dealt with explicitly
in the twentieth problem in the third chapter of this treatise. It asks whether a
painter can represent someone’s “internal affect,” even if failing to represent
the external features. [“Se può il Pittore esprimere l’interno affetto d’uno. E
se, essendo quegli diffetoso nell’esterno, può rappresentarlo senza diffetto”].58
In other words, is a correct representation of physical appearance a necessary
condition for the accurate representation of the inner self? This question
is, in fact, a complement to the question in Del Bene of whether the illusion
of reality, accomplished by truthful imitation, is a necessary prerequisite
to touch the affetto. Now the question does not regard the epistemological
status of imitation, but the painter’s or sculptor’s point of view. If Del Bene,
for argument’s sake, doubted the affective powers of art that is recognized
as untrue, the Trattato will confirm that only a representation as truthful as
possible can represent the affetto and subsequently touch the beholder. The
reestablishment of the alliance between truthfulness and affect—even after
and in acknowledgment of Del Bene—reopens the question of the possible
relationship between religion and artistic practice.
In order to answer these questions the authors appeal to the authority of
antiquity. Aristotle and Pliny explained that Polygnotos and Aristides gave
their figures “character and sense” [“mores & sensus”]; Zeuxis painted a
Penelope that made her “mores” visible. The nature of painting is described
with the aid of the sixteenth-century author Gian Paolo Lomazzo. “The art of
painting imitates the nature of corporeal things in such a manner that it not
only represents thickness and relief within the plane but also movement (il
moto).”59 This, the text continues, creates “the kinds of pictures that are said
to breathe and that are called ‘ethice.’”60 This is also why painting resembles
poetry. After all, Benedetto Varchi has written that just as poetry can represent
the external, painting is capable of capturing the internal.61 At this point the
authors introduce the argument from Del Bene about how painting indeed
imitates both the internal and the external.62 Sculpture can accomplish the
same thing, because
although a good sculptor does not want to appear like a Prometheus who breathes
life into his statues, the best among them represent the souls of their models so
strikingly—in posture, movement, and gesture—that they appear to move, breathe,
and speak, so that they clearly show each viewer the inner part of the affetti.
[E questa lode conviene anche alla Scultura: e se bene non si fingono i Prometei,
che infondano l’anime nelle statue, nondimeno i perfetti Scultori esprimono tanto
somigliantemente al vero nell’attitudini, nella movenza, e ne’gesti gli animi di coloro,
che scolpiscono, che paiono muoversi, spirar, e favellar in modo, che mostrino
chiaramente l’interno degli affetti ad ogni spettatore.]63
In order to “excel at the living and moving expression” [“questa eccellenza

d’espressione viva, & affettuosa”]—in answer to the second question— artists
must master their art to perfection. By mastering disegno, invenzione and
dispositio and through knowledge of proportion, appropriate posture and
physiognomy, through careful observation and graceful representation of
the whole, a character can be represented to reveal not just one or the other
affetto but all its affetti and all its heart. The painter’s state of mind is especially
important in this process: the essential requirements are pure judgment, a
quiet soul and sincere benevolence. The painters of primitive Christianity, who
depicted sacred history and the first martyrs in their work, serve as examples.
They were able to represent the most intimate passions of true devotion and
sincere feelings of piety in extraordinarily lively fashion. Viewers were moved
to virtue by the mysteries and heroic acts of these “vivaci & affetuose figure.”64
Thus, painting—like poetry—represents both the outer and inner life of
its characters. The internal includes both a person’s character and their state
of mind at the time, his affetti, the sum of which, it is suggested, reveals their
true nature. The art of painting shares this ability with sculpture, as both
media are capable of creating representations of great verisimilitude in the
hands of an accomplished and sincere artist. Any fine example of such art,
like the early Christian paintings of sacred history and martyrdom, proves
that good pictures move their viewers to virtue. Thus, when a painter wishes
to depict an inner affetto, the exterior must be represented well; conversely,
the successful representation of a person is one that convincingly depicts their
character and emotions.
The Trattato della Pittura e della Scultura attributes a representation’s ability
to stimulate the viewer’s affect to its liveliness, just as Del Bene does. This
time, however, liveliness is the result of the successful representation of
living and acting figures. While to Pallavicino vivacità is a mode of expression
characteristic of poetry and pittura d’invenzione, in the Trattato it also refers to
the successful imitation of a living being. The treatise contains a warning, in
this context, against human pride: sculptors do not have to think themselves
Prometheus in order to make lifelike statues. The examples in the theoretical
argument show, however, that the qualities of a sculptor are hard to praise
without claiming nearly demiurgic faculties. The text lauds “all the figures
of that same Michelangelo, where one see Art capable of nothing less than
Nature.”65 Then Vasari is quoted, who literally claims that Michelangelo’s
figure of Night on the tomb of Giuliano de Medici is alive.66 Finally Guido
Reni’s figures in the Pauline chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore are mentioned:
work that expresses lively, so well and so marvelously, the inner affetto of true
devotion, that every judicious beholder when looking becomes with reason
completely rapt, and almost overwhelmed by great, and exceptional stupor; so it was
that some, and very good connoisseur was not afraid to state that in these figures the
ultimate sublimeness of the valor of this great modern Master of painting becomes
visible.
[… e sono opera, che esprime al vivo tanto bene, e con tanta maraviglia l’affetto
interno di vera divotione, che ogni giuditioso Spettatore nel rimirarla rimane con
ragione astratto grandemente, e quasi soprafatto da alto, & insolito stupore: anzi v’è
stato tal’uno, e molto buon conoscitore, che non hà temuto di dire. Vedesi in quelle
figure l’ultima sublimità del valore di quel gran Professor moderno della Pittura.]67
The Trattato warns for human hubris, but the examples just quoted illustrate
that it struggles to distinguish clearly religious and artistic meraviglia and
stupore: in the work of the greatest modern painters images of early Christian
martyrs quickly transform into marvels of art praised with the topoi of living
likeness. Michelangelo’s Night, too, is so well made, our authors write, that she
seems to live. This ambiguity is locked into the frequently used expressions of
al vivo, vivacità and vivezze.68
The Image as a Purveyor of the Good
The morphology of the expressive image defines the benefits it bestows

upon the viewer. The gains drawn from sacred images can be gleaned from a
relatively short section of the second chapter. This section—on “immagine”—
is divided in three sections, according to the “good” that one can derive from
images: first the joy that it provides to the different cognitive faculties; then the
“useful good” to the intellect, memory and will; and finally the “bene onesto,”
or higher good. The first form of benefit—the pleasure derived from the act
of knowing itself—recalls Pallavicino’s exposition on the human cognitive
process. The lowest form of knowledge
is derived from sacred images when the eye sees the elegant variation of colors, the
beauty of the light, the artfulness of the disegno, the loveliness of the ornaments, and
all the other things that fill the mind of the beholder with sweet marvel when it is
seen. And this delight is great for connoisseurs who, because they have a good eye,
become rapt to study with the greatest attention any work of a valent’huomo.
[… e questo nasce dalle sacre immagini, quando il senso dell’occhio conosce in

quelle la gratiosa varietà de’colori, la vaghezza de’lumi, l’artificio del disegno, la
gentilezza degli ornamenti, & il resto, che veduto empie di dolce maraviglia l’animo
dello spettatore. Questo diletto ricevono in gran maniera que’giuditiosi intelligenti,
che, havendo occhio buono, si lasciano rapire à mirare con somma attentione
ciascun’opera di valent’huomo.]69
The Trattato associates this sensuous beauty with the liveliness of color and
the splendor of gold, and clearly distinguished from pure arte and disegno.70
The next step is the knowledge “that the spirit does not achieve by means
of the apprensione,” and that is known in the discorso.71 Here, the beholder
acquires knowledge of all that is depicted on the painting, because “painting
is one of those arts that is considered an excellent imitator.”72 For this reason
also “those images, that express more lively the natural of the imitated object,
should reasonably be celebrated with higher praise” [“E da questo raccorre
possiamo, che quell’immagini, che più vivamente esprimono il naturale d’una
cosa imitata, sono ragionevolmente con maggior lode celebrate …”].73 Finally
the authors distinguish spiritual knowledge, when the beholder distinguishes
in a painting a foreshadow of paradise, in the “admiratio.”74
The next category of the good, “the useful,” concerns the intellect, the will
and memory.75 Images are didactic and remind the faithful of the lives of saints
and the rules of the Church. When the Trattato describes the effect of the image
on the will, the authors compare the image to a sermon: “because Painting is
such a useful art, that they who master her perfectly, can do with images
what the eloquent Orator does with words to stir the human affetto and will to
perform virtue.”76 With the same line from Horace as in Pallavicino’s Del Bene,
it is established that the will is affected more through the eye than through
the ear.77 This argument is bolstered further with texts, often sermons, from
Byzantine iconophile authorities like Saint Damasius and Saint Basil, and the
acts of the second Council of Nicaea.78 The first example is drawn from Saint
Gregory of Nyssa’s famous sermon about a painter who had depicted the
sacrifice of Abraham in such a lively manner that “the images seemed to live,”
and time and again drew tears of devotion from his eyes.79 This anecdote,
probably the most frequently cited example of the affective effect of a true-
to-life image, is followed by a host of examples that hammer home the same
point: a well-made image touches the heart and reaps tears of devotion.80
Along exactly the same lines, the Trattato describes the highest good of
the image, its moral value: “All sacred images deserve to be loved, because,
when made by judicious artists, they are a treasure trove of honesty, and are
able to generate virtuous and marvelous affetti in their beholders” [“E certo,
non solo quella, mà tutte le sacre immagini meritano d’essere amate; poiche
condotte da’giuditiosi Artefici sono per ordinario un tesoro d’honestà, e
possono generare affetti virtuosi, e maravigliosi ne’loro spettatori”].81 That is
why images deserve respect and veneration.82
When compared with Del Bene, the Trattato entirely lacks the subtle
antithesis of giudicio and discorso on the one hand and apprendere on the other.
Error is not distinguished from seeing that does not judge truth or untruth.
As a consequence, the Trattato does not treat intellectual understanding and
affective seeing as separate operations. It sees a simple relationship between
the different “goods” associated with the image: the beholder progresses
along a linear path from the intellectual to spiritual knowledge. Similarly,

the image equally appeals to the three faculties of the will, the intellect
and memory, and this to a rhetorical effect. The complex dynamic between
affective seeing and intellectual understanding, central to Pallavicino’s Del
Bene and Arte della Perfezion Cristiana, here becomes integrated as a series of
seemingly concurrent functions of the image.
The medium of this integration is excellent art. In the chapter dedicated to
painting, when discussing “power that painting has in the representation,”
the Trattato identifies the affective, devotional power of the image, resulting
in an effective manipulation of the will, explicitly with artistic mastery that
guarantees lifelikeness.83 “The eye shows the intellect” that art truly is “an
emulator of Nature.” Because color and disegno allow art to represent things
like nature, “elegant deceptions” occur.84 This is illustrated with a number
of anecdotes where painted objects are taken for real, such as the contest of
Parrhasius and Zeuxis, used also by Pallavicino in Del Bene.85 The Trattato
quotes poets who praise paintings that only lack speech to come alive.86 In
the next Aggiunta the authors deal with “another reason” why the painted
representation is so powerful. This “power” corresponds exactly with the two
“goods” associated with sacred painting, the diletto and the utile: a painting
shows things that are absent, and so teaches the simple-minded viewer; above
all, like the orator, it moves the beholder. Saint Basil and Gregory of Nyssa
are mentioned again, like Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, Book 6, which treats
the peroration. In this manner, painting is at once “emulation of nature” and
“imitator of oratory.”87
If the judicious artist is able to perform a perfect synergy of verisimilitude
and affective impact, their powers are such that they are only allowed to
operate in service of the good cause of Catholic faith. Therefore, it is essential
to prescribe decorum, to ensure that “every painter will honor this very
respectable art by making only works that do honor to himself, and will be
useful to and stimulate the good vices [costumi], so they will be of profit to
every beholder.”88 This principle attests the inevitable ambiguity that comes
with any recognition of the power of images. Its danger resides in the very
cause of its beneficial effect, which therefore requires definition and control.
The same concern determines Gian Domenico Ottonelli’s approach to theater
in his Della Christiana Moderatione del Theatro, the multi-volume treatise that
encapsulates the Trattato. Because the theater exerts such powerful fascination
and attraction, the strictest of rules should control it. Ottonelli’s attitude is
especially restrictive towards ornament, disguises and body language, or actio,
whose lure he sees at work in the performance of women, the embodiment of
theater’s appeal to the eye and the will.89
However, in one of the few passages in the Della Christiana Moderatione del
Theatro attempting to explain and define the pleasure that theater provides,
Ottonelli again turns to Pallavicino’s prima apprensione, and now in a
manner that directly engages the core of Pallavicino’s argument. The “great
ability” of theater “to please everyone,” Ottonelli writes, results from its
artfulness, its novità and varietà.90 “Commedia” and the arid teachings of the
schoolmaster are juxtaposed: pupils will soon be bored when being taught
by just one person speaking always in the same voice, whereas comedy
will please because of the diversity of characters, gestures and voices.
That is why authors look for “stories with verisimilitude,” and judge them
according to the meraviglia and amusement they provide. Then Ottonelli
quotes Pallavicino:
even if the experts know the stories to be false, as P. Pallavicino very cleverly proves, they
cause so much joy, that every age, sex, yes every mortal allows itself to be enchanted
by the story.
[E tali favole, come ingegnosamente prova il Pallavicino, tuttoché da’savi siano

conosciute per cose false, recano tanto gusto che ogni età, ogni sesso, ogni condizione di
mortali, si lascia con diletto incantar dalla favola.]91 (My emphasis)
Ottonelli thoroughly transforms Pallavicino’s argument. In Del Bene,

Pallavicino contradicts the “learned men” who believe that “the marvelous
[poetic] inventions are considered to be true,” by those (simple and learned)
who are “enchanted” by theater. Ottonelli suggests that the wise see the
falseness of the favola where the people do not.92 This misquotation is
significant. In fact, Ottonelli acts like one of the experts whom Pallavicino
condemns, for Ottonelli argues that experts and non-experts profess different
judgments of the truth-value of theater. Only experts, Ottonelli states, possess
the necessary knowledge and authority to judge whether the play is true or
false. The performance of the play subsequently generates the enchantment
that casts its spell over all who are present, experts and ignorant alike. Yet,
contrary to Pallavicino, Ottonelli believes that this enchantment produces the
effect of reality. As a consequence, it is the truthfulness of the story performed
that determines whether a piece of theater is a lie. In other words, Ottonelli
adheres to the idea that the enchantment of theater has the power to make
lies, or untruths, real. Exactly for this reason, the morality and virtue of plays
and stories should be policed by experts.
Chapter 3 will examine in detail what kinds of truths Pallavicino sees as
the province of poetry, theater and painting. Here, it should be stressed that
the Trattato della Pittura e Scultura and Della Christiana Moderatione del Theatro
follow a logic that stands in marked contrast with the argument of Del Bene: in
the mimetic arts, the synergy between illusion and affective power, denoted
with vivacità, cannot be broken, and only be controlled by the “savi,” the
experts of the favojacola. This logic is closely connected with their focus on the
improper use of images writ large, an issue, as will be examined in Chapter 4,
that skirts the matter of idolatry.
Liveliness and the Expression of Virtue in Francesco Bocchi
Ottonelli and da Cortona’s Trattato is deeply indebted to earlier religiously

inspired treatises on images and the arts, most notably Gabriele Paleotti’s
Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane.93 Yet their stress on the artfulness
of the lively images rearranges the arguments and topoi of Paleotti in such a
way as to align the Trattato with the traditional use of the concept of liveliness
in art theory. The affinity and confusion in the Trattato between the living and
the lively, stimulating representation, connected by the conveyance of virtue
to the viewer, is clearly illustrated in the writings of Francesco Bocchi.94 In his
Eccellenza del San Giorgio di Donatello Bocchi aims to capture the perfection of
Donatello’s work by seizing the qualities of an excellent sculptor. To that end
he defines the concepts of costume, vivacità and bellezza, to show that they are
perfectly represented in Donatello’s San Giorgio.95 Costume is the character and
virtue of a person. The immediate and striking legibility of someone’s virtue
can be transferred to a sculpture, especially in the depiction of the face.96
Thus it will function as an exemplum and instill the model’s virtue upon the
viewer: “Made alive from hard stone, it has the power to enrapture others
beyond themselves and to transform them in the virtue that is their heritage”
[“… che, fatto vivo in duro sasso, ha forza di rapire altrui fuori di sé stesso, e
nella virtù, che a lui è assegnato, trasformarlo”].97 Vivacità is the quality that
allows us to look beyond art and stone in a statue and thereby experience the
original virtue.98 Thus, in sculpture vivacità serves a purpose analogous to that
in the model’s life: without vivacità not a single great deed can be performed
and virtue cannot unfold. Bocchi said that someone without vivacità was like
a dead person, whose own being was thus obstructed.99 Bellezza, finally, is the
coherence, proportionality and sound content of the model and statue.100 In
this way, Bocchi concludes, “the statue moves through vivacità, elicits elevated
thoughts through costume, and gives pleasure through bellezza.” Thus the
statue adopts the three functions of oratory: muovere, docere and delectare.101
When a statue possesses those three qualities, this is due to its maker.
Only a “champion of God” is capable of grasping superhuman costumi; only
the sculptor who, like the orator, masters the actio, can represent vivacità;
only a good artist can conquer the difficultà that makes art an exercise in
virtue and can do justice to his model through invenzione.102 These qualities
make the sculptor, in casu Donatello, a veritable demiurge: such “divine
invention” transforms a “marble statue” into a “living thing.”103 Although
when Bocchi defines vivacità he clearly states that it does not signify the
“powerful vigor of human life” but “that lively movement and that force
that are joined with Passion,” the text is filled with topoi that compare a
good work of art to a living being. For example, vivacità transforms a stone
into action, art into nature, stagnation into movement.104 For Bocchi the two
meanings of vivacità—expressive vigor and lifelike imitation—intermingle.
This fusion derives from the exceptional artistry of the sculptor Donatello,
who combines virtue, inspiration and skill.
The way in which Bocchi connects different contents with the notion of
vivacità ties in with the use of the concept during the Renaissance.105 It refers to
the liveliness, the degree to which a representation conforms with nature. It is
guaranteed by the capturing of moto, movement, which also implies the depiction
of a person’s inner self. In a lifelike representation, finally, the distinguishing
features of the model meet the ideas of the artist, which come alive through
this process. At the same time, the Eccellenza clarifies the moral connotations
of the concept, which reverberate in Ottonelli and da Cortona’s Trattato.106
To Pallavicino confusion between the lifeless and the living, the true and
the false, art and nature, is unthinkable. Consequently, imitation is always
artful. “And that is why the painter and the sculptor, who copy from nature,
are inventori: because they do in fact imitate, but in color and stone and
therefore in another, very different way than the things made by Nature
or through some other art” [“E per tal cagione il Pittore, e lo Scultore, che
ritraggon dal naturale, sono inventori perchè imitan sì, ma ne’colori e ne’sassi,
ciò che in altra maniera dissimilissima di cose veggon fatto dalla Natura, e da
qualche arte diversa”].107 The artfulness of imitation is emphasized by giving
the vivacità of the representation a role of its own. A depiction becomes lively
through the use of artistic means, through details and ornamentation.108
In comparison with art theory, Pallavicino has a narrow conception of
vivacità. To him it only denotes the expressive force of a representation. The
compelling connection with lifelikeness is explicitly set aside. Expressiveness
is clearly foregrounded and carefully defined: it gets a subservient role
within the referential and didactic function of mimetic representation. A final
aspect of the logic of the anecdote in the Arte della Perfezion Cristiana is that to
Pallavicino vivacità should not be attributed to a portrait, and that he does not
inextricably connect the conveyance of virtue to the lifelike representation of a
virtuous model. The fly in the anecdote represents both the acknowledgment
of Bernini’s imitative skill and an awareness of its vanity and transitory
nature.109 The insect shows the futility of the successful, striking likeness in
comparison with the immense work of God. Thus, the fly also functions as
a symbol of vanitas: the living likeness, characteristic of Bernini’s work, does
not bring a statue to life, just as a lifelike image does not make a mortal being
immortal. The bust, a dead object, remains inferior to all that is alive. Even the
sun is actually less than “un vil mosca.”110
Domenico Bernini’s Version of the Anecdote
Domenico recounts the anecdote in the chapter that sets out to report
on the “notion of esteem of the pontiff Alexander VII and the court of
Rome towards the Cavaliere in those times.”111 The anecdote is meant to

illustrate that “everyone continued to be amazed at how Bernini, simply
by the power of his ingegno, was able to talk about any subject that others
had only been able to broach with some effort after much studying.”112
The plot of the anecdote revolves around the conventional dichotomy
between the insights of a genius and the knowledge someone gathers
through considerable study and practice. Bernini’s comparison shows
how, in a flash of wit, he can understand and summarize the most complex
philosophical matters. Pallavicino is cast as the learned authority who
repeats and explains the sculptor’s astute remark in a scientifically sound
manner. After the anecdote, Domenico adds three more statements about
the greatness of his father. According to Alexander VII the sculptor would
have excelled at any profession to which he might have devoted himself.113
Then Pallavicino appears again: he feels enflamed, “infiammato,” by
Bernini’s words to “subtleness of reasoning.”114 Finally, Domenico
emphasizes that Pallavicino simply thinks Bernini is the greatest man of
his era. For although the appreciation for a great orator, a brilliant general
or an exceptional scientist is greater, because their activities are after all
more necessary or useful, there was no one in Bernini’s time who had gone
as far in those domains as the Cavaliere had gone in his.115
But the anecdote is about more than the greatness of Bernini’s ingegno.
Domenico clearly mentions the art of painting twice. He compares a “muto
ritratto di virtuosissimo pittore” and the fly is more like the pope than
“ogni qualunque insensata tela di ben disposti, mà morti colori.” He does
not mention sculpture at all: the colors of the painting are dead; the fly and
the pope are alive. As living beings they share “[il] moto, l’attitudine delle
parti, la proporzione delle operazioni, e la sensibilità degli organi esterni,
& interni.”116
When Domenico Bernini, further along in his biography, writes about the
marble bust of Louis XIV made by his father during his stay in France in
1665, he devotes a little digression to the “practice of the Cavaliere in making
portraits.” Bernini, his son writes, preferred that a model moved and talked
as usual. That way the sculptor can see “all his beauty.” People are never
more themselves than when they move. In movement or moto “consists all
those qualities, that are his, and not of others, and which give likeness to the
portrait”:
Tenne un costume il Cavaliere, ben dal commune modo assai diverso, nel ritrarre
altrui ò nel Marmo, ò nel Disegno: Non voleva che il figurato stasse fermo, mà ch’ei
colla sua solita naturalezza si movesse, e parlasse, perche in tal modo, diceva, ch’ei
vedeva tutto il suo bello, e’l contrafaceva, com’egli era, asserendo, che nello starsi al
naturale immobilmente ferme, egli non è mai tanto simile a sè stesso, quanto è nel
moto, in cui consistono tutte quelle qualità, che sono sue, e non di altri, e che danno la
somiglianza al Ritratto.117
In order to capture the moment, as the diary entries by Paul Fréart de Chantelou
on Bernini’s stay in France attest, the sculptor first sketches his model during
his ordinary activities. He sketches Louis XIV, for example, during a council
of ministers and a ball game.118 The sketches are just a preliminary step. When
the king asks why Bernini no longer looks at his drawings as he works on the
bust in stone, the sculptor replies with a philosophical remark that moves
Louis XIV, too, to acknowledge the greatness of his ingegno.119 The sketches
serve to impress the characteristic traits of the model in the fantasia. When the
model is “conceived there” and it has to be worked in stone, Bernini uses the
complete, “real” model in his imagination, not the pictures on paper.120 On
the basis of sense perception, which is by definition limited, data are gathered
and reassembled in the imagination, where a complete picture emerges. The
externalization in stone, the “dar fuori,” is based on this synthetic image, not
on partial observations.
In order to make the representation as lifelike as possible, the model is
depicted in motion. Bernini explains “that, in order to succeed in a portrait,
one should take an action and attempt to represent it well; and that the most
beautiful moment that one could choose for the mouth is when one has just
spoken or is about to speak; and that he seeks to seize this moment” [“…
que, pour réussir dans un portrait, il faut prendre un acte et tâcher à le bien
représenter; que le plus beau temps qu’on puisse choisir pour la bouche
est quand on vient de parler ou qu’on va prendre la parole; qu’il cherche à
attraper ce moment”].121 Bernini chooses a moment in the middle of an act,
in this case speech, to shape the portrait. This means that the model is often
represented with a slightly open mouth and with an upper body that appears
to be in motion, through the arrangement of the drapes, the position of the
arms, or the turn of the head in relation to the body.122
When Domenico mentions the moto of his father’s busts, he aims to show
that they are exceptionally alike, precisely because they capture the model
in motion. The external movement shows what is unique about someone,
reveals his costume, “quelle qualità, che sono sue, e non di altri.” The open
mouth simultaneously suggests movement and that the statue is about to
speak. Speaking was also traditionally associated with the representation
of the model’s character: personality is after all revealed through speech.123
The result is a lively portrait that is almost indistinguishable from the living
model.
Bernini’s biographies as well as later literature about his work point out
that Bernini was able to make nearly living statues. Most famous is, no
doubt, the incident when Cardinal Maffeo Barberini called Bernini’s bust
of Jacopo Foix de Montoya the original and Montoya himself the copy.124
Just as in Bocchi’s Eccellenza the lifelike quality of Bernini’s statues is the
result of superhuman labor and a more than intimate relationship with
holy virtue. Domenico writes about the statue of Santa Bibiana that “not
he [Bernini] had made this statue but that the saint had been chiseled and
imprinted into the marble by herself.”125
[His] constant work in marble, which so obsessed him that it seemed as though he
was in ecstasy and in the process of calling up the spirit to make the stones come
to life with his eyes, was an important cause of a serious disease, which made him
bedridden with high fever and deadly seizures.126
This passage explicitly connects Bernini’s ability to make nearly live statues
with his nearly ecstatic condition. The intensity of his labor completely
exhausts the sculptor.127
The reach of Gianlorenzo’s sculpture is therefore of a different order than
that of painting. In a passage that deals explicitly with the paragone, Domenico
contrasts the moto of his father’s sculpture with the vivacità characteristic of
the painter’s art.128 Painting has color at its disposal. The vivacità of color is
one of the appropriate means to create likeness: the color of a face determines
to a great degree what it looks like. Sculpture has to manage with a lively, but
nevertheless simple, impression. If we compare the colors of painting with
living beings, however, we see that “molto più si assomogliava quel vivente
Animaluccio a quel vivo Monarca, che ogni qualunque insensata tela di ben
disposti, mà morti colori.”129 The lifelike colors of painting are pale next to the
“uniformità del moto, l’attitudine delle parti, la proporzione delle operazioni,
e la sensibilità degli organi esterni, & interni” of the pope and the fly. Not
color, with its vivacità and varietà, but moto guarantees perfect likeness. And
at capturing moto, in an “impressione vivissima,” Gianlorenzo Bernini’s
sculpture excels.
Domenico uses the anecdote of the fly to emphasize the superiority
of his father’s art.130 Implicitly, a confrontation arises between the two-
dimensional representations presented to the pope and his company
and the immense series of exceptionally successful sculpted portraits by
Gianlorenzo. The concept of moto plays a crucial role in this confrontation,
since capturing motion guarantees likeness and thus real liveliness. This is
where painting fails. Domenico Bernini uses the story of the fly to have his
father, by the sheer power of his ingegno, make a philosophically grounded
statement about the relationship between painting and sculpture.
Consequently, the story also fits the paragone tradition and is consistent
with other remarks by Bernini that confirm his belief in the superiority of
sculpture.131 By casting Sforza Pallavicino, Bernini’s statement is supported
by philosophically sound authority; the cardinal is used to prove the
superiority of Bernini’s portraiture. It is he, after all, who explains that it is
moto that makes the pope and the fly akin, as living beings.
In this respect it is striking to see how Domenico Bernini evokes Pallavicino’s
philosophical terminology, which is not restricted to the material mentioned
before. The phrase “che ogni qualunque insensata tela di ben disposti, mà
morti colori” appears to be an echo of a letter from Pallavicino to Monsieur

de Lionne, about a painted portrait that Bernini was commissioned to make
for de Lionne by Pallavicino. Pallavicino assures de Lionne that he carries his
friend’s image in his own heart, painted in the two colors of estimation and
friendship: a portrait that is maybe not as beautiful but at least as alive and
immortal, and certainly more dignified, than what the four colors of painting
produced.132
Pallavicino versus Bernini?
Domenico Bernini and Sforza Pallavicino consider painting capable of the

same thing: it presents a dead simulacrum of something that is not there. The
vivacità of color, the characteristic means of painting, does not really change
this; the painted image remains lifeless. Not so the sculpture of Gianlorenzo
Bernini, Domenico claims. Bernini manages to cast a statue into marble as
though in motion. Through moto the statue does not just obtain a superficial,
exterior likeness; it truly shows who the model is, in living likeness. The image
represents the model so convincingly that Bernini’s statues are proverbially
confused with their originals.
This distinction between painting and sculpture is unacceptable to
Pallavicino. The mimetic arts, like any other human skill, are at the service
of a relevant task—in the case of the arts, representing what is not there. The
connoisseur experiences pleasure when a work of art manages to do so even in
the most difficult circumstances. This is why painting is superior to sculpture:
because a painter has to represent depth on a flat plane, the distance between
the medium and the original is greater and the creative work is harder.133 The
impact of a work of art on its audience does not derive from confusion about
the truth or falseness of that which is represented. The viewer immediately
sees through the deception, primarily because the lifeless image lacks
movement, the sign of life. The impact is made by vivacità, the liveliness of the
work of art that appeals to the lived experiences of the viewer. Thus the affetto
of the viewers can be manipulated, even though they know they are looking
at a figment of the imagination. To the Jesuit cardinal Pallavicino, it is obvious
that a good work of art instills virtue in this way.
The two versions of the anecdote show what happens when an artist ends
up in the realm of philosophy and devotional literature and a thinker in that of
artistic biography. They are forced to switch places. The greatness of Bernini
is claimed by his son on grounds that are unacceptable to Pallavicino. The
ecstatic furor, the confusion between model and original, the striking likeness
are only valid to the cardinal as poetic imaginings or popular misconceptions.
The sincere respect that Pallavicino and Bernini no doubt had for each other
does not grant any special privileges to the sculptor and his art.
Notes
1. Domenico Bernini, Vita del Cavalier Gio. Lorenzo Bernino descritta da Domenico Bernino suo figlio
(1st edn Rome, 1713) (photographic reprint, Perugia, 1999), pp. 95–6: “Et una volta fatto avvenne
certamente degno per ogni capo di racconto. Terminata la mensa, furono presentati al Pontefice
diversi Ritratti in Pittura, e in Lapis lavorati da più insigni Professori di Roma in rappresentazione
di lui, chì in profilo, chì di faccia, chì a sedere, chì in piedi. Erano soliti di assistere, e far
corona al Principe in quell’hora i maggiori Virtuosi di Roma, de’cui discorsi egli si pasceva in
divertimento non men nobile, che dilettevole delle sue cure. Frà essi sempre vi erano il Cardinal
Sforza Pallavicino, e’l nostro Cavalier Bernino. Hor’alla comparsa de’sopranominati ritratti
ciascun dicendo la sua opinione di qual più simile paresse all’Originale, che era quivi presente,
sopravenne a caso una Mosca sù la Tavola del Papa, e in appena vederla, Questa, disse il Bernino,
è più simile al Papa nel più forte, e nel più bello, che ogni qualunque muto Ritratto di virtuosissimo Pittore.
Alessandro, e’l Pallavicino, che penetrarono subbito il profondo senso del Cavaliere, applaudirono
incontanente al suo detto, e nobilissimi furono gl’insegnamenti di Filosofia, che in lungo discorso
quindi dedusse il Cardinale, dimostrando la uniformità del moto, l’attitudine delle parti, la
proporzione delle operazioni, e la sensibilità degli organi esterni, & interni, co’quali negli occulti
principii molto più si assomigliava quel vivente Animaluccio a quel vivo Monarca, che ogni
qualunque insensata tela di ben disposti, mà morti colori.”
2. Sforza Pallavicino, Arte della Perfezion Cristiana, bk I, ch. 14, in Opere del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino
(Milan, 1834), vol. 2, p. 660: “Mi ricorda, che un giorno essendo io alla presenza del nostro
ottimo Papa Alessandro; & havendo il Cavalier Lorenzo Bernini, sommo Scultore dell’età nostra,
fatta portar colà una statua ov’era intagliato da lui con arte maravigliosa il sembiante di Sua
Beatitudine; io, dopo haver date all’opera le degne lodi, à fine di ricrear’ il Pontefice dalla noia del
caldo, ch’era fervente, e per la stagione, e per l’ora; volli alquanto sollevar’il ragionamento, come
stimai esser’in grado all’alto ingegno del nostro Principe. Onde aggiunsi: E pure, signor Bernino,
questo simulacro di Papa Alessandro formato da voi con inestimabile diligenza, quanto gli è meno
simile eziando nella visibile corporatura, che quella mosca la qual ci si gira d’intorno? Il che tosto
dal Pontefice, e non molto di poi dal Bernino, huomo di presto ed acuto ingegno, fù conosciuto per
vero: essendo troppo più simigliante al corpo di qualunque huomo quello di qual si sia difforme
animale per l’organizzazion delle membra, in moltissime delle quali tutti i viventi sensitivi
convengono; che una massa di pietra solo articolata nell’esterior superficie.”
3. Richard Krautheimer and Roger B.S. Jones, “The Diary of Alexander VII: Notes on Art, Artists and
Buildings,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 15 (1975), no. 134: “hoggi il Cav. Bernino porta
il marmo in grande del nostro ritratto e lo vedon molti.” See also Giovanni Morello, “Bernini e i
lavori a San Pietro in Vaticano nel ‘diario’ di Alessandro VII,” in Bernini in Vaticano (Rome, 1981),
p. 323.
4. Baldinucci mentions the remark that introduces the anecdote of the fly; see Filippo Baldinucci,
Vita del cavaliere Gio. Lorenzo Bernini scultore, architetto, e pittore (1st edn Florence, 1682), ed. Sergio
Samek Ludovici (Milan, 1948), p. 108: “… di rimanere stupito, come il Bernino in sola forza del
ingegno potesse ne’discorsi giungere, là dove gli altri con lungo studio appena erano pervenuti.”
The remark that closes the passage in Domenico’s account, namely that Pallavicino considers
Bernini the greatest man of his era (p. 97) can also be found in Baldinucci (pp. 151–2), in the
chapter that lists Bernini’s merits, and is mentioned by Bernini himself in the diary of his stay
in France kept by Paul Fréart de Chantelou: for the entry on 20 October 1665, see Paul Fréart de
Chantelou, Journal de voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France, ed. Milovan Staniç (Paris, 2001), p. 281:
“Le Cavalier [Bernini] a dit que le cardinal Pallavicini notait deux grands esprits de son temps, le
cardinal Mazarin pour l’un et n’a pas voulu nommer l’autre. Le Nonce a dit qu’il soupçonnait que
c’est le Cavalier. Il a faiblement dit que non.”
5. Eraldo Bellini, “From Mascardi to Pallavicino: The Biographies of Bernini and Seventeenth-
Century Roman Culture,” in Maarten Delbeke, Evonne Levy and Steven F. Ostrow (eds), Bernini’s
Biographies. Critical Essays (University Park, 2006), pp. 305–6.
6. Arthur S. Pease, “Things without Honor,” Classical Philology, 21 (1926): 27–42.
7. Alessandro Angelini, Monica Butzek and Bernardina Sani (eds), Alessandro VII Chigi (1599–1667). Il
papa senese di Roma moderna (Siena, 2000), no. III.92.
8. Pallavicino, Arte, bk I, ch. 1, p. 643a.
9. Ibid., ch. 14, p. 659b: “Ragioni che rendono chiaro ad ogni intelletto, haverci un Dio Autore
dell’Universo.”
10. Ibid., p. 661a: “… che ’l nostro pensiero non può concepire una fila ordinata d’effetti, l’uno
cagionato dall’altro, senza che vi habbia un primo efficiente, il quale non sia effetto.” See also
ibid., p. 661b: “Il Mondo non fù ab eterno, mà hebbe principio in tempo. Adunque fù procreato
da una superior cagione intellettuale, che ’l fece quando le piacque.” These are the conventional
points of departure to explain creation and consequently divine providence within a Thomistic/
Aristotelian framework. For a brief introduction, see Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche (14 vols,
Freiburg, 1957–67), vol. 10, c. 885–92, “Vorsehung,” and vol. 9, c. 459–66, “Schöpfung”; Antonio
Poppi, “Fate, Fortune, Providence and Human Freedom,” in Charles B. Schmitt (ed.), The
Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge and New York, 1987), pp. 641–67.
11. Pallavicino, Arte, bk I, ch. 14, p. 660a: “E per verità quanto maggior’arteficio si scorge, non
dirò in questo immenso e sempre carico Oriuolo del Mondo; ma in un melagrano, ò in un
melarancio, che in tutte le figure di Michel’Agnolo? Onde assai minor follia sarebbe il sentire
che tutte quelle figure fosser’uscite dalla mano di Michel’Agnolo ad abbattimento; e senza
che veruna mente ne havesse prima divisato il concetto, e poi à norma di quello regolati i
movimenti del braccio per lavorarle; che non sarebbe l’avvisarsi, haver l’Universo un cieco
suo essere casuale ò fatale, e una simil cieca maniera di continuare, senza che qualche sommo
Intelletto habbia regolato e regoli l’operare di queste insensate cagioni, che son gli strumenti e
gli ordigni per mantenerlo.”
12. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, bk 22, ch. 24, ed. Loeb Classical Library, trans.
William M. Green (Cambridge MA, 1972), vol. 7, pp. 321–39, which praises the harmony
subtending even the minutest animals in Creation. Athanasius of Alexandria, Contra Gentes, 35,
69b, intro., trans. and comm. by E.P. Meijering (Leiden, 1984), pp. 117–18.
13. Pallavicino, Arte, bk I, ch. 14, p. 660a–b: “Col qual’argomento quella savia Genitrice de’ Maccabei
fè noto a’figliuoli, che Idio e non lei doveano conoscere per loro vera cagione; à cui erano
debitori dell’esser loro.” The text refers to 2 Macc. 7:6, 9, 11 and 23, and 7:22: “dixit ad eos: Nescio
qualiter in utero meo apparvistis; neque enim ego spiritum & animam donavi vobis & vitam, &
singulorum membra non ego ipsa compegi.”
14. Pallavicino, Arte, bk I, ch. 14, p. 660b: “Or se questa imperfetta effigie di pietra da niuno
suspicherassi incisa con cieco movimento dello scarpello e del braccio, senza indirizzo
d’un’intelletto movente; il suspicheremo d’una melagranata, d’un elefante, d’un’ huomo; sopra il
quale Galeno, Filosofo Gentile dopo esquisitissimo studio ardì provocare gli Epicurei à trovargli
una vena, un nervo, un articolo, di migliaia ond’è composto, che potesse starvi più acconciamente:
promettendo allora di ceder’à essi la lite, e di concederne autore il Caso?”
15. Ibid., p. 659: “Non aspetti veruno, che io in questo, e nei due susseguenti capi, voglia far da
inventore, con ostentazione sol di nuovi e non mai sentiti discorsi.”
16. Sforza Pallavicino, Trattato del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino sulla Provvidenza, bk I, ch. 3, in Ottavio
Gigli (ed.), Opere edite e inedite del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino (4 vols, Rome, 1844), vol. 1, p. 48: “…
mostrasi ogni causale effetto aver dipendenza dalla libertà delle creature, e s’apporta la cagione
ond’è impossibile affatto che si affronti ad uscir dal caso con una lunga serie d’operazioni ben
ordinate.”
17. There is an implicit reference to Sforza Pallavicino, Del Bene Libri Quattro del Cardinale Sforza
Pallavicino, in Opere del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino (Milan, 1834), bk II, ch. 43, pp. 476–7. Chapters
40–45 of the second book correspond to the argument in Pallavicino, Trattato sulla Provvidenza, bk I,
ch. 3.
18. Pallavicino, Trattato sulla Provvidenza, bk I, ch. 3, p. 50.
19. Sven Knebel, “Die früheste Axiomatisierung des Induktionsprincip: Pietro Sforza Pallavicino,”
Salzburger Jahrbuch für Philosophie, 41 (1996): 106–23, demonstrates, on the basis of the second
book of Del Bene, the central role of induction in Pallavicino. His conclusions are also valid for
the Trattato sulla Provvidenza. On the seventeenth-century Jesuit views with regard to chance,
providence and free will, see also Sven Knebel, Wille, Würfel und Warscheinlichkeit. Das System
der moralischen Notwendigkeit in der Jesuitenscholastik 1550–1700 (Hamburg, 2000), which includes
discussions of the views of Pallavicino and Antonio Perez.
21. Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk II, ch. 43, p. 476a–b. See also Chapter 3, n. 78.
22. Pallavicino, Trattato sulla Provvidenza, bk I, ch. 3, p. 53: “Imperocchè operando la sua omnipotenza
ne’lor pensieri, e ne’loro affetti, o per mezzo delle inferiori cagioni create e mosse dalla sua mano,
o anche immediatamente con le illuminazioni e con le ispirazioni ora naturali, ora soprannaturali
secondo la qualità degli oggetti, sa disporre soavemente gli animi per tal modo, qual vede esser
loro adattato, perchè s’inducano con intiera libertà più tosto ad un voler che ad un altro.”
23. Ibid., p. 54.
24. Ibid., p. 55. The passage continues as follows: “Più oltre, essendoci aperto che nè la terra, nè il
seme, nè la putredine, o l’altre sensibili cagioni, le quali concorrono a tali effetti, conoscono ciò
che fanno, convien che discorriamo di esse, come del pennello e dello scarpello in rispetto alla
figura, verso la quale non sono essi i principali motori, ma muovono mossi ed applicati l’uno dal
dipintore, l’altro dallo scultore, che ne posseggono l’arte. E ciò interviene eziando nella formazione
dell’uomo, il quale benchè sia prodotto da genitori dotati d’intelligenza, con tutto ciò ignorando
essi affatto la stupenda architettura, onde il suo corpo è lavorato, e dalla quale dicono gli
intendenti di questa professione, che s’è pigliato l’esempio di tutta l’architettura, e non avendone
veruna idea, non possono esser riconosciuti come precipui facitori di quel miracolo naturale. Con
questo argomento quella saggia madre de’giovani Maccabei diè loro a vedere che non essa, ma più
propriamente Iddio gli aveva prodotti.”
25. Both passages also contain a comparison with the growth of plants and the birth of a child, cf.
Pallavicino, Arte, bk I, ch. 14, p. 662.
26. Pallavicino, Arte, bk I, ch. 1, p. 643a.
27. For the tradition of this theory, see Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge
MA, 1988), pp. 71–120; Erwin Panofsky, Idea. Contribution à l’histoire du concept de l’ancienne théorie
de l’art, trans. Henri Joly (Paris, 1989), pp. 56–60. For the influence of this idea on the functions
attributed to images, see David Summers, The Judgment of Sense (Cambridge and New York,
1987), pp. 226–7. For the Renaissance uptake of this notion, see (for instance) David Summers,
Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, 1981), pp. 297–304.
28. Jerome J. Pollitt, The Art of Ancient Greece. Sources and Documents (Cambridge MA, 1990), pp. 13–15;
and especially Alice A. Donahue, Xoana and the Origins of Greek Sculpture, American Classical
Studies, 15 (Atlanta GA, 1988), pp. 179–83. In Greek literature, Dedalos can be both a historical
figure and the personification of artistic skill, as Pallavicino suggests.
29. Pallavicino, Trattato sulla Provvidenza, bk I, ch. 6, pp. 66–7. Catholic creationism and
providentialism always had to distance itself very clearly from any form of deism, from the idea
that God realizes and perfects Himself through Creation. See Lexikon, “Schöpfung.” The solution
proposed by Pallavicino belongs to the Thomistic tradition of the Jesuits. See also Gabriele
Baroncini, “L’insegnamento della filosofia naturale nei collegi italiani dei Gesuiti (1610–1670):
un esempio di nuovo aristotelismo,” in Gian Paolo Brizzi (ed.), La “Ratio Studiorum”. Modelli
culturali e pratiche educative dei Gesuiti in Italia tra Cinque e Seicento (Rome, 1981), pp. 202–7, which
shows the kinship between the Trattato sulla Providenza and Pallavicino’s 1625 doctorate in
philosophy.
30. Pallavicino, Trattato sulla Provvidenza, bk I, ch. 6, p. 72: “… imperò che quella maniera [dei viventi]
di riparare e d’aumentare con proporzione tutte le sue particelle non è capace di procedere da
principio esteriore, come l’esperienza ne insegna, e come ne insegnerebbe altresì la cognizione
immediata di tali azioni, s’elle così ben venissero sotto il nostro conoscimento, come quelle che o
in tutto o in parte derivano dalla facoltà animale, o dalla intellettuale. E così scorgiamo avvenire
primieramente nel moto progressivo, però che là dove nulla distinguiamo l’un movimento
dall’altro quando la mano è tratta all’ingiù dalla gravezza natia, e quando vi è portata da un
peso a lei soprapposto: per contrario ciascun prova la diversità dell’azione quand’egli stende
spontaneamente la mano, o quando altronde gli è mossa. Molto più chiaramente appare lo stesso
nelle cognizioni sì del senso, come dell’intelletto, le quali non possono venir di fuori.”
31. This is a conventional Aristotelian notion, which also had an impact on art theory. See for example
Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, pp. 76–96. See also Chapter 4, n. 49.
33. Ibid., p. 73: “Siegue il moto progressivo, ch’è l’infima operazione d’un anima prossimamente
migliore, cioè della sensitive.”
34. Ibid., ch. 7, p. 78: “Dichiarasi come la collegazione ch’è tra le parti del vivente dimostri in lui
l’unità della forma, e non dimostri il simile la collegazione tra le parti del mondo, ma ben dimostri
l’unità sì dell’autore, sì del governatore.”
35. Ibid., p. 79: “Ci ha una differenza assai notabile, e poco notata fra gli artefici inferiori e ’l supremo
che è Iddio. Gli uni impiegano l’arte loro a valersi delle cose per altro fine da quello, a cui sono
specialmente proporzionate di sua natura; onde spesso col mezzo di violenta maniera le troncano,
le alterano, le torcono contro all’inclinazione loro natia. … Ma l’artefice supremo esercita la sua
maestria in conformarsi con l’attitudine, e con l’inclinazione essenziale di ciascuna cosa.”
36. Ibid., p. 80.
37. Ibid.
38. In Del Bene this idea is applied to Bernini’s sculpture, which is compared to the taming of a
horse. See Del Bene, bk III, ch. 17, p. 504a: “Anzi è consueta maniera di favellare il misurar
la perfezione delle cose, non tanto da ciò, che loro tornerebbe più in acconcio, quanto dalla
conformità col fine inteso dal loro artefice, eziandio dall’artefice umano, non che dall’ artefice
divino, ch’è la Natura. Così diciamo, che fù perfezionato quel sasso dallo scarpello del
Bernino, da cui fu ridotto in una graziosissima statua. E pure ciò non ha fatto il Bernino, se
non tagliando d’intorno al sasso molti pezzi a lui simili di sostanza, che gli stavano congiunti;
la qual congiunzione meglio si conformava colla naturale inchinazione, e col mantenimento
del sasso. E la stessa misura eziandio usasi da noi nel divisare il bene degl’inferiori animali.
Dicesi perfezionarsi dal Cavallerizzo il cavallo, all’ora che il rende ubbidiente alla briglia, & alla
bacchetta; e tuttavia più gioverebbe al cavallo il non apprender mai una tal disciplina; Essendo
principio di servitù la docilità in lui; che non diverebbe scihavo [sic], se non sapesse imparar
l’ubbidienza di schiavo.” On the sixteenth-century prehistory of these ideas, see Fredrika H.
Jacobs, The Living Image in Renaissance Art (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 16–61, esp. p. 25.
40. Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk III, ch. 49, p. 526b.
41. Ibid. See also Chapter 3, n. 40.
42. Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk III, ch. 49, p. 526b. For possible sources for the concept of the prima
apprensione, see Eraldo Bellini, “Scrittura letteraria e scrittura filosofica in Sforza Pallavicino,” in
Carlo Scarpati and Eraldo Bellini (eds), Il vero e il falso dei poeti. Tasso, Tesauro, Pallavicino, Muratori
(Milan, 1990), p. 87.
43. Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk III, ch. 49, p. 527a.
44. The title of ch. 50 is: “Perché, se il fine della poesia è la sola apprensione e non il giudicio, ella
cerchi la verisimilitudine e possa muover gli affetti.”
45. Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk III, ch. 50, p. 527a: “Se il compassionare è un haver passione insieme; chi mai
compassionerà le miserie altrui, mentre sappia, che colui non patisce, e che non è misero?”
46. Ibid., p. 527b: “La pittura non è ella una dilligentissima imitazione la cui lode stà tutta in
rassomigliare i lineamenti, i colori, gli atti e fin le passioni interne dell’oggetto dipinto?”
47. Ibid. For the distinction between human and animal cognition in the Aristotelian tradition, see
Katharine Park, “The Organic Soul,” in Schmitt, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy,
pp. 464–84.
48. Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk III, ch. 50, p. 527b: “E pur le figure dipinte, benchè per dipinte sien
ravvisate, pungono acutamente l’affetto. Il dimostrano con buona e con rea operazione e le divote
lagrime che spesso traggon dagli occhi alle persone spirituali i ben formati ritratti del tormentato
Redentore, e le fiamme pestilenti che sono accese ne’ petti giovanili dalle immagini oscene, le quali
con obbrobrio dell’umana sfacciataggine talora pagansi gran danaro per esser mantici della sopita
lascivia, comperandosi, come prezioso il desiderio medesimo di peccare.”
49. Ibid., pp. 527b–28a.
50. See also Bellini, “Scrittura letteraria e scrittura filosofica,” pp. 90–95. Also Sforza Pallavicino,
Trattato dello stile e del dialogo del padre Sforza Pallavicino (1st edn Rome, 1662) (Reggio Emilia, 1824),
ch. 9, p. 75: “Dall’altra parte il fin del Poeta è ancora il recar piacere con isvegliar immaginazioni
vive e maravigliose: ma l’immaginazione sempre è più viva quando maggior numero di proprietà
nell’oggetto immaginato ci si rappresenta: è più mirabile quando ella ci fa concepire qualche
proprietà di lui, ò nobile, ò non prima osservata.”
51. Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk III, ch. 50, p. 528a.
52. Ibid., p. 527a.
53. Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk III, ch. 51, p. 528b–29a; see also Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 30. The
difference between historiography and poetry is treated in Aristotle, Poetics, 9, 1451b5, ed. Loeb
Classical Library, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge MA, 1995), p. 59; also see Bellini, “Scrittura
letteraria e scrittura filosofica,” pp. 90–91. Also see Paola Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento (3
vols, Milan and Naples, 1977), vol. 3, pp. 2705–6; Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism
in the Italian Renaissance (2 vols, Chicago, 1961), passim.
54. Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk III, ch. 51, p. 529a: “… quantunque il finto sia immitazione del vero,
tuttavia l’espressione del finto non è immitazione dell’espressione del vero; e che però non fa
mestieri, par esempio, che’l pittore d’invenzione sappia l’arte di far bene i ritratti: dovendo
quest’atto esprimer le cose quali sono, ò belle ò non belle, che sieno; e dovendo per lo contrario il
pittor d’invenzione formar le sue figure in maniera, ch’elle assomiglino, non già nel tutto, mà nelle
parti, separatamente considerate, qual si sia delle cose, che sono, ò che furono, pur che gustoso a
mirarsi: e così convenendo loro osservar diversi precetti?”
55. Ibid., ch. 49, p. 526b.
56. Gian Domenico Ottonelli and Pietro Berrettini, Trattato della Pittura e Scultura. Uso et Abuso loro.
Composto da un Theologo, e da un Pittore (1st edn Florence, 1652) ed. Vittorio Casale (Treviso,
1973), p. 214. In his introduction, “Ragione teologicas e poetica barocca,” pp. lxxxvii–cxxvii,
Casale explains a connection between the treatise, Zuccari’s idea, and Pallavicino’s Arte and
Del Bene. He emphasizes the similar evaluation of the power of fantasia and consequently
of the image. On the Trattato della Pittura e Scultura, see also Marco Collareta, “L’Ottonelli-
Berretini e la critica moralistica,” Annali della scuola normale superiore di Pisa, s. 3, 5/1 (1975):
177–96; Vittorio Casale, “Poetica di Pietro da Cortona e teoria del barocco nel ‘Trattato
della Pittura e Scultura,’” in Anna Lo Bianco (ed.), Pietro da Cortona 1597–1669 (Milan,
1997), pp. 107–16; Donatella L. Sparti, La casa di Pietro da Cortona. Architettura, accademia,
atelier e officina (Rome, 1997), pp. 89–103; Elisabeth Oy-Marra, “Das Verhältnis von Kunst
und Natur im Traktat von Gian Domenico Ottonelli und Pietro da Cortona,” in Hartmut
Laufhütte (ed.), Künste und Natur in Diskursen der Frühen Neuzeit, Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zür
Barockforschung, 35 (Wiesbaden, 2000), pp. 433–44.
57. Excerpts from the treatise in Ferdinando Taviani, La Commedia dell’Arte e la società barocca, vol.
1, La fascinazione del teatro (Rome, 1969), pp. 313–526. On p. 429 there, in point 17 of Book 2
Ottonelli asks: “Se si permette la publica, e privata mostra delle pitture, e statue oscene, si può
anche permettere la comedia oscena,” thus comparing actio on the scene directly with painting
or sculpture. He continues by announcing a book “già composto”—in 1649—on this important
topic. In the Trattato della Pittura e Scultura Ottonelli explicitly refers to this intention in “A
chi legge”: “Questo Libro doveva uscir in luce dopo il Secondo Theatrale, e si sarebbe potuto
nominar il Terzo della Christiana Moderatione del Theatro.” See also ibid., pp. 401–2, where he
concludes that “la publica oscenità dipinta non è lecita, dunque ne meno è lecita publicamente
recitata.” See also Vittorio Casale, “Ragione teologica e poetica barocca,” in Ottonelli and
Berrettini, Trattato della Pittura e Scultura, pp. xxix–xxxi; Collareta, “L’Ottonelli-Berretini e la
critica moralistica,” pp. 180–81.
58. Ottonelli and Berrettini, Trattato della Pittura e Scultura, ch. III, q. 21, p. 214.
59. Ibid.: “L’Arte del dipingere imita la natura delle cose corporee talmente, che non solo
rappresenta nel piano la grossezza, & il rilievo de’corpi, mà anche il moto, e visibilmente
dimostra à gli occhi nostri molti affetti, e passioni dell’animo; il che si vede nell’opere
de’Valenthuomini.” The quotation is from Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della
Pittura … (Milan, 1584), vol. 1, p. 30; see Casale’s comment in Ottonelli and Berrettini,
Trattato della Pittura e Scultura, p. 85. On Lomazzo’s notion of moto, see Jacobs, The Living
Image, pp. 16–20.
60. Ottonelli and Berrettini, Trattato della Pittura e Scultura, p. 214: “Con questa espressione son fatte
quell’immagini, che paiono spiranti, e si chiamono Ethice.”
61. From Benedetto Varchi’s Lezzione nella quale si disputa della maggioranza delle arti (1546), see Paolo
Barocchi (ed.), Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento fra manierismo e controriforma (3 vols, Bari, 1960), vol. 1,
p. 55.
62. See n. 46.
63. Ottonelli and Berrettini, Trattato della Pittura e Scultura, ch. III, q. 21, pp. 214–15.
64. Ibid., p. 215.
65. Ibid., p. 218: “… tutte figure dell’istesso Michel Angelo, in cui si vede l’Arte poter non men, che la
Natura.”
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., p. 219.
68. Ibid., p. 218.
69. Ibid., ch. II, q. 9, p. 57.
70. Ibid., p. 58.

71. Ibid., p. 59: “Il secondo diletto, che dall’immagini profane, e molto più delle sacre si riceve, è
il ragionevole, cioè quello, che viene cagionato dalla cognitione intellettiva, e stà nell’appetito
superiore. … E tal diletto si gode, mentre nell’immagini l’animo conosce col discorso della ragione
varie cose, alle quali non giunge con l’apprensione, e cognition del senso ….”
72. Ibid.: “La Pittura è una di quell’Arti, che si dicono per eccellenza imitatrici.”
73. Ibid., p. 60.
74. Ibid.: “[la] terza, che è dono di Dio, e sopranaturale, si deriva il diletto spirituale, appoggiato al
fondamento della santa fede.”
75. Ibid., q. 10, p. 61. See also Casale, “Ragione teologica e poetica barocca,” pp. lxxxii–lxxxiv.
76. Ibid., p. 62: “… imperoche la Pittura è Arte tanto giovevole, che, chi l’esercita virtuosamente, può
far con l’immagini ciò, che fà con le parole un’eloquente Oratore nel muovere l’humano affetto, e
volontà all’impresa delle virtù: ….”
77. Ibid. The Trattato della Pittura e Scultura here quotes Horace, “The Art of Poetry,” 180–81, in Satires,
Epistles and the Art of Poetry, ed. Loeb Classical Library, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge
MA, 1929), p. 465, like Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk III, ch. 50, p. 527b.
78. See also Casale in Ottonelli and Berrettini, Trattato della Pittura e Scultura, p. 41.
79. Ottonelli and Berrettini, Trattato della Pittura e Scultura, ch. II, q. 10, p. 64. See also Giuseppe
Scavizzi, The Controversy on Images from Calvin to Baronius (New York and Frankfurt, 1992), p. 97.
80. Ottonelli and Berrettini, Trattato della Pittura e Scultura, ch. II, q. 10, pp. 64–8.
81. Ibid., q. 11, p. 68.
82. Ibid., q. 13, p. 75: “Se la rappresentatione de’sacrì esemplari sia buona’ragione per istimar assai le
sacre immagini.”
83. Ibid., ch. I, q. 6, p. 22: “Della forza, che hà la Pittura nel rappresentare.”
84. Ibid.: “Et invero una cosa ben formata con disegno, e ben colorita con decoro dall’Arte, rende
quasi il medesimo aspetto, che rende la stessa cosa dalla natura prodotta, e perfettionata nell’essere
naturale: e però sono seguiti, e seguono alle volte inganni gratiosi.”
85. See Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk II, ch. 7, p. 447b.
86. Ottonelli and Berrettini, Trattato della Pittura e Scultura, ch. I, q. 6, pp. 22–4.
87. Ibid., p. 24: “La Pittura è di grande utilità a’Principi, & a’Guerrieri comandanti assoluti, e supremi;
perche fà veder vivamente i paesi, e l’altre cose del mondo, rappresentandole tutte, come valente
emulatrice della natura. Un’altra ragione mostra la sua utilità, e prova la forza, che hà nel
rappresentare; cioè perche si può nomar potente imitatrice dell’Arte oratoria ….”
88. Ibid., p. 25: “Dunque ogni Pittor doverebbe honorar questa honoratissima Arte col formar
solamente opere d’honor all’Artefice, e di giovamento, e stimolo a’buoni costumi; onde ogni
riguardante ne potesse ritrarre utilità; ….”
89. Taviani, La Commedia dell’Arte e la società barocca, pp. 329–33, 341, 346, 368 and 390–91, where
theater is opposed to ecclesiastical splendor. See also François Lecercle, “L’obscénité de l’idole:
à propos du ‘Trattato della pittura e scultura, uso et abuso loro’ de G. D. Ottonelli et Pietro da
Cortona (1652),” in Ralph Dekoninck and Myriam Watthee-Delmotte (eds), L’idole dans l’imaginaire
occidental (Paris, 2005), pp. 155–65.
90. Taviani, La Commedia dell’Arte e la società barocca, p. 410.
91. Ibid., p. 411.
92. See n. 52 above for the original passage in Pallavicino.
93. Especially the section of the Trattato discussed above is deeply indebted to Paleotti’s Discorso, yet
rearranges Paleotti’s argument in order to emphasize the role of art and artistry in the production of
the affective image; see Maarten Delbeke, La fenice degl’ingeni. Een alternatief perspectief op Gianlorenzo
Bernini en zijn werk in de geschriften van Sforza Pallavicino (Ghent, 2002), pp. 208–18; Jens Baumgarten,
Konfession, Bild und Macht. Visualisierung als katholische Herrschafts- und Disziplinierungskonzept in Rom
und im habsburgischen Schlesien (1560–1740) (Hamburg and Munich, 2004), esp. pp. 99–102. Ottonelli
and Berrettini, Trattato della Pittura e Scultura, ch. III, pp. 615–90, gives the many references to Paleotti
in the Trattato della Pittura e Scultura.
94. For Bocchi’s writings, see Summers, The Judgment of Sense, pp. 143–6; Caroline van Eck, Classical
Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2007), pp. 150–53.
95. The work was written in 1571 and is published as Eccellenza del San Giorgio di Donatello. Dove si
tratta del costume, della vivacità e della bellezza di detta statua, in Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento,
vol. 3, pp. 125–94.
96. Bocchi, Eccellenza, p. 134, 135–42 and 144: “Perché, qual cosa maggiore e più mirabile … possono
le statue dimostrare, che l’animo et i pensieri, et in una vista sola quasi la vita tutta, che si dee
vivere, farci vedere? E certamente, sì come l’amicizia allora è di più pregio, quando l’uno amico
scambievolmente all’altro mostra i suoi pensieri et il secreto del suo animo, così le statue che
esprimono vivamente il costume sono altresì delle altre molto migliore e di più stima.”
97. Ibid., p. 151.
98. Ibid., p. 153.
99. Ibid., p. 157.
100. Ibid., pp. 169 and 179.
101. Ibid., pp. 192–3: “… muove con la vivacità, crea gentili pensieri col costume, diletta con la bellezza,
e con tutte e tre queste cose infonde in chi mira alta virtù et eroica, che in questa statua felicemente
è fabbricata.” See Thomas Frangenberg, Der Betrachter. Studien zur florentischen Kunstliteratur des
16. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1990), pp. 121–9, and Robert Williams, Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-
Century Italy. From Technè to Metatechnè (Cambridge MA, 1997), pp. 201–12.
102. Bocchi, Eccellenza, pp. 150, 160, 176, 185.
103. Ibid., p. 164.
104. Ibid., pp. 153 and 160; also pp. 147, 150, 190. See also Marek Komorowski, “Donatello’s St. George
in a Sixteenth-Century Commentary by Francesco Bocchi. Some Problems of the Renaissance
Theory of Expression,” in Ars Auro Prior. Studia Ionna Bialostocki Sexagenaria Dicata (Warsaw, 1981),
pp. 61–6; and Robert Williams, “A Treatise by Francesco Bocchi in Praise of Andrea del Sarto,”
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 52 (1989), p. 120.
105. Arjan de Koomen, “Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ into Art Criticism: Francesco Bocchi in Praise of
Donatello’s Saint George,” in Harald Hendrix and Paolo Procacciolo (eds), Officine del nuovo.
Sodalizi fra letterati, artisti ed editori nella cultura italiana fra Riforma e Contrariforma. Atti del Simposio
internazionale Utrecht 8–10 novembre 2007 (Manziana, 2008), pp. 89–91, discusses previous uses of
vivacità in connection with the San Giorgio. See also Mary E. Hazard, “The Anatomy of ‘Liveliness’
as a Concept in the Renaissance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 33 (1975), p. 410; Jacobs, The
Living Image, pp. 29–30.
106. On the familiarity between Bocchi’s work and the art theory of the Counter-Reformation, see
Scavizzi, The Controversy on Images, pp. 234–6. In the annotation of Bocchi’s work, Paolo Barrocchi
points to the affinity between the Eccellenza and Gabriele Paleotti’s Discorso intorno alle immagini, as
pointed out earlier an important source for the Trattato.
107. Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 30, p. 211.
108. Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, pp. 41–55.
109. For this significance of the fly, see André Chastel, “Musca Depicta,” in Musca Depicta. Con testi di
Luciano di Samorata, Leon Battista Alberti, Giovan Battista Lalli, Katherine Mansfield, Luigi Pirandello
(Milan, 1984), pp. 11–36.
110. Sforza Pallavicino, “Discorso … se il Principe debba essere letterato,” in Spicilegium Romanum,
6 (Rome, 1841), pp. 619–20. Republished with corrections in Pallavicino’s Opere edite e inedite del
Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino, vol. 1, pp. 1–19. The fly appears often in Pallavicino’s work as the most
inferior creature in creation. The Trattato sulla Provvidenza even says that the most beautiful things
in life can arouse less “compassione” than “le più noiose bestie, quale sono l’estive mosche” (bk I,
ch. 9, p. 96). See also Chapter 4, n. 133.
111. Bernini, Vita, p. 95: “concetto di stima del Pontefice Alessandro VII., e della Corte di Roma verso il
Cavaliere in quel tempo.”
112. Ibid.: “Rimaner stupito, come a sola forza d’ingegno potesse in qualunque materia discorso
giungere, dove altri con lungo studio appena erano pervenuti.”
113. Ibid., p. 97: “Se si fosse il Bernino in qualunque scienza ò professione raffinato collo studio, e
coll’esercizio, haverebbe in tutte avantaggio ogni altro di questo Secolo per illustre, che fosse.”
114. Ibid., as quoted in Chapter 1, n. 40.

115. Ibid., pp. 97–8: “E per tale lo predicava & avanti il Papa, & in ogni congresso di Virtuosi,
sostenendo, che il Cavalier Bernino non solo fosse il più eccellente nella sua professione, mà
semplicissimamente parlando, un Grand’Huomo: Conciosiacosache quantunque nel Mondo più
si apprezzi un Grand’Oratore, un Gran Capitano, un Gran Dottore, ò perche queste professioni
siano più utili, ò più necessarie, tuttavia nel Secolo presente nissun’Oratore, nissun Capitano, ò
Dottore, è arrivato nel suo genere a quell’altezza di perfezione, come il Bernino nella propria, con
un attitudine maravigliosa per tutte.”
116. Ibid., p. 96, see above, n. 1.
117. Ibid., pp. 133–4. On Bernini’s theory of portraiture, and especially its relation to Cinquecento
concepts of verisimilitude, see Diane Bodart, “L’excellence du portrait par Gian Lorenzo Bernini,
ou la ressemblance à l’épreuve de l’idea,” Studiolo, 4 (2006): 39–60.
118. For the making of the bust, see Helga Tratz, “Werkstatt und Arbeitsweise Berninis,” Römisches
Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 23/24 (1988): pp. 466–71 and 474–8. Bernini sketched Louis XIV during
a ball game on 23 June 1665 and during the council of ministers on 12 July.
119. Bernini, Vita, p. 134: “Io non hò fin’ora conosciuto Huomo di quell’ingegno come Voi [Bernini].”
120. Ibid.: “i Modelli gli erano serviti per introdurre nella fantasia le fattezze di chì egli doveva ritrarre,
mà quando già le haveva concepite, e doveva dar fuori il parto, non gli erano più necessarii, anzi
dannosi al suo fine, che era di darlo fuori, non simile alli Modelli, mà al Vero.”
121. Bernini made the remark on 4 September 1665, in connection with his work on the bust of Louis
XIV; see Chantelou, Journal, p. 154.
122. On these features of Bernini’s busts and their role in historiography, see Andrea Bacci and
Catherine Hess, “Creating a New Likeness: Bernini’s Transformation of the Portrait Bust,” in
Andrea Bacci and Catherine Hess (eds), Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture (Los
Angeles, 2008), pp. 1–43.
123. See Williams, Art, Theory and Culture, pp. 205 and 211, with a reference to Bocchi’s emphasis on the
connection between speaking and the representation of costume.
124. Bernini, Vita, p. 16: “Il cardinal Maffeo Barberino, poi Urbano Ottavo … si portò ad incontrarlo
[Montoya], e toccandolo disse: Questo è il ritratto di Monsignor Montoya (e voltosi alla Statua)
e questo è Monsignor Montoja”; see Baldinucci, Vita, p. 76. Also registered, with substantial
differences, in Chantelou, Journal, pp. 123–4, 17 August 1665. For the issue of imitation in
the accounts of the Montoja bust, see Rudolf Preimesberger, “Bernini’s Portraits, Stolen and
Nonstolen, in Chantelou’s Journal and the Bernini Vite,” in Maarten Delbeke, Evonne Levy and
Steven F. Ostrow, Bernini’s Biographies. Critical Essays (University Park, 2006), pp. 210–18; and Evonne
Levy, “Chapter 2 of Domenico Bernini’s Vita of his Father: Mimeses,” in ibid., pp. 174–5.
125. Bernini, Vita, p. 42: “… non haver’esso fatta quella statua, mà la Santa medesima essersi da sè
medesima scolpita, & impresa in quel marmo.” See also Frank Fehrenbach, “Colpi vitali: Berninis
Beseelungen,” in Nicola Suthor and Erika Fischer-Lichte (eds), Verklärte Korper. Ästhetiken der
Transfiguration (Munich, 2006), pp. 91–144.
126. Bernini, Vita, p. 48: “… quel continuo lavoro in Marmo, in cui era così fisso che sembrava
estatico, & in atto di mandar per gli occhi lo spirito per render vivi li sassi, fù in lui gran causa
di male, che l’abbatti nel letto con febre acutissima, & accidente mortale.” For the link between
the furor and liveliness in the visual arts, see Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art,
pp. 60–70.
127. Chantelou, Journal, p. 77, 15 July 1665: “que veritablement c’était avec trop d’attache [Bernini’s
work on Louis XIV’s bust] et que mardi au soir il était si las que j’avais peur qu’il ne s’en trouvait
malade.”
128. Bernini, Vita, p. 30: “perche può essa [la Pittura] con la varietà, e vivacità de’colori più
facilmente accostarsi alla effigie del rappresentato, e far bianco ciò ch’è bianco, rosso ciò ch’è
rosso; Ma la Scultura priva del commodo de’colori, necessitata ad operar nel sasso, hà di
mestiere per render somiglianti le figure di una impressione vivissima, mà schietta, senza
l’appoggio di mendicati colori, e colla forza solo del Disegno ritrarre in bianco marmo un volto
per altro vermiglio, e renderlo simile.” A similar remark is also made in Chantelou’s Journal,
on 6 June and 12 August 1665. On the identification of color with liveliness and animation
in painting, see Frank Fehrenbach, “Color nativus—Color vitale. Prolegomena zu einer
Ästhetik des ‘Lebendigen Bildes’ in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Ulrich Pfisterer and Max Seidel
(eds), Visuelle Topoi. Erfindung und tradiertes Wissen in den Künsten der italienischen Renaissance
(Munich, 2003), pp. 158–61; idem, “Kohäsion und Transgression. Zur Dialektik lebendiger
Bilder,” in Ulrich Pfisterer and Anja Zimmermann (eds), Animationen/Transgressionen. Das
Kunstwerk als Lebewesen (Berlin, 2005), pp. 1–40.
129. Bernini, Vita, p. 96 (my emphasis).
130. Tomaso Montanari, “Sulla fortuna poetica di Bernini. Frammenti del tempo di Alessandro VII e
di Sforza Pallavicino,” Studi secenteschi, 39 (1998), pp. 153–4, presents an ode by Ferdinand von
Fürstenberg, probably addressed to the same bust. The ode says that the marble bust, in contrast
to painting, manages to give a lively representation of Alexander.
131. For Bernini’s ideas on the paragone, see Matthias Winner, “Berninis ‘Verità’ (Bausteine zur
Vorgeschichte einer ‘Invenzione’),” in Tilman Buddensieg and Matthias Winner (eds), Munuscula
Discipulorum: Kunsthistorische Studien Hans Kauffman zum 70. Geburtstag 1966 (Berlin, 1968), pp.
393–413; Rudolf Preimesberger, “Themes from Art Theory in the Early Works of Bernini,” in
Irving Lavin (ed.), Bernini. New Aspects of his Art and Thought (University Park, 1985), pp. 1–24;
idem, “Berninis Cappella Cornaro: eine Bild-Wort-Synthese des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts?,”
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 49 (1986): 190–219; Steven F. Ostrow, “Bernini e il paragone,” in
Tomaso Montanari (ed.), Bernini Pittore (Cinisello Balsamo, 2007), pp. 223–33.
132. Sforza Pallavicino, Lettere dettata dal Card. Sforza Pallavicino di glorioso memoria. Raccolte e dedicate alla
Santità di N. Sig. Papa Clemente nono. Da Giambattista Galli Pavarelli Cremonese (1st edn Rome, 1668)
(Venice, 1669). The letter is “A Monsig. Roberti Arcivescovo di Tarso, allora Nunzio Apostolico in
Turino, poscia in Parigi, & ora Cardinale,” not dated, pp. 494–5: “Ben assicuro V.S. Illustrissima,
che quantunque l’esser dipinto per mano del Bernino sia nella mia estimazione quanto se fosse
per man d’Apelle; di che si pregiava Alessandro: assai più mi glorio d’un altro superior mio
ritratto, dal quale havrà origine questo secondo; cioè di quello che’l Signor di Lionne stesso ha
di mè formato nel cuore. E tenga Sua Eccellanza per certo, che un’altro se non tanto bello, almen
tanto vivo, e tanto indelebile, ma più degno; nè hò formato io di lui nel cuor mio con due colore
solamente. (là dove la dipintura narrano che incominciasse con quattro) cioè con la stima, e con
la gratitudine, &c.” Mention of de Lionne’s wish to have Bernini portray Pallavicino for him is
also made in Pallavicino’s letter to de Lionne of 7 December 1665; see ibid., pp. 369–70. Sandrina
Bandera Bistoletti, “Lettura di testi Berniniani: qualche scopertà e nuove osservazioni. Dal Journal
di Chantelou e dai documenti della bibliothèque nationale di Parigi,” Paragone, 36 (1985), pp. 68–9,
n. 57, mentions two letters of de Lionne to Bernini and Pallavicino, dated 6 January 1666.
3
Art as Revelation: The Revelation of Art
Pallavicino’s epistemological take on the imitative arts defines the truth-

claims of artistic expression. Our author distinguishes two mimetic registers,
one concerned with poetic invention, the other with history. In neither case,
however, is art concerned with the replication of reality. This distinction
renders moot the tenacious conflation of art and life that occurs in art
literature, be it concerned with religious art, civic art, or with a particular
artist. As a result, two opposing conceptions of art emerge, one stressing its
emotive effect regardless of art’s truthfulness, the other focusing on the life-
giving powers of the artist. This raises the question of which truths Pallavicino
thinks art is still capable of expressing. Which notions or ideas benefit from
imitation’s separation from truth and which are excluded?
Sforza Pallavicino’s conception of the human system of knowledge implies
that a work of art will provoke two moments of knowledge. First of all, a
poem, painting or sculpture is mimetic: it evokes something that is not there.
Secondly, the connoisseur sees how mimesis was created, not just recognizing
the original but also the art involved. If that were not the case, if the work of
art were to be taken for real, two problems would arise. Deception would
become error. To make someone believe that which is false is morally wrong
and therefore reprehensible.1 Furthermore it eliminates the pleasure that
comes with seeing a good work of art. Poets may attribute the impossible to
painters, to the delight of the ignorant masses, but they are not doing artists
any favors. When a painted head is taken for real, the arte, and thus the hand
of the artist, becomes invisible. Moreover, the imitation loses all purpose.
The idea is to present someone who is absent as present to the fantasia, not
to produce a belief through a tenacious error that someone who is dead or
absent is truly present.2
Furthermore, all art is the result of accurate artificio, also works creating the
impression that they are the product of the creative frenzy of the artist, their
furor. Pallavicino’s Trattato dello stile describes “the adoption of the kind of
language that people think is the mark of someone possessed by a superhuman
furor, as poets like to present themselves” simply as a form of imitation. This

form uses meter and the “unusual diction that is called poetic.” “[And] the
people consider this kind of language as speech inspired by the Gods.”3 The
representation of poetic furor is a question of style, a mode of expression. At
most, it creates the impression that the artist is divinely inspired. Similarly,
Pallavicino writes in the same Trattato that that is why a poet can at best
metaphorically claim that a sculptor possesses the divine power to make a
thing come alive. If he tries to pass off such a claim as the literal truth, he is a
liar. In support of this statement, Pallavicino cites a line of poetry on the art
of sculpture by Giambattista Marino which is guilty of exactly this form of
deceit, “You are truly God; for only God is capable of giving life to marbles”
[“Tu pur Dio sei; Che Dio sol è chi può dar vita ai marmi”].4
In short, Pallavicino distinguishes art clearly from both the barefaced
error or lie and divinely inspired revelation. The introduction of this double
distinction in mid-seventeenth-century Rome is historically important.
Artistic practice in many disciplines is characterized by an innovative quest
into the possibilities of illusionism and the inganno or deception. At the same
time, and intimately intertwined with that quest, several authors reflect
upon the revelatory function of art and its potentially privileged relation to
divine truth. Together these queries help to define the particular relationship
of art to higher truths and, therefore, religion. This chapter will examine
in more detail how Pallavicino positions himself with regard to these two
interrelated issues. This should clarify the implications of his theoretical
position for the role of art in the representation of religious truths.
Bernini, Pallavicino and the Paradoxes of Zeno
As the previous chapter has shown, in seventeenth-century Rome not only

artists and their biographers but also theologians and philosophers like
Pallavicino recognize and conceptualize the power, the attraction and the value
of art and artifice per se. They are compelled to do so probably at least partly
because of the sheer presence of contemporary art and architecture in their
surroundings. At the same time the secular, mainly biographical discourse on
art aims to enlarge the scope and importance of artifice and artistic genius by
incorporating the religious, philosophical and theological aspects of art into
the persona of the individual artist. The two discourses—“theological” and
“biographical”—exchange notions, anecdotes and references, and use and
transform them according to their own needs.
In the case of Gianlorenzo Bernini, this process is not limited to the
biography written by his son Domenico. In Filippo Baldinucci’s Vita del Cav.
Gio. Lorenzo Bernini (1682), too, we find a comparison that is derived from
Sforza Pallavicino’s Arte della Perfezion Cristiana. The passage in question
art as revelation: the revelation of art 65
compares artistic judgment and paradox. As we will see, to Baldinucci

the comparison suggests that true art is something beyond the grasp of
the layperson: it is the privilege of exceptional individuals, in this case
Gianlorenzo Bernini. In Pallavicino it serves to address a closely related
problem: how can the use of artifice be accepted and even encouraged without
having it stand in the way of the content it should help to demonstrate?
Examining the larger framework of Pallavicino’s thought will lead us back
to the prima apprensione. Comparison of Pallavicino’s ideas with Baldinucci’s
appropriation will delve further into the epistemological foundations of the
notion and their implications for Pallavicino’s ideas on the function of art. If,
as we have seen in the previous chapter, art is deprived from its privileged
association with divine creation, what is left for it to do?
Baldinucci’s and Pallavicino’s perspectives on art differ mainly in how
they define its aim. For Baldinucci art reveals the genius of its creator; for
Pallavicino it is a means to glimpse the truths of faith. What makes this
version of an age-old tension interesting, and perhaps turns it into a defining
feature of artistic reflection in seventeenth-century Rome, is how it derives
from attempts to deal with a specific problem, the relation between truth
and artifice. The importance of this issue for the understanding of Roman
baroque art has been recognized by a number of authors, starting with
Argan’s and Morpurgo-Tagliabue’s contributions to the 1954 Retorica e barocca
conference.5 Its implications become especially clear in Anthony Blunt’s
article “Gianlorenzo Bernini: Illusionism and Mysticism,” published in 1978.
Blunt defines “the chief aim of baroque artists” as “[arousing] wonder and
astonishment,” and “illusionism was one of the most powerful weapons
they used” to do so.6 To prove this point, Blunt traces a classical tradition
which accords “deception” an “importance in its own right,” culminating in
a passage of Sforza Pallavicino’s Trattato dello stile e del dialogo. In this passage,
Pallavicino writes that “every practitioner of imitative art is to be praised
more, when he deceives more; because this deception, when it is recognized,
in generating new admiration, becomes master of truth.”7 According to Blunt
“[this] idea corresponds exactly to the effect produced by Baroque illusionism,
which gives pleasure by the deception which it produces, but this pleasure is
followed by another provided by the recognition of the fact that the eye and
the mind have been deceived.”8
Blunt understands “illusionism” as an antithesis between two aesthetic
moments: an initial deception is followed by a moment of insight and
learning, or “truth.” This truth is attained by seeing the falseness of the
illusion. The process of unmasking produces wonder and therefore pleasure
in the beholder. The question then remains exactly what kind of truth the
beholder sees or understands. According to Blunt, the beholder gathers
insight into the refined mechanism that made the illusion initially believed.
When this artifice is unmasked, the beholder’s initial ignorance is superseded
and aesthetic pleasure is the result. Blunt himself is acutely aware of the
fundamental problem this view imposes. If the representation ultimately
wants to be unmasked as an illusion, also its content, the res, will become
affected by this unmasking. Indeed, following this analysis the res seems
of only secondary importance, serving as a vehicle to allow the process of
deceiving and unmasking to take place. This seems strangely at odds with
the definitely missionary—or at least didactical—aims of a rather important
body of baroque art. To solve this contradiction, Blunt postulates Gianlorenzo
Bernini as an exception to the general rule, calling upon a concept closely
akin to Rudolf Kuhn’s Tatpersönlichkeit, the exceptional ability to charge
artifice with new meaning by internalizing the exigencies that new modes
of religious experience impose on representation.9 According to Blunt,
Gianlorenzo Bernini was the greatest master of baroque illusionism because
“though many of his contemporaries and successors used illusionism with the
utmost ingenuity to produce striking and dramatic effects, Bernini—almost
alone—used it to express a particular kind of deeply felt religious emotion
and so raised it to an altogether higher level of imaginative creation.”10 Blunt
opposes illusionist “effect” to a “religious emotion” produced by an artist
who throughout his life experiences an ever-increasing “deeply emotional,
even mystical” feeling.11 Mysticism infuses the playful illusion with meaning
that is conveyed through the expression of emotion; only this expression,
then, prevents the artifice of illusionism from being idle.
Although Anthony Blunt well understood that the tension between artifice
and truth is an essential problem in seventeenth-century artistic practice and
theory, his interpretation of the problem can be challenged on two points. First,
Bernini is hailed as an exceptional artist because only he truly understands
what art means and can do. As we will see, by proposing this solution Blunt
almost reproduces the rhetoric of Filippo Baldinucci’s biography. Second,
Blunt’s interpretation is based on a seventeenth-century theory—as can be
found in Pallavicino—that he considers to be an attempt to define the aims
and modalities of illusionism. As will become clear, because Blunt does
not acknowledge the theological background of these theories he follows
Baldinucci’s lead, transforming a theory that accords a subservient place to
art and artifice in soteriology into a justification of artifice as a legitimate goal
in itself.
Zeno’s Paradoxes in Baldinucci
The implicit citation of the Arte della Perfezion Cristiana occurs in the following
passage of Baldinucci’s Vita:
One day a Cardinal showed Gianlorenzo Bernini a dome painted by one of his
favorite artists, who had done a rather bad job. Asked by the Prelate, in the presence
of many experts on painting, what he thought of it, Bernini, after carefully studying
the dome, answered the cardinal who, ignorant in all matters artistic, expected
Bernini to praise his painter: “Truly, the work speaks for itself,” and this Bernini
said three times, with energy. And because someone who receives, always receives
according to his own ways, the Cardinal took this to be the most perfect praise,
whereas the experts looked at each other and silently mocked the work. Bernini said
that a thing merits great praise not when it shows little errors, but only when it has
many qualities. And the Cardinal Pallavicino, his close friend, added to this: what you
say here about your art, goes also for mine, namely, that a sentence is not falsified by
insolvable arguments, but by solid and convincing reasons, that prove the conclusion.
Likewise, one cannot deny that movement exists, and even so the philosopher Zeno
uses such arguments as to prove that it doesn’t, and these have not yet been resolved.
[Da questa moderazione di stima di se stesso nacque nel Bernino una gran discretezza
nel parlar dell’opere altrui, che lo portava a lodare il buono, e tacere il manchevole,
e non avendo che lodare, inventar modi di tacere parlando; così essendo una volta
condotto da un Cardinale a vedere una Cupola, ch’egli aveva fatto dipignere ad uno
suo molto favorito pittore, nella quale l’artefice s’era portato assai male; interrogato
dallo stesso Prelato alla presenza di molti professori di ciò, che gliene paresse, dopo
averla bene osservata, rispose al Cardinale, che poco intentendo dell’arte, si aspettava
sentire encomj del suo pittore: Veramente l’opera parla da se, e ciò disse con energia
fino a tre volte; onde perchè chi riceve, sempre per modo di se stesso riceve, il
Cardinale prese quel detto per una somma lode, mentre i professori guardandosi in
viso l’un l’altro fra se stessi si ridevano di quell’opera. Diceva che per dar gran lode
ad una cosa non doveva bastare l’avere ella in se pochi errori, ma l’avere molti pregi:
a questa sentenza aggiugneva il Cardinal Pallavicino suo intrinsechissimo; quello che
dite voi nell’arte vostra, dico io nella mia, cioè, che non è contrassegno della falsità di
una sentenza l’avere contro di se argomenti insolubili, ma ragioni sode e convincenti,
che provino la conclusione, siccome non può negarsi, che si dia il moto, e pure il
filosofo Zenone fece tali argomenti per provare, che e’non si desse, che non son mai
stati sciolti finora.]12
In this anecdote, Pallavicino compares judging the beauty of an object with

assessing the truth of a philosophical proposition: the aesthetic qualities of an
artwork are like good arguments against a proposition; artistic errors are like
arguments that do not falsify a proposition. Pallavicino explains this with an
example: everybody knows that movement exists, even if Zeno’s arguments to
the contrary have not yet been resolved. However, the existence of movement
is not contradicted by an “unsolvable” argument.
Baldinucci’s text probably fuses passages from several contemporary
sources. Domenico Bernini’s Vita contains Gianlorenzo Bernini’s utterance
that only something with great qualities deserves high praise, so it is possible
that the remark was present in the material prepared for Baldinucci to write
Bernini’s biography. In Domenico, this goes to explain an earlier, enigmatic
remark of Bernini that the bad work “speaks for itself.” Bernini here wants
to make clear that one should not discuss bad works, but criticize good
works and only praise great works, a point that Baldinucci’s biography
mentions in a different context.13 The comparison between the aesthetic and
the philosophical judgment, exemplified with the reference to Zeno, does

not appear in Domenico’s Vita. As pointed out, it is taken from the Arte della
Perfezion Cristiana.
Before examining the exchange that takes place between Baldinucci’s and
Pallavicino’s writings, it is necessary to take a closer look at the anecdote
as it appears in the biography. The anecdotal comparison uses the famous
paradoxes on movement ascribed to the pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno
of Elea, which are known in the seventeenth century through Book 6 of
Aristotle’s Physics.14 Exemplified in stories like the race between Achilles and
the tortoise, Zeno’s paradoxes on movement argue, as Aristotle puts it, that
there is no motion “because that which is moved must arrive at the middle of
its course before it arrives at the end.” Even if Aristotle and Plato considered
these paradoxes to be sophisms, they actually were not solved at the time
when Baldinucci wrote and received a lot of attention from philosophers and
mathematicians until deep into the twentieth century.15 Baldinucci juxtaposes
these unfathomable paradoxes to Bernini’s ability to make at once sound and
pleasing aesthetic judgments. When judging the dome, Bernini addresses
himself simultaneously to someone who is incapable of making aesthetic
judgments and to a group of people to whom the deficiencies of the dome
are all too obvious. This turns the supposedly univocal pronouncement on
its quality—the work being what it is—into opposing judgments of the same
work. Bernini wittily exploits the paradox that the work does not speak for
itself and can be understood in different ways, distinguishing two ways of
understanding art.16
If we compare Bernini’s judgment of the dome with Zeno’s paradox, then
the unlearned Cardinal is like someone who actually would believe Zeno.
Just as a person ignorant of philosophy is dazzled by the counter-intuitive
but “unsolvable” propositions of the paradox and is thereby forced to believe
things they do not see, so does a layperson in the art of painting appreciate
an obviously badly painted dome if an authority tells them so. Experts, on
the other hand, sees through the insufficient arguments of the paradox or
the failures of the painting, because, in both cases, they are able to identify
the “artistic” deficiencies; they do not have to believe, they are able to prove.
Baldinucci’s Vita thus uses the unsolvable paradox as a metaphor for a bad
aesthetic judgment which results from an inadequate knowledge of the rules
of art. Taking the comparison between judgment and paradox one step further,
it can be argued that Baldinucci distinguishes two ways of reading Zeno’s
paradoxes: either one is baffled and lured into falseness, or one is aware of
their sophistic nature, thanks to a knowledge of philosophical artifice. In other
words—this self-evident point needs to be stressed—Baldinucci invokes
paradox as a legitimate object of philosophy, and precisely those who are
capable of dealing with paradox earn Baldinucci’s and Bernini’s praise, for
they master their art to perfection. This explains why Baldinucci emphasizes
that Zeno’s paradoxes have yet to be solved.17 It is not only thinkable but even
desirable that this should happen, as a display of perfect “artistic” mastery.
In Baldinucci the paradoxes show that genuine aesthetic experience is
comparable to a philosophical inquiry. It is provoked by good works of art
and the privilege of those who master the rules of artifice and able to make
proper judgment. Within the biographical framework, the ultimate authority
in this matter is relegated to Gianlorenzo Bernini, who is like a philosopher,
a master in the art of judgment. The anecdote is consistent with a series of
paragraphs that present Bernini as a universal ingegno.18
Zeno’s Paradoxes in Sforza Pallavicino
In Sforza Pallavicino’s Arte della Perfezion Cristiana the reference to Zeno’s

paradoxes on motion appears in the thirteenth chapter. As a popular book on
devotion the Arte was certainly known to Baldinucci.19 The chapter in question
describes different methods of defending the truths of faith.20 Pallavicino thinks
it unwise to attempt to refute every single argument against these truths. For
it is one thing to accept them, but quite another to unmask a false proposition
that contradicts them. Then follows the example of Zeno’s paradoxes, which
greatly intrigued Aristotle even if they are evidently false. The Christian author
should not fall in the same trap as Aristotle and should avoid arguing with
perverse propositions against self-evident truths, Pallavicino concludes.21 This
observation immediately indicates the major shift between Baldinucci’s and
Pallavicino’s use of Zeno’s paradoxes. Baldinucci compares the paradoxes to
an argument that motivates a judgment; accepting a paradox is like praising a
painting for “pochi errori.” Pallavicino considers the paradoxes as a perverse
form of truth; they are like propositions that contradict the truths of faith,
such as the existence of God or the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church.22
This shift brings out a second major difference. Baldinucci distinguishes two
ways of reacting to paradox, depending on the scienza of the person involved.
For Pallavicino paradoxical “truth” falls by definition outside the realm of
philosophy; it embodies the point where legitimate reasoning turns into idle
and dangerous speculation.
As in Domenico’s adaptation of the anecdote of the fly, the shift between
Baldinucci’s and Pallavicino’s text assumes its full meaning when examined
within the larger framework of Pallavicino’s argument. Only by positioning
paradox and the truths of faith within his epistemological system will it
become fully clear why paradox should be ignored by the faithful and what
kind of truth it represents. After explaining the wrong methods to defend
the truths of faith, Pallavicino’s Arte della Perfezion Cristiana proceeds to
demonstrate these truths with a delicate mixture of argument and example,
adopting a didactic strategy that tries to reconcile the transitory powers of the
imagination—or fantasia—with the fragile reasoning of the intellect and the

volatile movements of the will.23
This strategy is explained in great detail both in the Trattato sulla Provvidenza
and the Arte della Perfezion Cristiana. In the Trattato, Pallavicino suggests that
it is not the preacher who converts us but God. The preacher stimulates the
imagination and creates fantasmi, which present themselves to the intellect
and influence the will. But the fundamental conversion of the hearer is beyond
their control.24 The same idea is developed in the first book of the Arte della
Perfezion Cristiana, when Pallavicino states his methodology. To explain how a
rational argument contributes to conversion, Pallavicino briefly calls to mind
that we possess immortal intellect, which judges and discusses things, and
imagination, fantasia, which we share with animals and allows us to represent
things that are not there.25 The image contained in the fantasia relates to the
object the way a corpse relates to a living human being, just as when a theater
audience truly believes the plight of the actors to the point of crying with
them during the play, but soon after realizes that it was all false.26 Yet fantasia
is still capable of deeply influencing our judgment. First of all, the more lively
its representation of things, the more it will enrapture the intellect, just like
when a head drawn by Michelangelo will enrapture the intellect more than
any other.27 Secondly, it has greater power over our appetito inferiore, which we
share with animals.28 Intelletto and fantasia are two faculties that work closely
together and, as any artist knows, matter can best be treated according to its
nature.29 Therefore the Arte takes the relationship between the two faculties as
the first step towards making the perfect Christian.30 Not until the imagination
has been shaped can more solid arguments be used which reach the intelletto
directly. This second step is essential and determines whether perfection
will last. Pallavicino gives the example of a Spanish preacher who terrifies
his audience by predicting that all the good intentions induced by a lively
evocation of Judgment Day will evaporate within a few minutes after the end
of his sermon.31 Through fantasia a path is cleared for the intellect to see what
was always present in the heart.32
In sum, Pallavicino acknowledges that perfection of one’s faith requires
reasoning, as we have seen in the previous chapter, but he also acknowledges
that reasoning does not suffice. The intellect is hardly capable of reaching
the heart. At the same time, a conversion purely based on manipulation of
the fantasia, for instance through vivid preaching, will always be superficial.
The Christian should balance the two powers so that they keep each other in
check. Even if Pallavicino does not write so explicitly, it is clear that—within
the context of the Arte—Zeno’s paradoxes can be rejected simply because they
are inconceivable to the imagination, which thus imposes a definite limit to
intellectual speculation.
But it has also become clear that for Pallavicino intellectual reasoning is a
necessity. What the intellect contributes to faith can be deduced from the Arte,
but is explicitly developed in Pallavicino’s Storia del Concilio di Trento. Again

the example of Zeno’s paradoxes is used, now to defend the Christian use
of philosophy, the intellectual activity at the furthest remove from the realm
of imagination.33 Pallavicino argues that philosophy serves the defense of
Catholic faith in three ways. First, philosophical tools can help to demonstrate
the errors of other “sects”; second, they can refute the sophisms that are
opposed against Christian doctrine; third, they enrich the faithful with
conclusions deduced from the truths of faith.34 Pallavicino is more lenient
towards the use of philosophy in contradicting sophisms in the Storia than in
the Arte della Perfezion Cristiana because of the context of the argument: he is
defending the theologian’s use of Aristotelian philosophy, not propagating
the dissemination of philosophical arguments in popular books on devotion.
However, his analysis still works from the same premises as in the Arte, namely
that the truths of faith need to be made manifest or demonstrated. Whereas
the Arte privileges a carefully balanced collaboration between imagination
and intellect, the Storia needs to take on those who deny Catholics the right to
use philosophy in interpreting the truths of faith. He does so by also arguing
that philosophical discussion is a form of demonstration and clarification, or
to use Pallavicino’s phrase, of “porre in discorso.”
This becomes clear in his rebuttal of the anti-scholastic objection that
Thomistic thinkers even challenge the existence of God. Pallavicino argues
that they do so “because it is necessary to doubt all these propositions which
are not evident by themselves, and through the conjunction of their proper
terms, such as ‘every whole is larger than the part.’” It is even useful to “put
also some of these [evident propositions] into discourse,” not with the aim
to prove them, but “to make their clarity more apparent and to respond
to contrary arguments.” Then follows again the example of Aristotle’s
treatment of Zeno’s paradoxes, both the paradoxes on movement and those
on being, “the most evident principles of our intellect, namely that the same
thing can not at the same time be or not be,” and the example of squaring
of the circle.35 In all these cases, experience teaches us truths that the most
powerful of human ingegni have never been able to prove. Pallavicino
concludes:
Therefore, to dispute this kind of problem is not useful to remove the doubt
concerning the issue, but to know the legitimate proof. Without this exercise, our
intellect, which is blind and lazy, often confuses the conclusion with the argument;
and being sure of [the conclusion], it mistakenly trusts [the argument]; and when that
[argument] is shown to be weak, [the intellect] starts to doubt [the conclusion].
[Il disputar dunque di siffatti problemi giova non per disgombrare il dubbio intorno
alla cosa, ma per saperne la legittima prova. Senza questo esercizio il nostro intelletto,
ch’è losco e pigro, confonde spesso la conclusione con la ragione, e sicuro di quella,
si gabba in fidarsi di questa: e dipoi mostrandoglisi l’una per debole, comincia a
tener l’altra per dubbia.]36
In other words, philosophical speculation is necessary to spare Christians the

embarrassment of standing unarmed in front of their enemies and to provide
them with philosophical ammunition.37 It also clarifies and demonstrates these
truths by weeding out erroneous and perverse opinions, buttressing them with
arguments shaped by a powerful alliance between philosophy and rhetoric.
The Prima Apprensione and the Higher Truths of Faith
At the core of this argument lies the conviction that higher truths are evident
but not convincing or appealing. Pallavicino’s oeuvre treats this kind of
truth on several occasions in the Storia del Concilio di Trento, but also in the
Trattato dello stile e del dialogo, where exactly the fact that “clear” truths do not
always convince or appeal is brought in to warn against a too-generous use
of sentenze in scientific writing. The sentence, “a group of words so related as
to convey a completed thought with the force of asserting something,” often
allows only the most acute reader to penetrate its sense.38 However, once
understood, its truth becomes “evident,” “manifest,” which makes it closely
akin to the first truths or “primi principii” which form the foundation for all
human knowledge.39 These first principles are few in number but they cannot
be proven, only stated.40 They are the prime examples of “evidence,” “such an
appearance that never allows the intellect to doubt its truth.”41
Amongst these evident truths, a distinction must be made between first
principles concerning, for instance, movement (the principle attacked by
Zeno), and the truths of faith, which are much more obscure and lie hidden in
the heart. As opposed to the knowledge of movement people have to choose
to embrace the truths of faith. If these truths were not a matter of choice
humans would be unfree, morally as low as a beast. Precisely because God
requires humans to choose—in other words, because they are knowing and
moral beings—these truths should be coated in an appealing guise, to incline
humanity towards them.42 This professed necessity to make the truths of
faith manifest and desirable in some form of representation—for example, a
philosophical argument, a sentence, but also, as will become clear, as a poem,
a painting or a piece of theater—leads us back to the problem Anthony Blunt
addressed. If convincing, appealing representation is necessary, how can it not
be a corrupting power, how can it not taint truth with illusion, falseness or
error? And if such kind of representation is at all possible, to what conditions
is it subjected?
To answer these questions, we should briefly return to our examination of
Pallavicino’s epistemological system. As we have seen according to Pallavicino,
first truths, philosophical proof and any form of imitative or mimetic art are
primarily aimed at different acts of the human intellect. The first truths are
recognized by the giudicio, the judgment; knowledge of these principles or
truths is innate and these judgments are natural and manifest. Philosophical
reasoning is the object of the discorso, the third intellectual act. The first act
of knowledge is the prima apprensione, the pre-rational act of seeing in which
the intellect does not judge the truth or falseness of an object. As we know,
according to Pallavicino the imitative arts should arouse the apprensione.
To fully understand the implications of this point, it should first be
recognized that Pallavicino introduces the apprensione to solve a larger
problem: how can error-free knowledge be gathered of those truths that by
their very nature lie beyond the grasp of the human intellect, the truths of
faith? Pallavicino does not theorize the prima apprensione to justify poetry and
the visual arts, as has been assumed, but to escape precisely this deadlock.43
His argument then leads to a refined justification of the visual, which, in
turn, allots a very precise but instrumental place to visual or imitative art in
humanity’s history of salvation.
Pallavicino proposes the apprensione after a failed attempt to define how
people understand the truths of faith. The starting point of this attempt is the
following question: if the “good” is related to knowing, how does “error”
relate to the good?44 In a first tentative solution to this problem Pallavicino
proposes that error and scienza are two necessary components of all human
knowledge. This mixture is within reach for those who refuse to linger in
eternal sleep—the totally ignorant—and do not belong to the beings with
absolute knowledge, the “beati.” Error and scienza are proper to all human
knowing, especially—and this point is duly stressed—when dealing with
the truths of faith. Any knowledge of these truths will always be mixed with
error, simply because these truths transcend human intellectual capacities.45
Therefore humanity has to prefer “true, but uncertain” knowledge to the
ignorance which would result from a desire to have perfect knowledge of the
“too numerous, too high, or too necessary objects,” the truths of faith.46 Or, as
Pallavicino puts it, man has to prefer to wear a spotted coat to being naked.47
Soon after reaching this conclusion, however, Pallavicino realizes
that he has not only become a valiant champion of error, but also of error
recognized as such since, according to this theory, any knowledge of the
truths of faith necessarily implies error.48 To escape this dead end the prima
apprensione is introduced. This “apprendere” creates a space where also the
incomprehensible can be grasped without the stain of error, since error cannot
occur in an act of human understanding that does not judge the veracity of
an object.49 The prima apprensione opens a window to perceive the truths of
faith in a pre-rational, pre-discursive moment. Because the object of this
seeing is not considered to be true or false, it is simply there, in its actuality, or
evidenza. Of course these perceptions will also be submitted to the giudicio and
the discorso, where they will become the object of partly erroneous attempts
to grasp, explain and understand them. But—and this point is developed at
great length in the digression prompted by the question on verisimilitude
discussed in the previous chapter50—in the apprensione humans can be deeply

touched and moved by these truths, and thereby be inclined to rediscover the
higher truths that lie hidden in their hearts.
As we have seen, Pallavicino reverts to the imitative arts to explain how an
object in the apprensione appeals to the beholder. The object does not appeal
because we think it is true but because it touches our affetto: if a representation
lacked verisimilitude we would not be touched. Pallavicino explains this with
examples taken from painting, poetry and theater, and proposes a different
assessment of the role of verisimilitude in the “poetic” or “historical” genres
of imitation. This assessment is continued throughout his oeuvre, where
Pallavicino shows how each genre defines its own res and how each res has
its own prerequisites with regard to liveliness and verisimilitude. Metaphor
or example may enliven a philosophical discourse to put the difficult subject
matter in front of the mind’s eye.51 History writing proves its authenticity by
its liveliness, because precision of detail convinces the reader that the author’s
account is probable.52 In these cases, errors against verisimilitude undermine
the argument. In theater, poetry or painting, however, lack of verisimilitude
does not affect the argument, for these arts do not claim to be true. It only
makes poetry or painting ineffective vehicles for seeing something that cannot
be grasped by judgment or discourse; poetry lacking in verisimilitude becomes
idle and frivolous. In other words, Pallavicino defines verisimilitude as an
epistemological function, not as a part of a poetics bent on establishing norms
for decorum. However, his reliance on examples gathered from the imitative
arts reveals the extent to which his approach is determined by the traditional
discussions on the effect and function of evidenza, a rhetorical notion with
strong epistemological connotations frequently used in artistic and literary
theory.53 It is this crossing of epistemological and art theoretical discourse that
allows Pallavicino to propose the arts that aim at attaining evidenza—“visual”
arts in the broadest sense of the word—as the best instruments to express
truths beyond the reach of the human intellect, precisely because artifacts that
appeal to the apprensione are never judged on their veracity. These arts steer
clear of the risks that a rational approach to the truths of faith imposes, risks
embodied by Zeno’s paradoxes and the responses they elicit. Poetry, painting
and theater escape these pitfalls because of their pre-rational appeal.
This conclusion can now be compared with the remarks made by Blunt
and Baldinucci. Blunt considered artifice as the final truth to be revealed by
the unmasking of a successful illusion. Blunt sees the “false” or “deception”
as a transitory illusion of veracity to be overcome by the cunning beholder.
According to Pallavicino on the other hand, deception is not considered
first as a reliable truth and then unmasked by insight in artifice. An artful
construction is always immediately recognized as artifice and therefore as
“untruth.” It does not need to be unmasked. What is required from readers
or beholders is to discover which fundamental truth of faith the untruth of
the artifice is pointing at. The obviousness of the artificial untruth allows
beholders to rediscover some fundamental truth, that is, if the artifice arouses
the affetto and incites them to carefully contemplate the representation.54 It
follows that their pleasure will be greater if they are offered a richer image.
But ultimately they will have to look into their own hearts. According to
Pallavicino then, examining the veracity of an illusionist painting is as futile as
trying to prove the truthfulness of Zeno’s paradoxes. In both cases the human
intellect, whether it is trained or not, recognizes immediately the fundamental
untrue nature of the object.
This view on artifice also opposes Pallavicino and Baldinucci. The same
artifice Pallavicino considers as an appealing coat for truths beyond the grasp
of humans is turned into a capacity that lifts art to the level of theology or
philosophy by Baldinucci.55 Moreover, for Pallavicino Baldinucci’s opposition
of Bernini’s ability to judge against the “unsolvable” arguments of Zeno is
futile. A painted dome, Zeno’s paradoxes and ultimately Bernini’s artifice are
only relevant to the degree that they render visible what can not be understood,
and thereby take up a place in the beholder’s individual history of salvation.
Only then does artifice become meaningful, only then can art make evident.
What distinguishes Pallavicino’s from Baldinucci’s position not only
depends on the diverging points of view of the religious scholar or the
biographer-connoisseur. If Pallavicino moves art to the realm of the untrue, it
is because he believes in the power of reason to explain and demonstrate all
but the highest form of truth. Baldinucci, on the other hand, is eager to cast
the cloak of mystery over artistic success, in order to assimilate it with other
realms of knowledge that (in his view) equally benefit from obscurity. The
ineffable, that which should speak for itself but cannot be explained, becomes
charged with meaning, and connects art with the realm of the divine. This
connection becomes all the more powerful when art becomes allied with that
peculiar and inherently obscure form of expression, prophecy.
Art’s Deceit and Prophetic Truth
If the essentially untrue character of works of art renders them prone to

leading the beholder towards the truths of faith beyond the grasp of reason,
Pallavicino does not accept the Neoplatonic assumptions about poetic
inspiration as conduits towards a higher understanding. This view is well
illustrated by Pallavicino’s characterization of furor mentioned at the outset
of this chapter.56 Poetry can never act as revelation by dint of its artistry.
As a result, when a poem pronounces itself on the papacy, the Church or
God by means of prophecy, it is equally untrue as a meditation on Christ’s
suffering. But are both kinds of poems of equal value? This question bears
upon an important historical phenomenon. In seventeenth-century Rome
there circulated many prophecies of often quite questionable content and thus
these were easily distinguished from sacred histories or pious exempla. Still,
these prophecies capitalized on a lingering sense that poetry in conjunction
with prophecy could conjure up something of the vates’ magic. As such, they
provoked a controversy that sheds additional light on Pallavicino’s position
and illustrates the contemporary relevance of his ideas.
In July 1667 Agostino Favoriti, an important member of the papal court,
wrote a rather sharp letter to an otherwise unidentified Monsignor de’Rossi.57
This de’Rossi had questioned Favoriti’s permission to publish a poem that
praised the election of pontiff Clement IX by incorporating a reference to the
so-called prophecy of St Malachy. The prophecy is a list of 112 Latin epithets
or mottoes that claim to identify every pontiff from Celestine II (1143–44) until
the Second Coming.58 It was first published only in 1595 as a long-lost work
of the Irish bishop Malachy (1094–1148) in Arnoldus Wion’s Lignum Vitae, a
genealogy of the Benedictine order. Favoriti’s letter does not name the poet
who, in 1667, employed this prophecy in his poetry and drew de’Rossi’s
ire, but it may well have been Michele Cappellari, whose poem celebrating
Rospigliosi’s election incorporated the appropriate epithet Sidus olorum, or
“Star of the swans.”59 Likewise, James Alban Gibbes, an English doctor who
lived in Rome and taught at the Sapienza, used the epithet as the starting
point for his Horatian ode in honor of the same event.60
Cappellari’s and Gibbes’ compositions were part of a more general trend.
By 1667 the prophecy had already been known for sixty years and been
mentioned in a range of texts.61 But only with the pontificate of Clement’s
predecessor, Alexander VII, did it appear frequently in panegyrics of the
papacy.62 Alexander VII was often celebrated with the appropriate epithet,
Custos montium, also on sensitive occasions and in a wide range of genres. In
1656, the chaplain of the Louvre used the epithet in an engraving commissioned
from Jean Lepautre, to cast his chapel as a monument for the impending peace
between France and Rome.63 If this exhortation proved far too optimistic,
it may have initiated the appropriation of the prophecy in French prints
pledging allegiance to the pope.64 Chantelou’s diary of Bernini’s French stay of
1665 attests that Alexander’s bad health provoked lively speculation amongst
Italians in Paris about the identity of the Sidus olorum that would succeed
the Chigi pope.65 In a different context, the Benedictine monk and preacher
Juan Ricci presented Alexander VII with a design of a column dedicated to
the Virgin to be erected in front of the Pantheon under the same motto, and
in many of his historical and Mariological publications the prophecy occurs
as well.66 The prophetic exaltation of Clement IX, too, was not limited to the
examples cited above. Several versions of a widely circulating sonnet pointed
out that Sidus oloris is an almost perfect anagram of Rospiliosus, Clement’s
family name.67 The triumphal arches erected for the possesso of Clement X
were adorned with his Malachian motto De flumine magno (Fig. 3.1).68
3.1 Giovanni Battista Falda, Triumphal arch erected on the Capitol for
the possesso of Clement X, designed by Carlo Rainaldi (ICCD). The prophecy
was inscribed on the central medallion as well as the two medallions
held aloft by the putti between the pairs of columns flanking the gate.
Moreover, the prophecy was not only known but also discussed within
the very intellectual and cultural core of mid-seventeenth-century Rome. The
authors who referred to the prophecy in Alexander’s and subsequent times—
James Alban Gibbes, Carlo Bovio and Michele Cappellari, amongst others—
belonged to the cultural elite of Roma Alessandrina, like Sforza Pallavicino. As
his letter demonstrates, Alessandro Favoriti, secretary of the Sacro Collegio
under Alexander VII, at least once explicitly spoke out in favor of the
prophecy’s legitimacy.69
If the comparison of Baldinucci’s and Pallavicino’s attitude towards the
paradoxes of Zeno illustrated the position of mimetic art with regard to the
higher truths of faith, Favoriti’s discussion of Malachian prophecy and its role
in papal imagery will position these higher truths with regard to prophetic
imagery. As in the construction of the artist’s persona, different authors
defend divergent views on the matter, and Pallavicino’s poetics will emerge
as a subtle attempt to mend fences between those who reduce poetry to an
encomiastic game and those who defend its revelatory capacities.
Pallavicino pronounced himself only briefly (but strikingly) on prophecies,
but his ideas on mimetic art and artistic expression are germane to the dispute
between Favoriti and de’Rossi. The letter and the prophecy’s circulation
indicate that the problem of the prophecy’s legitimacy is framed in terms of
contemporary poetics: Favoriti relegates the prophecy to the realm of poetic
invention. Yet by its very nature the prophecy of Malachy still incorporated
visionary claims.70 At the same time, the authenticity and truthfulness of
the epithets were the subject of an increasingly intense debate.71 Thus, the
discussion of the prophecy’s appropriateness connects with the two central
issues of Pallavicino’s poetics: the visionary capacities of poetry and the role
of historical truth and verisimilitude in poetic invention.
Prophecy as Poetry
In the letter defending his permission to publish the vexed poem, Favoriti
argued that poets could write things that “would be scandalous in the mouth
of others.” This was true especially for this prophecy, he continued, because
it was well known and was allowed to circulate in Rome in other publications
as well. Moreover, Favoriti pointed out, whereas the early Church Fathers
distrusted the sibylline prophecies, over time these oracles had become
“embraced,” as for instance in Christian commentaries on Virgil’s fourth
eclogue. How then, he asked, could one object to poets playfully using
a prophecy attributed to a holy man like Malachy to corroborate the older
predictions of “women of uncertain reputation”?72
Central to Favoriti’s defense are not the doctrinal or legal arguments that
had been developed in the course of the sixteenth century to condemn or
condone apocryphal prophecy, but notions of poetic license and decorum.73

Favoriti argues that poets are allowed to spice their writings with the
prophecy because it is a figment of the imagination appealing to a wide and
not necessarily discerning audience. In other words, prophecy belongs to the
realm of poetic truth, unmasked as false by the learned but causing wonder
and amazement in the ignorant. Favoriti thus develops his defense of the
unnamed poet from a traditional and well-honed sociological perspective on
truthfulness and verisimilitude, quite similar to Baldinucci’s assessment of
artistic judgment or Ottonelli’s views on theater: the semblance of truth—in
this case, the accuracy of an apocryphal prediction—is believed only by those
unequipped to decode the artifice of the illusion, in this case the appropriation
of a pithy expression, a topos, that happens to be relevant.
Moreover, the deception of the public leaves room for a phenomenon that
could be termed the “prophetic effect.” In his letter, Favoriti sees no harm in
circulating a prophecy that confirms the outcome of a papal election after the
fact.74 If a fictional prediction happens to turn out to be accurate, it can actually
be put to beneficial use. Favoriti points out that over time the allegorical
interpretations of the sibylline prophecies and the fourth eclogue, too, have
proven their worth. If, by chance, apocryphal prophecy appears to confirm
certain facts, Favoriti suggests, it can lend a sheen of supernatural, higher
truthfulness to certain decisions or events, at least to the eyes and minds of
the uninformed masses.
Favoriti certainly believed that a prophecy like Malachy’s was false, and that
its coincidence with historical events or history in general is therefore purely
accidental. Yet rather than weakening the effect of the prophecy, Favoriti
implies that coincidence reinforces it. This chance correspondence generates the
effect of seemingly laying bare a deep and indeed providential truth. Together
with his assertion that the prophecy is a legitimate source for poetic invention,
his willingness to embrace the rhetorical effect of chance correspondences
points towards a body of theory that concerned itself with the discovery and
exploitation of exactly these fortuitous occurrences, the theories of the concetto, “a
marvelous thought seized in a pithy expression.”75 The association of prophecy
and the concetto becomes even stronger when one realizes that prophecies like
Malachy’s were incorporated into pageantry and poetry by means of emblems,
imprese or anagrams, all forms of expressions that exploit chance to suggest an
unexpected correspondence between words, things or ideas. These forms of
expression, too, are described and theorized as particular genres of concetti.
Poetry as Prophecy
Before turning to the literary theory of the concetto, it is worth recalling how
important the distinction between art and chance is to Pallavicino’s view
of art. Chance and art are categorically different causes in the creation of
objects, but Pallavicino recognizes that they can accidentally produce the
same result.76 Like his contemporaries, whose work will be discussed below,
Pallavicino argued that these unexpected congruences could be turned into
an advantage, especially in composing concetti. Yet, as could be expected,
Pallavicino firmly limits the field of action of these concetti; harnessing
chance is a poetic technique, nothing more.
The question of how the occasional congruence between art and chance
can be made productive arises in the chapter of the Trattato dello stile that
deals with equivocation and its purpose in the creation of concetti. Pallavicino
argues that any language contains so many equivocations as to render their
literary application obnoxious.77 Yet he also recognizes, with Aristotle, the
particular pleasure when “chance, in a way, has achieved in a certain matter
the same as art or diligence,” as for instance in the “image made by chance,”
when a particular likeness emerges from the surface of a precious stone.78
The joy that comes with discovering chance correspondences, Pallavicino
writes, is the only reason why compositions like anagrams are appreciated.79
In order to define when it is appropriate to employ equivocation in
composing concetti, Pallavicino quite strikingly proposes the prophetic effect
as the final criterion. Concetti of equivocation are acceptable to Pallavicino—
that is, will be enjoyable—only if one can “reasonably believe” that the
equivocation finds its root in some “hidden divine mystery.”80 By way
of example Pallavicino references a Greek paraphrase of Psalm 50, verse
20, “Benigne fac Domine in bona voluntate tua Sion et aedificentur muri
Hierusalem” [“In your good pleasure make Zion prosper; build up the walls
of Jerusalem”]. In Greek, “bona voluntate” becomes “Eudocia,” the name of
the empress in whose honor the paraphrase was made, and who would later
actually rebuild Jerusalem, as suggested—or prophesized—by the same
verse stating “that the walls of Jerusalem may be built up.” As a result, this
equivocation adds to the pleasurable discovery of a coincidence the frisson
of seemingly seeing chance, art and providence cooperate.
Against the background of Pallavicino’s theories that we have examined
so far, it seems fair to suppose that this “reasonable belief” in the “divine
mystery” enclosed in the equivocation carries little weight nor offers actual
insight into the mystery enunciated in the expression. That readers, listeners
or viewers, especially if they are part of the populace, derive pleasure from
these wittily exploited coincidences does not mean that equivocation is
capable of proof. Pallavicino puts this kind of concetti squarely into the
category of “the marvelous derived from falsehood, in order to make
concetti,” and more specifically into the class of paralogisms.81 They amuse
the reader or alleviate an otherwise arid argument. The prophetic effect
marks certain equivocations as more appropriate amongst the multitude
of possible inventions, even if such concetti contribute nothing essential to
an argument. Rather, if used inappropriately, they stand in an argument’s

way, just like sentenze, pithy expressions aiming to offer kernels of truth.
While the first dazzle the ignorant and the second address the sharpest
intellects, the revelatory pretensions of both forms of expression run the risk
of obscuring an author’s point and diverting attention from what is really
important.82
Nonetheless, Pallavicino here cautiously treads the terrain claimed much
more boldly in other theories of the concetto. Far from offering a complete
overview of these theories and their views on the prophetic concetto,83 I
will focus on Emanuele Tesauro’s treatise on metaphorical language, the
Cannocchiale aristotelico, written from the 1630s onwards, first published in
1654 and reworked by its author until the editio princeps of 1670.84 Tesauro deals
with the “prophetic effect” in the chapter on “metaphors of equivocation,”
where he defined the true or “fatal” anagram. In a “fatal” anagram all the
letters of the original reassemble into a new word that unveils something
about the original so as to generate a concetto. Thus “the human ingegno
retrieves a non so chè of the divine.”85 When such a “fatal” anagram can be
deduced from a proper name “all the more emerges that argutezza poetica
(poetic witticism), which seems to the populace a mysterious fatality.”86
Nonetheless, Tesauro immediately gives a number of such anagrams that
got it quite wrong, such as “GUSTAVVS–AVGVSTVS” (proposed not long
before the Swedish King perished in battle), to prove that these “prophecies”
are merely “poetry.”87
For Tesauro the prophetic effect is just one form of poetic meraviglia aimed
at the ignorant masses. This view seems to support Favoriti’s: adopted
cunningly, expressions experienced as “prophetic” cause amazement and
wonder in the populace. Both Favoriti and Tesauro recognize that this
amazement could help the public to accept and believe propagandistic or
self-promoting messages, since such expressions appear to unveil some
deeper truth apparently intimately connected to the providential course of
history.88 Yet while Favoriti and Tesauro both recognize the same beneficial
side effect of poetic invention, they also talk about two different aspects of
poetic language. Favoriti discusses a prophetic text that may or may not
be subjected to ingenious metaphorical operations like the anagram; much
poetry—such as Gibbes’ or Cappellari’s—does not use anagrams nor rely
heavily on concetti. Tesauro, on the other hand, aims to define a category
of exactly such concetti: he groups the anagram under metaphors or concetti
based on equivocation. But whereas Tesauro quotes anagrams and other
equivocations derived from prophetic sources, such as a numeric anagram
to prove that Luther’s name contains the number of the Beast prophesized in
Revelation, he certainly does not confine himself to this category of texts.89
Equivocation can be applied on all kinds of texts and in different contexts,
prophetic or not.
The Source of the Prophetic Effect
In Tesauro, the kind of ingenious artifice that produces the prophetic effect
lies at the heart of poetics, crowning a wide range of expressions with a
revelatory aura grouped under the umbrella of “divine metaphor.” On the
basis of the Cannocchiale aristotelico, the exact nature or “divinity” of this
revelatory aura is quite hard to define. In his description of the “efficient
causes” of argutezza, a word that means at once “wit” and “witty expression,”
Tesauro portrays God as the foremost model of the ingenious poet, who
expresses himself in “Imprese heroiche, & simboli figurati.” He is the source
of all that is ingenious in the world and creates a universe of “arguti & figurati
concetti”; every creature or creation potentially becomes an oracle.90 As a
consequence, human argutezze aimed at unveiling the divine word, most
notably “concetti predicabili,” “a witticism lightly touched by the Divine
ingegno,” interact with this divine form of communication, establishing an
analogy between the human and divine ingegno.91 Since Tesauro casts the
net of ingenious language extremely wide, the line between apocryphal and
non-apocryphal sources for divine revelation appears to be rather thin, as
when Virgil’s fourth eclogue is woven into the myth of Astraea and Christ’s
nativity.92
If the exact divinity attributed to argutezza remains unclear, it has a well-
defined source. At the center of Tesauro’s conception of argutezza stands
the innate capacity to discover unseen or obscure similarities in seemingly
different things. Already Aristotle wrote in his Poetics that “[the poet’s]
greatest asset is a capacity for metaphor,” which “cannot be acquired from
another, and is a sign of natural gifts: because to use metaphor well is to
discern similarities.”93 Aristotle called this innate capacity “eufuia,” which in
sixteenth-century commentaries became identified with ingegno. As Ernesto
Grassi has shown, the defining feature of the ingegno was its capacity to
unveil hidden truths by uncovering previously undetected similarities
between different or even opposed words, images, thoughts or objects.94
This idea can be traced back to antiquity, where authors like Ovid define the
ingenium by comparing it to oracles and prophecy.95 Juan de Huarte’s Examen
de ingenios para las sciencias, first published in 1575, states that the ingegno is
the faculty that sees primary relations between disjoined phenomena.96 By
the end of the sixteenth century, Aristotle’s suggestion that metaphors are
the product of ingegno had become extended to the idea that metaphorical
language is a way to greater knowledge.97
According to Tesauro, argutezza, the pinnacle of ingenious language,
is based essentially on antithesis or contrapposto; it derives from taking
together fundamentally different words, objects or ideas.98 This conjunction
transcends the media of text and image, and different genres of text and
speech; arguzie produce visuality.99 This speaking visibly encompasses a
wide range of forms such as the impresa, which Tesauro calls an argutia heroica,
or the concetto predicabile. The “most abstruse and secret, yet miraculous
and fruitful aspect of the human ingegno,” however, is produced when two
almost incompatible concetti become joined to produce an enigma. In the
enigma, the balance between revelation and obfuscation, characteristic of all
metaphorical language, shifts towards obscurity.100
Tesauro transforms the accepted notion that metaphor and especially
antithesis retain always a hint of obscurity into metaphor’s defining feature.
That metaphor is deeply familiar with obscure or enigmatic language was
recognized already by Aristotle, who wrote in his Rhetoric that “generally
speaking, clever enigmas furnish good metaphors; for metaphor is a kind
of enigma” (II.2, 1405b12–13) and suggested that “clever riddles” produce
pleasure because they mislead the hearer, “for something is learnt, and the
expression is also metaphorical” (III.11, 1412a6). Tesauro develops these
suggestions further by all but identifying antithesis with the enigma.
Still, in Tesauro’s view too, the obscure expression is founded in a sound
argument. And because antithesis requires ingegno, that particular and
highly individual form of insight, it does not simply reveal unexpected
relationships, but also both the writer’s capacity to uncover and seize
similarities and the reader’s ability to unveil the discovery. As a consequence,
only those who share this exceptional capacity recognize the truth espoused
or demonstrated by witty antithesis. The invention of antithesis lays bare
relations that are true and real, yet not self-evident or obvious. These
relations can be explained or described, but only gain their full significance
when expressed in a witty, sharp form. Argutezza, through antithesis, thus
offers a singular perspective on the world and produces a particular kind
of truth.101 According to Tesauro, argutezza “… playfully imitates truth,
without oppressing it; and it imitates falseness in such a guise that truth
transpires from it as through a veil” [“… scherzevolmente imita la verità,
ma non l’opprime: & imita la falsità in guisa, che il vero vi traspaia come per
un velo …”].102
The Prophetic Effect and Historical Truth
As the circumspect admission of equivocation’s capacity to hint at “divine

mystery” suggests, Pallavicino certainly knew poetry’s traditional claims on
the visionary. As we have seen, Pallavicino’s larger body of work develops
a poetics where these claims are converted into a notion of art providing
access to higher truths while being emptied of any discursive truth-value.
This view of poetry extends to the concetto, which may form part of poetic
“untruth.” Still, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, just like any other
literary ornament the concetto can play a different role as well, as a means
to assist reasoning. Because it lays bare the marvelous correspondence

between a known and an initially unknown truth, it pleases the intellect.
The unexpected demonstration of a certain truth provides an even greater
pleasure, derived from discovering and superseding one’s own ignorance.
As such, the concetto is highly useful in historical or even philosophical and
theological writings.103 In other words, the ingenious concetto is a legitimate
form of revelation to the extent that it contributes to the literary expression
of a given idea or res, as an embellishment that helps the human intellect to
grasp otherwise difficult and obscure notions or arguments.
Tesauro’s view on argutezze implies a different valuation of ingenious
language. Like Pallavicino, Tesauro considers antithesis, the taking together
of seemingly unrelated or even opposed things, not only as a form of
expression but also thought. These twofold conjunctions generate true
witticisms. Contrary to Pallavicino, however, Tesauro situates metaphor at
the very foundation of language and thought. Truth itself is metaphorical in
nature, and the whole of Creation and human action is an ever-expanding
production of metaphors. This logic extends to prophecy and invites always
new conflations of prophetic revelations and obscure forms of expression.
This is what happens in anagrams of Malachy’s prophecy. When the playful
equivocation of name and epithet confirms a fictional prediction, as in
ROSPILIOSVS–SIDVS OLORIS, form and meaning point towards the same
truth. Language and history together appear to vindicate the prophecy;
pure chance boldly assumes the cloak of divine providence.104
Tesauro’s contemporaries deemed his stretching of metaphoricity far
from innocent. Sforza Pallavicino criticized Tesauro’s poetics implicitly but
quite severely.105 But the consequences of Tesauro’s conflation of prophetic
res and verba are addressed in a treatise on enigmatic images, La philosophie
des images énigmatiques (1694), written by the French Jesuit Claude François
Ménestrier. His clear distinction between enigmatic ideas and enigmatic
style takes Pallavicino’s position to its logical conclusion.106 In his thorough
discussion of the prophecy of Malachy, the first of its kind, Ménestrier treats
it as an enigma on a par with forms of expressions such as the anagram,
the chronogram or the hieroglyph.107 In Ménestrier’s view, the Malachian
prophecy is similar to any other apocryphal revelation, a poetic trick, not
the carrier of a true or untrue idea. Ménestrier distinguishes this kind of
“revelation” sharply from the intrinsically enigmatic truths of religion, the
paradigm of the enigma enunciated in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians:
“Videmus per speculum in aenigmate” (“We now see as through a mirror
darkly”) (1 Cor. 13:12).
The point of La philosophie is that these two kinds of enigmas should
never be confused, as when apocryphal texts claim to be true prophecies
by assuming the literary guise of enigma.108 Ménestrier explicitly attacks
the prophecy of Malachy as such a “suspect” enigma precisely because its
defenders invoke its obscurity to argue that it contains a higher truth.109

Conversely, Ménestrier repeatedly stresses that clear and univocal language
should be adopted when dealing with divine mysteries, as these are difficult
enough to grasp even in their simplest form. In essence, Ménestrier’s position
rebuts the tradition that assigns enigmatic and obscure but also allegorical
or symbolical forms the capacity to open a window, or rather a dark mirror,
onto a world that remains hidden when only clear and univocal forms of
expression are used.110 In so doing, he presents a powerful case against the
prophetic effect. In Ménestrier’s view, it blurs the line between apocryphal
texts, different kinds of play with images or words (governed by the witty
exploration of chance) and true revelation.
Ménestrier was motivated to apply his theory of the enigmatic image to
an interpretation of the Malachian prophecy and other forms of divination
by Lodovico Castelvetro’s Poetica d’Aristotile vulgarizzata e sposta. Castelvetro
dealt with the enigma rather in detail, and concluded by wondering why
Aristotle’s Poetics (1458a23–30) did not mention when enigmatic or obscure
language could be used properly. In Castelvetro’s view, enigmatic language
might be in order for, amongst others, prophecies or “doctrines of divine
secrets or the sciences or the arts.” This statement is the target of Ménestrier’s
Philosophie.111
Castelvetro appeared in the previous chapter as the theoretician who,
in Pallavicino’s opinion, erroneously stated that poetry should be rooted
in history so as to guarantee its verisimilitude.112 Ménestrier’s criticism of
Castelvetro forms a pendant to that point. In Castelvetro the poetic and the
prophetic are two stylistic registers particularly fit for the embellishment
of particular kinds of truth, history in the first case, “divine secrets” in the
second. In the view of his critics, such strict correspondence between content
and style, or res and verba, is prone to undesired conflations. Ménestrier sees
as little benefit in wedding enigmatic form to revelation as Pallavicino in tying
poetry to historical truth. In both cases the promise will entail the expectation
that particular literary forms encapsulate specific truths. This will lead to false
claims on truthfulness as well as an undesired subservience of all poetry,
including the enigma. Pallavicino is convinced that unlike historiography,
poetry has nothing to prove; it is defined by its untrue nature. On the other
hand, he believes that rational argument can never be concerned with the
higher truths proper to true prophecy and revelation. Those truths are the
province of poetry, and by extension the imitative arts of theater, painting
and sculpture. This is not, as we have seen, because these art forms share
in the mystery of revelation, but because they provide unreal windows onto
a higher realm of reality. This higher realm is, according to Ménestrier, the
province of real enigmas far beyond the scope of literary invention.
The topic of literary invention brings us back to Agostino Favoriti’s
answer to Monsignor de’Rossi. Favoriti invoked decorum to condone
a poem incorporating Malachy’s prophecy. Such poetry thrives on the

pleasant illusion that chance sometimes operates like art, diligence, history
or even divine providence itself. As has become clear, Favoriti’s letter reflects
a contemporary tendency to discuss prophecy in terms of poetics. Contrary
to his colleagues, he does so quite lightheartedly. To Favoriti, apocryphal
prophecy is permitted because it is mere poetry. In Pallavicino’s view, the
true office of poetry is to point towards those higher truths that apocryphal
prophecy unrightfully claims as its own. The prophetic effect is pleasurable
enough to enhance certain stylistic ornaments, as in equivocations hinting
at “divine mystery,” but far too fragile or even futile to touch that particular
kernel of affective knowledge that any beholder carries in their own heart.
Favoriti’s letter also illustrates that prophecy lifts poetry into the public
sphere. The papal secretary was quite willing to let this illusion play its
beneficial role with the populace. After all, these poetic inventions formed
part of the literary and visual apparatus of papal self-representation.
Prophetic imagery concerns the public persona of the pope, because
it tests and predicts the alliance of an individual to civic and religious
office. The debate about its legitimacy thus touches upon the role of art in
the representation of the Roman pontiff. To Pallavicino, the mimetic arts
contribute to the dissemination and communication of the truths of faith
despite their dissociation from the revelation of history. The question then
arises what poetry and mimetic art in general may contribute to the public
persona of the pontiff, and the propagation of the Church and Catholicism.
Notes
1. Sforza Pallavicino, Del Bene Libri Quattro del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino, bk III, chs 55–6, in Opere del
Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino (Milan, 1834), vol. 2, pp. 488–90.
2. Sforza Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile e del dialogo del padre Sforza Pallavicino (1st edn Rome, 1662)
(Reggio Emilia, 1824) (photographic reprint, Modena, 1994), ch. 33, pp. 227–8: “… si parimenti
l’imitazione usata dal Dipintore dee ben figurare un volto simile al vero, mà non un volto che sia
riputato per vero. Che che dicano talora i Poeti nelle loro arguzie, con attribuire à un pennello per
lode ciò che non solo è impossibile à farsi, mà che fatto gli sarebbe di biasimo: benchè presso alla
moltitudine sia l’estremo degli encomij; il che basta alla Poesia. Dissi, che ciò fatto gli sarebbe di
biasimo: imperòcche se fingiamo che il volto dipinto fosse tenuto sempre e da tutti per vero, non
pur l’artefice rimarrebbe sconosciuto e però inlaudabile nel suo lavoro, mà non conseguirebbe il
pro e’l fine primiero ch’hebbe nel suo nascimento quell’arte il qual fù di giovare con render come
presenti alla fantasia per opera de’veduti colori gli oggetti lontani ò di tempo ò di luogo; e non di
nuocere, facendo che per un durevole errore sia creduto presente chi è morto ò distante.”
3. Ibid., ch. 30, pp. 211–12: “… rassomigliare quella maniera di favella, che il popolo si figura in chi
fosse preso da furor sopraumano, quali fingono sè i Poeti. … [E] tal favella … si riputava dal volgo
per simile ad un parlare ispirato dagli Dei.”
4. Ibid., ch. 17, p. 106; Ezio Raimondi, Trattatisti e narratori del Seicento (Milan and Naples, 1960), p.
203, n. 1, shows how Pallavicino manipulated the line to support his argument. See also Elena
Mazzocchi, “La riflessione secentesca su retorica e morale,” Studi secenteschi, 38 (1997), p. 36.
5. Giulio Carlo Argan, “La ‘rettorica’ e l’arte barocca,” in Enrico Castelli (ed.), Atti del III Congresso
internazionale di Studi Umanistici: Retorica e barocco (Rome, 1955); and Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue,
“Aristotelismo e barocco,” in ibid., pp. 33–46, 119–95.
6. Anthony Blunt, “Gianlorenzo Bernini: Illusionism and Mysticism,” Art History, 1 (1978), p. 67.
7. Ibid., p. 70, taken from Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 17, p. 105: “Anzi ove la falsità è ben
coperta dalla sembianza del vero, più essi convengono al Poeta, che se pura verità contenessero;
poichè sono più suoi, come prodotti col suo ingegno, e non accattati dalla natura dell’oggetto.
E generalmente ogni professor d’arte imitatrice tanto è più lodevole, quanto più inganna;
avvegnachè quell’inganno stesso poi conosciuto, generando nuova ammirazione, divien maestro
di verità” (Blunt’s translation).
8. Blunt, “Gianlorenzo Bernini,” p. 70.
9. Rudolf Kuhn, “Gian Lorenzo Bernini und Ignatius van Loyola,” in Martin Gosebruch and Lorenz
Dittman (eds), Argo. Festschrift für Kurt Badt (Cologne, 1977), p. 318.
10. Blunt, “Gianlorenzo Bernini,” p. 71.
11. Ibid., p. 79.
12. Filippo Baldinucci, Vita del cavaliere Gio. Lorenzo Bernini scultore, architetto, e pittore (1st edn Florence,
1682), ed. Sergio Samek Ludovici (Milan, 1948), pp. 141–2.
13. Domenico Bernini, Vita del Cavalier Gio. Lorenzo Bernino descritta da Domenico Bernino suo figlio (1st
edn Rome, 1713) (photographic reprint, Perugia, 1999), p. 31: “Ciò successe una volta, che pregato
da un Cardinale, acciò dichiarasse il suo sentimento di quel, che gli paresse di una Cuppola
fatta dipingere ad un Professore suo dependente, che per altro poco bene si era diportato, con
repugnanza uguale di dire, e di tacere il vero, quanto sol tre volte con energia replicò, che l’Opera
parlava da se. Il Cardinale come affezzionato all’Artefice, applicò facilmente il detto del Bernino a
lode di quello, nel medesimo tempo, che molti Professori, che si ritrovarono presenti, guardandosi
l’un l’altro, si ridevano tacitamente del fatto. Et interrogato poscia da un suo Discepolo, perche
non biasimasse l’opere cattive, anzi le belle, rispose, Non doversi biasimare le Opere mal fatte, che da
se medesime si vituperano, mà le Opere belle nelle parti biasemivoli, perche col biasimare qualche parte, si
veniva a lodare il tutto, col fondamento, Che il perfetto si cerca col riflettere alle mancanze, che hà il buono.
Tuttavia per dar gran lode a una cosa, non bastava, ch’ella havesse pochi errori, ma che havesse in se molti
pregi.”
14. Aristotle, The Physics, bk 6, 9, 239b5–240a18, ed. Loeb Classical Library (1st edn 1935), trans. Philip.
H. Wickweed and Francis M. Cornford (Cambridge MA, 1957), vol. 2, pp. 181–91.
15. A historical overview of the transmission and the treatment of Zeno’s paradoxes on motion is
given by Florian Cajori, “The History of Zeno’s Arguments on Motion,” American Mathematical
Monthly, 22 (1915): 38–47, 77–82 and 109–15, for the period considered here. Whereas Cajori
addresses Galileo’s assumptions on the infinite, he does not deal with the Jesuits’ efforts on the
matter. A wealth of material is provided by Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical
of Mr. Peter Bayle (1st English edn London, 1734–38) (London, 1997), pp. 605–19. For a general
bibliography on Zeno, see Pauly Real-Encyclopaedie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Neue Bearb.,
ed. Georg Wissowa (Stuttgart, 1894–1972), vol. 19, c. 53–83.
16. On this function of paradox, see Rosie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica. The Renaissance Tradition of
Paradox (Princeton, 1966), pp. 3–40.
17. Baldinucci, Vita, p. 142: “… e pure il filosofo Zenone fece tali argomenti per provare, che e’non si
desse, che non son mai stati sciolti finora.”
18. See Chapters 2 and 5.
19. On Baldinucci and the Arte della Perfezion Cristiana, see Tomaso Montanari, “Gian Lorenzo Bernini
e Sforza Pallavicino,” Prospettiva, 87/88 (1997), p. 57. Baldinucci’s rejection of the Plinian anecdote
on how Zeuxis chose the most beautiful parts of different women to portray Venus (Baldinucci,
Vita, pp. 143–4) is possibly also derived from the Arte della Perfezion Cristiana; see Montanari, “Gian
Lorenzo Bernini e Sforza Pallavicino,” p. 62.
20. Sforza Pallavicino, Arte della Perfezion Cristiana, bk I, ch. 13, in Opere del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino
(Milan, 1834), vol. 2, p. 658a: “Qual elezione d’argomenti debba usarsì perchè l’intelletto abbia
salda credenza e sublime estimazione de’premj eterni.”
21. Ibid., p. 659a: “L’uno [dei due errori [nel confrontar … la credenza dei fedeli]] è il mettersi a
sciorre distintamente e per opera tutte l’obbiezioni contra gli articoli di nostra fede. Ogni verità,
quantunque certissima, può esser combattuta da impugnazioni sottili e nodose, da cui a stento
valentissimi dottori sappiano disvilupparsi. Qual vero più indubitabile, che il muoversi i corpi da
luogo a luogo? E pur Zenone vi argomentò in contrario sì possentemente, che un Aristotile non si
recò a vergogna il mostrarvisi intrigato. … Altro è dunque l’assicurarsi d’un vero, altro è il saper
esplicare ove sia posta la falsità e l’inganno di que’sofismi che a tal vero si fanno incontro.”
22. See also the definition of paradox in John A. Faris, The Paradoxes of Zeno (Aldershot, 1996), p. 1, as
“a seemingly absurd statement that is supported by some sort of argument. But the term may also
be applied to the argument that leads to the seemingly absurd conclusion.”
23. Pallavicino, Arte, bk I, ch. 13, p. 658a: “C’insegna la stessa fede, ch’ella è dono di Dio: e che
spunta nel cuor nostro non alla persuasiva favella dell’umana sapienza, ma solo all’interior voce
dell’omnipotente; il qual parla e fa udirsi in que’ripostigli dell’anima ove non penetra il suono
d’altra loquela. Ma similmente è vero, che la nostra fede è libera: altrimente non saria meritoria;
e che a tal fine Iddio non vuole ch’ella sia necessitata da evidenza. Onde l’intelletto crede
perchè la volontà gl’impone ch’ei creda: e per sè stesso non può farlo senza la spinta di questo
comandamento, per cui abbracci una verità oscura con tal fermezza come s’ella gli fosse aperta;
ma la volontà scambievolmente non può muoversi a comandargli ciò senza riceverne primo
dello stesso intelletto l’eccitamento in virtù delle ragioni quali dimostrono a lui per chiaro, che
tal credenza sia saggia, onesta, e dovuta alla condizion dell’obbietto, e giovevole al credente.”
On Jesuit views of the role of the senses and the image in conversion, see Ralph Dekoninck, Ad
imaginem. Statuts, fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du XVIIe siècle
(Geneva, 2005), pp. 101–28.
24. Sforza Pallavicino, Trattato del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino sulla Provvidenza, bk I, ch. 3, in Ottavio
Gigli (ed.), Opere edite e inedite del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino (4 vols, Rome, 1844), vol. 1, p. 56.
25. Pallavicino, Arte, bk I, ch. 3, p. 645b: “Si dee sapere, che nell’uomo, oltre all’intelletto, il quale
giudica e discorre delle cose, e rimane immortale dopo la morte, è un altra potenza, la qual
con greco vocabolo si chiama fantasia, e più volgarmente immaginativa ò immaginazione; e ci
rappresenta gli oggetti eziandio spirituali sotto immagini corporali; siccome essa è corporale, e
non vive più lungamente del corpo.”
26. Ibid., ch. 4, p. 647b: “Ma tantosto che’l senso cessa d’avvalorar con la sua rappresentazione
l’obbietto, ne rimane alla fantasia un simulacro sì smontato e discolorato, che sembra quasi il
cadavero di quell’altro dianzi sì robusto e sì vivace. Allo stesso modo nelle azioni rappresentate,
finchè il recitante piagne le finte sue sciagure sul palco, il teatro s’avvisa per poco ch’elle non sian
ritratti, ma originali; ed accompagna le altrui simulate lagrime con le sue vere; ma calata la tenda
repente si discerne la falsità, e s’estingue la compassione.”
27. Ibid., ch. 3, p. 646a: “Così una medesima ragione vera, posta davanti all’intelletto dalla fantasia con
certa sembianza confusa, tenue e sparuta, nol muove più di quel che faccia l’effigie d’un bellissimo
volto, rappresentata mortamente nella sua ombra; laddove quella stessa ragione colorita dalla
fantasia in una immagine distinta, gagliarda e vivace, quali soglion esser quelle di Michel Agnolo,
rapisce l’intelletto all’approvazione e all’estimazione.”
28. Ibid., ch. 3, p. 646a; see also Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk III, ch. 50, p. 528a.
29. Pallavicino, Arte, bk I, ch. 11, pp. 655b–656b. Pallavicino compares the two faculties with lutes
tuned in harmony (ch. 12, p. 656b). For precedents of the close alliance between fantasia and
intelletto and the purifying power of that alliance, see David Summers, Michelangelo and the
Language of Art (Princeton, 1981), pp. 109–16; and idem, The Judgment of Sense (Cambridge and
New York, 1987), pp. 117–24, which stresses the personal aspect of this symbiosis.
30. Pallavicino, Arte, bk I, ch. 3, pp. 645–646b.
31. Ibid., ch. 4, p. 647a–b.
32. Ibid., ch. 13, pp. 658a–659b.
33. The role of the imagination in philosophical practice is discussed in Pallavicino, Trattato sulla
Provvidenza, bk I, ch. 5, pp. 62–4.
34. Sforza Pallavicino, Storia del Concilio di Trento del cardinale Sforza Pallavicino, bk 7, ch. 14, in Opere del
Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino (Milan, 1834), vol. 1, p. 348. This chapter is an ardent rebuttal of Paolo
Soave’s attack on scholastic theology.
35. Ibid., p. 349: “Non pongono essi [gli scolastici] in dubbio se ci è Dio, di che stoltamente gli nota
il Soave; il pongono in discorso bensì, com’è necessario porre tutte quelle proposizioni che non
hanno evidenza per sè medesime, e secondo la congiunzione de’proprj termini, quale ha per
esempio questa: ogni tutto è maggior della parte. Anzi pur è giovevole il porre in discorso alcune
di tale eziandio, non a fine di provarle, ma di farne ben apparir la chiarezza e di rispondere agli
argomenti contrarj. E così Aristotile nella metafisica fu costretto a disputar in confermazione del
più evidente principio che abbia l’intelletto, cioè di quello: non può la medesima cosa insieme essere
e non essere, negato da qualche antico filosofante. E nella fisica gli convenne disputar a lungo
sopra la più manifestà verità che si scorga col senso, cioè, che si faccia il movimento locale, per
disciogliere i sofismi contrarj assai difficili di Zenone.” On the paradox of the squaring of the
circle, see Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, pp. 319–21.
36. Pallavicino, Storia del Concilio, bk 7, ch. 14, vol. 1, p. 349. On Pallavicino’s defense of philosophical
methods in theology, see also Jean Armogathe, “Aux origines modernes de la philosophie du
sujet,” in Cesare Mozzarelli and Danilo Zardin (eds), I tempi del Concilio. Religione, cultura e società
nell’Europa tridentina (Rome, 1997), pp. 271–81.
37. Pallavicino, Storia del Concilio, bk 7, ch. 14, vol. 1, p. 348.
38. Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 6, p. 48: “Le sentenze altro in effetto non sono che alcune verità
a cui l’intelletto senza spinta d’altra provazione acconsente subito che gli sono proposte.” My
definition of the sentence is taken from Gerard LeCoat, The Rhetoric of Arts, 1550–1650 (Bern, 1975),
pp. 48–51.
39. Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 6, pp. 48–50.
40. See also Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk II, ch. 7, p. 447b: “Proposizioni evidenti ed indemostrabili
sono quelle che, sol pronunziate, per simpatia di natura tirano a sè l’intelletto e portano il
testimonio della lor verità scolpito nel volto.” See also ibid., ch. 24, p. 460a: “… negli oggetti
dell’intelletto una proposizione si fa evidente per l’altra e così per lunga serie; ma finalmente
perviensi ad alcune proposizioni evidenti per sè medesime e quasi fiaccole accese dalla natura
per illuminazione dell’altre proposizioni oscure.” See also idem, Arte, bk I, ch. 15, p. 663a–b; idem,
Trattato sulla Provvidenza, bk I, ch. 3, p. 54; and Sven Knebel, “Die früheste Axiomatisierung des
Induktionsprincip: Pietro Sforza Pallavicino,” Salzburger Jahrbuch für Philosophie, 41 (1996), pp.
106–23.
41. Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk II, ch. 24, p. 460a: “Evidenza è una tale apparenza che non lascia mai
dubitar l’intelletto della sua verità.”
42. See the quotation above, n. 27. On the intricate link between knowing process, persuasion and
the definition of stylistic means in Pallavicino, see Eraldo Bellini, “Scrittura letteraria e scrittura
filosofica in Sforza Pallavicino,” in Carlo Scarpati and Eraldo Bellini, Il vero e il falso dei poeti. Tasso,
Tesauro, Pallavicino, Muratori (Milan, 1990), pp. 173–5 and 185–9; idem, “Linguistica Barberinae.
Lingua e linguaggio nel Trattato dello stile e del dialogo di Sforza Pallavicino,” Studi secenteschi, 35
(1994): 57–104; Giovanni Baffetti, Retorica e scienza. Cultura gesuitica e Seicento italiano (Bologna,
1997), pp. 73–116; Samuele Giombi, “Retorica sacra in età Tridentina. Un capitolo per la storia dei
debattiti sull’imitazione e il ciceronianismo nel Cinquecento religioso italiano,” Rivista di storia e
letteratura religiosa, 35/2 (1999), p. 302; Federica Favino, “Sforza Pallavicino editore e ‘Galileista ad
un modo,’” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, s. 6, 20 (2000), pp. 313–15.
43. This was Benedetto Croce’s view, see the literature quoted in Chapter 1, n. 42. Critical of Croce are
Franco Croce, Tre momenti del barocco letterario italiano (Florence, 1966), pp. 172–4; Ezio Raimondi,
Anatomie secentesche (Pisa, 1966), pp. 4–6; and Mario Costanzo, Critica e poetica del primo Seicento
(Rome, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 129–32, 147–58. Mercedes Blanco, Les rhétoriques de la pointe. Baltasar
Gracián et le conceptisme en Europe (Paris, 1992), pp. 319–25, interprets the prima apprensione within
the framework of contemporary concettismo. Mazzocchi, “La riflessione secentescha su retorica
e morale,” pp. 24–39, integrates the notion in contemporary reflections on style and ethics. The
prima apprensione has been viewed as a justification of the visual arts by Karl Noehles, “Rhetorik,
Architekturallegorie und Baukunst an der Wende vom Manierismus zum Barock in Rom,” in
Victor Kapp (ed.), Die Sprache der Zeichen und Bilder. Rhetorik und nonverbale Kommunikation in der
frühen Neuzeit (Marburg, 1990); Vittorio Casale, “Ragione teologica e poetica barocca,” in Gian
Domenico Ottonelli and Pietro Berrettini, Trattato della Pittura e Scultura. Uso et Abuso loro. Composto
da un Theologo, e da un Pittore (1st edn Florence, 1652), ed. Vittorio Casale (Treviso, 1973), pp. lxxxi–
lxxxvii and cxviii–cxix; and idem, “Poetica di Pietro da Cortona e teoria del barocco nel ‘Trattato
della Pittura e Scultura,’” in Anna Lo Bianco (ed.), Pietro da Cortona 1597–1669 (Milan, 1997),
pp. 107–16. The prima apprensione has been linked with Bernini’s work in Alessandro Angelini,
Gianlorenzo Bernini e i Chigi tra Roma e Siena (Siena, 1998), pp. 297–9, who discusses Pallavicino’s
“opere di teoria nell’arte.” Giovanna Zanlonghi, “La tragedia fra ludus e festa. Rassegna dei nodi
problematici delle teoriche secentesche sulla tragedia in Italia,” Communicazioni sociali, 15, 2–3
(1993), pp. 174–6 and 185–7, explores the relevance of the concept for contemporary theatrical
theory.
44. Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk III, ch. 46, p. 524b: “Come, secondo le definizioni tra noi convenute,
debban fra le cognizioni approvarsi per bene solamente le vere, e non solo per minor bene ma per
male condannarsi le false; … Pertanto io vorrei che mi fosse spiegato come l’errore possa esser
male, poichè egli, quand’è presente, non è mai oggetto che attristi.”
45. Ibid., ch. 48, p. 525b: “Ciò ch’io affermai dell’errore il provo così. Propongasi questo partito a
ciascun di noi: o di conoscer tutte le cose con errore, o di non conoscer nulla ma viver sepolto in
perpetuo sonno. Qual condizione eleggeremmo? Io certo la prima, e crederei che tutti in ciò mi
sarebber compagni; adunque l’errore è più vantaggioso che la mera privazion dell’errore. E ciò che
avvien dell’errore in genere, paragonato alla privazione in genere, avverrà per conseguente d’un
errore in particolare paragonato alla sua privazione particolare.”
46. Ibid., p. 526a: “E tuttavia sappiamo che la notizia incerta ma vera è migliore della mera ignoranza
ed è pregiata fra noi mortali, che sol con gli occhi dell’incertezza possiamo contemplar gli oggetti
o più numerosi o più alti o più necessarij. Così ha più del reale non portar indosso altre gioie che
di maravigliosa bellezza, non perchè l’altre ancora non sieno di qualche pregio e ragionevolmente
desiderate dalle persone inferiori, ma perchè alla maestà d’un re conviene che tutti i suoi
ornamenti ostentino essi ancora una singolarità come regia fra gli ornamenti de’privati.”
47. Ibid., ch. 52, p. 530a: “E perchè ogni giudicio è insieme apprensione dell’oggetto giudicato da lui,
però qualunque giudicio, avvengachè falso, è misto di qualche bene desiderabile per sè stesso. E
per avventura un tal bene è di tanto pregio che, quando non si potesse aver alcuno intendimento
se non con l’atto d’errore, sarebbe meglio all’intelletto il portar la veste macchiata che il restar
nudo.”
48. Ibid., ch. 49, p. 526a–b: “… mentre vi siete fatto avvocato dell’errore e non già dell’errore
mascherato di verità, com’ei suol comparire, ma scoperto e nulla dissimulante la sua deformità, la
quale ei nemmeno e sè stesso giammai s’attenta di palesare.”
49. Ibid., ch. 52, p. 530a: “Ma se tutti quegli oggetti che sono effigiati nell’atto d’errore si conoscessero
per mezzo di pure apprensioni, le quali siccome di verità non sono adornate, così di falsità sono
esenti, chi dubita che sarebbon elle più desiderabili degli errori?”
50. Ibid., ch. 50, p. 527b: “Io non posso rattemperarmi che non v’interrompa, disse il Saraceni in
sembiente di chi ode cosa lontanissima fin allora dal suo concetto. Che pro adunque il dipinger la
favola verisimile, s’ella non vuol esser tenuta per vera?” This remark opens the digression, which
ends at ibid., ch. 51, p. 530a, with the words “Ma torniamo al nostro filo.” For the discussion on
verisimilitude, see Chapter 2.
51. Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 30, p. 199: “Tutto ciò più chiaro si mirerà nella Poesia, la
quale può chiamarsi Reina delle professioni imitatrici, tanto per la maggior nobilità, e varietà
dell’operazioni imitate da essa, quanto per la maggior vivacità della sua imitazione. E benchè in
questo, ed in altro Libro [Del Bene] io abbia di lei filosofato più bassamente, considerandola solo
per ministra di quel diletto che l’anima nostra può assaggiare nella meno perfetta operazione sua
dell’immaginare, o dell’apprendere con dipendenza dall’immaginazione, e però in ordine a questo
io le abbia un poco allargati i lacci che la tengon legata col verisimile, voglio qui mostrare l’altro
ufficio della Poesia più esimio e più fruttuoso, ma che soggiace al verisimile con vassallaggio più
stretto: il qual ufficio è illuminar la nostra mente nell’esercizio nobilissimo del giudicare, e così divenir
nutrice della Filosofia porgendole un dolce latte” (my emphasis). In this passage, Pallavicino treats
poetry as an embellishment of rational truth as opposed to the “lower” function described in Del
Bene. On this point, see also Bellini, “Scrittura letteraria e scrittura filosofica,” pp. 137–8.
52. Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk III, ch. 51, pp. 528a–529b. See Eraldo Bellini, Agostino Mascardi tra “ars
poetica” e “ars historica” (Milan, 2002), pp. 180–81, who points out the parallel with Agostino
Mascardi, Dell’Arte istorica (1st edn Rome, 1636), ed. Adolfo Bartoli (Florence, 1859) (photographic
reprint, Modena, 1994), vol. 5, ch. 1, p. 298: “Che sia virtù [l’enargia] all’istorico necessaria è
manifesto; perché dovendo egli in adempimento delle sue parti adoperar con la penna, che
la verità de’fatti nella sincerità delle sue narrazioni per l’appunto si riconosca, con quanto
maggior accuratezza e puntualità l’anderà descrivendo, tanto più vivamente potrà ella ravvisarsi
da’leggitori, perché la vederanno ad un certo modo con gl’occhi ritratta al naturale, quasi in
pittura, nelle carte dello scrittore.”
53. Pallavicino’s awareness of these discussions is illustrated by his reference, in Del Bene, bk III,
ch. 50, p. 528b, to Quintilian’s definition of enargeia, as in Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, ed. Loeb
Classical Library, trans. H.E. Butler (Cambridge MA, 1920–22), 6.2, pp. 29–32. See also ibid., ch. 51,
p. 529a–b: “… e perchè il diletto dell’apprensione nasce dalla vivacità di quella e dallo splendor
de’colori ond’ella è dipinta, però la poesia non è inventrice di que’successi che, se fosser veri,
gioverebbono a sapersi, ma finge quelli i quali, avvegnachè falsi, riescon gustosi ad immaginarsi
e si studia di porli avanti gli occhi, disegnandoli al vivo colle circostanze minute e colorandoli con
oltremarine tinture di metafore e di similitudini, di prosopopeie, d’aggiunti e d’altre figure ben
espressive e pompose. E forse questa evidenza o energia nel rappresentare è quella imitazione
di cui tanto si disputa, propria del poeta e comune ad ogni individuo di poesia. Ma intorno a ciò
non è ora tempo di quistionare.” The notion evidenza can be translated as “actuality,” but also, as
Pallavicino suggests, “evidence.” An excellent analysis of evidenza is provided by Perrine Galand-
Hallyn, Le reflet des fleurs. Description et métalangue poétique d’Homère à la Renaissance (Geneva, 1994),
pp. 36–48; idem, Les yeux de l’éloquence: poétiques humanistes de l’évidence (Orléans, 1995), pp. 97–184.
54. See Chapter 6.

55. Baldinucci, Vita, p. 142.
56. On the notions of furor poeticus and the poet as vates, see Noel L. Brann, The Debate over the Origin
of Genius during the Italian Renaissance (Leiden, 2002). Raphael Falco, “Marsilio Ficino and Vatic
Myth,” Modern Language Notes, 122 (2007): pp. 101–22, argues that the poet’s association with the
prophet and the subsequent “remythicization” of poetry in the course of the Cinquecento serves a
social agenda as well, an issue that will have become all the more prominent in Pallavicino’s times
as ingenious language became a conduit of sociability and the figure of the vatic poet a celebrated
commonplace, for instance in the figure of Torquato Tasso or the Jesuit Stefonio, as Pallavicino
himself writes in Del Bene, bk III, ch. 50, p. 528b. Finally, Pallavicino must have been aware of the
idea of a “Theologia poetica,” where poetry is seen as a primitive but also quintessential form of
theology, a view held by Pallavicino’s own exemplum Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; see Günter
Bader, “‘Theologia poetica.’ Begriff und Aufgabe,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 83 (1986),
pp. 190–207.
57. Joseph Schmidlin, “Die Papstweissagung des hl. Malachias,” in Festgabe, enthaltend vornehmlich
vorreformationsgeschichtliche Forschungen, Heinrich Finke (Münster, 1904), Appendix 1: Brief vom 8.
Juli 1667, “Copia di lettera scritta dal Signor Agostino Favoriti a Monsignor de Rossi sopra il Sidus
Olorum (BAV Barb. lat., cod. 2234).”
58. On the prophecy, see Joseph Maître, La prophétie des papes attribuée à S. Malachie. Etude critique
(Beaune, 1901); idem, Les papes et la papauté de 1143 à la fin du monde, d’après la prophétie attribuée á
Saint Malachie. Etude historique … (Paris, 1902); Miguel Avilés Fernandez, “Una profecia apocrifa
sobre el futuro de la monarquia española,” Cuadernos para investigación de la literatura hispánica, 5
(1983): 19–48.
59. Michele Cappellari, Clementi Nono pontifici optimo maximo, olim Cardinali Iulio Rospiglioso (BAV
R.G.Misc.G.112(29)). According to Enrico Sonesio, Profetia veridica di tutti Sommi Pontefici sin’al fine
del mondo fatta da San Malachia arcivescovo Armacano (Venice, 1670), p. 36, it was Cappellari who first
read “Sidus olorum” as referring to the poetic activities of the “swan” Clement IX.
60. James A. Gibbes, Carminum … Pars Lyrica ad exemplum Q. Horatii Flacci … (Rome, 1668), p. 1:
“Ad Clementem IX. Pont. Opt. Max. recens creatum. Ode I. augustissimam eius inaugurationem
commendat, non spe tantùm, & ex umbra vaticinij Sidus Oloris futuram, sed etiàm reapse divinum
venisse Cygnum ex Helicone. Deinde ad alias eiusdem procedit laudes singulares.” Another
poetic application of the prophecy to Clement IX is that of Malaise Toussaint, Publica exultatio in
electionem Clementis IX, BAV R.G.Misc.G.124(15).
61. Maître, La prophétie des papes, provides the most extensive bibliography. Additional references
to the prophecy are given in Maarten Delbeke, “The Revelatory Function of the Image-Text: The
Prophecies of S. Malachy during and after the Papacy of Alexander VII Chigi,” Studi secenteschi, 46
(2005): 229–56 and the following notes.
62. See ibid., p. 246. Other references to Alexander as Custos montium can be found in Alexandro VII.
Spiritus Sancti singulari directione, eminentissimi senatus unanimi suffragatione, orbis universi communi
gratulatione, in supremum Christi vicarium mirabiliter electo: quos illius amori succedit ignes, honori dedit
plausus; quae pro felici eiusdem gubernatione, et obtinenda per eum pace nuncpavit vota, ipso corporis
Christi solenni die dedicat consecratque Ruraemunda (Roermond, 1655), fol. 8r, emblema XII; Willem
van Blitterswyck, Ruraemonda vigens, ardens, renascens, Sanctissimo Domino Nostro, Alexandro VII.
Pontifici Opt. Max. totius virtutis ac pietatis thesauro … (Brussels, 1666), p. 47, Elegia 14. BAV Chigi
N.III.83, fols 251r–256r, contains the prophecy of Malachy with explanations of the mottoes up to
Innocent X.
63. Maarten Delbeke, “Custos Montium. A Prophecy on the Election of Alexander VII in Jean
Lepautre’s Depiction of the Chapel of Notre Dame de la Paix in the Louvre,” Zeitschrift für
Kunstgeschichte, 3 (2009): 369–88.
64. The prophecy appears in three engravings dedicated to Clement IX and his cardinal nipote; see
Stefano Roberto, Gianlorenzo Bernini e Clemente IX Rospigliosi: arte e architettura a Roma e in Toscana
nel Seicento (Rome, 2004), pp. 72, 80 and [302].
65. Paul Fréart de Chantelou, Journal de voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France, ed. Milovan Staniç
(Paris, 2001), p. 180: “Le 14e, au matin, le cardinal Antoine [Barberini] est venu voir le
Cavalier. Il y avait avec lui un seigneur génois, lequel a fort discouru de l’élection du pape
à venir, et a dit que Corrado, Ferrarais, y avait grand’part; … que les prophéties de Joachim
désignaient Corrado par sidus olorum, ayant des étoiles dans ses armes et étant natif de
Ferrare, d’où sont sortis les grands poètes d’Italie.” The conflation of Joachim de Fiore and
Malachy is probably stimulated by the combined publication of different prophecies; see
Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1969), p. 462, or
BAV Chigi M.V.V., which contains three folios compiled during the pontificate of Innocent XII
comparing the two prophecies.
66. Juan Andrés Ricci, La Pintura Sabia, ed. Fernando Marìas and Felipe Pereda (Toledo, 2002), pp. 33,
41, 123, 246. The association of Custos montium with hilltop shrines for the Virgin was reinforced
by Marian interpretations of Horace, Ode 3.22, “Montium custos nemorumque virgo” dedicated to
Diana. An example undoubtedly known to Alexander VII was “Ad D. Virginem Aetelensem,” Ode
3.2 of Jacob Balde, a Jesuit with whom Alexander became acquainted during his stay in Germany.
See Martin Heinrich Müller, “Parodia Christiana.” Studien zu Jacob Baldes Odendichtung (Zurich,
1964), pp. 89–90.
67. Pierre Petit, De Sibylla Libri Tres (Leipzig, 1686), vol. 3, pp. 349–50; Sonesio, Profetia veridica,
pp. 36–7. The engraving published in Roberto, Gianlorenzo Bernini e Clemente IX Rospigliosi, p. 72,
carries a poem by Joachim d’Estrehan referring to the anagram.
68. For a discussion of the possesso, see Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, La festa barocca (Rome, 1997), pp.
482–3. The importance of the Malachian theme becomes clear from the written account of the
possesso: Vera, e compita relatione della solenne caualcata, e cerimonie fatte il dì VIII. Giugno MDCLXX.
dal Palazzo Vaticano alla Basilica di S. Gio. Laterano per il possesso preso da N.S. Papa Clemente X. nella
detta Basilica Laterana … (Rome, 1670). For the occasion, Carlo Bovio composed an inscription
referring to Malachy; see Filippo Buonanni, Numismata Pontificum Romanorum (Rome, 1699), vol. 2,
p. 719.
69. On this circle, see Jozef Ijsewijn, “Scittori Latini a Roma dal Barocco al Neoclassicismo,” Studi
romani, 36 (1988), pp. 232, 236–44; Dirk Sacré (ed.), Sidronius Hosschius (Merksem 1596–Tongeren
1653). Jezuïet en Latijns dichter (Kortrijk, 1996), nos 69–72; Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco and Rossella
Pantanella, “Libri,” in Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco and Francesco Petrucci (eds), L’Ariccia del Bernini
(Rome, 1998), pp. 163–77; Tomaso Montanari, “Sulla fortuna poetica di Bernini. Frammenti del
tempo di Alessandro VII e di Sforza Pallavicino,” Studi secenteschi, 39 (1998), pp. 135–55; idem,
“Gli intellettuali alessandrini,” in Alessandro Angelini, Monica Butzek and Bernardina Sani (eds),
Alessandro VII Chigi (1599–1667). Il papa senese di Roma moderna (Siena, 2000), pp. 380–98; Marc
Laureys, “Ein Freundeskring im barocken Rom. Einige Bemerkungen zu den ‘Septem illustrium
virorum poemata,’” in Boris Börkel, Tino Licht and Jolanta Wiendlocha (eds), Mentis amore ligati.
Lateinische Freundschaftsdichtung und Dichterfreundschaft in Mittelalter und Neuzeit. Festgabe für
Reinhard Düchting zum 65. Geburtstag (Heidelberg, 2001), pp. 217–32.
70. On prophecy, see the entries in Dictionnaire de la spiritualité ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire
(16 vols, Paris, 1932–95), vol. 12, c. 2410–46; Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (Paris, 1908–), vol. 13,
c. 708–37.
71. The first refutation of the prophecy was published in 1642, in Angel Manrique, Cisterciensium seu
verius ecclesiasticorum annalium a condito cistercio, tomus secundus, … (1st edn Lyon, 1642) (4 vols,
photographic reprint, Farnborough, 1970), ch. 12, p. 115b.
72. Schmidlin, “Die Papstweissagung,” pp. 39–40: “… Primieramente i Poeti, o sia versificatori, a
quali solo ho permesso d’usarlo, hanno licenza quod libet audendi, stanno bene in bocca loro
molte cose che in bocca d’altri forse sariano scandalose. In 2o. luogo si permette publicamente
anche in Roma la stampa del Sidus Olorum, e di altri vaticinii de futuri Pontefici sotto il nome
di S. Malachia Primate d’Hernia [sic]; onde io non so veder, perche non possa parimente permettessi
l’applicatione de vaticinii medesimi doppo che i Pontefici sono eletti, dove l’allusione ha sentimento honesto,
e quadra gratiosamente al successo; mentre fu lecito à S. Paolo di applicarle al Nostro Redentore il
titolo superstitioso dell’altar dedicato alla Grecia Idolatra Ignoto. Del 3o. gli oracoli sibillini furono
da Christiani della primitiva Chiesa tenuti per empii, … E pure in progresso di tempo sono stati
poi dalla Chiesa non solamente permessi, ma abbracciati i medemi oracoli, non havendo havuto
timore i santi Padri di applicar quelli della Sibilla Cumana: Iam redit et Virgo, alla nascita di
Christo Signor Nostro, e la Chiesa istessa nel sacrificio della messa appoggia l’autorità de suoi detti
al testimonio delle Sibille in compagnia delle profetie Davidiche: teste David cum Sibilla. Per qual
ragione dunque sarà vietato ad un Poeta gentilmente scherzante l’adattare all’elettione del Papa un
pronostico creduto di allegare i vaticinii delle Sibille, donne d’incerta fama, in comprovatione de
più alti e più reviriti misterii …” (my emphasis).
73. On doctrine regarding prophecy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Nelson H.
Minnich, “Prophecy and the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517),” in Marjorie Reeves (ed.),
Prophetic Rome in the High Renaissance Period (Oxford, 1992), pp. 63–87; Luigi Fiorano, “Astrologi,
superstiziosi e devoti nella società romana del Seicento,” Ricerche per la storia religiosa di Roma,
2 (1978): 97–121; Germana Ernst, Religione, ragione e natura. Ricerche su Tommaso Campanella e il
tardo Rinascimento (Milan, 1991), pp. 255–79; Marion Leathers Kuntz, “Profezia e politica nella
Venezia del sedicesimo secolo: il caso di Dionisio Gallo,” in Venice, Myth and Utopian Thought in
the Sixteenth Century (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 155, 177; Brann, The Debate over the Origin of Genius.
Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, 1990), shows that prophecy as
a popular, urban phenomenon largely disappeared in Italy around 1530; the case that concerns
us here is indeed confined to an intellectual elite with a keen sense for the use of prophecy as
propaganda.
74. Schmidlin, “Die Papstweissagung,” pp. 39–40: “… onde io non so veder, perche non possa
parimente permettessi l’applicatione de vaticinii medesimi doppo che i Pontefici sono eletti, dove
l’allusione ha sentimento honesto, e quadra gratiosamente al successo.”
75. Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 10, p. 79: “[un] osservazione maravigliosa raccolta in un detto
breve.”
76. See Chapter 2, n. 20.
77. Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 17, p. 111: “Ma un tal diletto nel proposito nostro è assai tenue,
per la frequenza degli equivoci nei linguaggi, la qual diminuisce l’ammirazione.”
78. Ibid.: “Poichè non è mai senza maraviglia, nè però senza diletto il trovare che il caso abbia operato
in qualche materia ciò che avrebbe potuto operar l’arte.” See also ibid., p. 114. On this topos, see
Horst W. Janson, “The ‘Image made by Chance’ in Renaissance Thought,” in Millard Meiss (ed.),
De Artibus Opuscula XL. Essays in Honor of E. Panofsky (New York, 1961), pp. 254–66; Giacomo
Berra, “Immagini casuali, figure nascoste e natura antropomorfa nell’immaginario artistico
rinascimentale,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 43 (1999): 358–419.
80. Ibid., p. 112: “Questa noja però non succederà in due casi. L’uno è quando si può ragionevolmente
credere, che l’imposizion di quel nome equivoco non sia stata senza occulto misterio divino.”
81. Ibid., p. 110.
82. Ibid., pp. 112–15. Here Pallavicino labels Seneca, the foremost exemplum of the laconic or
“sententious” writer, as “intemperamente fuori scusa.” Pallavicino’s own views on the use of
sentenze can be found in his Trattato dello stile, ch. 6. Pallavicino aligns himself with the Ciceronian
position, as held by (for instance) Agostino Mascardi against Virgilio Malvezzi, Pallavicino’s uncle
and interlocutor in the Trattato sulla Provvidenza, the representative par excellence of the so-called
laconic or “sentenced” style; see Marc Fumaroli, L’âge de l’éloquence: rhétorique et res literaria de la
Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva, 1980), pp. 217–19; and Ezio Raimondi, “Polemica
intorno alla prosa barocca,” in Letteratura barocca. Studi sul Seicento Italiana (1st edn 1961) (Florence,
1982), pp. 175–248. Raimondi quotes Dominique Bouhours who counts Malvezzi amongst
“faiseurs de reflexions politiques et morales” who are “un peu visionaires.” In the Trattato sulla
Provvidenza, bk I, ch. 3, p. 51, Antonio Perez accuses him, as an “ingegno più che umano,” of using
a “linguaggio altro che umano.” Mascardi explicitly disparages enigmatic or obscure language; see
Bellini, Agostino Mascardi, pp. 18–19.
83. The issue is, for instance, also broached in Baltasar Gracián, L’acutezza e l’arte dell’ingegno, trans.
G. Poggi (Palermo, 1986), ch. 6.
84. The literature on concettismo in general, and on Tesauro specifically, is quite extensive. A good
starting point is offered by the following studies, all with excellent bibliographies: Mario Zanardi,
“Metafora e gioco nel Cannocchiale Aristotelico di Emanuele Tesauro,” Studi secenteschi, 26 (1985):
25–99; Stefano Gensini, “L’ingegno e le metafore: alle radici della creatività linguistica fra Cinque e
Seicento,” Studi di estetica, s. 3, 25 (thematic issue: Genio/Ingegnio, 16) (1995), pp. 141–3; Pierantonio
Frare, “Per istraforo di perspettiva”. Il “Cannocchiale aristotelico” e la poesia del Seicento (Pisa and Rome,
2000); Carlo Scarpati, “La metafora al di là del vero e del falso in Emanuele Tesauro,” in Carlo
Scarpati and Eraldo Bellini, Il vero e il falso dei poeti. Tasso, Tesauro, Pallavicino, Muratori (Milan,
1990), pp. 35–71.
85. Emanuele Tesauro, Il Cannocchiale aristotelico (1st edn Turin, 1670) (photographic reprint,
Savigliano, 2000), p. 378: “Onde ne’veri Anagrammi, due Virtù necessariamente si ricercano.
L’una è la Propietà della Significatione: sich’ella sia quadrante alla persona: & quasi per fatal
misterio avviluppata e nascosta nel Vocabulo naturale. L’altra è la Integrità: in maniera, che dalla
sola Mutation del sito delle lettere, senz’alcuno accrescimento, ò diminutione, ò scambiamento di
una lettera in un’altra: nasca il Concetto pellegrino. Et questi si chiamano Anagrammi fatali; dove
l’ingegno humano ritrova non so chè di Divino: ….”
86. Ibid., p. 378: “Et questi Anagrammi, oltre alla Integrità, & Proprietà; mertano quest’altra laude, che
han per Tema il sol Nome proprio: dove appar maggiormente quell’argutezza poetica, che sembra
al vulgo misteriosa fatalità.” On the relation between anagram and the proper name, see Carlo
Ossola, “Les devins de la lettre et les masques du double: la diffusion de l’anagrammatisme à la
renaissance,” in Marie Thérèse Jones-Davies (ed.), Devins et charlatans au temps de la Renaissance:

colloque organisé par le Centre de recherches sur la Renaissance (Paris, 1979), p. 145.
87. Tesauro, Cannocchiale, p. 379. Tesauro continues: “Ma la battaglia di Luz [Lützen], mostrò chiaro,
che queste Profetie, son Poesie.” In a following example, he calls the anagram MARTINVS
LVTERVS–TER MATRIS VVLNVS “quasi divino Oracolo.”
88. Ibid., p. 379, points out the anagram on GUSTAVVS cited earlier “diede grande anima
a’suoi.”
89. Ibid., p. 381.
90. Ibid., p. 59.
91. Ibid., p. 65: “un’Argutia leggiermente accennata dall’Ingegno Divino”; this definition is repeated
on p. 501, at the beginning of the Trattato de concetti predicabili, which is introduced in the
section on Arguzie Divine. See Zanardi, “Metafora e gioco,” pp. 44–5; Ernesto Grassi, “La mania
ingegnosa,” Studi di estetica, s. 3, 25 (thematic issue: Genio/Ingegno, 16) (1995), p. 14.
92. Tesauro, Cannocchiale, pp. 63–4.
93. Aristotle, Poetics, 22, 1459a5–8, ed. Loeb Classical Library, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge
MA, 1995), p. 115.
94. This paragraph is deeply indebted to Grassi, “La mania ingegnosa,” pp. 9–35.
95. Ibid., p. 13.
96. Ibid., p. 27.
97. Gensini, “L’ingegno e le metafore,” pp. 141–3.
98. Frare, “Per istraforo di perspettiva,” pp. 85–99.
99. Zanardi, “Metafora e gioco,” pp. 88–98; Giovanni Pozzi, La parola dipinta (Milan, 1981).
100. The section on the “DIFFINITION MIRABILE & ENIGMATICA” (Tesauro, Cannocchiale,
pp. 454–60) concludes and crowns the section on the “metafora di oppositione,” but is already
identified with this kind of metaphor on p. 446, in the section on the conjunction of positive and
negative attributes; again, on p. 459, Tesauro explicitly writes that “L’ultimo, ma principalissimo
& proprissimo Parto del Mirabile, è l’ENIGMA.” In this section, Tesauro draws on Aristotle’s
multiple remarks on the affinity between metaphor and enigma; see Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric,
bk 3, 2, 12–13, 1405b, and bk 3, 11, 6, 1412a, ed. Loeb Classical Library (1st edn 1926), trans. John
H. Freese (Cambridge MA, 1994), pp. 359 and 409, that is, immediately after the explanation on
actuality through metaphor. On the relation of the enigma with obscure truths, see Nicholas
Cronk, “The Enigma of French Classicism. A Platonic Current in Seventeenth-Century Poetic
Theory,” French Studies, 40 (1986): 269–86, esp. p. 283 with reference to Tesauro.
101. Frare, “Per istraforo di perspettiva,” p. 18; Gensini, “L’ingegno e le metafore,” p. 142.
102. Tesauro, Cannocchiale, p. 484. See also Frare, “Per istraforo di perspettiva,” pp. 153–4.
103. Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 26.
104. The relation between chance and providence lay at the heart of contemporary theological
and philosophical debate; see Sven Knebel, Wille Würfel und Wahrscheinlichkeit. Das System der
moralischen Notwendigkeit in der Jesuitenscholastik 1550–1700 (Hamburg, 2000).
106. Claude-François Ménestrier, La philosophie des images énigmatiques ou il est traité des Enigmes,
Hieroglyphes, Oracles, Propheties, Sorts, Divinations; Loteries, Talismans, Songes, Centuries de
Nostradamus, De la Baguette (Lyon, 1694). On this treatise, see Michel Charles, “Claude-François
Ménestrier. Poétique de l’énigme. Présentation, notes et commentaire,” Poétique, 45 (1981): 28–52;
Cronk, “The Enigma of French Classicism,” pp. 278–9; Florence Vuilleumier Laurens, La raison des
figures symboliques à la renaissance et à l’âge classique (Geneva, 2000), pp. 309–15.
107. Judy Loach, “L’influence de Tesauro sur le père Menestrier,” in Jean Serroy (ed.), La France et
l’Italie au temps de Mazarin (Grenoble, 1986), pp. 167–71.
108. By the mid-seventeenth century, the enigma was a well-established category of allegorical or
metaphorical language. Aenigmata are theorized for instance in Jacob Masen’s Speculum Imaginum
Veritatis occultae, first published in 1650 (with a dedication to Fabio Chigi, the future Alexander
VII) and still imbued with the idea that the image offers access to the hidden meanings of Creation
itself; see Barbara Bauer, Jesuitische “Ars Rhetorica” im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Frankfurt, 1986),
pp. 461–545; Vuilleumier Laurens, La raison des figures symboliques, pp. 249–66; Joseph Imorde,
Affekt Überträgung (Berlin, 2004), pp. 177–95; Dekoninck, Ad imaginem, pp. 58–63.
109. Ménestrier, La philosophie, Préface, pp. [3]–[4]: “Cependant les hommes ont trouvé l’adresse de
se faire un merite de leur ignorance, en la rendant misterieuse. Il se sont même fait des Arts &
des Sciences dangereuses de ces tenebres affectées. La Magie, les Sortileges, les Divinations,
les Oracles, les Predictions, ont pris le masque des Enigmes pour se déguiser, & pour imposer
aux hommes sous ces apparences misterieuses, qu’Aulugelle [Aulus Gellius] a si bien nommées
les voiles des sentimens & des pensées, les enveloppes du discours, les équivoques, & les
déguisements des paroles.” See also ibid., pp. 1–2, 11–12, 106–7, 249–53, 287–301.
110. This argument has been developed by Jean-François Groulier, “Monde symbolique et crise de la
figure hiéroglyphique dans l’oeuvre du père Ménestrier,” Dix-septieme siècle, 158 (1988): 93–108;
idem, “Le dépassement de l’Ut Pictura Poesis dans l’oeuvre du Père Ménestrier,” Word & Image, 4
(1988): 109–15.
111. Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, ed. Werther Romani (2 vols, Rome
and Bari, 1979), vol. 2, pp. 71–2. Ménestrier’s reference to Castelvetro is in La philosophie, p. 64.
4
The Image of the Pope
The previous discussions of portraiture, paradox and prophecy have indicated

Pallavicino’s awareness of art’s close association with untruth, error and lie.
As this chapter will argue, he was nonetheless imbued with the traditional
conviction that the splendor of art is as desirable as necessary in the public
representation of the papacy and in the celebration of religious rites. Not only
did our Jesuit accept the well-honed justifications of ecclesiastical splendor, but
he also understood that ornament provides crucial assistance in imprinting
the historical feats and virtues of the papacy into the hearts and minds of the
beholder. If Pallavicino needed to mediate two potentially contradictory aspects
of art in institutional and public contexts, as a device both of representation and
deception, he was less prompted by an original stance towards ecclesiastical
splendor than by his own subtle examination of art’s potential dangers. The
distinction between poetry and historiography, examined in Chapter 2,
which Pallavicino likened to the relationship between pittura d’invenzione and
portraiture, acquires new meaning here, as two possible modalities for the
representation of the ruler, each with their own virtues and risks.
That Pallavicino indeed operated that mediation and did not simply keep
his musings to himself and those who read his treatises, becomes evident
from two near-contemporary controversies regarding the public appearance
of Alexander VII in the city of Rome. These controversies, on each of which
Pallavicino explicitly expressed himself, have survived in different forms. The
first regards Alexander’s refusal of a statue on the Capitoline Hill. Pallavicino’s
detailed examination of this decision in his Vita di Alessandro VII bears traces of a
suppressed discussion about the refusal’s appropriateness. The issue surfaces in
other contemporary sources as well, most notably in Giovanni Andrea Borboni’s
treatise Delle statue (1661). Like the Vita, the treatise weighs the risks of the effigy
against the political necessity of the public representation of a virtuous authority.
Reading Pallavicino’s reflections on the matter against Borboni’s treatise will
make clear that the Jesuit’s general ideas on the truth-value of art generated
specific views about the representation of the ruler as well.
The second controversy regards Alexander’s wish to move the papal

residence from the Vatican to the Quirinal palace. Here, Pallavicino publicly
entered into discussion with his old friend Lucas Holstenius, the erudite
Protestant convert with whom he was accepted into the Accademia dei
Lincei. Our Jesuit argues in favor of the pope’s wishes on the grounds that his
presence in the city allows for greater opportunities for public display.
Taken together, the two issues illustrate a final consequence of Pallavicino’s
distinction between poetry and history: precisely because mimetic imitation
falls short of embodying truth, the public representation of the papal persona
and its virtues is best performed by the ruler himself, through his physical
presence, the spaces and buildings suggesting that presence, and his actions.
These are the stuff of history, worthy of the literary—not visual—record.
Historiography and the deeds it records, too, benefit greatly from the splendor
of art and artifice, but only because they stimulate the beholder or the reader
much in the way they are seduced by examples, as colorful patches enlivening
an otherwise arid discourse or demonstration.
What gives these two controversies their peculiar poignancy is their concern
with the sacred and its relationships with particular objects and places. The
question of idolatry looms large in Borboni’s discussion of Alexander’s
refusal and is central to Pallavicino’s own reflections on the imitative arts. The
views of Holstenius and Pallavicino on the papal residence diverge in part
because they rest upon different ideas about the sacrality of Rome and Saint
Peter’s. The sacred connects the controversies with Pallavicino’s more general
reflections on the material aspects of the papacy and the Church, developed
in a third contemporary controversial text, his Storia del Concilio di Trento.
Now, however, the debate is not implicit or confined to Alexander’s inner
circles. Pallavicino’s Storia is a well-publicized and long-expected rebuttal of
Paolo Sarpi’s earlier Istoria del Concilio tridentino, published in London in 1619
under the assumed name Paolo Soave Polano. Apologies for ecclesiastical
splendor and the worldly aspects of the papacy are a crucial line of defense in
Pallavicino’s vehement account of Tridentine doctrine. In his view, the papal
persona and its material attributes partake in the realm of the sacred. The
sacred, however, is not inherent to certain objects or places, but conveyed
through the act of consecration.
Pre-Emptive Modesty: Pope Alexander VII’s Refusal

of his Capitoline Statue
From May 1656 to March 1657 the city of Rome was in the grasp of the
bubonic plague. Even if the city authorities and the papal curia were
unable to stop the disease from entering the city, their decisive (and
uncompromising) actions helped to contain the contamination and limit the
the image of the pope 99
number of victims.1 The measures to protect the city and its population,
ranging from medical and administrative interventions to pleas for divine
assistance, became memorialized in books and monuments. Girolamo
Gastaldi, who later would assume patronage of the twin churches on the
piazza del Popolo, wrote a treatise on his organization of the epidemic
hospitals, still considered an important contribution to the history of
epidemiology.2 Because the papal administration had been so efficient in
protecting the city, the Roman Senate—the body representing the citizens
of Rome—approved on 8 December 1656 the transfer of the sacred image
of Santa Maria del Portico that was thought to have been instrumental in
ending the disease’s course to a new church to be erected under the aegis
of Alexander VII, Santa Maria in Campitelli.3 On 5 April 1657, the Senate
also vowed to offer the pope a statue in the palazzo dei Conservatori on the
Capitoline Hill. Through the gift, Alexander would enter a tradition initiated
under Leo X, where the Roman Senate thanked those pontiffs whose actions
had been especially beneficent to the city with the erection of a monumental
statue in the seat of Roman civic government. Thus, the effigy of Alexander
VII would assume its place next to the likenesses of Leo X, Paul III, Gregory
XIII, Sixtus V, Urban VIII and Innocent X.4
Alexander VII, however, refused the statue. In the words of his master
of ceremony, Francesco Maria Febei, the pope considered “the image [that
the citizens of Rome] had imprinted in their hearts a sufficient hallmark of
their gratitude, without them making another, exterior demonstration of it.”5
Commemorative artifacts were produced however, most notably an inscription
installed in the palazzo dei Conservatori (Fig. 4.1) and a splendid medal
4.1 Inscription commemorating the refusal by Alexander VII of his honorific statue,

Rome, palazzo dei Conservatori (Fabio Barry)
4.2a, 4.2b and 4.2c Gianlorenzo Bernini and Gioacchino Francesco Travani (?):
(a) Medal struck in honor of Alexander VII; (b) with Androcles and the Lion
on the reverse; (c) the two sides cast separately, set into decorative borders
and made into a hinged case with internal inscriptions; bronze, 1659/60
(Soprintendenza dei beni culturali di Roma)
(Fig. 4.2), both in honor of Alexander’s good governance and the modest
refusal of the statue. As would have been the case with the statue, these
artifacts resulted from an intricate interaction between donor and recipient,
with the pope exerting decisive influence on the nature and content of
the gifts.
The arguments engendered by the refusal of the statue, put forward by
Pallavicino and Borboni, not only highlight the anxieties surrounding the
commission of a papal statue for the Capitol but also connect the episode
with more general considerations regarding honorific sculptures, their
function and status. Borboni’s interpretation of the refusal, presented as
the culmination of an entire treatise on sculpture, lays bare the inherent
strains in the Catholic reflection about honorific statuary. The premises
of Borboni’s argument are similar to those of Francesco Bocchi or Gian
Domenico Ottonelli: the expression of virtue depends on a successful
lifelike imitation that manages to substitute the model for the original.
Borboni, however, recognizes that applied to honorific statuary this logic
will inevitably lead to charges of idolatry and entail the risk of defamation.
In order to avoid that risk Borboni is forced to denounce sculpture
in favor of other means of representation, foremost the inscription.
Through its almost inadvertent radicalism, Delle statue sets the problem
for Pallavicino when he attempts to clarify the benefits and pitfalls of the
ruler’s effigy.
The Refusal of the Statue
As Kaspar Zollikofer has argued, Alexander’s refusal of the statue was

probably at least partly inspired by precedents when Capitoline statues of
earlier popes had become the subject of mob violence.6 The destruction of
the effigy of Paul IV represents the most striking example of such public
defamation. On the day of Paul’s death, 18 August 1559, an angry crowd
attacked the statue but failed to damage it. In the following days, the Roman
Senate, who only four years earlier had commissioned the sculpture,
decreed to have it destroyed. When the statue was dismembered, the head
was paraded through the streets of Rome before it was thrown into the
Tiber.7
Forty-one years later, upon the death of Sixtus V in August 1590, the
destruction of his bronze statue (only the second Capitoline papal statue
erected since the death of Paul IV) was narrowly avoided (Fig. 4.3). This
episode induced the Senate to ban its members from proposing to erect
a statue to a living pope on the Capitol; in 1605, an extension of the ban
included all members of the pontiff’s family.
However, from very early on in the

reign of Urban VIII the Senate pressed
for the authorization to abolish the
ban. On 23 June 1634 the decision was
granted, and on 13 October 1635 it
was decided to erect a statue to honor
Urban’s protection of the city from war
and plague, and his incorporation of the
duchy of Urbino into the ecclesiastical
state.8 But according to Giacinto Gigli,
already in April 1634, while the process
for lifting the ban was still running its
course,9 the Roman Senate decreed a
statue in honor of Francesco Barberini,
Urban’s cardinal nephew and the
special prefect of the Congregation of
Health instituted to protect Rome from
the plague that had swept through
Italy in 1630–32.10 Francesco refused
the statue, but between 1634 and 1636
4.3 “Capitoline statue of Sixtus V,” from an inscription designed by Bernini
[Girolamo Franzini], Icones statuarum recalling Urban’s good deeds for the city
antiquarum urbis romae hieronymi franzini was placed in Santa Maria in Aracoeli,
bibliopolae ad signum fontis opera (Rome,
1589) (Royal Library, Brussels)
where on 24 March 1632 Urban VIII had
celebrated mass to celebrate the end of
the plague.11
In the end Urban’s Capitoline statue, a monumental bronze by Gianlorenzo
Bernini, was installed only on 24 June 1640 under cover of night.12 Barely four
years later, the statue was nearly destroyed when upon the news of Urban’s
death on 29 July 1644 angry Romans stormed the Capitol, exhausted as
they were by the consequences of the disastrous Castro war. Only a swift
intervention of the Colonna and Orsini families saved Urban’s likeness. The
crowd then turned against the large and very similar plaster effigy still in the
courtyard of the nearby Collegio Romano, where it had been the centerpiece
of the decorations put up there for the celebrations of the centennial of the
Jesuit Order four years earlier.13 The Barberini even feared that the mob would
attack Bernini’s studio, where a statua of Urban awaited completion.14
As a result, of the seven papal statues erected on the Capitol before
Alexander’s papacy, three had been the object of attacks. In Pallavicino’s day,
the relics of the statue of Paul IV must have served as a grim reminder of
the risk a vulnerable effigy posed to one’s posthumous fame. The rump of
the statue languished for years on the Capitol, until in 1645 it was decided
to “unearth” it and transform it into a likeness of Innocent X, Alexander’s
predecessor. This project was never executed, and later attempts to restore the
statue also proved unsuccessful.15 When Giovanni Silos included epigrams
devoted to the papal statues on the Capitol in his Pinacoteca of 1672, he still
decried the fate of the likeness of Paul IV.16 It is safe to assume, then, that
by Alexander’s times the commemorative form of the Capitoline statue was
associated as much with the violence it invited as with the honors it conferred
upon its model.
Pallavicino and the Politics of Refusal
It is therefore not surprising that the first important justification of Alexander’s

refusal, in Sforza Pallavicino’s biography, recalls the episode of the statue
of Paul IV and the narrowly avoided destruction of the statue of Sixtus V
immediately after relating how, when the plague of 1656 was waning, the
Roman Senate expressed the desire to offer Alexander a statue as it had done
to Urban VIII and Innocent X.17 Pallavicino explicitly recalls the ban of 1590
and Urban’s decision to lift it. Pallavicino continues:
Alexander, even if he saw similar honors being bestowed upon his immediate
predecessors without any ill effect, and even if the benefits for which the city wanted
to render him homage were so manifest and important that it excluded any suspicion
of adulation, nonetheless he disagreed [with the proposal] in a modest and courteous
manner …
[Alessandro ancorchè ritrovasse simiglianti onoranze fatte a due prossimi antecessori

senza verun effetto sinistro, ed ancorchè il benefizio per cui la città volea render a lui
questa gratitudine fosse così manifesto ed insigne, che assolveva quell’atto da ogni
nota di adulazione, tuttavia dissentì con modesta e cortese maniera, …]18
Pallavicino then paraphrases Febei’s answer to the Roman Senate, that

Alexander wanted no other simulacrum of them than the one kept in their
hearts [“… ordinando, che sì rispondesse in Campidoglio a suo nome,
ringraziarli egli dell’amorevole pensiero, ma non voler da essi altro simulacro,
che quello, che per loro bontà gli conservavano nei loro cuori”].19 The citizens
were “more amazed than satisfied” with Alexander’s answer, and asked again
if they would be at least allowed to install “a memorial of what happened,”
an inscription that would not only cost nothing to the people of Rome, but
also constitute “a simple witness to the truth.” Even so, Pallavicino writes,
Alexander politely declined:
I cittadini più maravigliati, che soddisfatti della risposta, richiesero, che almeno fosse
loro conceduto di lasciar quivi memoria di tutto il fatto in una iscrizione, la quale non
recherebbe al popolo nessuna spesa, e sarebbe une semplice testimonianza del vero,
ma non meno in ciò diè loro il Pontefice una cortesemente acconcia ripulsa.20
Pallavicino must have known about the mob violence against Urban’s effigy
and the destruction of the plaster statue and was certainly able to appreciate
its importance. In 1644 he taught at the Collegio Romano and four years earlier
he probably authored an extensive description of the festive decorations of
the Collegio Romano which paid ample attention to the statue.21 If the mere
survival of Urban’s Capitoline statue allowed Pallavicino to argue that two
immediate predecessors of Alexander were spared the infamy of having their
likeness destroyed, his suppression of the related episodes in the Vita strongly
suggests that he sought to allay suspicions about Alexander’s motivations in
declining the statue.
Out of the same concern Pallavicino proceeds to examine these motivations
in minute detail. If our Jesuit is loath to address anxieties inspired by
iconoclasm, he delights in weighing the possible pitfalls of modesty, to
conclude that Alexander’s decision is, in fact, an act of political prudence.22 He
offers a careful examination of three potential objections against Alexander’s
refusal. The refusal bespeaks a vice so rare that it has no name, namely to
be inclined to desire less rather than greater glory; or the refusal ignores the
gentleman-like kindness that allows lesser subjects to present their gifts to
their masters, insignificant as those gifts are; or the refusal is an artifice to
acquire even greater glory, because many great men deserve statues and
inscriptions but only few refuse them.23 None of these objections applies to
Alexander, Pallavicino states. The pontiff’s motivations were of a different
kind: he wanted to “liberate” the Roman people of the “pension” to offer each
subsequent pontiff a statue, regardless of what the pope had done for them.24
Conversely, he wished to prevent subsequent popes from automatically
expecting such a statue, since the habit of the gift would turn its absence into
a matter of dishonor. Such practices, Pallavicino continues, would foment
adulation and vanity, a menace to the sincerity and modesty required for
good government.25
By steering the discussion away from a judgment on Alexander’s character
towards a weighing of the benefits of the statue in the political relations between
the Roman people and the pontiff, Pallavicino cleared the path to transform
Alexander’s decision—open as it was to misinterpretation—into a healthy
political act. The refusal itself becomes even worthier of commemoration than
the deeds that occasioned the gift of the statue, as a supreme testimony of
Alexander’s concern for the benefit of the Roman people. Since the effigy has
been discarded, the record of the refusal will necessarily assume the form of an
inscription. That is why, Pallavicino argues in the last section of his justification,
Alexander ultimately accepted one. It would appear to be a double statue, one
erected for earlier merit, Alexander’s containment of the plague, and the other
to the generosity of the refusal, with its important implications for the future
(after Alexander’s refusal only Clement XII received a statue on the Capitol).26
For it is true, Pallavicino concludes, that the only worthy simulacrum of esteem
is the one shaped by the pens and tongues of the most reputed men since they
are not remunerated with the treasures of power, but of virtue.27
Pallavicino’s justification of Alexander’s refusal (by far the most extensive
passage in the biography dedicated to a work of art)28 juxtaposes the effigy
carried in the heart of the Romans, the honorific statue, and the inscription
composed by men of letters. Besides the question of expenditure, the
juxtaposition revolves around the need to externalize great deeds and
gratitude on the one hand, and the potential abuse of such externalization on
the other. Pallavicino recognizes two possible forms of abuse of the statue,
first—suppressed—the risk of its destruction and the defamation of the
model; and second, more subtly, the risk of misappropriation. Pallavicino
in fact intimates that Alexander wanted to break a nascent tradition. By
accepting the statue, he would have been the third consecutive pope to receive
one. Such tradition would allow the effigy to become part of an economy
of representation disjointed from the celebration of virtue, fueled by idle
expectations and personal vanity.
The Image of the Heart
Just like the damnatio memoriae that so preoccupied Alexander VII and
his friend, both the praise of the exquisite virtue of refusing the honor of
the statue in favor of the image kept in the citizens’ heart and the paragone
between commemoration by means of the effigy or letters are well established
by classical precedent.29 Xenophon had once vaunted the unwillingness of
Agesilaus, King of Sparta, to “suffer any image of his bodily form to be set
up.”30 The whole Capitoline episode recalls Plutarch’s “Life of Cato the Elder,”
where it is described how Cato derides the citizens who erected him a statue
because “they were taking pride in the workmanship of brass-founders and
painters; whereas [they] bore about his best likeness in their breasts.”31 Cato’s
dismissal, however, is expressed after he actually received a statue, and other
classical sources, too, prefigure Pallavicino’s deliberations about the political
appropriateness of the refusal. The emperor Trajan grudgingly granted Pliny
the Younger his request to erect an honorific statue, since “I [Trajan] do not
wish to seem that I have put any check on your loyal feeling towards me,”
even though, the Emperor added, “I am generally very reluctant to accept
honours of this kind.”32 The same Pliny’s careful examination of the effigy’s
status within the economy of honor and gratitude in his “Panegyric to Trajan”
must have served as a model to Pallavicino’s deliberations in the Vita.33
Yet Pallavicino’s mistrust for the honorific statue also reflects the disregard
for the effigy we have encountered elsewhere in his work. In several instances
the cardinal opposes the external portrait model in stone or paint to the
true essence of a person.34 To Pallavicino, this essence is best captured by
the portrait that is shaped and carried in the heart, not by the effigy. As we
have seen, the author employs this topos in a letter to Hugues de Lionne,
written shortly after Gianlorenzo Bernini’s stay in Paris, when he writes that
“I vaunt myself more for another portrait, from which [Bernini’s portrait of
Pallavicino] would originate; that is the one that Signor de Lionne himself has
formed in his heart of me.”35 The unavoidable artificiality and “externality”
of the portrait condemn the stone effigy to remain only a secondary record of
one’s true inner virtue.
Pallavicino’s disparaging opinion of portraiture helps him to justify
Alexander’s refusal. But the eminently public character of the refused statue
(contrary to the rather more private, less conspicuous and better protected
portrait bust), and hence the refusal itself, forces him to recognize the
expression of gratitude and the propagation of virtue as legitimate concerns.
In fact, other contemporary sources mention the refusal along similar lines.
Athanasius Kircher dedicated his Mundus Subterraneus (1665) to the pope,
in the hope that the backdrop of the underwordly shadows described in his
book would set off the splendor of Alexander’s wisdom and piety in order to
substitute for the refused statue.36 And as mentioned before, the Roman Senate
offered Alexander VII a medal in lieu of the statue. Designed by Bernini and
produced in 1659, the medal’s obverse depicted a portrait of the pope (Fig.
4.2a) and the reverse a scene from Aulus Gellus’s Androcles and the Lion (Fig.
4.2b). Separately cast, the two sides were each set into an elaborate border and
then made into a hinged case. Inside the opened case can be seen two broken
portions of an inscription in bronze in honor of the pope (Fig. 4.2c).37 Around
the same time, in 1659–60, two large engravings were produced that combined
depictions of both sides of the medal with inscriptions celebrating Alexander’s
beneficent actions for Rome, first among them the eradication of the plague
and the refusal of the statue, now substituted by the medal (Fig. 4.4).38
The three media or forms of expression combined here are the allegorical
history, the medallic portrait and the inscription. The choice for this story is
easily explained. As a gladiator, Androcles finds himself face to face with the
lion he befriended years before, when he had cured the animal by pulling
a thorn from its paw. Upon recognizing his old master, the lion becomes
docile and licks Androcles’ feet. The story is an obvious allegory of gratitude,
with the lion representing the city of Rome and Androcles Alexander. This
reading is made explicit in the two engravings, where the inscriptions
list the deeds of Alexander that inspired the Senate to decree “a statue on
the Capitoline hill.” But, as we know, “the most modest prince declined.”
Domenico Jacobacci, on whose behalf the medal was made, “unable to erect
the statue, … dedicated … a medallion … already cast from gold, silver, and
bronze, and finally printed here on sheets more lasting than bronze.”39
Medals carry a connection to inner virtue and exemplarity at least as strongly
as the monumental statue.40 Unlike paper, however, they can be remolded.
4.4 Giovanni Battista Bonacina after Pietro da Cortona, Allegory with the
Medal of Androcles and the Lion, Rome, 1660 (Royal Library, Brussels)
Bearing in mind Pallavicino’s arguments in favor of the inscription, however,

the text in the engraving may less concern the material carrier of the message
than its medium: only writing truly eternalizes gratitude and its recipient.
In fact, an identical inscription appears inside the case which comprises
the two sides of the medal. Here too, attention is drawn to the carrier of the
inscription, two small bronze slabs that imitate the piece of paper with the
inscription, torn in two and folded to fit into the case. The image of paper,
made of a material similar to the medal’s, “lasts longer” than the images on
the medal, because it carries the explanatory inscription.41
In the Vita, Pallavicino himself proposes the inscription, letters hewn
into stone, as the true guarantee of correct commemoration between the
vulnerable statue and the mute inner effigy. Such a record is provided by
men of letters, not by artists. By claiming the superiority of the word over the
statue, Pallavicino implicitly sets up a paragone between the unmade effigy
and the very context of his own justification: like the inscription, his biography
of the pope is a simulacrum drafted by a reputed letterato. This portrait is a far
superior mirror image of the sovereign than any “external” effigy and a much
more effective reflection of his thoughts and deeds.
As we will see, Pallavicino’s biography of Alexander is an important point
of reference for the Jesuit’s views on the public representation of the pontiff.
By virtue of its microscopic attention to detail, the biography contains the
most reliable trace of the living pope, and acts as a much better analogue of
the pontiff’s historical, “real” presence than the effigy. On exactly this point
Pallavicino’s position differs markedly from Giovanni Borboni’s. His Delle
statue shares with Pallavicino’s considerations its discussion of sculpture
in ethical terms, not least because it can be read entirely as a justification of
Alexander’s refusal: Borboni publishes a treatise on sculpture that culminates
in an effigy that was never made. But Borboni’s argument is founded on the
notion that the effigy strives to be identical to the living body. For this reason,
idolatry looms large as soon as sculpture attains a level of sophistication
similar to the other arts and literature. To circumvent this conundrum,
Borboni proposed the image carried in the heart as the most perfect piece of
sculpture, a living effigy untainted by idolatry.
The Effigy and the Idol in Borboni’s Delle Statue
Graced with an illustration of a nearly finished statue of Alexander VII

that closely follows the typology of earlier Capitoline statues and Bernini’s
contemporary statue of Alexander for the Duomo in Siena, Delle statue
is a history of sculpture that centers on the question of how the ethical
and political function of statues can be reconciled with the risk of idolatry
inherent to the effigy (Fig. 4.5).42 It combines a wide array of classical sources,
4.5 Lazarus Baldus and François Spierre, frontispiece of Giovanni Andrea Borboni,
Delle statue (Rome, 1661) (Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele, Rome)
both historical and philosophical, with a plethora of biblical and patristic

pronouncements on image worship. In this Delle statue is quite innovative.
Early modern treatises on sculpture routinely dealt with the origin,
development and function of sculpture.43 Edmundus Figrelius-Gripenhielm’s
De statuis illustrium romanorum (1656) offered an extensive treatment of Roman
honorific sculpture, its function, use and meaning.44 Still, Borboni appears
to have made the first attempt to integrate a complete history of sculpture
with the problematic of idolatry.45 Indeed, to Borboni, the birth of sculpture
almost coincided with the emergence of idolatry, because rulers soon
misappropriated the love and admiration expressed through the erection of
sculptures, and people transferred their love for the ruler onto the effigy. His
treatise therefore examines in detail who deserves a statue and how statues
reflect and preserve the status of the model. As a result, the art of sculpture
is identified with portraiture, and to a large extent with the honorific statue.46
Sculptural mimesis is self-evident and less problematic than the possible
uses of and responses to statues. Issues of technique or imitation are barely
treated, and the personality, training and art of the sculptor receive little, if
any, attention.47 The different materials and the best examples of ancient and
modern sculpture, too, are discussed in order to understand how they pay
tribute to their model. Borboni’s point of view explains why Delle statue is a
treatise on sculpture permeated with the superiority of the word—written
and spoken—over the sculpted effigy: Borboni sees it as his task to revive in
writing all those monuments that have fallen victim to the voracity of Time.48
The treatise’s first seven chapters offer a history of sculpture from its
origins to the present. To Borboni, sculpture imitates the incarnation of Adam
and Eve. The art to confer movement and speech upon statues, “which is one
of the clear indications that it lives,”49 came close to perfection in the early
ages of humankind before it was irretrievably lost, only to live on almost as
a parody of itself in Pasquino.50 When the demiurgic activity of sculpture
became adopted by rulers to eternalize their fame, idolatry was born.51
Idolatry, in turn, gave rise to the risk of defamation: because the idol served as
a perfect substitute for its model, it became subject to violence, as in the case
of the prefect Lucius Aelius Seianus, whose bronze statue was torn down,
dragged through the city and cut to pieces, to be remolded into vases and
cutlery.52 This is why, Borboni continues, inscriptions prove to be much more
worthy and reliable testimonies of virtues: “Such ornaments do not succumb
to thieves or the indignities of Fortune.”53 Similarly, the most profound secrets
of the Egyptians have survived thanks to the hieroglyphic inscriptions on
their statuary: “At least they involved, in their idolatry, the most noble part of
man which is his mind … And so it was easier for the Master of the lie, to print
in their hearts, a treacherous, yet seeming religion ….”54
Borboni’s enumeration of the great statues of classical and modern times, in
Chapters 4 to 7, illustrates the greatness of Michelangelo and his seventeenth-
century emulator, Gianlorenzo Bernini. Borboni’s stress on Bernini’s imitatio

Buonarroti and the selection of examples suggest that at least part of Delle
Statue, probably these four chapters, stem from the 1630s.55 Bernini and
Michelangelo are cast as the artists most capable of representing the ruler, and
this point introduces the final section of the treatise, which deals specifically
with honorific statuary. Besides enumerating the categories of benemeriti who
deserve a statue, Borboni pays ample attention to the conditions under which
erecting, giving or accepting a statue is appropriate, closely following Seneca,
Plato and Cato.56 Their arguments are brought into harmony with Counter-
Reformation justifications of honorific sculptures as can be found in Gabriele
Paleotti’s Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane and Ottonelli and da
Cortona’s Trattato della Pittura e Scultura.57
As part of this argument, Chapter 11 offers the first comprehensive
history of the papal statues on the Capitol Hill. This series serves as the
prime example of good practice in honorific statuary: since at the Vatican
all honor is due to Saint Peter, the statues of his successors, like those of
emperors and kings, belong on the Capitol.58 The final chapter of Delle statue
constitutes Borboni’s original addition to the ethico-religious discussion on
honorific statues, as it is entirely dedicated to “the virtue of refusing the
honor of the statue.” The case of Alexander VII is the main subject. Borboni
recalls that sculpture imitates God’s original act of creation, and is therefore
first and for all an act of “ineffable” love.59 It is therefore perfectly natural,
and even praiseworthy to offer and accept a statue: “Who would not care to
be loved?”60 Refusing a statue is therefore counter-natural to the point that
the deed can have no other cause or explanation than a virtue so strong that
it has to be obeyed.61 Here, in an allusion to contemporary topoi that were
dear to Alexander VII, Borboni stresses how the public humility of rulers
like Alexander the Great and Augustus exemplified their conviction that
only the portrait in the hearts of their subjects truly matters. In fact, Borboni
concludes, it is the virtuous refusal that safeguards one’s name from the
envy, misunderstanding and even violence of posterity.62 Again Borboni
mentions the inscription as a guarantee against future usurpation of one’s
fame. This argument sets the stage for an extensive account of the story of
Alexander’s refusal, which culminates in the depiction of the inscription,
relieving Borboni from the duty to speak, since it performs the very task
his treatise set out to fulfill.63 Borboni concludes this chapter, and his book,
with a passage that extols Christ as the most perfect sculpture ever made,
the only effigy worthy of being held in front of one’s eyes at all times and to
be emulated by all, casting the refused and unmade honorific statue as the
closest human imitation of divine glorification.64 The expression of gratitude
is constrained to its most private and yet most precious locus, the heart. After
this rarest of effigies, the honorific statue comes in as a good second; in fact,
a merely “great” man does well to accept the honor of the effigy.65 Briefly
put, “He who has married himself with the immortality of his name in a
statue, has done well; but he who has chosen to remain celibate, has done
better” [“Chi s’è sposato coll’immortalità del suo nome in qualche Statua, ha
fatto bene; ma chi si è voluto in cio mantener Celibe, ha fatto meglio”].66 This
idea is, in fact, imagined on the full-page illustration after the frontispiece of
Borboni’s work. Fame heralds the moment when the near-complete effigy of
Alexander gestures towards the allegory of Sculpture to lay her instruments
to rest. Behind her, a second woman embodies Modesty, covering herself
with her arms and averting her gaze.
The Effigy and History
Borboni’s view of sculpture rests on the hierarchy between humanity and

God. Humans emulate but never equal divine artifice. Not only did they
lose the artistic ability but they are unable to deal appropriately with the
living image as well. Pallavicino, on the other hand, considers honorific
sculpture as an element in the relationship between sovereign and subject.
This explains why Borboni and Pallavicino hold quite different ideas about
the refusal. Borboni does not weigh the political consequences of a refusal
and adheres to his hierarchy of simulacra in which the honorific statue has
its legitimate place. Pallavicino is concerned with Alexander’s historical
reputation, central to his biography.
Underneath this divergence between Delle statue and the Vita lie opposing
assessments of sculpture. Borboni, very much along the lines of the ideas on
the mimetic arts found in authors like Paleotti and Ottonelli, feels pressed to
circumscribe the field of action of the honorific statue. The more successful the
statue, the more likely it carries the germ of idolatry. This is why Alexander’s
refusal is almost a monument to sculpture’s true capabilities. In fact, very
much like Francesco Bocchi, Borboni sees an intimate alliance between the
expression of virtue and liveliness. Delle statue pushes Bocchi’s view of
sculpture to its logical conclusion: the statue most expressive of exceptional
virtue is the actual person, not a piece of sculpture, because sculpture will and
should never attain the liveliness of living people. Since sculpture falls short
of honoring the individual, virtue should be remembered in writing.
Pallavicino, even if he has to face the historical reality of statues being
destroyed and defaced to punish their models, sees the problem not in terms of
idolatry but of the accurate representation of history. Because history pertains
to the discursive truths that appeal to the intellect, it is not well served by the
artful image. If, by consequence, the sovereign wishes to be present in public
space, this should not be done by means of an effigy, but by actions worthy of
historians and particularly biographers. Their words can herald these actions
in books as well as inscriptions.
Spurred by the twin specters of iconoclasm and idolatry hovering over the
effigy, Pallavicino and Borboni advocate, each in his own way, the written
word to commemorate and glorify great men. But for actions to speak louder
than effigies, they require a specific setting. Does it follow that rulers are tied
to particular places to perform their virtue? And does this virtue carry over
into those surroundings? These questions surface in the controversy over the
proper papal residence.
A Controversy over the Papal Residence
Alexander VII’s favorite residence was the palace on the Quirinal Hill or Monte
Cavallo, the present presidential palace. Alexander was by no means the first
pope who spent considerable time there, but he may have considered moving
the papal residence permanently from the Vatican.67 Probably quite early in
Alexander’s papacy a number of opinions on the matter were drafted.68 In fact,
the controversy may have been prompted by the sequestered residency of the
pope, his court and his preferred artists at the Quirinal during the plague.69
Pallavicino authored one opinion, to prove that “not a single temporal or
spiritual prerogative of the Vatican palace” could be used to argue against
a “permanent residence” for the pope at the Quirinal [“… dall’abitazione
continuata di Papa Alessandro nel Quirinale ridonderanno ad ogni qualità
di persone importantissimi beni temporali, e spirituali, e che niun grave
rispetto o temporale, o spirituale ha fondamento, e vigore per l’altra parte”].70
Another confidant of Alexander’s, Pallavicino’s old friend Lucas Holstenius,
responded to the Jesuit and argued that the pope belonged at the Vatican.71
Both pamphlets were published together in 1776, when the same issue arose
once again.72 A little under a century later, the arguments of Holstenius were
unshelved to prove that the pope could only rightfully claim the Quirinal as
a temporal leader. Because the Italian nation had relieved him of this heavy
burden, the palace consequently belonged to the new head of state.73
This issue touches upon one of the two central points of the controversy.
Pallavicino, following Roberto Bellarmino, argues on the basis of the pope’s
threefold task. He is the head of the Church, bishop of Rome and king of the
Papal State.74 In order to perform this daunting feat, Pallavicino prescribes
qualities for the papal residence that are still very much in line with Paolo
Cortesi’s remarks on the cardinal’s palace.75 The pontiff’s residence must
provide optimum accommodations to the court through a central location,
easy access and ample space.76 In addition, the papal residence must be
healthy, an argument with a peculiar urgency given the circumstances under
which the essay was drafted. As Pallavicino had remarked earlier in Del Bene,
a healthy principe can serve the interests of his subjects more hours a day and
therefore “with a clearer head.”77 Moreover, as Pallavicino well knew, Chigi’s
poor health while papal envoy in Cologne had impeded his “workings of the
mind” and prevented him from fulfilling his religious duties.78
Thus, Pallavicino’s argument focuses on comodità or convenience of the
palace. Convenience serves the common good, the well-being of Christians,
of the subjects of the papal state, and of “this extraordinary flock” of Rome.79
Pallavicino recalls that popes have always chosen the most practical residence,80
and points out how Rome rose from its ashes through papal interventions,
such as the building of fountains, a process of resurrection crowned by the
palace Sixtus V built on the Quirinal, which has since become the most logical
choice of residence for popes, “for their own health as well as the convenience
of others.”81
Because Holstenius really only discusses the role of the pope as head
of the Universal Church, he gives the papal residence an entirely different
meaning. He starts by showing the primacy of Saint Peter’s as the papacy’s
most important church. The pope is the bishop of Rome and the successor of
Saint Peter. This dual role is reflected in the relationship between Saint John
in the Lateran and Saint Peter’s. The seat of the vicar apostolic of Christ is
the Vatican basilica. On the basis of this vicariate the pope is the head of a
universal church, whose body is the holy college of cardinals.82 The authority
of the pope is embodied by Saint Peter’s, because it is based on the succession
of Peter and his body is tangible proof of that authority.83 Holstenius asks the
reader to imagine the “holy adoration” that would befall the pope throughout
the world, if he were to reside in the most famous palace in all Christendom
“as in his own house,” next to the first and most important church in the
world and right by the body and seat of Peter:
… a segno tale [il Vaticano … ridotto in quella grandezza, e comodità, che si

vede], che mancando ogni altr’obbligo, la sola maestà del luogo doveva invitare
il Pontefice a quella Residenza, conciliandogli una santa venerazione appresso il
Mondo, il vederlo alloggiato nel più nobile e più famoso Palazzo della Cristianità,
come in Casa propria, ed accanto alla prima e principal Chiesa del Mondo, vicino al
Corpo, ed alla Sede di S. Pietro, d’onde ogni sua grandezza riconosce.84
Pallavicino and Holstenius defend their choice of papal residence on the basis
of different conceptions of the papacy, exemplified in their interpretations of
the papal epithet servus servorum dei. To Pallavicino, it characterizes the pope
as a servant to the common good of the three communities he presides over.85
To Holstenius, it calls to mind the public acts of humility of Pope Gregory the
Great, the foundation of his holy reputation as the legitimate vicar of Christ.86
This brings us to the second important issue of the controversy, the role
and meaning of public display. A considerable part of Pallavicino’s discourse
refutes the claim that a long absence of the pope from the Vatican would
harm worship at Saint Peter’s.87 According to Pallavicino, the private cult,
the visiting of holy places by Romans and pilgrims, is only hindered by the
presence of the court. But the ceremonies that really tie the pope to Saint
Peter’s, like the Corpus Domini procession, will take place with “greater
splendor and conspiciousness” if he travels there in a lustrous cavalcade,
instead of descending the “nearby stairs” from his usual quarters. In this
context, Pallavicino refers explicitly to the policy of Sixtus V to spread the
papal cappelle over different Roman basilicas, in order to promote the dignity
of worship in different churches. This spread gave rise to a great number of
ceremonial parades per year, which were accommodated by Sixtus’s new
road system:
le altre visitazioni, e funzioni Ponteficie farannosi con maggior celebrità, e con più
segnalato culto di quella Basilica, quando il Pontefice vi si conduca in cavalcata
frequentissima, e nobilissima da si lontana abitazione, che se meramente vi
discendesse dalle ordinarie sue stanze per una congiunta scala; o delle Cappelle
meno solenne, che soglione tenersi dal Papa dentro al suo Palazzo: e questo tanto
è rispetto al Culto di quella Chiesa che si tengono nel Palazzo Quirinale, quanto
nel Vaticano: maggiormente che è stato in ciò sempre vario l’uso de’Papi, tanto,
che Sisto V. non pur le tenne in diverse Chiese di Roma, ma per una Bolla (benchè
poi non accettata da’Successori) statui determinatamente, che vi si tenessero anche
nell’avvenire.88
According to Holstenius, “secular spectacles” such as cavalcades never

brought anyone closer to faith. The usefulness of the Vatican palace does not
lie in the “appearance of solemn or other ceremonies that take place in this
basilica rather than others,” nor is it limited to the devotion of Romans or
pilgrims. It lies in the “opinion” and “respect” that the pontiff gains with kings
and all Christians through his devotion to Saint Peter’s. The dignity of the
papacy is based on the authority of Peter and on the assumption of apostolic
virtues. The adoration of some popes, for example, was greatly enhanced by
rumors that they secretly prayed at Peter’s tomb at night, in order to make
their decisions under the influence of the apostolic spirit.89 Acquaintances
of Holstenius who converted to Catholicism did not do so after attending
“cavalcades and other secular pump and circumstance,” but after witnessing
public acts of humility by the pope, such as washing the feet of the poor or
going in processions on foot, or his dedication to the Holy Sacrament during
the Corpus Domini procession.90
Agire sempre come in Teatro
Numerous studies have made us familiar with the architectural and urbanistic
interventions initiated or supervised by Alexander VII. Many concerned the
Vatican and Quirinal palace, Saint Peter’s and Saint John Lateran, and many
more local ameliorations to roads and piazze to accommodate increasing
traffic as well as processions and ceremonies.91 Since the impact of the
4.6 Giambattista Falda, “Scala interiore che conduce alla
cappella pontifica,” from Il nuovo teatro delle fabriche, et edificii, in prospettiva
di Roma moderna (Rome, 1665–69), vol. 1 (Ghent University)
Scritture at the time of their composition is unknown, it is hard to judge

whether they actually influenced Alexander’s decisions.92 Pallavicino’s
dismissal of the connection between the Vatican palace and Saint Peter’s is
the most glaring reference to a site of an important architectural intervention,
the building of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Scala Regia (Fig. 4.6).93 Yet it is hard
to draw a direct relationship between the text and the building. Marder
has argued that Bernini’s design served to accommodate processions
such as the Corpus Domini. This might indicate that Alexander and his
entourage indeed felt that the papal persona was served better with a more
conspicuous ceremonial connection between palace and church than the
existing staircase or a tunnel leading to Peter’s tomb. But it would certainly
stretch the Scritture too far to argue that Pallavicino motivated Alexander to
build the new staircase.
On the other hand, Holstenius’s arguments resonate with his own
involvement with the colonnade of Saint Peter’s Square, and especially the
iconography of its foundation medal (Fig. 4.7).94 Its inscription, Fundamenta
eius in montibus sanctis [“The foundations thereof are in holy mountains”],
recalls his citation in the Scritture of Cesare Baronio, when the venerated
church historian describes the Vatican as the new Capitol with a verse
taken from the prophecies of Isaiah, “Cujus est domus Domini in vertice
montium” [“This is the house of Lord on the top of mountains”],95 or his
reference to the dedication of Saint Peter’s as the moment when the church
was declared “tamquam ad Fidei petram & Ecclesiae fundamentum” [“both
the rock of Faith and the foundation of the Church”].96 But in this case, too, it
is far more probable that Alexander VII
employed Holstenius for his strengths
when devising the colonnade and the
concomitant symbolism, rather than
having the librarian direct pontifical
patronage.
If the Scritture are read as defending
opposing views of how Alexander’s life
translates into architecture, however, it
makes sense to relate the Scala Regia
to Pallavicino’s views, even if the
intervention enhanced the importance
of the Vatican. The dispute between
Pallavicino and Holstenius offers two
models to interpret the visual presence
of the pope in the city and its relation
to his exemplarity. Pallavicino wonders 4.7 Foundation medal of Saint Peter’s
in dismay what kind of education Square (obverse), bronze, 1656
a Christian could possible get from (Royal Library, Brussels)
knowing that the pope chooses to maintain a “glorious palace” before

attending to the well-being of everybody connected with the court.97 He
argues that “houses are made for people, and not people for houses.”98 This
argument should less be understood as an expression of common sense
than as carrying the conviction that the majesty and authority, or virtù, of
the pope is best expressed in deeds of good governance, such as choosing
an efficient residence and making a city healthy. Pallavicino had already
made a similar point in Del Bene, when the treatise dealt with the question
of whether rulership is a condition for happiness.99 The tasks of the principe,
which take an extraordinary toll on his mind and body, are rewarded with
the highest goods of fame, “amor pubblico,” veneration, and “that which
matters most,” namely “to see the highest happiness of the people as the
fruit of his own virtue.”100 For “what else is a ruler than the noble servant of
each vassal?”101
To Holstenius the pope’s public humility is the pre-eminent edifying
example to all Christians.102 The public appearance of the pope is just one
of the elements that constitute the essence of the papacy, his reputation as a
holy man in the entire Christian community. The pope gains this reputation
because everybody knows he lives next to Saint Peter’s as a worthy Christian
individual and performs devout deeds. Holstenius is less interested in the
vitality of the city than in places with a historical significance for Christianity.
To the converted man of letters, Rome is not the embodiment of good
governance, but the historical locus that justifies the exercise of papal
authority. The true measure of the pope’s virtue is his piety with regard to
that locus, with the tomb of Peter at its center. Or as he sums it up: “if Rome
honors Saint Peter’s, the world will honor Rome.”103
These diverging conceptions of papal exemplarity generate different
views of Rome and its meaning for the papacy. Our authors express these
views with body metaphors. Holstenius argues that Rome is no part of
the body of the Church, but that the sacred presence of Peter’s body ties
the Church to Rome. The body headed by the pope is the community of
Christians: “nothing works more efficiently in that body of the Church, than
the holy and good influences of the head,” the Vicar of Christ and successor
of Peter.104 Only in second place is the pope also the bishop of Rome, and
as such not tied to the Vatican, but to Saint John Lateran.105 The presence
of Peter’s body, who consecrated the Sede Apostolica “with his blood and
bones”106 confers upon the Vatican an unsurpassed maestà, not its position in
the city.107 With this argument, Holstenius quite closely follows the reasons
of Nicholas V (1447–55) to motivate his decision to develop the Vatican as
the see of the papacy.108
To Pallavicino, the city of Rome is a body deriving nourishment and life
from papal government; it was revived by the water of new fountains.109
This is why the manifestation of virtue is bound to Rome: it concerns the
buildings and other interventions that came into being under the pope’s
patronage, for they are living witnesses to his preoccupation with the
common good and the decorous worship of God. The public appearance
of the pope convinces his audience of his exemplary virtue; therein, too,
lies the function of ceremonies, processions and the cavalcata.110 The primary
audience of these manifestations consists of the “flock” of Rome, the visitor
and the pilgrim. Choosing the Quirinal thus not only evinces an appropriate
concern for the common good but also activates the city center of Rome as
a theater for the papal persona; the distance between the Quirinal and the
Vatican creates a space for a ceremony worthy of the pope and Saint Peter’s.
The papal presence in the city receives quite a lot of attention in Alexander’s
Vita. When building projects are mentioned, they appear as contributions to
the common good.111 Pallavicino describes in detail the many measures taken
by Alexander VII to enhance the dignity and splendor of ecclesiastical life
and offices.112 The pontiff’s own ceremonial appearance, too, is discussed,
with Pallavicino carefully balancing Alexander’s innate humility with the
requirements of decorum.113 An important ambassador once said that “the
splendor and the majesty” of the papal mass during Alexander’s papacy
lent something superhuman and heavenly to the apostolic college and its
head.114
In sum, Alexander VII is a living exemplum. In the introduction to the
biography, Pallavicino writes how he, Pallavicino, devotes his life to God and
to educating people by means of his pen. He writes:
Anyone knows how useful it is for Christendom to know that the one who is
venerated because of his supreme dignity, can also be venerated for his supreme
virtue, and that he who is hierarchically closest to Christ, also follows Him through
imitation. Moreover, because from the goodness of the Supreme Priest, almost as of
the influence of the first mover, depends all the wellbeing of the Church, and because
a good and recent example is the most useful master to man, it follows that the life
of pope, revealed to the world, contributes optimally, and for a long period to the
highest good of the church, because it will bring forth a long line of good pontiffs.
[Ciascun sa quanto giovi alla edificazione del Cristianesimo il sapersi, che chi è
adorato per suprema dignità, sia venerabile per suprema virtù, e che il più prossimo
a Cristo nel grado, gli sia vicino ancora nell’imitazione. Oltre a ciò dipendendo dalla
bontà del Sommo Sacerdote, quasi dalla propria influenza del primo mobile tutto il
ben della Chiesa, ed essendo agli uomini il buon esempio recente il più profittevole
d’ogni altro maestro, ne segue, che la vita palesata al mondo d’un Papa ottimo giovi
per diuturno tempo a sommo pro della chiesa, cagionando una lunga serie di Papi
buoni.]115
However, the biography is also meant to serve as an “intellectual mirror,” a

Fürstenspiegel which reflects the pope’s own actions to himself, a necessity
if even the Goddess of Wisdom needs to contemplate herself in a mirror. It
allows him to live according to the tenets of Seneca, who says that virtue is
best maintained by always acting “as though one were in a theater,” that is,
under the close and not always sympathetic scrutiny of one’s fellow men:
Mi sono ricordato che le favole misteriose c’insegnano, come la medesima Dea

della sapienza fu bisognosa di contemplar la sua effigie nel fido specchio d’un fonte
per non deformarla. Ho considerato adunque, che veggendo Alessandro VII. tutte
le sue azioni successivamente narrate, rimirerà ogni dì l’immagine de’suoi costumi
in uno specchio intellettuale, laddove il materiale per contemplarvi quella del
suo sembiante, già son diciott’anni si è da lui disusato; e saprà, che di lui avviene
ciò, che Seneca autore a lui famigliarissimo, raccomanda per ottimo presidio al
mantenimento della virtù, cioè di oprar sempre come in teatro.116
With these words Pallavicino embraces a view of the ruler examined in an

important strand of contemporary political historiography, most notably the
biographies of rulers by Virgilio Malvezzi, Pallavicino’s uncle and a close
friend of Chigi’s.117 Attempting to marry Christian ethics with the conditions
of emerging absolutist rulership, Malvezzi emphasizes a neo-Stoic notion
of theatricality as the ruler’s proper condition.118 He should be a worthy
exemplum and therefore act accordingly, balancing virtue and caution.119
In the Scritture, Pallavicino extends this notion of theatricality to the papal
presence in the city. If Alexander’s life is an example worthy of emulation, it
is because his deeds shine forth so strongly, and lend themselves so well to the
kind of detailed description that distinguishes biography from historiography
in general. Pallavicino even stresses the parentage of biography to the
observation of live phenomena by comparing it to the empirical practices that
emerged in his own circles in the 1620s, like the Accademia dei Lincei:120
[O]f unique and marvelous events, everyone wants to know even the most minute
circumstances; exactly as of the new phenomena in the heavens every tiny difference
is observed, and every subtle movement, and that in the anatomy of the human body
not a single nerve or fiber is overlooked.
[… sì perchè intorno a singolari e maravigliosi avvenimenti ciascuno è vago di risaper

ancor le minime circonstanze; siccome nelle nuove apparenze del cielo curiosamente
s’osserva ogni picciola diversità d’aspetto, ed ogni tenuissimo movimento, e nella
notomia dell’umano corpo niun nervicciuolo, e niuna fibra si trascura.]121
The exemplum, as a living image, unites the clarity of its expression with its
function as a model.122 Or, expressed by Pallavicino’s Spanish contemporary
Balthazar Gracián, “exempla are living texts.”123
The Body of the Church
Alexander’s exemplary role is stressed again in the dedication of the Storia del
Concilio di Trento, published in the first years of Chigi’s pontificate. Amongst
other examples Pallavicino adduces how “in its majesty, order and devotion,
the papal chapel is the most lively portrait of paradise that one could have”
[“Le pontificie cappelle a suo tempo nella maestà, nell’ordine, nella divozione,
il più vivo ritratto che aver si possa in terra del paradiso”].124 As a result, the
Vatican and Rome serve as a perfect example or “mirror” to all the churches
in the world.125 This is their mission, and explains why Rome is the capital of
Catholicism. In line with Pallavicino’s views on the papal residence, the Storia
justifies the primacy of Rome less because tradition warrants it than with its
practical advantages and the decorum of Catholic cult. As in Holstenius’s
contribution to the Scritture, the body metaphor helps to shape this argument.
In fact, Pallavicino literally turns his opponent’s comparison on its head. If
Holstenius argued that Rome is no part of the Church, but that the Church
belongs in Rome because the city is sacred, Pallavicino remarks that Rome is a
crucial element of the ecclesiastical body, because that body requires a material
component and Rome fulfills that task to perfection. The Urbs, however, has
no prerogative in this task. Indeed, the body of the Church has the special
ability to transform any part into another. It is a republic where “each plebeian
can become a senator, and any subject king.”126 As a result, “supported by
the maintenance of orthodox religion and papal authority, Rome is a court
composed of all Catholic countries, where each of those countries, by means
of their creed or merit, can arise to the most supreme dignity, and acquire
authority over, or participate in ecclesiastical government and patrimony.”
Rome does not exert tyranny over the Catholic world, but is the head of the
political union as described in Aristotle’s Politics.127
Pallavicino thus embeds Rome’s exemplarity within the Church’s political
constitution and the supremacy of the Roman pontiff: the capital is where the
head lives.128 Already in the first of its 24 books the Storia states that “the unity,
the government, the majesty” of the Church require one “supreme head,”
which in turn must avail of “its own state, its own court, and ministers.”129
Elsewhere, Pallavicino repeats that a harmonious body requires a head, and
that without a head there can exist no body.130 This “ecclesiastical rulership”
maintains the “unity, rule, and decorum” in the entire Church, just like all
religious orders have one general.131 After all, an unordered multitude of
“forms” will never produce a well-arranged composto.132
As a body, Pallavicino treats the Church as an entity on a par with living
creatures. And in all organisms the essence, “gli spiriti,” is maintained
by means of subservient, material components. When making this point,
Pallavicino reverts to a comparison with the fly: “In sum …, each part of
this republic [the Church] needs the other [material part]. And if it is atheist
unbelief to consider the body of the fly as casual, does the same not go for
the worldly body of the Church?” [“Insomma chi ben considera, ogni parte
di questa repubblica è bisognosa dell’altra. S’è impietà d’ateista il tener che
sia casuale il corpo natural d’una mosca, non sarà il creder tale il corpo civile
della Chiesa?”].133 The financial support provided by all subjects of the Church
is therefore necessary and not just destined for pomp and circumstance.
Moreover, Pallavicino points out, some tenacious misunderstandings exist
about the true meaning of splendor. Often it is said that the primitive church
was poor and that the present pomp is therefore superfluous. However, the
first Church only lacked “the beauty of the structure and decoration of the
temples, in the consecrated vessels, in the vestments for the service” because
times were evil. Pallavicino then enumerates the splendor of the Temple of
Jerusalem and Constantine’s Saint Peter’s, and he mentions the countless
sacred texts arguing that “gold is nowhere better than in the temple.”
Just like God, so to speak, gilded heaven with lights to enamour mortals with it, so
it is fitting that churches are illuminated with gold, so that the people fall in love
with them, and run towards them, and makes a pact between the senses and reason,
between pleasure and devotion.
[Se parliamo delle pompe nella struttura, e negli addobbamenti de’tempj, ne’sacri
vasi, e negli abiti sacerdotali, queste mancarono sì alla primitiva Chiesa; ma per
malignità del secolo, non per elezione de’prelati. Veggiamo quale splendidezza
comandasse Iddio nel suo tempio dei Gierosolima; quale ne usasse Costantino subito
che fu convertito, e quante lodi ne riportasse dalle penne di tutti i santi. Anche i gentili
conobbero, e dissero che l’oro in niun luogo stava meglio che nel tempio: … Siccome
Iddio ha, per così dire, indorato il cielo di luce per innamorarne i mortali, così è
spediente che sieno illuminate d’oro le Chiese, perchè il popolo se ne invaghisca, e vi
corra; confederandosi il senso con la ragione, e il piacere con la divozione.]134
This kind of sacred magnificence is not reserved for Rome, but a universal
model. Pallavicino concludes: “The people want theaters; and it not only
follows piety, but also politics to make the theaters curing sin more sumptuous
and pleasant than those where sin goes to feed” [“Vuole il popolo i teatri: ed
è non solo conforme alla pietà, ma eziandio alla politica il fare che i teatri più
sontuosi, e più dilettevoli sieno quelli dove il vizio si medica, non dove si
nutre”].135
By connecting exemplarity with papal supremacy and ecclesiastical
splendor, the Storia further clarifies Pallavicino’s views on the relationship
between the arts and different kinds of truth. His identification of the Church
with a living body, characterized by a unity of form and composed of a material
and spiritual component, is particularly relevant. The material manifestation
of the Church becomes a necessary corpo, animated by the apostolic spirit.
The pontiff, as a living person, is a crucial connection between the spiritual
and material realm, just like the church building itself and the liturgy it
accommodates. These bodies, objects and artifacts are clearly distinguished
from portraits, statues or buildings that are not part of the same ecclesiastical
body or partake in that body only at a certain remove. Alexander’s body
resembles the fly, just like the body of the Church, but Bernini’s bust does not.
And while Pallavicino certainly considers the portrait of Alexander VII the
Romans carry in their hearts superior to the honorific statue on the Capitol,
the same is not true for the material component of religious worship or the
institution of the Church. In fact, his point that churches require ornament
is an implicit but unmistakable paragone with the spiritual temple that each
Christian carries in his or her heart. In the case of the church building, the
material artifact prevails because it is sacred.
Like the portrait of the heart, the cordial temple is a notion of classical
pedigree that soon entered Christian thought. In Epistle 95 Seneca stated
that “[t]he first way to worship the gods is to believe in the gods,” a dismissal
of the “precepts” for divine worship.136 Lactantius’ De ira dei (24.14–15)
and Divinae Institutiones (6.25) echoed these words in a way that strongly
reminds us of Cato’s refusal recorded by Plutarch, or Tacitus’ recollection
of Tiberius’ desire to be remembered by the “temples in your hearts,” his
“most beautiful statues.”137 In De ira dei Lactantius exhorts his readers to
“let God be consecrated by us, not in temples, but in our heart,” and in the
Institutiones Seneca is quoted as stating that “temples are not to be raised
unto his honor by the piling of rocks to great height. Worship must be paid
in each one’s heart.”138 In Christian literature, Lactantius’ description of
worship, often paired with Paul’s comparison that believers are “the temple
of the living God” (2 Cor. 6:16), served as a stern warning against the use of
earthly pleasures to honor God, insignificant, ephemeral and destructible
as they are.139 Yet it also helped to define consecration as the sacralization of
places of worship exempt from violation and idolatry.140 As such, the notion
of the cordial temple contributed to the legitimation of religious architecture.
That the question of appropriate and legitimate places of worship was
on Pallavicino’s mind when he was composing the Istoria del Concilio
seems to be confirmed by the preface to the reader in Giovanni Bona’s
Rerum liturgicarum libri duo, first published in 1672. Bona was another close
confidante of Alexander VII and deemed papabile after Chigi’s death.141 In
the preface, he recalls how Sforza Pallavicino, when he was working on the
Storia del Concilio di Trento, expressed his admiration for Bona’s study of
the history, use and symbolism of the Psalms, his Divina psalmodia of 1653,
and asked him whether he could write a similar work on liturgy.142 The task
turned out to be much more arduous than expected, but Pallavicino urged
his friend on. Some twenty years later, well after Pallavicino’s death, the
Rerum liturgicarum was finally published, with a dedication to Christ. The
book critically re-examined the origins and meaning of the entire liturgical
apparatus, including the church building, using sources ranging from
patristic writings to Antonio Bosio’s recent publications on the catacombs.143
As such, it was the most thorough re-examination of liturgy since the
Rationale divinorum officiorum, written by Wilhelmus Durandus around 1280
and frequently printed from the fifteenth century onwards.144
The Rerum liturgicarum discusses the church building in Chapter 19.

Bona argues that from the earliest times the Christians distinguished
their places of worship by means of a dedication. At the same time, their
churches had nothing to do with heathen temples, “crowned with elevated
domes in which they thought to seclude the divinity.”145 The Christian
creation of holy places that are different from temples is the real meaning
of Lactantius’ dictum in De ira dei, Bona argues.146 As soon as the times
permitted, however, the Christians did build their own churches. Bona
quotes Eusebius’ panegyric of Constantine, celebrating the emperor’s
erection of churches all over the Empire.147
In his justification of the church building Bona emphasizes less the
opulence of ecclesiastical structures than their sanctity. This sanctity
is produced by sacred remains but conferred by choice. Consecration
transforms the church building into a holy body and an intrinsic part of
liturgy, the cult of praising God. As such, it exemplifies the nature of the
Church, which literally incorporates the splendor of liturgy and religious
feasts. Pallavicino adds to this view in the Storia, his contribution to the
Scritture and the Vita of Alexander, that part of the ecclesiastical body also
pertains to the secular existence of the Church. This worldly body is guided
by principles of good governance and rulership, which produce their own
requirements for display and commemoration. On this point, Pallavicino’s
defense of the Quirinal as an appropriate papal residence dovetails with
his justification of Alexander’s refusal of the honorific statue. Choosing the
Quirinal not only evinces an appropriate concern for his subjects but also
activates the city center of Rome as a theater for the living presence of the
papal persona. This presence is worthy of the biographical record as an
exemplum for every Christian in general and future pontiffs in particular.
As exactly such a record, the Capitoline inscription recalling the refused
statue not only reminds Romans and popes alike of Alexander’s virtue but
also of the peculiar risks that living “as in a theater” entails.
The previous chapters have dealt with Sforza Pallavicino’s views on the
relationship of art to truth. Pallavicino contends that art should not simulate
or embody higher truths but address beholders so that they are moved to
discover them. At the same time, as this chapter has argued, art can also
assist in the expression, recording and dissemination of less elevated yet
equally essential ideas, such as the legitimacy of a ruler or the promotion
of the common good. Finally, art produces the material component of the
ecclesiastical body. This raises new questions. Are these different truths
expressed in the same way? Do different kinds of truths produce different
registers of style? If so, how do these different registers translate into form?
Or is it simply a question of perception, conditioned by the viewer and what
they are ready to believe?
Notes
1. On the 1656 plague, see the relevant sections in the diary of Carlo Cartari, published with a
valuable introduction in Cesare D’Onofrio, Roma val bene un’abiura (Rome, 1976), pp. 221–59;
Giacinto Gigli, Diario di Roma, ed. Manlio Barberito (Rome, 1994), pp. 763–76; Sforza Pallavicino,
Descrizione del Contagio che da Napoli si communicò a Roma, nell’anno 1656 … (Rome, 1837), later
republished as part of Sforza Pallavicino, Della vita di Alessandro VII. Libri cinque, Opera inedita di P.
Sforza Pallavicino della Compagnia di Gesù. Accademico della Crusca e poi Cardinale di S. Chiesa (2 vols,
Prato, 1839–40), vol. 2, pp. 84–111; Ludwig von Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste (Freiburg am Breisgau,
1929), vol. 14, pp. 324–6; Alessandro Pastore, “Tra giustizia e politica: il governo della peste a
Genova e Roma nel 1656–1657,” Rivista storica italiana, 100–101 (1988), pp. 140–52; Rose Marie
San Juan, Rome. A City out of Print (Minneapolis and London, 2001), pp. 219–31; and the different
contributions in Irene Fosi (ed.), La peste a Roma (1656–1657) (thematic issue: Roma moderna e
contemporanea, 14, 2006) (Rome, 2007), with extensive literature.
2. Alessandro Angelini, Monica Butzek and Bernardina Sani (eds), Alessandro VII Chigi (1599–1667).
Il papa senese di Roma moderna (Siena, 2000), no. III.90. See also Irene Fosi, “Il pontificato di
Alessandro VII tra ambiguità e splendori,” in ibid., pp. 138–9.
3. On the building history of the church, see Klaus Güthlein, “Zwei unbekannte Zeichnungen zur
Planungs- und Baugeschichte der römisches Pestkirche Santa Maria in Campitelli,” Römisches
Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana, 26 (1990): 185–255. The date of the approval is given in
Pallavicino, Della vita, vol. 2, p. 111. On the same day, Alexander VII also visited Santa Maria
Maggiore and Santa Maria del Popolo “doppo molti giorni di clausura in Monte Cavallo”; see
D’Onofrio, Roma val bene un’abiura, p. 254. See also Sylvia Barker, “Art, Architecture and the Roman
Plague of 1656–57,” in Fosi, La peste a Roma, pp. 251–4, who draws a compelling parallel between
the Santa Maria in Campitelli and the Chiesa del Voto in Modena, built 1631–34.
4. On the Capitoline statues, see Werner Hager, Die Ehrenstatuen der Päpste (Leipzig, 1929); Ernst
Steinmann, “Die Statuen der Päpste auf dem Kapitol,” in Miscellanea Francesco Ehrle. Scritti di storia
e di paleografia (Studi e testi, 36, part 2) (Rome, 1924), pp. 480–503; Monika Butzek, Die Kommunalen
Repräsentationsstatuen der Päpste des 16. Jahrhunderts in Bologna, Perugia und Rom (Bad Honnef,
1978).
5. The episode is dealt with in detail by Kaspar Zollikofer, Berninis Grabmal für Alexander VII. Fiktion
und Reprësentation (Worms, 1994), pp. 82–93, and documents B10–B12, with the quote at pp.
119–20: “Bastarle per contrasegno della loro gratitudine quell’Imagine che le SS. VV. havevano
impressa nei loro cuori, senza che ne facciano altra esteriore dimostrazione.”
6. Zollikofer, Berninis Grabmal, p. 96.
7. Steinmann, “Die Statuen der Päpste,” pp. 492–4; Butzek, Die Kommunalen Repräsentationsstatuen,
pp. 274–80. The head was eventually retrieved.
8. On the ban and its subsequent lifting, see Zollikofer, Berninis Grabmal, pp. 88–9, with earlier
literature.
9. According to Hager, Die Ehrenstatuen, p. 61, Urban VIII published a brief retracting the ban on 15
January 1634.
10. Gigli, Diario, vol. 1, p. 248: “… fu fatto Decreto, che si dovesse nella Chiesa d’Araceli fare una
Scrizzione in memoria delle cose fatte dal Papa, et una Statua al Cardinale Francesco Barberino.
Andorno poi a far sapere al Cardinale questo Senatus consulto, il quale con molta prudenza rifiutò
questo honore, che il Popolo Romano gli voleva fare, ne volse mai consentire che gli fusse fatta la
d.ta Statua, questo si, che si contentò che fassero la Scrittione al Papa, et in essa facessero mentione
del suo nome, quale memoria fu fatta nelli mesi seguenti, perche li detti Conservatori per tal causa
ottennero la riferma.”
11. Rudolf Wittkower, Bernini, Lo scultore del Barocco romano (Milan, 1990), no. 37.
12. Ibid., no. 38.
13. Gigli, Diario, vol. 1, p. 426; Stanislao Fraschetti, Il Bernini. La sua vita, la sua opera, il suo tempo
(Milan, 1900), p. 154; Hager, Die Ehrenstatuen, p. 61; Steinmann, “Die Statuen der Päpste,” p. 492;
Laurie Nussdorfer, Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princeton, 1992), pp. 232–4; Zollikofer,
Berninis Grabmal, p. 89.
14. Karen Lloyd, “Bernini and the Vacant See,” Burlington Magazine, 150/1269 (2008): 821–4. Lloyd
argues convincingly that the statua in question was the bust destined for Spoleto.
15. Steinmann, “Die Statuen der Päpste,” pp. 492–6; Butzek, Die Kommunalen Repräsentationsstatuen,
pp. 316–18.
16. Giovanni Michele Silos, Pinacotheca sive Romana Pictura et Sculptura (1st edn Rome, 1673), ed. and
trans. Mariella Basile Bonsante (Treviso, 1979), bk 2, epigrams 65–70.
17. Pallavicino, Della vita, vol. 2, bk 4, p. 167: “Significarono al Papa i conservatori questo decreto,
pregandolo a consentir loro l’esecuzione, come avea fatto Innocenzo, e prima di lui Urbano,
dal quale era stata rimessa una proibizione statuita per altro tempo, che in Campidoglio niuno
sotto pena d’infamia osasse proporre innalzamenti di statua a Papa vivente. Aveano mosso
a questo divieto il popolo romano gli esempj di Paolo IV., la cui effigie in Sede vacante dal
furore popolare tratta di Campidoglio fu spezzata ed oltreggiata non come d’un successor di s.
Pietro, ma quasi d’un Giuda, e poscia di Sisto V., la cui dirizzata immagine dopo la sua morte
pericolava, se i capi delle famiglie Orsini e Colonna; stretti di affinità con la sua, non vi fossero
accorsi.”
18. Ibid.
19. Compare Pallavicino’s text with the quote above in n. 5.
20. Pallavicino, Della vita, vol. 2, bk 4, pp. 167–8.
21. Riccardo Garcia Villoslada, Storia del Collegio Romano dal suo inizio, 1551, alla soppressione della
Compagnia di Gesù, 1773 (Rome, 1954), pp. 323, 327, 330, 332, 334; Sforza Pallavicino, Relazione
scritta ad un’Amico delle feste celebrate nel Collegio Romano della Compagnia di Giesù per l’anno centesimo
dopo la fondazione di essa (Rome, 1640). The text is reprinted in Renato Diez, Il trionfo della parola.
Studio nelle relazioni di feste nella Roma barocca 1623–1667 (Bologna, 1986), pp. 160–84. On the
decoration of the Collegio Romano, see Gigli, Diario, vol. 1, pp. 332–3; Cesare D’Onofrio, “Bernini
e la festa del primo centenario della Compagnia di Gesù (1639–1640),” Scritti di storia dell’arte in
onore di Federico Zeri (2 vols, Milan, 1984), vol. 2, pp. 626–9; Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, La festa
barocca (Rome, 1997), pp. 316–18.
22. Butzek provides similar examples where the erection of honorific statues engendered delicate
discussions about the appropriateness of the gift, the expenses and obligations that it entailed, and
the appropriateness of reluctance or refusal; see for instance the case of the statue for Julius III in
Bologna, described in Butzek, Die Kommunalen Repräsentationsstatuen, pp. 148–61.
23. Pallavicino, Della vita, vol. 2, bk 4, p. 168.
24. The same point was used as an argument against nepotism; see Antonio Menniti Ippolito, Il
tramonto della Curia nepotista. Papi, nepoti e burocrazia curiale tra XVI e XVII secolo (Rome, 1999),
pp. 86–7. In general, Pallavicino’s deliberations about nepotism are strikingly analogous to his
pondering of the refusal of the statue, in that he views the practice of nepotism and the status of
nipoti in terms of representation and exemplarity.
25. Pallavicino, Della vita, vol. 2, bk 4, p. 168.
26. Notes in Alexander’s diary indicate that the inscribed plaque is not only a monument to the
gratefulness of the Roman people, originally embodied in the gift of the statue, but also to
Alexander’s refusal; see Richard Krautheimer and Roger B.S. Jones, “The Diary of Alexander
VII: Notes on Art, Artists and Buildings,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 15 (1975),
no. 135: “la memoria della statua recusata”; no. 368: “Iscrittione … in vece della Statua in
Campidoglio.”
27. Pallavicino, Della vita, vol. 2, bk 4, pp. 168–9: “Vero è, che eziandio per la gloria mondano, l’unico
simulacro di stima è quello, che forman le lingue e le penne degli uomini i più riputati, come tale,
che costa un prezzo non contenuto negli erarj della potenza, ma della virtù.”
28. Alexander’s architectural patronage is briefly listed in Pallavicino, Della vita, vol. 2, pp. 179–80.
29. See, for instance, Peter Seiler, “Petrarcas kritische Distanz zur skulpturalen Bildniskunst zeiner
Zeit,” in Renata L. Colella, Meredith J. Gill, Lawrence A. Jenkens and Petra Lamers (eds), Pratum
Romanum, Richard Krautheimer zum 100. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden, 1987), pp. 299–324; see also Frank
Fehrenbach, “Color nativus—Color vitale. Prolegomena zu einer Ästhetik des ‘Lebendigen Bildes’
in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Ulrich Pfisterer and Max Seidel (eds), Visuelle Topoi. Erfindung und
tradiertes Wissen in den Künsten der italienischen Renaissance (Munich, 2003), p. 155.
30. Xenophon, “Agesilaus,” 11.7, in Scripta Minora, ed. Loeb Classical Library, trans. E.C. Marchant
(Cambridge MA and London, 1925), p. 129.
31. Plutarch, “Life of Cato the Elder,” 19.4, in Lives, ed. Loeb Classical Library, trans. Bernadotte Perrin
(Cambridge MA, 1916), vol. 2, p. 359.
32. Pliny the Younger, bk 10, letter 9, in Letters and Panegyricus, ed. Loeb Classical Library, trans. Betty
Radice (London and New York, 1969), vol. 2, p. 181.
33. Pliny the Younger, “Panegyric to Trajan,” esp. 52–5, in Letters and Panegyricus, vol. 1, pp. 439–51,
with explicit reference to honorific statues on pp. 439–40 and 451.
34. See, for instance, Sforza Pallavicino, Del Bene Libri Quattro del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino, bk III,
ch. 5, in Opere del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino (Milan, 1834), vol. 2, p. 497b: “Che vi par, Monsignor
(Querengo), di questa viletta? Forse non tanto ameno era il praticelle di Rodi, ove Cicerone [De
Claris Orator] col fratello, e con Bruto tenne il famoso ragionemento. E, se a quei grand’huomini
porgere spirito insieme, e diletto il verdersi a canto la statua di Platone, miglior condizione è la
nostra, che in voi, scorgiamo una viva immagine, non del corpo, che vestiva Platone, ma di quel,
ch’era il vero Platone, e che non puo rappresentarsi dalle scarpelle.”
35. See Chapter 2, n. 132. The image also appears on 19 September in Paul Fréart de Chantelou, Journal
de voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France, ed. Milovan Staniç (Paris, 2001), p. 189, when Bernini says
that the French Queen has the image of the King printed in her heart, a point that is reiterated
in the two Vitae; see Domenico Bernini, Vita del cavalier Gio. Lorenzo Bernino, descritta da Domenico
Bernino suo figlio (1st edn Rome, 1713) (photographic reprint, Perugia, 1999), p. 136. Pallavicino
uses the image in the dedication to Giulio Rospigliosi in Del Bene, bk IV, ch. 1, p. 534a–b.
36. Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneaus (Amsterdam, 1665), “Dedicatio”: “… & qui decretam
TIBI à S.P.Q.R. statuam non admisisti, hoc etiam ipso aeternis immortalis Capitolii honoribus
longe dignissimus, admitte primas has Mundi Subterranei sive tenebras, sive umbras; ut in
illis Beatissima tum Sapientiae, tum utilis ad omnia Pietatis TUAE imago magis resplendeat,
tenebrasque meas faciat eruditâ luce splendescere.”
37. On the medal, see the entries by Tobias Kämpf in Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco and Francesco
Petrucci (eds), L’Ariccia del Bernini (Rome, 1998), nos 22a, 22b; Maria Grazia Bernardini and
Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco (eds), Gianlorenzo Bernini. Regista del Barocco (Milan, 1999), no. 173.
38. On the engravings, see Bernardini and Fagiolo dell’Arco, Bernini, nos 172, 174 and 175; Angelini et
al., Alessandro VII Chigi, no. 91.
39. The translations of the inscriptions are taken from Shelly K. Perlove, “Bernini’s ‘Androclus and the
Lion’: A Papal Emblem of Alexandrine Rome,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 45 (1982), pp. 289–90,
n. 7–8.
40. John Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious. The Numismatic Presence in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1999),
pp. 22, 34–9; Tommaso Casini, Ritratti parlanti. Collezionismo e biografie illustrate nei secoli XVI e XVII
(Florence, 2004).
41. The same observation in Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, “Immagini della propaganda. Libri,
illustrazioni, feste,” in Bernardini and Fagiolo dell’Arco, Bernini, p. 233.
42. On the statue, see Pèleo Bacci, “Giov. Lorenzo Bernini e la statua di Alessandro VII per il duomo
di Siena,” Diana, 6 (1931): 37–56; Zollikofer, Berninis Grabmal, pp. 94–5.
43. See, for example, Orfeo Boselli, Osservazioni sulla scultura antica. I manoscritti di Firenze e di Ferrara,
ed. Antonio P. Torresi (Ferrara, 1994), pp. 116–18. Perhaps the most extensive treatment of the
history, meaning and function of sculpture in a treatise is the first chapter of Pomponius Gauricus’s
De Sculptura (1504), which was frequently reprinted in the seventeenth century, sometimes paired
to Ludo Demontiosius’s De vetera sculptura, a commentary on Pliny first published in 1585; see for
instance Abraham van Goorle, Gaurico Pomponio and Aldo Manuzio, Pomp. Gaurici Neapolitani De
Sculptura Libro / Ludo Demontiosii De veterum Sculptura, Caelatura, Gemmarum Scalptura, & Pictura Libri
Duo. Abraham Gorlaei (Antwerp, 1609). For a brief assessment of the available treatises in sculpture in
the seventeenth century, see Elisabetta di Stefano, Orfeo Boselli e la “nobiltà” della scultura, Aesthetica
preprint, 64 (Palermo, 2002), pp. 9–14; Angelini et al., Alessandro VII Chigi, pp. 273–84; and the
bibliography in Christian Michel and Maryvonne Saison (eds), La naissance de la théorie de l’art en
France 1640–1720 (thematic issue: Revue d’esthétique, 31–32) (1997), pp. 269–84.
44. Edmundus Figrelius-Gripenhielm, De statuis illustrium romanorum (Stockholm, 1656). Figrelius’s
treatise is summarized in Pierre Rainssart, “Dissertation sur les statues,” in Journal des sçavans, 20
May 1686, pp. 133–8.
45. Giovanni Borboni, Delle statue (Rome, 1661), p. 17, ch. 2, and pp. 327–8. The close association
of sculpture with idolatry had received much attention in Figrelius’s De statuis, pp. 11–24, an
important source for Borboni; in late fifteenth-century treatises on sacred images and religious
art, such as Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (1st edn Bologna, 1582),
ed. Stefano della Torre, Gian Franco Freguglia and Carlo Chenis (Vatican City, 2002), pp. 138–49,
or Giovanni Marangoni, Delle cose gentilesche, e profane trasportate ad uso, e adornamento delle chiese
(Rome, 1744); and in sacred historiography, for instance Michelangelo Lualdi, “Argomento,”
in L’origine della christiana religione nell’Occidente. Istoria ecclesiastica (Rome, 1650). Anne Betty
Weinshenker has aptly defined this issue as the sculpture-idolatry nexus; see her “Idolatry and
Sculpture in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38/3 (2005), pp. 487–9, with
numerous French examples dating from the 1680s onwards.
46. Borboni, Delle statue, p. 27.
47. In the treatises of Alberti, Pomponius Gauricus or Boselli mentioned earlier, mimesis is the
central problem. By focusing on the passages in Borboni that describe Bernini’s work, Alessandro
Angelini, Gianlorenzo Bernini e i Chigi tra Roma e Siena (Siena, 1998), pp. 302–5, overemphasizes the
author’s attention for the technique and formal properties of sculpture.
48. Borboni, Delle statue, “Introduttione.”
49. Ibid., p. 9: “… in cui è uno de’chiari contrassegni del suo vivere.”
50. Ibid., pp. 10–11.
51. Ibid., pp. 12–24, 328.
52. Ibid., p. 27. Lucius Aelius Seianus was the Praetorian prefect under Emperor Tiberius. Borboni
refers here to the tenth Satire of Juvenal.
53. Ibid., p. 35: “Simiglianti ornamenti non soggiacciono a Ladronecci, nè alli sdegni della Fortuna.”
54. Ibid., pp. 36–7. “Almeno costor impiegarono nell’Idolatrare la piu nobil parte dell’huomo che
è la mente, e per meritare sempre più la protettione de’due grandi Luminari del Mondo, sotto
l’ombra de’quali si pregiavano di vivere; andarono al meglio che poterono rappresentando sotto
que’ simboli, le perfettioni, e le pregorativi de’medesimi. Così riuscì più facile al Maestro della
menzonga, di Stampare ne’cuori, per messo delle scienza, una mentita sì; ma apparente Religione,
accreditandola, con impiegarvi a dilatarla i piu Savij, che applicati a inventare tuttavia nuovi
enigmi, davano ad intendere al Volgo della gente idiota, di haver trovato finalmente il vero Culto
delli Dei, e il vero modo di Adorare la Divinità.”
55. Elisabetta Neri, “Bernini, Michelangelo e il Delle statue di Giovanni Andrea Borboni,” Prospettiva,
113/114 (2004): 32–47, reduces Delle statue to this argument.
56. Borboni, Delle statue, chs 8, 9 and 10.
57. See Paleotti, Discorso, pp. 138–49; Gian Domenico Ottonelli and Pietro Berrettini, Trattato della
Pittura e Scultura. Uso et Abuso loro. Composto da un Theologo, e da un Pittore (1st edn Florence,
1652), ed. Vittorio Casale (Treviso, 1973), pp. 100–112; see also Zollikofer, Berninis Grabmal, pp.
105–7. The issue would be debated until at least the eighteenth century; see Marangoni, Delle cose
gentilesche, p. 307.
58. Borboni, Delle statue, p. 241.
59. Ibid., pp. 327–8.
60. Ibid., p. 328: “Ma chi à che non habbia a caro di essere amato, di vivere immortalmente nella
memoria de’Posteri, e di esser degno di honore?” See also p. 333.
61. Ibid., pp. 328–9.
62. Ibid., p. 332.
63. Ibid., pp. 338–44.
64. Ibid., p. 345: “Io fra tanto, che fin’adesso impresi a favellare de’marmi effigiati, tocco dal conseglio
del Vangelo Profeta; metto d’avanti a gli occhi dell’intelletto di chi che sia, quella Pietra viva, di
cui favella Pauolo, effigiata per opra dello Spirito Santo nell’Utero Vergine di Maria, apponto, per
parlar con Bernardino Santo da Siena, Tamquam in officina suae stupendae operationis. Dirò dunque
con Esaia, Attendite ad petram, unde excisi estis [Cap. 51]; accioche a simigliante consideratione,
ogniuno si studij per mezzo delle virtuose operationi di rassomigliarsi a quell’Immagine Divina;
poiche allhora saremo degni ritratti di esser collocati nel Tempio dell’Eterna Gloria; che saremo
conformes Imaginis Filij Dei, cui soli honor, & Imperium [Ad. Rom. 8].”
65. Ibid., p. 335.
66. Ibid., p. 336.
67. See Franco Borsi, Chiara Briganti, Marcello del Piazzo and Vittorio Gorresio, Il Palazzo del Quirinale
(Rome, 1974), pp. 61–120; Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste, vol. 14, p. 523; Tod A. Marder, Bernini’s Scala
Regia at the Vatican Palace (Cambridge MA, 1997), pp. 88–9, 249. On Alexander’s preoccupation
with the Quirinal, see the synthesis in Antonio Menniti Ippolito, I papi al Quirinale. Il sovrano
pontefice e la ricerca di una residenza (Rome, 2004), pp. 58–60 and passim.
68. Dorothy Metzger Habel, The Urban Development of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII (Cambridge and
New York, 2002), p. 327, n. 14, mentions two other statements on the matter kept in the Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana, one of which is discussed in Menniti Ippolito, I papi al Quirinale, pp. 100–103.
69. Barker, “Art, Architecture and the Roman Plague,” pp. 244–5.
70. Scritture contrarie del card. Sforza Pallavicino e del chiarissimo monsignor Luca Holstenio sulla
questione nata a’tempi di Alessandro VII se al Romano pontefice più convegna di abitare S. Pietro, che in
qualsivoglia altro luogo della Città. Ora per la prima volta date in luce con qualche annotazione e consecrate
All’Eminentissimo, e Reverendissimo Principe Il Signor Cardinale Gio.Battista Rezzonico Pro-Segretario
de’Memoriali Da Francesco Zaccaria (Rome, 1776), p. 22.
71. Pallavicino, Della vita, vol. 1, p. 357, for a short but admiring profile of Holste by Pallavicino. For
recent biographical profiles of Holste see Peter Rietbergen, Power and Religion in Baroque Rome.
Barberini Cultural Policies (Leiden and Boston, 2006), pp. 256–95; Giovanni Morello, “Olstenio,” in
Lorenza Mochi Onori, Sebastian Schütze and Francesco Solinas (eds), I Barberini (Rome, 2007),
pp. 173–80.
72. See Dizionario di erudizione storico ecclesiastico da S. Pietro sin ai nostri giorni (Venice, 1840–61), vol.
50, pp. 204–5. Pius VI (1775–99), to whom the edition is dedicated, is the first pope to choose to
stay at the Vatican after a long series of predecessors who stayed at the Quirinal “per comodo della
curia e del popolo.”
73. Achile Gennarelli, Il Quirinale e i palazzi pontificali in Roma. Osservazione storiche e risposta alla nota
del Cardinale Giacomo Antonelli (Rome and Florence, 1870), pp. 8–16.
74. Scritture, p. 6: “Anzi essendo il Papa non sol Vescovo particolare di questa città, ma signor
temporale di gran Dominio, e capo spirituale della Chiesa.”
75. Kathleen Weil-Garris and John F. D’Amico, “The Renaissance Cardinal’s Ideal Palace: A
Chapter from Cortesi’s De Cardinalatu,” in Henry A. Millon (ed.), Studies in Italian Art and
Architecture, XV through XVIII Centuries, Memoirs of American Academy in Rome, 35 (Rome,
1980), pp. 47–123.
76. Scritture, p. 6: “E non meno ancora divien comune questo disagio ad ogni altra qualità di persone,
cioè à Palatini, ed a’lor Familiari, quanto fa mestiero ad essi andar a parlar con alcuno, che stia
nel piu frequentato di Roma, e parimente a’Medici, che devono andar’a curare, ed agli Artisti, ed
a’Mercandanti, a’quali occorre d’andar a contrettare in Corte.”
77. Ibid., p. 7: “Deesi considerare oltre a ciò, ch’è di sommo rilievo al corso degli affari, ed a questo
pascimento del gregge si speciale di Roma, si generale del Cristianesimo, ed insieme al governo
temporale dello Stato Ecclesiastico che’l Pastore, e’l Principe sia sano, ed atto a poter operare più
lunga parte del giorno, e con miglior testa.” Compare Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk IV, ch. 20, p. 549b:
“Nè di picciol rilievo è la sanità e il vigor della testa per esercitar queste funzioni [intellectual
labor] senza dolore o stanchezza.”
78. Pallavicino, Della vita, vol. 1, pp. 109, 267.
79. Scritture, p. 8.
80. Ibid., p. 9.
81. Ibid., p. 15: “Adunque essendo evidente, come appare dalle cose predette, che considerando noi
Papa Alessandro in ragion di Servo, e’l popolo in ragion di coloro, a cui egli dee servire, la stanza di
lui più acconcia all’uso di questi sciambevoli ufficj fra esso, e’l popolo, non è quella del Vaticano,
ma del Quirinale.”
82. Ibid., p. 37.
83. Ibid., p. 46: “E riconoscendo questo sacro luogo come il principio delle potestà spirituale, e della
giurisdizione Ecclesiastica, che nella persona del Sommo Pontefice comme successore di S. Pietro
primo, & principaliter risiede, egli stesso levava il Sacro Pallio del corpo del glorioso Apostolo,
e se lo metteva sopra le spalle, siccome di continuo anche oggi si levano tutti sacri pallj, che
a’Patriarchi, e Metropolitani si mandano, come segno della communicata giurisdizione. … dove
si vede che quei Santi Pontefici credevano che S. Pietro stesso precedesse ne’l Concilj avanti il suo
sacro Corpo radunati.”
84. Ibid., p. 59.
85. Ibid., pp. 7–8: “Ed in somma non usando il papa alcuno titolo, il quale suoni maggior perfezione,
ed al quale corrispondo egli ne’fatti operi con maggior perfezione, che quello introdotto da S.
Gregorio Magno SERVUS SERVORUM DEI. Dobbiamo nella presente esaminazione unicamente
rimirare ciò, che sia di maggior beneficio a color, a’quali Egli professa di servire: perocchè in
questa maniera torremo da lui ogni rispetto di propria comodità, e di privato interesse, regoleremo
questa sua deliberazione secondo la pura norma della carità, e del ben comune.”
86. Ibid., p. 63: “… a servire, e sovvenire i poveri.” See Dictionnaire historique de la papauté, ed. Philippe
Levillain (Paris, 1994), s.v. “Titulaire,” 1629–30.
87. Scritture, pp. 19–22.
88. Ibid., p. 19. See Helge Gamrath, Roma Sancta Renovata. Studi sull’urbanistica di Roma nella seconda
metà del sec. XVI con particolare riferimento al pontificato di Sisto V (1585–1590), Analecta Romana
Instituti Danici. Supplementum, 12 (Rome, 1987), pp. 131–47; Sible de Blaauw, “Immagini di
liturgia: Sisto V, la tradizione liturgica dei papi e le antiche basiliche di Roma,” Römisches Jahrbuch
der Bibliotheca Hertziana, 33 (1999/2000): 259–302. Giorgio Simoncini, Roma restaurata. Rinovamento
urbano al tempo di Sisto V (Florence, 1990), p. 172, publishes parts of Sixtus’s bull on the papal
ceremonies.
89. Clement VIII installed a corridor between palace and tomb; see Jack Freiberg, The Lateran in 1600:
Christian Concord in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge and New York, 1995), p. 178.
90. Scritture, pp. 60–62: “L’utile, che da questa Residenza risulta, non consiste a mio parere
nell’apparenza delle funzione più, o meno solenni, che in questa Basilica piuttosto, che altrove
si facciano, nè manco si ristringe alla devozione, o particolare del popolo Romano, o generale
de’Pellegrini, che v’arrivano; ma consiste nell’opinione, e stima, che acquista il Sommo Pontefice
appresso i Principi, e tutto il popolo Cristiano col mostrarsi devoto verso S. Pietro. E la ragione
è evidente, mentre la dignità Pontificia si fonda sopra il merito di S. Pietro e mentre il papa per
l’autorità di quel glorioso Apostolo esercita le funzioni più ardue dell’officio Apostolico, che
sostiene. L’obbedienza, e venerazione de’Principi, e popoli Cristiani non si acquista nè conserva,
se non colla persuasione ferma, che tengono della Santità, ed altre virtù Apostoliche del Pontefice,
le quali nascono da una certa intrinsichezza, o familiarità, e confidenza più strerta [sic] con quel
glorioso Apostolo. Sappiamo in che concetto e venerazione sono stati alcuni Pontefici, anco
de’tempi nostri, per aver penetrato il mondo, che essi la notte per vie secrete, e sotteranee si
conducessero al Sepolcro di S. Pietro, e per ore intere vi si trattenessero in orazione. Questo poi
accredita i loro consigli, e risoluzioni, come suggeriti ed avvalorati dallo Spirito Apostolico,
imbevuto in quel sacro luogo. Però sono lontanissimo dal credere, che a questo concetto possa
giovare la grandezza secolare, come sono le cavalcate, ed altre simili apparenze. Lasciando
dunque, come si dice, ad populum phaleras, attesterò con verità, che come a me sono passate per le
mani molte persone d’ogni sorte, e condizione, ridotte alla fede, ed unione Cattolica per diversi
ragioni, così sono stato curioso di conoscere i motivi più principali d’una così santa risoluzione,
per valermi de’medesimi a beneficio degli altri. Qui ho conosciuto che in Roma ha servito assai
quasi a tutti, il vedere diverse azioni pie ed Ecclesiastiche del Sommo Pontefice, come sono lavare
i piedi ai poveri, e servirli a tavola, il frequentare le chiese, il fare le Processioni a piedi, il celebrare
con singular divozione la Messa, il vederlo fisso con riverenza esemplare nella venerazione del
santissimo Sacramento ….” Holstenius, himself an ex-Protestant, assisted converts to Catholicism,
most notably Christina of Sweden; see Sforza Pallavicino, Descrizione del primo viaggio fatto a Roma
dalla Regina di Svezia Cristina Maria convertita alla religione cattolica e delle accoglienze quivi avute
sino alla sua partenza. Opera inedita del P. Sforza Pallavicino della Compagnia di Gesù. Accademico della
Crusca e poi cardinale di Santa Chiesa. A cura di Tito Cicconi (Rome, 1838); D’Onofrio, Roma val bene
un’abiura, pp. 61–5.
91. Alexander’s most important interventions at the Quirinal consist of the construction of the Manica
Lunga and the decoration of the long gallery; see Stefania Pasti, “Pietro da Cortona e la Galleria
di Alessandro VII al Quirinale,” in Marcello Fagiolo and Paolo Portoghesi (eds), Roma barocca.
Bernini, Borromini, Pietro da Cortona (Milan, 2006), pp. 88–97.
92. A connection between Pallavicino’s stance and Alexander’s urbanistic strategy is suggested by
Augusto Roca de Amicis, L’opera di Borromini in San Giovanni in Laterano (Rome, 1995), pp. 19–20.
93. See Marder, Bernini’s Scala Regia.
94. Daniela Del Pesco, Colonnato di S. Pietro “Dei Portici antichi e la loro diversità.” Con un ipotesi di
cronologia (Rome, 1988); Anna Menichella, “Genesi e sviluppo del processo progettuale della
fabbrica dei nuovi portici,” in Valentino Martinelli (ed.), Le statue berniniane del colonnato di San
Pietro (Rome, 1987), p. 14, note 112, links Holstenius’s point of view in the Scritture with the
iconography of the colonnade.
95. Scritture, p. 39.
96. Ibid., p. 37.

97. Ibid., p. 7.
98. Ibid., p. 17: “… che le case sono fatte per gli huomini, e non gli huomini per le case.”
99. Pallavicino, Del Bene, bk IV, chs 57–60, pp. 576b–579a.
100. Ibid., ch. 57, p. 577a: “[il principe] è rimunerato d’altissimi beni, cioè dalla gloria, dall’amor
pubblico, dalla venerazione e, ciò che più importa, dal veder frutto della propria virtù il felice stato
degli uomini, il che è il sommo della felicità umana, ….”
101. Ibid., ch. 59, p. 578b: “E che altro finalmente è il principe buono se non un servo nobile d’ogni
vassallo?”
102. Scritture, p. 62: “… da queste, e simiglianti azioni dico, ho sentito edificati molti; ma niuno ho
trovato fin’ora, che delle cavalcate, ed altre pompe, e magnificenze secolari avesse ricevuto alcun
motivo di pietà.”
103. Ibid., p. 64.
104. Ibid., p. 62: “Niuna cosa più efficacemente opera nel corpo della Chiesa, che i santi, e buoni influssi
del capo ….”
105. Ibid., pp. 34–5: “… per primo, come Vicaro di Cristo, e successore di S. Pietro, capo supremo sopra
tutti; per secondo, come Vescovo, e Patriarca della prima Città del Mondo, innanzi a tutti.”
106. Ibid., p. 36: “… per consecrarvi la Sede Apostolica col suo sangue, e colle sue ossa.”
107. Ibid., p. 59.
108. Carroll Westfall, In this Most Perfect Paradise. Alberti, Nicholas V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban
Planning in Rome, 1447–55 (University Park PA and London, 1974), pp. 19–24; Christine Smith
and Joseph F. O’Connor, Building the Kingdom. Gianozzo Manetti on the Material and Spiritual Edifice
(Tempe AZ, 2006), esp. p. 190.
109. On this notion, see Frank Fehrenbach, Compendia Mundi: Gianlorenzo Berninis Fontana dei Quattro
Fiumi (1648–51) und Nicola Salvis Fontana di Trevi (1732–62) (Munich, 2008), esp. pp. 227–40.
110. See Dizionario di erudizione storico ecclesiastico, vol. 10, pp. 291–318.
111. Pallavicino, Della vita, vol. 2, bk 5, ch. 5, pp. 177–84.
112. Ibid., vol. 1, bk 5, ch. 18; bk 3, pp. 410–13; also Luigi Fiorano, “Le visite apostoliche del Cinque–
Seicento e la società religiosa romana,” Ricerche per la storia religiosa di Roma, 4 (1980), pp. 127–33.
113. Pallavicino, Della vita, vol. 1, bk 3, ch. 2, pp. 267–8.
114. Ibid., ch. 10, pp. 334–5.
115. Pallavicino, Della vita, vol. 1, “Proemio,” pp. 21–2.
116. Ibid. See also Sforza Pallavicino, Arte della Perfezion Cristiana, bk III, ch. 6, in Opere del Cardinale
Sforza Pallavicino (Milan, 1834), vol. 2, p. 737b, where the same expression is used; and Pallavicino,
Del Bene, bk IV, ch. 59, p. 578a, where “il fare ogni azione come in teatro ed alla censura
dell’invidia” is enumerated as one of the burdens of rulership.
117. See Silvia Bulletta, Virgilio Malvezzi e la storiografia classica (Milan, 1995).
118. See Diego Quaglioni, “Il modello del principe cristiano. Gli ‘specula principum’ fra medio evo e
prima età moderna,” in Vittor Ivo Comparato (ed.), Modelli nella storia del pensiero politico (Florence,
1987), vol. 1, pp. 103–22; Chiara Continisio, “Il principe, il sistema delle virtù e la costruzione di
una ‘buona società,’” in Cesare Mozzarelli and Danilo Zardin (eds), I tempi del Concilio. Religione,
cultura e società nell’Europa tridentina (Rome, 1997), pp. 283–305.
119. Seneca’s De Clementia especially is a key source for the Fürstenspiegel. In Seneca’s oeuvre, the
exercise of virtue is often associated with theatrical performance; see Ben L. Hijmans Jr, “Drama
in Seneca’s Stoicism,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 97 (1966):
237–51. As Ezio Raimondi has shown, Seneca and Stoicism had a formative impact on the baroque
notion of theatricality as the defining characteristic of the human condition; see for instance his “Il
Seicento. Un secolo drammatico,” in Ivano Dionigi (ed.), Seneca nella coscienza dell’Europa (Milan,
1999), pp. 181–97. As the quote suggests, Pallavicino knew that Alexander VII was familiar with
Seneca’s work; see also Giovanni Incisa della Rochetta, “Gli appunti autobiografici d’Alessandro
VII nell’archivio Chigi,” in Mélanges Eugène Tisserant, vol. 6 (Studi e testi, 236, part 1) (Vatican City,
1964), pp. 444–5.
120. On Pallavicino’s involvement with the Lincei, and especially his recurrent references to empirical
observation in religious and literary contexts, see Eraldo Bellini, “From Mascardi to Pallavicino:
The Biographies of Bernini and Seventeenth-Century Roman Culture,” in Maarten Delbeke,
Evonne Levy and Steven Ostrow (eds), Bernini’s Biographies. Critical Essays (University Park PA,
2006), pp. 298–307.
121. Pallavicino, Della vita, vol. 1, p. 372.
123. Timothy Hampton, Writing from History. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature
(Ithaca NY, 1990), p. 11, quoted from: “Oraculo manual y arte de prudencia,” no. 75. See also
John Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, 1989),
pp. 10–16.
124. Sforza Pallavicino, Storia del Concilio di Trento del cardinale Sforza Pallavicino, bk 24, ch. 13, in Opere
del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino (Milan, 1834), vol. 2, p. 398b.
125. Ibid., bk 4, ch. 5, vol. 1, p. 186b: “[la] Chiesa speciale di Roma, la quale dee servir di specchio a
tutte le Chiese del mondo.”
126. Ibid., bk 3, ch. 10, vol. 1, p. 156b: “Ma qui abbiamo un corpo, dove ogn’altro membro si può
convertire in stomaco, siccome il chilo in sangue, e poi questo in carne: voglio dire, abbiamo una
repubblica dove ogni plebeo può divenire senatore, ogni suddito principe. Rome in quanto capo
della religione non è una particolare città, ….”
127. Ibid.: “Ma la Roma che si sostiene col mantenimento della religione ortodossa e dell’autorità
pontificia, è una Corte composta di tutti i paesi cattolici, nella quale ognuno con la dottrina e col
merito può salire alle dignità più sublimi, ed avere o la sovranità, o la participazione del governo
e del patrimonio ecclesiastico: una Corte, la quale è quell’anima che tiene in unità tanti regni,
e costituisce i paesi a lei ubbidienti un corpo politico il più formidabile, il più virtuoso, il più
letterato, il più felice che sia in terra. Or vegga il Soave, se alle membra di così fatto corpo è utile
il sopportare qualche disagio per non separarsi da quest’anima, e non rimanere con le sole forme
parziali, come le nomina la scuola, che sono proprie di ciascun membro anche privo di vita. Non
è questo dunque un servaggio verso una padronanza dispotica, il quale repugna all’inclinazione
della natura, ma una congiunzione di vita perfettamente politica, la qual congiunzione è sì
naturale, che Aristotile ebbe a dire: siccome la mano che non serve all’intero corpo dal cui
buono stato ridonda il bene di ciascun membro, dicesi equivocamente mano; così l’uomo che
abbia per fine il privato suo prò, e non il comune, dal quale deriva ogni bene privato, chiamarsi
equivocamente uomo.”
128. The idea of Rome as the capital of a global Christianity emerges in the sixteenth century;
see Gérard Labrot, Roma “caput mundi.” L’immagine barocca della città santa 1534–1677 (Milan,
1997); Jens Baumgarten, Konfession, Bild und Macht. Visualisierung als katholische Herrschafts- und
Disziplinierungskonzept in Rom und im habsburgischen Schlesien (1560–1740) (Hamburg and Munich,
2004), pp. 152–9.
129. Pallavicino, Storia del Concilio, bk 1, ch. 25, vol. 1, p. 84a: “Ora supposto che per l’unità, pel
governo, per la maestà debba essere un capo supremo, ed un supremo rettore della Chiesa,
convien che egli a fine di poter essere padre comune, e non diffidente a veruno, non abiti nello
stato di alcuno degli altri principi; ma che abbia stato proprio, corte propria, ministri proprj, e
quali, richiedonsi alla grandezza della sua amministrazione.”
130. Ibid., bk 3, ch. 10, vol. 1, p. 154b: “Non conoscea egli [Paolo Sarpi], che questo termine cristianità
resta un vocabolo inutile, e, come dicono le scuole, un mero aggregato accidentale, s’ella non
riceve l’unità con una forma che la indirizzi e la governi? E questa forma non potendo essere
un principe temporale, conviene che sia un capo spirituale che congiunga i varj principati di
questo tutto in una medesima religione, in una medesima osservanza di leggi appartenenti alla
vita eterna, in una medesima carità, siccome fra destinati cittadini della celeste Gerusalemme;
e finalmente in una medesima Chiesa, che importa, congregazione. Di modo che posta la
discordanza negli articoli della fede e la nimistà degli uni col capo spirituale degli altri, questo
nome cristianità non è più nome d’un medesimo corpo composto di varie membra che abbiano
speciale unione e lega fra loro, ma di molti corpi non solo affatto separati, ma inimici.”
131. Ibid., bk 8, ch. 17, vol. 1, p. 390b: “… il principato ecclesiastico che mantiene in unità, in regola, e in
decoro tutta la Chiesa ….”
132. Ibid., p. 392a–b: “E questo rispetto fu il dover tali religioni con uniformità di vita e con direzione
del medesimo capo diffondersi in ogni parte del mondo: talchè non poteano dipendere dal vario
giudizio ed arbitrio di molti vescovi; ma solo di superiori soggetti ad un medesimo lor generale: in
quella maniera che non possono molte forme tra loro non ordinate dominare in un composto.”
133. Ibid., bk 9, ch. 9, vol. 1, p. 420b.

134. Ibid., bk 1, ch. 25, vol. 1, p. 84b.
135. Ibid. This argument is indebted to Roberto Bellarmino’s controversial writings and pertains to the
regiment of visuality of the post-Tridentine Church, analysed in Baumgarten, Konfession, Bild und
Macht, esp. pp. 32–138.
136. Seneca, Epistulae Morales, Letter 95, ed. Loeb Classical Library (1st edn 1917), trans. Richard M.
Gummere (Cambridge MA, 1979), vol. 3, pp. 87–9: “Primus est deorum cultus deos credere.”
137. Tacitus, Annales, 4.37.2–38.3, ed. Loeb Classical Library, trans. John Jackson (Cambridge MA and
London, 1937), with the quote vol. 2, p. 67, 38.1–2, discussed in Patrick Sinclair, “These are my
Temples in your Hearts (Tac. Ann. 4. 38. 2),” Classical Philology, 86/4 (1991): 333–5.
138. “Deum non immolationibus et sanguine multo colendum: quae enim ex trucidatione
immerentium voluptas est? sed mente pura, bono honestoque proposito. Non templa illi, congestis
in altitudinem saxis, struenda sunt; in suo cuique consecrandus est pectore.” See Lactantius, The
Divine Institutes, 6.25, trans. Sister Mary Francis McDonald OP (Washington DC, 1964), p. 467.
Lactantius, La colère de Dieu, ed. Christiane Ingremeau (Paris, 1982), gives another reference to
Seneca’s Letter 41, Epistulae Morales, vol. 2, p. 273: “We do not need to uplift our hands towards
heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol’s ear, as if in this way our
prayers were more likely to be heard. God is near you, he is with you, he is within you.”
139. Lactantius himself considered the Christian body as the legitimate temple, and places of worship
as mere “conventicula.” See Hugo Koch, “Der Tempel Gottes bei Laktantius,” Philologie. Zeitschrift
für das klassische Altertum und sein Nachleben, 76 (1920): 235–8.
140. Dominique Iogna-Prat, La Maison Dieu. Une histoire monumentale de l’Eglise au Moyen Age (Paris,
2006), pp. 260–65.
141. “Bona, Giovanni,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1960–), vol. 11, pp. 442–5. Bona’s
prominence is well illustrated by the prophecies casting him as the successor of Clement IX. Enrico
Sonesio’s Profetia veridica di tutti Sommi Pontefici sin’al fine del Mondo fatta da San Malachia arcivescovo
Armacano (Venice, 1670) is dedicated to Bona, and explains the appropriate Malachian epithet, De
flumine magno, as follows, pp. 34–5: “Questo è quello, di cui si tratta hora l’elettione in conclave,
e verrà da un Fiume grande, & inafiarà le Campagne fitibone della Christianità colla sua Bona
influenza, e coll’affluenza di quelle acque celesti, delle quali disse Christo: Qui biberit ex aqu, quam
ego dedero ei, non fitiet in aeternum.” When Emilio Altieri is elected as Clement X, Sonesio quickly
adds the Osservatione notabile sopra l’elettione del nuovo Pontefice Clemente X E sopra la verificatione della
profetia di San Malachia “De Flumine Magno” (Venice, 1670). See also the remark of Claude-François
Ménestrier in his La philosophie des images énigmatiques (Lyon, 1694), pp. 342–4, that the many
prophecies in favor of Bona indicate the real purpose of false prophetic texts like Malachy’s.
142. Giovanni Bona, Rerum liturgicarum libri duo (1st edn Paris, 1672) (Cologne, 1674), “Lectore”:
“Edideram Romae ante aliquot annos Tractatum de Divina Psalmodia, ejusque causis, mysteriis,
& disciplina; deque variis ritibus omnium Ecclesiarum in psallendis divinis officiis. Vidit eum
aliquando & percurrere dignatus est Sfortia Pallavicinus Cardinalis amplissimus, de litteris & de
Ecclesia optimè meritus, & ut erat mihi arctissima junctus amicitia ab eo tempore, quo in domo
sancti Andreae Societatis jesu historiam Concilii Tridentini toti orbi notissimam scribebat, protinus
urgere me atque compellere cohortatione, imperio, ac quotidiano penè convitio coepit, ut de
augustissimo nostrae Religionis Sacrificio simile opus adornarem, amicè testatus me in hoc genere
aliquid posse. … In his autem angustiis constitutum urgebat quotidie Pallavicinus, adhibitis etiam
amicorum auxiliaribus copiis, & eorum interposita auctoritate, quorum praeceptis refragari nefas
erat; donec tandem timorem abjicere, onusque suscipere satius duxi, quàm deesse obedientiae,
quae perfecta tunc esse censetur; cùm nihil videt, nihil dijudicat.” The close relationship between
Bona and Pallavicino is also illustrated by the dedication to Bona of the third book of Pallavicino’s
Arte della Perfezion Cristiana.
143. On Bosio’s position within ecclesiastical historiography, see Simon Ditchfield, “Text before
Trowel,” in Robert N. Swanson (ed.), The Church Retrospective (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 343–60.
144. Smith and O’Connor, Building the Kingdom, p. 38.
145. Bona, Rerum liturgicarum, p. 280: “… nulla Christianis esse Templa, qualia apud nationes erant,
sublimibus elata fastigiis, quibus putarent divinitatem concludi.”
146. Ibid., p. 281.
147. Ibid., pp. 286–7. On the panegyric, see Christine Smith, “Christian Rhetoric in Eusebius’ Panegyric
at Tyre,” Vigiliae Christianae, 43 (1989): 226–47.
5.1 Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini, Baldacchino,
1624–33, Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City (ICCD)
5
The Composite Work
Chapter 3 discussed Pallavicino’s view on the revelatory capacity of the

concetto and particularly antithesis. Comparing positions on the epistemology,
the form and the function of the concetto and the contrapposto identified two
interrelated questions with regard to the composite form. First, authors like
Tesauro contend that the contrapposto stands in a particular kinship with the
divine since it purports to simultaneously lay bare and veil some deeper
truth that cannot otherwise be known. Second, the contrapposto, since it
depends on the fortuitous conjunction of seemingly unrelated things or ideas,
points towards a particular form of creativity that appears to bypass rules
and therefore description. These two issues converge on the notion of the
ineffable, and the relationship between the composite form and its hidden
meaning: to what extent does the expression of certain higher truths hinge
on the production of concetti? Does the contrapposto define the style of higher
truth?
This question will be examined by comparing two models of thinking about
art and creativity. In the first—represented by Pallavicino—style establishes
an almost natural relation between res and verba, leaving the revelatory
impetus to the truth expressed by art. In the second—represented in Bernini’s
biographies, but also by Emanuele Tesauro—an elevated style evokes and
even produces revelation. To understand and disentangle these two views,
this chapter will compare different ways of theorizing the design of the
Baldacchino, the giant bronze canopy that Bernini and Francesco Borromini
built over the papal altar and the tombs of Peter and Paul in the new Saint
Peter’s on behalf of Urban VIII (Fig. 5.1).
The Baldacchino is a valid case in point because of its program, its context
and its form: a monument to Saint Peter and Urban VIII, it is the centerpiece
of the new Saint Peter’s, covering the papal altar, and a hybrid bronze
structure on an unseen scale.1 As such, its design embodies a quality that
Pallavicino values highly, like many of his contemporaries: the Baldacchino
is a composite, the artificial unity of a diversity of objects or ideas. In the next
chapter I will return to Pallavicino’s theoretical examination of compositeness

and its aesthetic effect, variety, because it relates Pallavicino’s view on the
tangible and visual aspect of the Church examined in Chapter 4 to the ability
of art to assume ever-new shapes in order to express essentially unchanging
ideas. This chapter examines how compositeness and variety define the
relation between the creation, form and effect of art works. As composites,
their creation entails the mastery and composition of a multitude of diverse
objects, which generates a unique effect.
The issue of compositeness leads us to the heart of discussions of baroque
art theory since the 1960s. In fact, one of the few theoretical notions to gain
near-universal acceptance as a valid descriptive and analytical tool for
seventeenth-century art, and specifically the work of Gianlorenzo Bernini, is
the bel composto, generally understood as the unification of the three visual
arts in one work.2 As its name indicates, the composto implies compositeness,
if not of a diversity of objects or ideas, then certainly of different media. Here,
the aim is not to examine the art historical validity of the bel composto as such.3
Rather, we wish to gauge what the compositeness implied in its definition
contributes to artistic forms.
The point of departure for our discussion of these questions is again an
anecdote culled from Domenico Bernini’s Life, now a discussion between
Pallavicino and Bernini at the foot of the Baldacchino. The biography stages
this exchange thirty years after the baldachin’s completion, in the 1660s, when
Pallavicino had already been made a cardinal by Alexander VII. Like the
anecdotes of the fly and the paradoxes of Zeno, this passage, too, references
ideas from Pallavicino’s written work. Now these ideas serve to explain how
Bernini managed to design the complex structure of the Baldacchino, and to
read its effect on the beholder.
A Conversation at the Foot of the Baldacchino
When, in the biography, Domenico Bernini sets out to describe the Baldacchino
in Saint Peter’s, he makes it explicit that he faces a daunting enterprise. The
Baldacchino renders him speechless, Domenico writes, because only the
eye of the viewer is the legitimate judge of the Baldacchino’s beauty. This
remark empathically introduces the viewpoint of the beholder: Domenico, as
the author of the description, retells the experience of seeing the Baldacchino
and being asked to transmit its effect. When, despite his initial reservations,
Domenico undertakes this task, he immediately individuates the source of
the Baldacchino’s overwhelming impact, in order to link his experience with
his father’s design process. The gaze of the beholder, Domenico writes, is
unique in seeing all at once the site, the building, the vastness of the void, the
beauty of the sculpture, and the richness of the material. And mastering this
the composite work 137
multitude of elements which are not proper to the object, but connected to it,
“annesso a lei,” was exactly the main problem his father had to confront when
designing the Baldacchino. Domenico’s abilities as a writer are challenged
by his experience of seeing the Baldacchino, as was his father’s art by the
difficulties he faced in designing the thing. Bernini’s overcoming of this
challenge led him to modestly acknowledge that his work had succeeded “by
chance”:
Se ben richiederebbe l’Historia, che facessimo particolar descrizione di questo

stupendo Edificio, tuttavia essendo certi, che colle parole non faressimo mai per
sottoporlo adequatamente alla luce dell’intelletto, ci siamo risoluti passarlo sotto
silenzio per due ragioni; la prima delle quali si è, che questa maravigliosa Machina
non tanto è in sè riguardevole, per ciò che essa in sè contiene, quanto per ciò, che in
sè non contiene, mà che è annesso a lei, e l’accompagna: Onde l’occhio solamente
può esserne degno Giudice, che con riguardare unitamente il Sito, la Mole, la Vastità
del Vano, che empie senza ingombrarlo, la Vaghezza de’Rilievi, la Ricchezza della
Materia, e tutto ciò che essa è, e la proporzione che fuor di essa nel Tutto s’accorda,
rimane appagato, e sodisfatto, mà in tal modo, che tramandandone la specie
nell’imaginativa, fà di mestiere, che l’intelletto affermi per verità, ciò che diceva per
sua modestia il Cavaliere, Quest’Opera essere riuscita bene a caso, volendo con raro
temperamento dimostrare di haverla più tosto per buona, che fatta; ….4
Even so, Domenico continues, in his design Bernini applied a specific and
rigid method, a procedure, it is emphasized, which can be taught, and hence,
it might be added, described. By identifying Bernini’s design method as the
source of the Baldacchino’s effect, the biographer is now able to revert to the
ekphrastic strategy of evoking the creative process rather than the finished
product; from beholder Domenico becomes author.5 This analogy between
writing about and making art—between description and creation, or language
and form—receives extra emphasis because Bernini’s design method reflects
the categories of rhetoric:6 first there was the choice of the material, then the
invention, then the ordinazione, or arrangement of the parts, and finally the
addition of beauty and grace:
E come che il Cavaliere dava per documento a’suoi Discepoli in materia di

Architettura, che prima bisognava riflettere alla materia, indi all’invenzione, poi
all’ordinazione delle parti, e finalmente a dar loro perfezzione di grazia, e tenerezza;
così in questa grand’Opera fece studio immenso di ciascuna di esse.7
This carefully constructed analogy gains its full momentum only when
it breaks apart: the rhetorical model adopted by Bernini and reproduced
by Domenico can only point at a creative act that escapes description and
explanation. Domenico states that the customary rules of the ordinazione did
not allow Bernini to determine the arrangement and proportion of the parts,
because the space of the church was too vast. Therefore, with great reluctance,
Bernini had to determine the ordinazione by, as Domenico writes, “leaving
behind the rules without however violating them, and in so doing, he himself
found the measure which can not be found in the rules”:
Volle nobilitar l’Invenzione con una ordinazione miracolosa delle parti, in cui pareva,
che consistesse la difficoltà maggiore. Considerò, che in un tratto così smisurato
di spazio, vana sarebbe stata la diligenza delle misure, che malamente potevano
concordare col tutto di quel Tempio; onde facendo di mestiere uscir dalle Regole
dell’Arte, difficilmente vi acconsentiva per timore di perdersi senza guida. Tuttavia
accordò così bene queste repugnanze, che nel dar loro la proporzione, seppe uscir
dalle Regole senza violarle, anzi egli stesso da sè trovò quella misura, che invano si
cerca nelle Regole.8
This act, in turn, explains Domenico’s initial bafflement: something of the

Baldacchino’s effect is not encoded in Bernini’s generic design process. The
Baldacchino amazes the beholder with its seemingly artless but actually highly
ingenious conjunction of things that first seemed apparently impossible to
match. And whereas Bernini succeeds in creating order from a multitude of
elements, Domenico must remain speechless in front of this achievement.9
The descriptive strategy of Domenico’s text identifies Bernini’s unique
ordinazione of the Baldacchino as its defining quality. This is emphasized
by an additional anecdote, which again stresses the delicate link between
the Baldacchino’s marvelous effect and its conception. Thirty years after
the completion of the Baldacchino, Bernini visited Saint Peter’s together
with Sforza Pallavicino. Pallavicino asked the artist how he had been able
to determine the size of all the parts of the Baldacchino so as to make it look
well proportioned from every point of view. Bernini responded: “with the
eye.” “How then,” Pallavicino continued, “can the eye determine the size
of the parts before they are arranged and put into place?” He answered this
question for Bernini, who was dumbfounded: “because the eyes are yours”:
E questa fu quella medesima [misura, che invano si cerca nelle Regole], di cui
richiesto una volta doppo trent’anni dal Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino suo intrinseco
& amorevole, che domandògli, mentre un giorno vagheggiava quest’Opera, “Di
che misura si fosse servito in ordinar così proporzionate le parti, che da qualunque
prospetto di quel vasto Tempio si consideravano, e sembravano tutte fatte apposta per
qualunque veduta,” rispose, “Che dell’occhio.” “E come hà potuto l’occhio,” ripigliò
l’acutissimo Cardinale, “appagarsi delle proporzioni delle parti, avanti che queste
fossero ordinate, e commesse?” allora il Cavaliere ò che si dichiarasse vinto, ò che
volesse parer convinto, non temendo d’altro più, che di parer d’intenderlo, chinò il
capo, e nulla rispose: Mà ben per lui rispose il Cardinale, con soggiungere, “Che altri
occhj non vi volevano al bisogno, che quelli della sua Testa.”10
In this exchange, Domenico’s anecdote paraphrases Pallavicino’s own

definition of contrapposto, or antithesis, proposed in his Trattato dello stile.11
There, Pallavicino advises a moderate use of contrapposti. As discussed in
Chapter 3, a contrapposto brings together two seemingly opposite things and
this pleases readers, because their intellect enjoys discovering an unexpected

similarity, harmony or correspondence.12 By referring implicitly to literary
antithesis, Domenico introduces yet another parallel between the evocative
powers of language and Bernini’s creative prowess. In the Baldacchino
Bernini explored and seized the proportionality of essentially diverse
things. In his treatise on style, Pallavicino defines antithesis as the device
employed by the ingenious writer to connect together different or even
opposed words, things or ideas. Bernini, as Domenico points out, credited
chance with the success of his work; Pallavicino, as we have seen, stresses
the delicate balance between art and chance in the devising of antitheses,
and praises the author who manages to convey the impression that their
witty invention depended on absolute contingency. In fact, antithesis
operates within the same relationship between art, chance and multiplicity
that Pallavicino defined with regard to equivocalisms or human creativity
in general: art and chance are two mutually exclusive causes of creation, but
the semblance of chance’s workings appeals to the reader or listener and
even the viewer, to the extent that it can be made to convey the impression
that certain expressions reveal not only human ideas but divine intentions
as well.13
Because of his epistemological presuppositions, Pallavicino is wary of
the possible confusion of art and chance. His contemporary Emanuele
Tesauro, as we have seen, did not hesitate to embrace the “non sò che of the
divine” revealed in the “mysterious fatality” of a successful concetto, and
especially antithesis. Chance produces the prophetic effect, swathing those
who harness it in authority.14 If Domenico’s description of the Baldacchino
proposes a definition of composition closely akin to Pallavicino’s
antithesis, the question arises as to the extent to which the biographer
meant to incorporate or appropriate the creative principles and expressive
possibilities associated with it. I will argue that the oscillation, in the
description, between making and viewing, composing and marveling,
attempts to associate Bernini’s design process, and consequently Bernini’s
persona as a designer, with particular properties of the concetto. The
description suggests how a unique design process leads to a unique
expression, and how the formal qualities of that expression, engendered by
that design process, characterize it as of a higher, indeed ineffable nature.
In the biography, this characterization becomes firmly embedded in a
portrayal of Bernini as a composto of virtue, who guarantees the successful
mediation between design, its effect and its cultural context. Bernini
becomes the very source of successful expressions like the Baldacchino,
the embodiment of a non sò che. Exactly this condition generates and
defines the meaning of the work: to Domenico, the Baldacchino is about
idiosyncratic artistry that, in its ineffable result, subsumes (but does not
replace) the iconography and program of the work.
With this portrayal of Bernini, Domenico stakes claims on his father that are
subjected to quite intense theoretical reflection in the course of the seventeenth
century and concerns the relationship between complex and composite
poetic expressions and truth discussed in Chapter 3. In fact, Pallavicino’s
own treatment of antithesis attempts to harness the experience of surprise
and marvel generated by the successful contrapposto in the service of an
elegant style that enlivens all kind of subject matter. In so doing, Pallavicino
circumscribes a register of ornate expression that is not confined to poetry and
the imitative arts.
The difference between Pallavicino’s instrumental view of antithesis and
Domenico’s invocation of its almost oracular capacities is also symptomatic
of a more general historical shift in views of the relationship of artistic forms
to their meaning. Pallavicino’s theory of style prefigures late seventeenth-
and early eighteenth-century notions of good taste. But the authors who
sponsor these notions, like Ludovico Muratori, explicitly dismiss the Jesuit’s
epistemological presuppositions. By prescribing a far more strict relationship
between art and truth, they close the particular niche that Pallavicino carved
out for the visual arts, their ability to act upon pre-rational comprehension.
The non sò che emerges as the means to maintain art’s potential to reach
beyond the realm of reason. In what is only a paradox in appearance, the late
seventeenth-century advocates of good taste, who dismiss what they term
the baroque style, embrace the singularity of particular works and artists as a
bridgehead towards transcendency, in a manner not dissimilar to Domenico’s
portrayal of Bernini. Around the ineffable, carefully circumscribed by
Pallavicino and employed with rhetorical vigor by Domenico, revolves the
transformation of art from a privileged yet all-too-human expression of every
form of truth, into a practice only escaping the realm of the aesthetic when it
assumes the guise of mystery.
Pallavicino’s Contrapposto: the Elegance of Antithesis
In the Trattato dello stile, Pallavicino distinguishes the antithesis of things—

concepts and objects—and words. This second form is especially apt for
poetry, and takes on the form of rhyme. A reader will enjoy the acoustic
similarity between the names of two completely different things, because it
suggests a familiarity between those objects or ideas, even if the relationship
between words and things is entirely arbitrary.15 The less far-fetched the
rhyme seems, and the more natural or necessary, the greater the reader’s
pleasure, because—as in the case of equivocalisms—art and chance appear
to work together.
The key elements in the definition of the contrapposto can also be found
in Pallavicino’s treatment of numero, or rhythm, a category of rhetorical
ornament; in fact, Pallavicino illustrates his thoughts about rhythm by

having recourse to rhyme and the contrapposto.16 Here, to explain why certain
conjunctions of different objects please the senses and others not, Pallavicino
examines the pleasant effect of proportionality almost regardless of medium.
The beneficent effect of visual or acoustic proportion has two possible causes:
on a sensory level, proportion generates a good alternation between repose
and excitement, and thus trains the senses. Second, the intellect is pleased by
recognizing “the uniform and regular deformation that distinguishes Art—
which produces beauty—from the workings of Chance, which only produces
formlessness.” In other words, rhythm pleases listeners or beholders because
it incites them to discern the rules governing the “uniform and well-arranged
varietà” of the object:
… stimo che sia certa uniforme e regolata difformità, per cui si distinguono i
lavori dell’Arte ch’è formatrice del bello dall’opere del Caso che suol produrre
il deforme. Onde m’avviso, che la maggior dilettazione partorita dall’acconcio
numero sopravvenga per la riflessione che occultamente fa l’intelletto intorno a
quell’uniforme e ben regolata varietà che nell’oggetto si discerne.17
Pallavicino expands this observation by arguing that good proportions

stimulate an individual’s innate acumen, “l’innata perspicacità” of the spirit.
The intellect, “cioè [il] discorso,” is thus stimulated to discover new truths,
and Pallavicino reminds us that Aristotle defined contrapposti along exactly
these lines.18 The intellectual aspect of proportionality is moreover proven by
the animal insensitivity to it.19
When discussing rhythm, Pallavicino pays close attention to the notion
of fittingness, or “convenevolezza.” The rhythm of a text should support its
content, and here Pallavicino compares using meter with focusing a spyglass:
just like the optical instrument, rhythm renders things visible while becoming
invisible itself, and seems to connect naturally to the words and ideas of the
text.20 And because sensory harmony is the province of everyone, rhythm
can and should be subjected to rules, selected by means of “il Tribunal
dell’orecchio,” or Cicero’s iudicium aurium.21
Cicero may have inspired Pallavicino to virtually equate the acoustic
rhythm of speech and visual proportion. With the iudicium aurium, Cicero
also founded the equation in a notion of the sensory or bodily experience of
natural harmony that is important to Pallavicino.22 Moreover, Cicero argues
that there exists a near-natural bond between the sensory experience of
proportion and the fitting expression of ideas. In the third book of De Oratore,
when discussing how “the orator links words and meaning together in such
a manner as to unfold his thought in a rhythm that is at once bound and
free,” Cicero stresses the ability of plain speech to transform into “prose of
various styles and many kinds” by comparing rhetorical composition with
the manipulation of wax:
… for the vocabulary of conversation is the same as that of formal oratory, and we
do not choose one class of words for daily use and another for full-dress public
occasions, but we pick them up from common life as they lie at our disposal, and then
shape and mould them at our discretion, like the softest wax.23
Cicero here probably draws upon a well-established comparison of words

and wax, as would for instance surface again later, in the Instituto Oratoria,
when Quintilian praises the endless malleability of wax in describing how
each single thought can be expressed in myriad different ways: “we may
specially select certain thoughts and recast them in the greatest variety of
forms, just as a sculptor will fashion a number of different images from the
same piece of wax.”24 De Oratore proceeds to explain how the wax-like qualities
of language eventually allows the user to produce a variety in keeping with
the requirements of speech, permitting “style” to “follow the line of thought
we take.” Moreover, this variety fuses the purpose of oratory, to influence the
mind of the audience, with the experience of dignity and beauty. As such,
speech recalls the work of Nature herself as visible in the universe, the body
of man and all kind of living matter:
But in oratory as in most matters nature has contrived with incredible skill that the
things possessing most utility also have the greatest amount of dignity, and indeed
frequently beauty also. … Now carry your mind to the form and figure of human
beings or even of other living creatures: you will discover that the body has no part
added to its structure that is superfluous, and that its whole shape has the perfection
of a work of art and not of accident.
In sum, speech is as universal as the creativity of Nature, able to mold any

thought into a fitting form, just like wax. Moreover, Cicero argues that we
intuitively recognize in well-metered speech a harmony similar to the
best works of Nature, uniting beauty, dignity and purpose. Exactly this
understanding of perfection would inspire Leon Battista Alberti in his De
Re Aedificatoria (Book IX.5) to define the source of beauty as concinnitas, the
“natural excellence and perfection [of a building] that excites the mind and
is immediately recognized by it.” Concinnitas, Alberti continues, provides
form, dignity and grace, “and as soon as anything is removed or altered, these
qualities are themselves weakened and perish”; nowhere does concinnitas
“flourish as much as it does in Nature herself.” Like Cicero, Alberti offers no
real explanation why we recognize concinnitas, except that it appeals to an
instinct or—to put it in only slightly anachronistic terms—taste.25
A similar aesthetic ideal underpins Pallavicino’s view of literary style,
including the use of contrapposti. Pallavicino characterizes elegance as the
middle road between a merely correct application of lexicon, syntax and
grammar, and splendor, which “much supersedes what is common in the
world.”26 This distinction is quite conventional, but Pallavicino’s explanation
develops an extended comparison of literary style and dress, paying close
attention to the impression that different degrees of delicacy and splendor

convey upon visitor and host.27 Pallavicino stresses that even people whose
language does not dispose of a well-wrought grammar or who are not used
to argue in “well-composed sermons” can achieve splendor if a “sublime”
ingegno is at work, spouting “majestic and flourished beauties.” Such speech,
however, will lack the “varnish” of elegance. The point here is that Pallavicino
acknowledges an ornamental language that, unaided by the rules that
structure expression, abounds in figures of “all sublimeness (ogni sublimità)”
and splendor, like (for instance) Venetian poetry,28 but that such language is
clearly distinguished from a more civilized and hence preferable style based
on elegance, which presupposes a harmony between words and ideas, formed
by grammar and usage, and enlivened by ornament where required.29
Pallavicino’s criticism of Venetian poetry also clarifies his views on novelty
of expression. To fulfill its function, the contrapposto, like any category
of concetti, needs to be new. Stale inventions fail to marvel and leave the
reader unstimulated.30 But novelty is an instrument gathered for expressive
purposes, not a goal in itself. As such, it is subjected to rules. Drawing
upon Agostino Mascardi’s digression on style in his Dell’Arte istorica (1636),
a passage that will be examined in more detail below, Pallavicino argues
that good novelty depends on an idea deduced from different particular but
related examples.31 While the very nature of the concetto allows to determine
only very general rules, these rules are nevertheless valuable and necessary.
To stray too much from the rules governing the invention of concetti would
not only violate decorum, but also rob the expression from its ability to
relate to truth.
Pallavicino’s view of elegance defines a framework where the beneficent
effects of antithesis, like that of any figure of speech, are a means to elucidate
a thought in an almost natural way.32 This conception of the relationship
between style and expression betrays a similar instrumental view of artifice as
the one encountered in our discussion of the lively image, but a fundamental
distinction needs to be made. In its discussion of antithesis, rhyme and
rhythm, the Trattato dello stile is essentially concerned with the contribution
of stylistic means to the expression of the rational ideas proper to disciplines
such as historiography or philosophy. Expressive ornament can be useful or
even necessary to sugarcoat difficult subject matter in writings that deal with
truths judged by the intellect.33 When discussing poetry, the Trattato rarely
touches upon its exceptional truth-value.34 In other words, the whole plethora
of baroque figures of speech is not necessarily relegated to the realm of the
untrue, actually quite to the contrary. Pallavicino recognizes that figures of
speech are able to act upon and with truth, and that the surprise and wonder
they engender are as many means to guide the lazy intellect towards a better
understanding of even the most recondite doctrines. In sum, Pallavicino
defines a realm for the application of stylistic means depending on novelty
and marvel that is clearly distinct from the creation of images that affectively
draw the beholder towards the ineffable truths of faith.
Bernini’s Art as “Uscire dalle Regole” in Domenico Bernini
As we have seen, Domenico treats the composition of the Baldacchino as its

essence. In order to achieve the ordinazione, Bernini had to “[leave] behind the
rules without however violating them, and in so doing, he himself found the
measure which cannot be found in the rules.”35 This statement is prepared
by numerous passages in the previous chapter of the biography which locate
the source of the Baldacchino’s success in Bernini’s innate creativity and
sense for artistic innovation. Domenico’s biographical narrative suggests an
immediate relationship between his (and by extension our) amazement at its
proportionality and Bernini’s identity as an artist. This argument culminates
in the recorded exchange between Bernini and Pallavicino, revolving around
the giudizio dell’occhio.36
The giudizio is the visual counterpart to the iudicium aurium and occurs
in an important body of sixteenth-century texts on the visual arts. Rather
than calibrating its contribution to stylistic elegance, as Pallavicino did with
the iudicium, these texts treat the giudizio as the faculty mediating between
teachable and rule-bound art, arte, and individual ingegno.37 Like the arbiter
of rhythm, the giudizio is a sensory capacity able to discern proportionality
in objects independently from—if often in close consultation with—the
rules and inventions proposed by both the intellect and the ingegno. As
such, David Summers has written, it allows “the artist to seek the various
and the new, to display his skill, to use all means, in short, which delighted
the eye,” and is closely associated with “free artifice outside normative
rule.”38 The exercise of the giudizio manifests itself in the establishment
of proportion, not only understood in a quantitative sense—that is, as
sensory proportion—but also qualitative, as a fundamental, ontological
unity, created with the force of reason. None achieved this better than
Michelangelo, and the giudizio is the emblem of his exceptional and indeed
unique status as an artist.39
From at least the early sixteenth century, the “occult proportion” established
and recognized by the giudizio was denoted with the non sò che. For instance,
Agnolo Firenzuola’s Discorsi della bellezza delle donne (1541, published 1548),
describes the non sò che that produces the beauty of particular women as
a consonnant order, almost a harmony that mysteriously results from the

composition, union and mixture of many different members, and different from
each other; and in themselves, according to their own quality and purpose, well
proportioned; which, before they unite themselves to form a body, are different and
mutually exclusive.40
The source of this non sò che is evoked in terms reminiscent of the giudizio:
We are forced to believe that this splendour is born of some unknown

proportion and a measure that can be found in none of our books, which we neither
know or can imagine, and which is, as we say of things that we cannot explain, a non
so che.41
The non sò che produces composites governed by rules or principles that

escape a formal definition or discursive explanation. Their effect is an
ineffable grace, which attracts, marvels and seduces the beholder.42 This
occult proportionality and its effect are part of a far more general notion of
ineffable grace associated with the non sò che and indeed oracular art.43 This
effect continued to be associated explicitly with the unexplainable union of
contrasting elements until at least the mid-eighteenth century.44
If the non sò che does not occur as such in Domenico’s description of the
Baldacchino, the passage evinces exactly the same ideas. Domenico, too,
locates the source of the Baldacchino’s proportionality in “a measure that
can be found in none of our books,” and this measure, in turn depends upon
Bernini’s originality, as stated explicitly in Chapter 5 of the biography:
… it was generally thought, and probably not that easy to rebuke, that he [Bernini]
was among the first, also from past centuries, who had been able to unite together the
fine arts of sculpture, painting, and architecture, in such a way that he formed within
himself a marvelous composto of all, and he mastered them all with eminence. He
reached this perfection by tireless study, and by leaving behind the rules from time
to time, however without ever violating them, because he often said, “he who never
leaves behind the rule never surpasses it.” But not everybody is able to do this.
[Ci giove solamente il dire, esser concetto molto universale, e da non potersi forse
così facilmente riprovare, ch’egli sia stato fra’Primi, anche de’Secoli trascorsi,
che habbia saputo in modo unire assieme le belle Arti della Scultura, Pittura, &
Architettura, che di tutte ne habbia fatte in se un maraviglioso composto, e le
habbia tutte possedute in eminenza. Alla qual perfezzione giunse per mezzo di
un’indefesso studio, e con uscir tal volta dalle Regole, senza però giammai violarle,
essendo suo detto antico, che “Chi non esce tal volta di Regola, non la passa mai.”
Mà il far ciò, non è impresa da tutti.]45
This passage deals with the tension between teachable art and ingegno,
governed by judgment proper to the giudizio dell’occhio: Bernini was able to
unite absolute mastery of the three arts by tireless study of especially the
works of Michelangelo and Raphael:
[Because of the presence of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Rome] it was

made easy for Bernini, through close and continuous study of the most praiseworthy
works, above all those of the great Michelangelo and Raphael, to draw within himself
the essence of all their perfection and distinction so that he could, in accordance with
his ability, emulate the lofty ideas of those sublime spirits.
[Imperciocché ammirandosi in quella sola Città le fatiche più illustri, sì degli antichi,
come de’moderni Pittori, e Scultori, e le preziose reliquie eziandio della vecchia
Architettura, che ad onta del tempo, non leggier nemico, stando ancora in piè, …
fu a lui facile coll’attento studio, e continovo dell’opere più lodate, e massimamente
di quelle del gran Michelagnolo, e di Raffaello, il farne in se un estratto di tutto
l’esquisito, e di tutto l’eletto, a fine di poter, giusta sua possa, agguagliare l’eccelse
idee di quelle sublimissime menti.]46
At the same time, Domenico stresses that Bernini sought to judiciously

transgress the rules of art from very early on, most explicitly in the anecdote
on young Bernini’s unwillingness to simply copy the models his father Pietro
provided.47 The theme of transgressive imitation is present in the entire
biography, also when Domenico compares his father’s remarkable ability to
treat stone as if it were wax, casting Bernini’s art as a paragone between the
“regola” transmitted by classical sculpture, and the judicious expansion of the
canon facilitated by the artist’s unique “cuore.”48 Like Cicero’s simile about
the lexicon of speech, this passage references the infinite malleability of wax
that allows creativity to reign supreme. But if Cicero uses the comparison in
order to define a universal creativity that emulates Nature in making objects
of perfect form, purpose and beauty, Domenico wants to convince the reader
that Bernini alone achieves a new form of art, thanks to his innate judgment.
Novelty here is not an instrument to achieve perfection, but the very essence
of creation.
Because novelty is crucial to Bernini’s persona, Domenico feels pressed to
distinguish legitimate innovation from mere license. He does so by opposing
Bernini to another contemporary artist, Francesco Borromini.49 Domenico’s
claim that his father “had been able to unite together the fine arts of sculpture,
painting and architecture, … by tireless study, and by leaving behind the
rules, … however without ever violating them” is preceded by a sneering
commentary on Bernini’s nemesis. When an illustrious person complained to
Bernini that Borromini had strayed so much from the examples he had shown
him in his School, and said that Borromini, as a good designer, had chosen to
follow the Gothic manner, or maniera Gotica, instead of the Roman antique or
the “good modern way,” Bernini responded that he had always considered it
better to be a bad Catholic than a good heretic. Domenico adds that Bernini’s
mastery of the “good way” is proven by the works he will describe.50 The
work that follows is the Baldacchino.
By explaining the successful effect of the Baldacchino in terms of legitimate
artistic innovation, Domenico harks back to exactly the same discussions
on style and novelty that informed Pallavicino’s Trattato dello stile.51 These
discussions took place in the 1620s and helped to shape the appreciation
of Bernini’s art. A fine example of this discourse is a dialogue between the
courtier Lelio Guidiccioni and Gianlorenzo Bernini, probably written by
the same Guidiccioni in 1633.52 Lelio Guidiccioni was a letterato and courtier
who first gravitated around the Borghese—he authored a description of the

catafalque of Pope Paul V—and subsequently became part of the Barberini
circles and entered the household of Antonio Barberini. He wrote the Ara
Maxima Vaticana, a long poem in honor of the Baldacchino and Urban VIII,
which will be discussed in Chapter 6.53
In the dialogue Bernini asks Guidiccioni to compose a poem in praise of
the coronation of Urban VIII. Guidiccioni will only do so if he is allowed to
use Latin; in Italian poetry “too many tastes are spoiled,” since the volgare
has long left “the road that I always knew as the right one.”54 As pointed
out by Orreste Ferrari, Guidiccioni obliquely refers to the contemporary
discussion on Marinism, the ornate and capricious style of poetry and drama
named after Giambattista Marino, which was heavily debated in the 1620s,
most notably by Tomaso Stigliani in his Dell’occhiale (1627).55 A key issue
in that discussion is the freedom of the poetical ingegno, whether the poet
is allowed to relentlessly invent new forms of expression—forms that break
loose from careful imitation and selection—as a means to arouse meraviglia.56
In the dialogue, the implicit reference to this debate incites a playful verbal
duel on novelty and innovation. Is an artist able to carve out an entirely new
path of their own or do they have to follow a well-established “strada”? If
they chose this option, what leeway do they have? Using an old metaphor,
Guidiccioni argues that we should always follow our great predecessors,
without however following their exact traces.57 Bernini opts for the Marinist
position, answering that it is more honorable to lay out a new path, away from
the masses.58
As we have seen, this idea also occurs in Domenico’s biography, where
it retains its strong Michelangelesque ring. In the dialogue, Bernini’s
reference to this particular view on imitation not only identifies himself with
his Florentine predecessor, but also suggests that Michelangelo’s attitude
towards imitation and innovation corresponds with Marino’s.59 In the course
of the dialogue, however, Guidiccioni convinces Bernini that “natural talent,
and vigorous study,” together with excellent gusto and sound giudicio, allow
an artist to progressively extend the canon of art, without having to succumb
to the need of “leaving behind the rules.” By changing Bernini’s mind, his
initial identification with Michelangelo is now severed from the Marinist
connotations.60
The dialogue’s implicit but ultimately dismissed identification of Bernini
and Marino confirms that the discussion on judgment and proper innovation
in the visual arts is played out in terms borrowed from literary debates.
As already pointed out, a key passage in this discussion is the digression
on style in Agostino Mascardi’s Dell’Arte istorica.61 According to Mascardi,
the individual styles of authors are, in fact, un non sò che, defined by their
ingegno. Personal style allows an author to judiciously modulate the use of the
different teachable caratteri or forms of expression. Referring to an important
topos in Cinquecento artistic theory, most famously developed by Gian Paolo

Lomazzo, Mascardi compares style to the painter’s maniera. It follows that
artists wishing to develop their own style should study examples to which
they feel inclined. While each excellent master will have followed the rules
to perfection, their ingegno will mark their works, to the extent that one is
condemned to their own inclinations. As Mascardi writes: “It makes no sense
to ask one in which style he writes, because one can not write in another style
than one’s own, given by the ingegno ….”62 Mascardi’s conception of style
shows that the playful discussion between Guidiccioni and Bernini forms part
of a more elaborate reflection on the relationship between individual ingegno,
judgment and artistic progress. The multitude of ingegni are each prone to
their own style, Mascardi points out, which guarantees an endless variety of
artistic forms and challenges imitation of universal models as a conduit to
good practice.
As will be discussed in the final section of this chapter, Mascardi’s idea
of style influenced the development of taste as a critical notion in the early
eighteenth century. In the context of our discussion of Bernini’s artistic identity,
it frames Domenico’s view of the difference between Bernini and Borromini
and their attitude towards imitation: each artist selects models in order to
develop an innovative artistic practice and is marked by an irreductible kernel
of individuality. To Domenico, this kernel defines the entire artist, and it will
be brought out by their works.
Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Non sò che
In Domenico’s Life, declarations of Bernini’s unique and idiosyncratic ability

to shape unity in a plurality of elements are not confined to the description
of the Baldacchino. Evenly spaced over the pontificates that structure the
narrative, the biography offers a limited number of extensive descriptions of
Bernini’s works, and each reiterates the same idea with regard to the design
problem at hand. Echoing the exchange between Gianlorenzo and Pallavicino
at the foot of the Baldacchino, Domenico describes the amazement of Innocent
X and his court when they visited the unfinished Four Rivers Fountain, and
wondered “how this vast building of the obelisk with its big pedestal could
stand itself on a mass that is everywhere perforated.” Gianlorenzo explained
that “since all the joints of the pieces are cut in swallowtail, they remain
incrusted in themselves, as one piece makes the most tenacious joint with the
other, and all the joints beautifully contribute to keeping the Whole together”:
Sopra tutto recò stupore, come quella vasta Mole della Guglia col suo gran Piedestallo
potesse reggersi sopra un Masso da tutti le parti forato, che non solo par, che posi
in falso, mà sol tanto hà sotto di sè di vivo per base, quanto appena bastar potrebbe
a sostenar un moderato peso, non che una Machina così grande. Delche glie ne diè
ragione il Cavaliere, conciosiacosache tutte le congiunzioni de’pezzi dello Scoglio

essendo tagliate a coda di Rondine, restano in tal modo in se medesime incassate, che
l’una all’altra fà tenacissima legatura, e tutte le legature concertano mirabilmente per
tenere insieme il Tutto.63
Unity here not only concerns the visual appearance, but the fundamental,
almost organic cohesion of the work as well. The idea of visual coherence
obtained through the arrangement of a multitude of elements occurs again
in the description of works that bracket the pontificate of Alexander VII,
Saint Peter’s Square and the Cathedra Petri.64 In the final section devoted
to Chigi’s pontificate, Domenico revisits Bernini’s ability to judiciously
transgress the rules, when he describes in detail the equestrian statue of Louis
XIV, in which Bernini “reunited all his spirits, and the essence of his art (il
più vivo dell’arte), as he had to place it all in such a worthy figure” [“Otto
anni di tempo v’impiegò il Cavaliere, che consumato già in tante ammirabili
operazioni, parve, che allora unisse tutti i suoi spiriti, & il più vivo dell’arte,
per doverlo tutto collocare in così degna figura”].65 Finally, Bernini’s bust
of the Savior unites Bernini’s artistic capabilities in order to supersede the
effects of the artist’s old age, who “took together, and extracted all his Art …”
[“Compendiò, e ristrinse tutta la sua Arte”].66
This final example assimilates Bernini’s artistic success, best exemplified
in the composition and arrangement of complex wholes, to his own peculiar
accumulation of capabilities. As we have seen, Domenico writes that
Gianlorenzo “formed within himself a marvelous composto of all [three arts].”67
But his artistic qualities are only one, albeit essential, part of his collected
virtues. They extend to any endeavor Bernini would undertake. In the very
first paragraph of the biography we read that
since [Bernini] with a maraviglioso composto of highly praised gifts, each of which
could have rendered any man admirable and great, was so well able to furnish his
soul with all, that his greatest achievement was not to be praised as excellent in the
profession he exercised; so much he had in himself with eminence all the parts, that
shape a man of great and virtuous idea.
[Poiche egli con un maravigliose composto di pregiatissime doti, ciascuna delle quali
in se stessa poteva rendere ammirabile e grande ogni huomo, seppe così ben di
tutte fornire il suo animo, che non fu il maggior pregio in lui l’essere acclamato per
eccellente nella professione che fece: Tanto in se hebbe con eccellenza ancora tutte
quelle parti, che posson formare un’huomo d’idea grande, e virtuoso.]68
Domenico’s chronological story of his father’s life concludes with a

restatement of the same idea: Bernini led his life “with such a composto of
Body, Habits, Complexion, and Naturalness, that would become to form a
Man of Great Ideas, and Actions” [“Con un composto tale di Corpo, Costumi,
Complessione, e Naturalezza, quale si conveniva per formare un’Huomo
d’Idee grandi, e di Operazioni”].69
The notion of the compendium virtutis had an important precedent in

artistic discourse, for instance in characterizations of Michelangelo.70 But
the idea is certainly not confined to practitioners of the visual arts. Sforza
Pallavicino and his fellow fenici, we have seen, were characterized in the
same terms.71 Writers, thinkers and artists are so described in order to praise
their invention of entirely new forms of art and thought, encompassing
unprecedented difficulties with insight and grace. Exactly this point is made
in a relazione—a proto-journalistic account of a festivity or celebration—
describing the ephemeral architecture designed by Bernini to celebrate the
birth of the Dauphin in 1662: the artist’s innate genius reduced also the
most challenging problems to the realm of art, in order to create unseen
wonders.72
What binds the characterization of Bernini in the relazione to Domenico’s
biographies and the fame of Pallavicino and Cesarini is the modernism
inherent to accumulating virtue: these unique men and their creations mark
a fresh beginning for the arts, the sciences or each enterprise they embark
upon. As the hallmark of new origins, the notion of the compendium easily
shifts from people to objects and back. In Domenico’s biography Rome is
the only fitting theater for Bernini’s art, as the birthplace for new wonders.73
A guidebook from 1658 writes how modern Rome “reunites in itself all
the world’s marvels,” competing with and superseding ancient Rome, and
explicitly compares Rome’s unique compendium with the array of virtues
possessed by Flavio Chigi, the cardinal nephew of Alexander VII to whom
the book is dedicated.74
Domenico is particularly eager to exploit the possibilities of the compendium
virtutis. It is as a composto that popes, kings and queens recognize Bernini
as almost one of their own.75 Domenico accounts how the queen, the king
and all the “greats” received Bernini with extraordinary applause, and ever-
increasing admiration for his ingegno, “which on each and every occasion
proved itself so fertile with concetti.”76 Christina of Sweden discovered in
Bernini “such an elevated ingegno and such a perfect judgment, that Painting,
Sculpture and Architecture, which he possessed with eminence, were only
the minor parts of excellence bestowed upon this man by God” [“…, che nella
continua prattica havuto col Bernino l’havevo scoperto di un’ingegno così
elevato, e di un giudizio così perfetto, che la Pittura, Scultura, & Architettura
possedute da lui in eminenza, erano le minor parti di eccellenza, di cui quel
grand’Huomo era stato dotato da Dio”].77 The esteem of Alexander VII for
Bernini is cast in similar terms.78
The final recognition that “[Bernini] truly was a man of high ideas, and
born with the ability to correspond with each most vast idea of a sublime
Monarch” [“… un’Huomo di alte Idee, e nato con capacita di corrispondere
ad ogni più vasto pensiere di sublime Monarca”] occurs at the court of Louis
XIV.79 Domenico explains the sympathy between the king and the artist
by casting them as equally complete compendia. In so doing, Domenico

transfers onto his father a model well established in French literature on the
king, where Louis XIV is portrayed as the original model uniting all virtues
historically dissipated among many other heroes. This transfer had been
prepared in the first biography on Bernini, well known to Domenico, Pierre
Cureau de La Chambre’s Eloge de M. le cavalier Bernin of 1681, republished
in 1685 with Préface pour servir à l’histoire de la vie et des ouvrages du Cavalier
Bernin. Yet if La Chambre is eager to emphasize the intimacy between the
artist and the king, he treats them as beings of a different order. Domenico
would lift that distinction, adopting the persona of the king to define
Bernini’s true nature.
In his Eloge, La Chambre states that he ventured to write Bernini’s
biography as it would provide the invaluable testimony of one of those rare
people who have seen into the king’s soul and seized his true being. After all,
Louis’ greatness is too vast to encompass:
How few people have gone back up to the source of things so great? How few have
penetrated as far as these vast insides, whose outsides are so pompous and brilliant?
Only geniuses of the first order can see him [Louis XIV] all whole. Such has been the
cavalier Bernini.
[Mais combien peu de personnes ont remonté jusqu’à la source de tant de grandes
choses? Combien peu ont penetré jusqu’à ces dedans immenses, dont les dehors sont
si pompeux et si éclatants? Il n’y a que les genies de premier ordre qui le puissent voir
tout entier. Tel a esté le cavalier Bernin.]80
By setting up his intended biography as the history of an artist’s confrontation

with suprahuman greatness, La Chambre follows closely in the footsteps of
André Félibien’s Portrait du Roy of 1663.81 This description of an otherwise
unknown equestrian portrait by Charles le Brun points out that the painter
“has enclosed in a very moderate space the portrait of a King, whose name
fills the whole earth,” indicating a tension between the king’s being and the
limits of both mortal men and art in seizing that greatness.82
By the time La Chambre measured Bernini’s value by his ability to tackle
this particular problem, vastness and elevation had become the epithets
of choice to describe Louis XIV. From the 1670s onwards especially the
“modernes” substituted the conventional comparison of the king with
Alexander the Great, the primary exemplum of the great monarch, by the
idea that Louis XIV alone embodied a greatness encompassing the virtues
dispersed amongst the heroes and rulers of old. He therefore became the
“original” king.83 This idea is already implicit in the device Nec pluribus
impar adopted by the King in 1662. Translated as “he can suffice to more
than one world (il peut suffir à plus d’un monde)” in the French Jesuit
Dominique Bouhours’ Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671), it echoes earlier
royal devices like Unus non sufficit orbis (“One world does not suffice me”)
and recalls Juvenal’s remark that Alexander the Great required more than
one world.84 But interpreted as “inferior to none” it lifts Louis well above
the fray of his illustrious predecessors. The idea of Louis as an über-king is
developed at length by Claude Charles Guyonnet de Vertron, a historian
of the king, in his Parallèle de Louis le Grand avec tous les Princes qui ont été
surnommez Grands of 1685, and again in his Nouveau Pantheon (1686).85 The
true “new Pantheon” is Louis himself:
Through your rare virtues, and thousand works

LOUIS fills the luster of the beautiful name he is given,
The whole universe admires in his single person
All the qualities of GODS and HEROES.86
Louis is at once “penetrating, prudent, prompt, happy, nice, affable,

equitable, glorious, splendid, acts without error,” he foresees the future,
and “through the lights of his spirit / is dedicated to all things.”87 Guyonnet
stresses that “in order to represent naturally this Conqueror of Princes, the
Great of the Greats, and the masterpiece of the Heavens, one should have
perfect knowledge of the divine language,” signaling the emergence of the
sublime as the category that collapses the ethical and aesthetic aspects of
the exceedingly grand royal persona.88 René Rapin, too, following Nicolas
Boileau’s translation of Longinus’s Peri Houpsos of 1674, had treated the
sublime as an ethical category in his Du grand et du sublime dans les moeurs et
les différentes conditions des hommes (1686), to posit Louis XIV as the ultimate
compendium of moral and—as a consequence—aesthetic greatness.89
The rare copies of La Chambre’s Préface pour servir à l’histoire de la vie et des
ouvrages du Cavalier Bernin are headed with a vignette based on the medal that
Jean-Charles-François Chéron designed in Bernini’s honor, which carried the
motto “Singular in each, unique in all together,” strikingly similar in tone to
the eulogies of the king (Fig. 5.2).90 Still, La Chambre’s writings on Bernini are
careful to distinguish the greatness of Louis XIV from the artist’s all-too-human
nature. The artist is, after all, still a mortal being, a “strange composite of good
and evil”: “Ce [in idealized portraits] n’est assurément point là cet étrange
composé de bien et de mal que l’on appelle l’homme, asservi tour à tour sous
des loix si differentes et si opposées.”91 Domenico is much less restrained, and
claims that Louis XIV himself discerned in Bernini “the Idea of an elevated
ingegno, and a composto of all excellent gifts.”92 Domenico further approaches
the young king and the old artist, both compendia of “unmatchable gifts,”93
by quoting Hugues de Lionne’s description of Bernini as “transformed in
Trumpet of the Most Christian King, who from sculptor has almost rendered
him stone” [“E’ giunto in Roma il Cavalier Bernino trasformato in Tromba del
Rè Christianissimo, chi di Scultore l’hà renduto quasi sasso …”].94 The king
becomes the artist, adopting and subverting Bernini’s own famed ability to
turn stones into living statues.
This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons.

To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book
5.2 Sebastién Leclerc, “Allegoria dell’arte di Gian Lorenzo Bernini,” from Pierre

Cureau de la Chambre, Préface pour servir à l’histoire de la vie et des ouvrages du Cavalier
Bernini (Paris, ca. 1686) (Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome)
The transfer of greatness from king to sculptor gives further meaning to

Bernini’s composto. It lifts Bernini’s persona empathically from the sphere of
the merely artistic, while suggesting its affinity with the sublime. Elevation is
attained by the fusion of qualities and virtues that are not always easily united,
and Bernini seems to possess the peculiar gift of seizing and expressing this
complexity. As we have seen, in the equestrian statue Bernini had employed
the essence, “il vivo,” of his art to portray the dignity of the king.95 La Chambre
explains Bernini’s grasp of Louis by the artist’s “singular dexterity with which
he knew how to insinuate himself into their spirit and so discover all its power
and extension,” an ability that extends into his portraiture.96 When Louis XIII
saw Bernini’s bust of Richelieu, Domenico writes, “it seemed that one also saw
the virtue of the Cavaliere sculpted in it” [“… quando veduto il Ritratto del
Cardinale, parve che in esso eziamdio vedesse scolpita la virtù del Cavaliere”].97
La Chambre’s remark that Bernini “had carefully examined his majesty when
he worked on the bust” echoes the extensive descriptions of Bernini’s method
in making portraits discussed in Chapter 2, where by watching the King at
work or play, the sculptor succeeded at seizing “all those qualities, that are his,
and not of others, and which give likeness to the portrait.”98
Not just the simple ability to record particular qualities of any model
defines Bernini’s work, but its capability to seize and unite of the properties
5.3 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Bust of Urban VIII, marble, 1632, Palazzo Barberini,

Galleria nazionale d’arte antica (ICCD)
that even the most elevated subjects contain. Chantelou’s diary points out
that Bernini’s bust conveys that the King is at once strict and kind, ferocious
and generous.99 Some thirty years earlier Lelio Guidiccioni had already
characterized Bernini’s work in similar terms, when he described the artist’s
portrait busts of Urban VIII (Fig. 5.3) and Scipio Borghese (Fig. 5.4) in a
5.4 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Bust of Scipione Borghese, marble, 1632,

Galleria Borghese, Rome (ICCD)
letter of 4 June 1633.100 Guidiccioni casts Urban VIII as the artefice who has
woken the artists of a new Golden Age, first among them Bernini, “subject
and creature who performs miracles in making marbles speak.”101 A first
testimony of Bernini’s success is his bust of Urban of 1632.102 Guidiccioni’s
description of the effigy enumerates antitheses: the work of art unites a
stupefying “variety of things” and “affetti that are mutually diverse”; Bernini
has
enlivened and expressed many affetti, and many views, that would have been
mutually repulsive in the natural, if through art [Bernini] had not reconciled them
with harmony together.
[Ma stupenda è la varietà delle cose, et degli affetti trà lor diversi, con dolce
consonanza, in esser rappresentati …. Hor quello che è da stupire, Vostra Signoria
[Bernini] nella faccia di Sua Santità ha vivacizzati (?) et espressi molti affetti, et molte
vedute, che sarebbero tra lor ripugnanti in via di natura, se in via d’arte ella non
l’havesse con armonia conciliate insieme.]103
Guidiccioni lists the different and contrasting emotions that are “united” in
the portrait, such as thoughtful and merry, sweet and majestic, spirited and
grave, laughing and reverent.104 He concludes: “Thus are made portraits of
rulers.”105
In this description of Bernini’s portraiture contrapposto emerges again as a
crucial quality, now less as a property of visual composition than the hallmark
of superior personalities. Antithesis indicates an exceptional propensity for
accumulation and appropriation, reflected both in the persona of the artist
and patron, and in their creations, be it the sculpted portrait that truly seizes
the original, or the original model of the ruler himself. Bernini’s non sò che
thus becomes imbued with rather more absolute meanings than artistic taste
or style. Bernini is a true original, marking a new beginning of sculpture,
architecture and painting. He masters art to the extent that he is able to unite
even the most dispersed elements into pleasing compositions. His ingegno is
sublime and operates well above the limitations of art. All this because, as a
stupendous composto of virtù, Bernini and his art partake in the elevated realm
of his patrons. As Domenico himself writes, at the opening of Chapter 5, the
introduction of Bernini’s privileged relationship to Urban VIII “all recognized
in [Bernini] a non sò che of singularity.”106 Public recognition follows when
Urban visits Bernini’s sickbed, witness of a “certain something of a particular
propensity towards him,” easily mistaken for mere affection, “but in Urban it
was substantially esteem for his virtue.”107
Variations of the Non sò che
The conversation at the foot of the Baldacchino in the Vita has pointed
towards two different views on compositeness. In the first view, represented
by Pallavicino, the conglomeration of ideas and forms is a crucial means to
achieve elegance of style. As such, it is subjected to general principles rooted
in human nature. In the second view, composition depends on genius, the
hallmark of exceptional and indeed elevated people. It reflects in places,

objects and ideas of an altogether different mettle than those cobbled together
by mere mortals.108
If these views are divergent, they share many notions and presuppositions,
most notably the preference for compositeness and complexity and the
concomitant appreciation of contrapposto. Moreover, because they concern
different aspects of art, beauty of expression or human creativity, they are not
necessarily incompatible.
Problems begin, however, when forms of creativity become conflated with
style of expression. As the previous chapters have shown, in the conception
of metaphor proposed by authors such as Tesauro, contrived and complex
forms signal an elevated, mysterious or ineffable res. Like Pallavicino, Tesauro
appreciates the heuristic potency of the concetto and specifically antithesis,
because antithesis blends revelation with obfuscation in a unique form of
expression spurred by the ingegno. Both authors find that only a creative
management of contingency of language and the objects it relates to generates
meaningful and enticing expressions. To Pallavicino, this process generates
style as a means especially apt to either clarify or project different kinds of
ideas precisely because it so well interacts with objects and their names. But to
Tesauro this process drives an unending exploration of possible significations
whose final meaning resides in its capacity to marvel and to invoke a non sò
che of the divine. When it attains a certain level of novelty and complexity,
Tesauro attributes metaphor with the same capacity as the successful poetic
image of Pallavicino, a device aimed at the heart, not the intellect. The author
of the Cannocchiale does not distinguish two realms of expression, but different
degrees of expressivity, of which the most accomplished also invokes the
highest truths. Tesauro’s non sò che exists in the conflation of Pallavicino’s two
offices of metaphor.
This conflation associates the interdependence of expression and meaning
with a particular style. Discussions of style then immediately involve questions
of signification. The problem had already arisen in Guidiccioni’s dialogue
on the Baldacchino, where the Marinist tenet of unfettered innovation was
dismissed as unbecoming of Saint Peter’s and Urban VIII. Only towards the
end of the seventeenth century, however, is the issue approached not only
by weighing the merits and appropriateness of certain styles but also by
questioning the truth-value of particular forms of expression. The non sò che
is crucial in this shift. New descriptions of the notion allow to distinguish
a realm of truth constraining art to clear and intelligible expression from
another realm, unbound by—and perhaps even independent of—the rules
and principles of art, where truth is undefined in both content and nature. In
this view, like in Tesauro’s, expression and meaning are inextricably tied, yet
now under the tutelage of a style according to similar precepts as to those of
Pallavicino’s Trattato dello stile.
The new function of the non sò che can be gauged from the earliest
systematic treatment of the notion as a critical category, in Les entretiens
d’Ariste et d’Eugène by Dominique Bouhours of 1671, briefly mentioned earlier
as a source on the impresa of Louis XIV. The fifth Entretien is spurred by the
“strange sympathy” that Ariste and Eugène sense for one another, not unlike
Urban’s particular propensity towards Bernini, which Eugène denotes as a je
ne sais quoi.109 Their subsequent exploration of the notion draws upon many
different areas of the human experience, ranging from the art of conversation,
to language, art and Nature. It recalls the courtly grace and wit of Castiglione,
while retaining a hint of mystery as to its actual cause: “the je ne sais quoi is
of the kind of those things we only know through the effects they produce”
[“Quoi qu’il en soit, dit Ariste, le je ne sais quoi est de la nature de ces choses
qu’on ne connaît que par les effets qu’elles produisent”].110 This brings to mind
the work of God, and the final section of the Entretien turns to religion. Ariste
wonders whether it is not a je ne sais quoi that makes us Christians, because
it “makes us feel” that there is “something above us.”111 This would have the
je ne sais quoi pertain equally to “grace itself” as to Nature and art, Eugène
interjects, and the interlocutors turn to the Church Fathers, more in particular
Saint Augustine, for a final attempt to define it:
What else is [divine grace], I ask, but a supernatural je ne sais quoi that can neither
be explained nor understood. The Church Fathers tried to define it and called it a
profound and secret vocation, an impression of the spirit of God, a divine unction, an all-
powerful sweetness, a victorious pleasure, a bold concupiscence, a covetous desire for the true
Good: in other words, a je ne sais quoi that makes itself felt but which cannot readily be
expressed in words and about which we would do well to say nothing.
[… cette grâce, dis-je, qu’est-ce autre chose qu’un je ne se quoi surnaturel, qu’on ne
peut ni expliquer, ni comprendre? Les Pères de l’Eglise ont tâché de la définir, &
ils l’ont appelée une vocation profonde & secrète, une impression de l’esprit de Dieu, une
onction divine, une douceur toute puissante, un plaisir victorieux, une sainte concupiscence,
une convoitise du vrai bien, c’est-à-dire que c’est un je ne sais quoi qui se fait bien sentir;
mais qui ne se peut exprimer, & dont on ferait bien de se taire.]112
As Scholar has pointed out, Bouhours here shrewdly inverts the criticism
voiced against scholasticism and its alleged dependence on occult qualities
in order to explain the work of God, by turning those very qualities into signs
of God’s inexplicable presence in the world.113 This inversion, moreover,
depends upon a conflation of divine with natural and even artistic qualities.114
In fact, this passage exemplifies not just an attempt to rescue the obscure from
the Port Royal rationalists, as Scholar rightly argues, but also to maintain a
sense that religious and artistic experiences can cross over into each other.115
In the Entretiens, as in the writings of Tesauro (which Bouhours knew
well),116 the discussion of the ability of language to reveal or at least hint at
certain somethings is closely bound up with a reflection on style. In fact, the
Entretiens would provoke a violent outburst in the long-simmering debate

over the superiority of either the French and Italian language and the literary
styles to which they are prone.117 In the fifth Entretien, Bouhours has Eugène
sigh that “[the] Italians, who make a mystery out of everything, use their non
sò che on each occasion,”118 and in the second Entretien on the French language,
Bouhours elaborates a linguistic theory demonstrating the preeminence of
French over all other languages, as the most natural form of expression: “There
is only the French language that follows Nature step by step, so to speak, and
she only has to follow her faithfully in order to find the number and harmony
that the other languages only find in the reversal of the natural order” [“Il
n’y a que la langue Française qui suive la nature pas à pas, pour parler ainsi,
& elle n’a qu’à la suivre fidèlement, pour trouver le nombre & l’harmonie,
que les autres langues ne rencontrent que dans le renversement de l’ordre
naturel”].119 Bouhours’ linguistic argument thus concurs with a stylistic ideal,
of a limpid, ordered and even naive form of expression; in French, language
itself produces a natural style, best suited for the clear communication of well-
founded ideas.120 As such, the French are much less inclined to make a mystery
out of everything, as the Italians do, and not as easily drawn to employ the je
ne sais quoi.121 Only those exceptional effects whose source cannot be known
or understood deserve that qualification.
Bouhours’ Entretiens, including his treatment of the je ne sais quoi, thus
intertwines considerations on language, style and expression, specifically in
reaction to Italian practices and theories.122 Still, Bouhours is deeply indebted
to Sforza Pallavicino, whose intuition that an ideal form is, so to speak, natural
and transparent becomes a norm. As in Pallavicino’s metaphor of the spyglass,
Bouhours portrays language as a medium shaping an image of reality in order
to disappear itself, when he writes that “beautiful language resembles a pure
and clear water that has no taste” [“Le beau langage ressemble à une eau pure
& nette qui n’a point de goût; …”].123
Our two Jesuits, however, differ in their view of the relationship between
artistic expression and truth. If Pallavicino distinguishes two realms of
expression, one concerned with rational discourse and the other with poetic
untruth, Bouhours grounds all art in truth. Truth, in turn, produces beauty.
In fact, in a later book, the La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit
of 1687, Bouhours’ endeavors to understand when a pensée—or ornate
expression—is untrue to the subject it means to express. A pensée should be
founded in truth. After distinguishing the three genres of pensées, the sublime,
the agréable and the délicat, Bouhours determines the appropriate ornament
of each genre and the clarity of expression that is desired. The prerequisite of
embellishment is, however, always a true and therefore already intrinsically
beautiful object. This vision on the relationship between truthfulness and
ornate expression allows Bouhours to single out epigrams composed for
Bernini’s bust and equestrian statue of Louis XIV as “pompous ideas,” that
is, far-fetched pensées that in their exaggerated loftiness expose the weakness
of the underlying idea.124 Pallavicino, too, comes in for some criticism in La
Manière, as serving himself of the exaggerations and unsound metaphors he
otherwise condemns.125
Still, Bouhours approvingly cites Pallavicino’s censure of the line “You are
truly God; for only God is capable of giving life to marbles” by “I don’t know
which poet,” in fact censuring Giambattista Marino, because the poet reads
a common metaphor as if it were a literal statement.126 But the epistemology
underpinning Pallavicino’s disavowal, his clear separation of poetry from the
real, is absent from Bouhours. The French author remains silent on the subject
of the apprensione; in fact, mimetic works of art that are untruthful are entirely
incompatible with his position. This problem is noted by one of Bouhours’
many Italian interlocutors, Pallavicino’s admirer Lodovico Muratori, the
author of Delle perfetta poesia italiana (1706) and Riflessioni sopra il Buon Gusto
(1708–15). Muratori grants the ingegno a rather more important role in finding
and treating rare truths than Bouhours, but agrees that there exists only
one truth, the subject of every form of expression. This prerequisite forces
Muratori to reject explicitly Pallavicino’s defense of the imitative arts and
the prima apprensione.127 In its stead operates il buon gusto or “good taste,” the
exercise of judgment.128 As Robert Klein has shown, gusto shares many roots
with giudizio.129 The term often occurs to describe the sensory recognition of
harmony, as in Cicero’s disquisition on rhythm of speech or the practice of
imitation.130 In Muratori’s view, prefigured in Mascardi’s Dell’arte istorica, this
criterion circumscribes the appropriate sphere of rulebound poetic activity, as
it regulates when individual preference may engender the non sò che.131
While adopting and enhancing Pallavicino’s notion of good style, Bouhours
and Muratori discredit his epistemological framework. As a result, they erase
the essential distinction between Pallavicino’s and Tesauro’s poetics. After all,
the earlier authors’ real bones of contention are their views on style’s relation
to truth, perhaps less so their stylistic preferences. Pallavicino’s criticism of
Tesauro and Marinism is directed against the unlimited application of formal
complexity as an attempt to invoke an ill-defined poetic truth, not against
ornate style per se. The late seventeenth-century view, however, identifies
legitimate truth (poetic or other) with a limpid expression capable of teetering
towards the ineffable. As a perhaps unexpected consequence, Bouhours and
Muratori share Tesauro’s view that artistic expression operates in one fixed
relation with truth and that all truth pertains to the same realm of cognition.
And much like Bouhours and Muratori, Tesauro sees a close correspondence
between the obscurity of an expression and the nature of the truth expressed.
When Bouhours likens divine grace to the je ne sais quoi, he verges quite closely
on Tesauro’s statement that in the true or “fatal” anagram “the human ingegno
retrieves a non sò che of the divine.” In both cases, the singularity of particular
experiences produced by art, Nature or God, serves as a bridgehead towards
transcendency. Yet the authors differ in their valuation of obscurity. Tesauro

believes that the finality of language resides in its capacity to generate the
non sò che; obscurity is an index of the divine, and enigmatic expressions are
the apex of human language. Bouhours defends an aesthetic where form and
content work as one to the point of perfect clarity. He only accepts the je ne
sais quoi in spite of language’s first office to communicate because certain
things simply cannot be said. As a consequence, the truths that Pallavicino
saw expressed in the untrue arts of imitation are now relegated to the realm
of mystery. Outside the grasp of reason, they exist beyond the reach of human
expression, only hinted at in “a supernatural je ne sais quoi that can neither be
explained nor understood.”132
Art and Religion
The emergence of good taste and the je ne sais quoi has been explained with
regard to shifting aesthetic preferences promulgated by new institutions
like the Accademia dell’Arcadia.133 But notions of art’s possible relations
with religion prove to be equally crucial. In what is only a contradiction
in appearance, Bouhours, a late seventeenth-century advocate of natural
style equally far removed from Tesauro’s metaphorical world view as
from Pallavicino’s epistemology, embraces the former’s non sò che and the
latter’s view of style in order to safeguard art’s relation with the divine. As a
consequence, the redefined je ne sais quoi and its cognate goût are not only the
indication of ineffable qualities within a poetics bent on the natural and the
truthful, but also a central concept in an epistemology of art, cementing the new
alliance between art and truth. As the undefined realm where the aesthetic,
the natural and the divine start to resemble one another because they produce
similar effects, the je ne sais quoi signals the emergence of new ideas about the
relationship of art to religious truths or, more precisely, about art’s capability
to represent and communicate the mysteries of faith. With this je ne sais quoi,
the notion of art providing access to the divine thanks to what it is rather than
what it is not has been disavowed, probably for good.
But the passage quoted from the Entretiens also suggests that if religious
ideas and experiences have been separated from art, a strong sense of religion’s
intrinsic artistry remains. The je ne sais quoi of religion constitutes the pinnacle
of artistic expression, yet it is too perfect and therefore unattainable. This
paradox acts as an open invitation to imitate the forms of religion in order to
elevate art. In La philosophie des images enigmatiques Claude-François Ménestrier
illustrates this dynamic quite well. As we have seen, Ménestrier sees cryptic
expression as a stylistic edifice with many uses, a first line of defense against
the profane and ignorant that protects and enhances the truth it encapsulates.
It moreover involves the fabrication of an ingenious expression and produces
aesthetic pleasure. Finally, it should never be confused with true revelation.

Still, La philosophie proposes divine revelation as the original model for the
enigma.134
It is religion that has consecrated the enigma by the obscurity of its mysteries, which
are above the penetration of the human spirit. God, as the prophet says, hides in the
shadows to instil respect in man, and his adorable shadows are to him like some kind
of Temple where he resides in his immensity.
[C’est la Religion, qui a consacré les Enigmes par l’obscurité de ses Misteres, qui sont
au dessus de la penetration de l’esprit humain. Dieu, dit le Prophete se cache dans
les tenebres pour tenir les hommes dans le respect, & ces adorables tenebres lui sont
comme une espece de Temple où il habite dans son immensité.]135
Ménestrier quotes Psalm 17, verse 12: “And [God] made darkness his covert,
his tabernacle round about him: dark waters in the clouds of the air,” and
throughout his treatise, the tabernacle, temple, and all their attributes serve
as key images for the enigma. In sum, “our entire religion is enigmatic.”
Conversely, the enigma encompasses every expression whose inherent
obscurity stems from the elevated nature of its object. Even if Ménestrier does
not write so, every visible aspect of religion is pervaded with a je ne sais quoi,
exerting the “profound and secret vocation” relished by Bouhours.
Ménestrier’s image of the tabernacle as the ultimate enigma brings us
back to the Baldacchino, and invites the question of how our analysis of its
form and authorship relates to the epistemology of style traced in this final
section. Domenico Bernini approaches the Baldacchino in Pallavicino’s
footsteps, echoing his treatment of antithesis. This is not, however, because
the biographer reads the construction as the ingenious expression of a precise
message, or as a mysterious shrine containing an ineffable truth. Bernini’s
son aims to emphasize that the Baldacchino has emerged as a composition of
various elements. Its compositeness produces an ineffable effect, much like a
linguistic composition. This effect is rooted in the non sò che of his father, whose
creativity the Baldacchino monumentalizes. By offering this description of the
Baldacchino, Domenico subsumes all other fields of meaning implicitly under
the umbrella of art. In this view, exceptional art made by excellent artists is
capable of producing an unprecedented aesthetic experience incorporating
the object’s possible layers of meaning, dispersed over ever so many different
elements brought together.
In so doing, Domenico’s biography, a book published in 1713 but deeply
rooted in the Seicento, gingerly navigates shifting views of art, style and the
sacred.136 Bernini’s artistry expands to shape the man, and the man reaches the
sublime, directed by his capacity to exceed the limits of art and accumulate all
kind of virtues. The only legitimate points of comparison are not artists, and
certainly not Francesco Borromini, but popes and kings. Indeed, Domenico’s
characterization of Bernini’s creativity puts designing the Baldacchino on a

par with acting in their presence and producing their effigy, the simulacrum
of their composite beings. Bernini’s contrapposto smacks of the oracular,
because it hints at the otherwise unknowable territory.
As such, Domenico’s description implies a non sò che certainly not far
removed from Tesauro’s, nor from the late seventeenth-century attempts to
define the same notion as denoting the hybrid realm beyond the reach of art.
This non sò che dismisses Sforza Pallavicino’s assertion that the same stylistic
means produce different epistemological effects depending on their res. The
refined ornate style the Trattato dello stile proposes for scientific writing is
collapsed into a general conception of truth as the object of rational enquiry,
while the vigorous exertions of ingegno become identified with the essence
of seventeenth-century art and architecture, deemed excessive by many of
Domenico’s contemporaries.137
This conflation of authorship, style and transcendence in the Vita raises
challenging questions about sacred art. If style is prone to operating with
different kinds of truth, how does it work in the realm of the sacred? And
if this conflation is dismissed, as Pallavicino does, how should sacred art be
conceived? What are its characteristics, its possibilities and its limits?
Notes
1. Irving Lavin, Bernini and the Crossing of Saint Peter’s (New York, 1968); William Chandler Kirwin,
Powers Matchless. The Pontificate of Urban VIII, the Baldachin, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Frankfurt,
1997); Maddalena Spagnolo, “G.L. Bernini, il Baldacchino,” in Antonio Pinelli (ed.), La Basilica di
San Pietro in Vaticano, vol. Schede (Modena, 2000), pp. 790–96.
2. See Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco and Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco, Bernini. Una introduzione al gran
teatro del barocco (Rome, 1967), pp. 62, 80, 163, 170–73; Irving Lavin, Bernini e l’unità delle arti visive
(Rome, 1980); Rudolf Preimesberger, “Berninis Cappella Cornaro: eine Bild-Wort-Synthese des
siebzehnten Jahrhunderts?,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 49 (1986): 190–219; Giovanni Careri,
Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion (Chicago and London, 1995); Maria Grazia Bernardini
and Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco (eds), Bernini. Regista del Barocco (Milan, 1999), pp. 119–82; Tomaso
Montanari, “Il ‘bel composto.’ Nota filologica su un nodo della storiografia Berniniana,” Studi
secenteschi, 46 (2005): 195–210.
3. See Maarten Delbeke, “Gianlorenzo Bernini’s ‘Bel Composto.’ The Unification of Life and Work
in Biography and Historiography,” in Maarten Delbeke, Evonne Levy and Steven F. Ostrow (eds),
Bernini’s Biographies. Critical Essays (University Park PA, 2006), pp. 251–74.
4. Domenico Bernini, Vita del cavalier Gio. Lorenzo Bernino, descritta da Domenico Bernino suo figlio (1st
edn Rome, 1713) (photographic reprint, Perugia, 1999), pp. 38–9.
5. On this descriptive method, see Perrine Galand-Hallyn, Le reflet des fleurs. Description et métalangage
poétique d’Homère à la Renaissance (Geneva, 1994), pp. 36–48.
6. On the analogy between the visual arts and rhetoric, see (for instance) Rensselaer W. Lee, “‘Ut
Pictura Poesis’: The Humanistic Theory of Painting,” Art Bulletin, 22 (1940): 264 and appendix
2; Gerard LeCoat, The Rhetoric of the Arts, 1550–1650 (Bern, 1975), pp. 30–32. With regard to
architecture, see Alina A. Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance. Architectural
Invention, Ornament and Literary Culture (Cambridge and New York, 1999), esp. pp. 152–7, 165–9 for
the theories of Giorgio Spini; Caroline van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern
Europe (New York and Cambridge, 2007), pp. 31–52.
7. Bernini, Vita, p. 39.
8. Ibid., p. 40.
9. Domenico points out that while many know the Baldacchino from engravings, these
representations miss the true quality of the Baldacchino, “che consiste nella proporzione, e
misura, che hà la Mole col Tempio,” ibid., p. 39. On the role of descriptions in Domenico’s Vita, see
Maarten Delbeke, Evonne Levy and Steven F. Ostrow, “Introduction,” in Filippo Baldinucci, The
Life of Bernini, trans. Catherine Enggass, foreword by Robert Enggass (University Park PA, 2006),
pp. xxiv–xxv.
10. Bernini, Vita, pp. 40–41.
11. Tomaso Montanari, “Gian Lorenzo Bernini e Sforza Pallavicino,” Prospettiva, 87/88 (1997): 62.
(Reggio Emilia, 1824) (photographic reprint, Modena, 1994), ch. 19, p. 121.
13. See Chapter 2, under the heading “The Superiority of Divine Art.”
14. See Chapter 3, under the heading “The Prophetic Effect and Historical Truth.”
15. In Sforza Pallavicino, Del Bene Libri Quattro del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino, bk II, ch. 54, in Opere
del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino (Milan, 1834), vol. 2, pp. 530b–531a; the equivocalism produced by
the limited amount of words available to denote an infinitude of objects is pointed out as the chief
instrument of sophism: “… che la sofistica è tutta fondata negli equivoci delle parole, essendo
queste finite, e gli oggetti immaginabili infiniti, e però convenendo spesso che una parola sia
contrassegno or d’una, or d’un’altra cosa ….” They are opposed to the “nominali” who pay careful
attention to “il vario significato de’nomi.” As Pallavicino points out in his introduction to the
Trattato dello stile, the unstable relationship between words and things is actually the central topic
of his treatise; see Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, p. 14.
16. Ibid., ch. 5, pp. 33–9, and esp. pp. 37–8: “… che il principal diletto del numero derivi dalla
riflessione dell’intelletto, lo sperimentarsi, che lo stesso numero, in componimenti d’una materia
ci piace, in altra materia nò, perocchè non riconosciamo ivi la debita convenevolezza o di vago,
o d’aspro, o di grave tra il suono e tra il sentimento delle parole … e per tanto la Virtù estimativa
interiore si trova in ogni momento sopra di ciò ingannata da quel che presupponeva, e quasi
se ne disdegna forse per una certa superbia, con cui ogni potenza conoscitiva ha in dispetto chi
fu cagione ch’ella cadesse in giudizio falso, quando ciò non le frutta qualche special godimento
nell’acquisto che le sopravvenga improvviso d’una verità riguardevole.”
17. Ibid., pp. 35–6.
18. Ibid., p. 36: “… sì perchè tutto il proporzionato appar bello e però giocondo, e scambievolmente
tutto lo sproporzionato appar brutto e però nojoso alla cognizione sperimentale, come perchè
è proprio dell’umano intelletto per un tal occulta ambizione il compiacersi quando esercita
l’innata perspicacità in accorgersi dell’arte, della proporzione, della corrispondenza; ed in somma
quando col suo, cioè col discorso, fa qualche novel guadagno di verità, come divinamente osserva
Aristotile intorno alla dilettazione che arrecano i contrapposti.” Pallavicino here refers to Aristotle,
The Art of Rhetoric, bk 3, 9, 8–9, 1410a, ed. Loeb Classical Library (1st edn 1926), trans. John H.
Freese (Cambridge MA, 1994), p. 393. See Eraldo Bellini, “Scrittura letteraria e scrittura filosofica
in Sforza Pallavicino,” in Carlo Scarpati and Eraldo Bellini, Il vero e il falso dei poeti. Tasso, Tesauro,
Pallavicino, Muratori (Milan, 1990), p. 128.
19. Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 5, pp. 36–7.
20. Ibid., p. 39: “… siccome i Pittori dispongono la varietà de’colori sopra la tela con palese artificio in
grazia sol della vista. Ma è arte più malagevole, e però più mirabile e più laudabile, il dar a vedere
che l’opera artificiosa sia fatta senz’arte, ….” The reference to the spyglass is in ibid., p. 38.
21. Ibid., pp. 40–47, with the citation on p. 42, “… ma si ricordi che l’armonia è l’unico pregio
dell’eloquenza noto anche al senso.” This is a conventional point of view, found for instance in
Lodovico Zuccolo’s Discorso delle ragioni del numero del verso italiano (1623), as quoted in Paolo
d’Angelo, “Il gusto in Italia e Spagna dal Quattrocento al Settecento,” in Luigi Russo (ed.), Il gusto.
Storia di una idea estetica (Palermo, 2000), p. 22.
22. See Cicero, De Oratore, 3.193–5, ed. Loeb Classical Library, trans. H. Rackam (Cambridge MA,
1948), pp. 155–7; Cicero, Orator, 49.162, in Brutus and Orator, ed. Loeb Classical Library, trans. H.M.
Hubbell (Cambridge MA and London, 1952), p. 423.
23. These and following quotes are from Cicero, De Oratore, 3.175–80, pp. 138–43. See also Elaine
Fantham, “Imitation and Evolution: The Discussion of Rhetorical Imitation in Cicero ‘De Oratore’
2.87–97 and some Related Problems of Ciceronian Theory,” Classical Philology, 73/1 (1978): 1–16.
24. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 10.5.9, ed. Loeb Classical Library, trans. H. Butler (4 vols, Cambridge
MA, 1920–22), vol. 4, pp. 117–19.
25. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and
Robert Tavernor (Cambridge and London, 1988), p. 302. See Christine Smith, Architecture in
the Culture of Early Humanism (Oxford, 1992), pp. 82–97. On concinnitas, see Caroline van Eck,
Organicism in Nineteenth-Century Architecture. An Inquiry into its Theoretical and Philosophical
Background (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 45–62; also see David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language
of Art (Princeton, 1981), pp. 437–43.
27. Ibid., pp. 129–30.
28. Ibid., p. 128.
29. Compare with Pallavicino’s assessment of Alexander VII’s use of Latin in Sforza Pallavicino, Della
vita di Alessandro VII. Libri Cinque. Opera inedita del P. Sforza Pallavicino della Compagnia di Gesù.
Accademico della Crusca e poi Cardinale di S. Chiesa (2 vols, Prato, 1839–40), vol. 1, p. 411: “Ed in
questo proposito solea maravigliarsi, che alcuni cardinali di culta letteratura, costumasserò nei
voti del concistoro un dir sì lontano dal naturale, che non avrebbero mai usato il corrispondente
nella favella natia. Il che s’avvisava che intervenisse, perchè la minor consuetudine della lingua
latina ci lascia meno accorgere dell’affettazione.”
30. This point, too, is applied to Alexander’s diction and behavior, see ibid.: “I sentimenti di questi
suoi discorsi erano sempre così addattati all’occasione ed al luogo, che si scorgevano per veste
nuova e tagliata a misura del dosso. Tutti gravi e devoti, ma insieme ingegnosi sì veramente che
l’ingegno non paresse dominare ma servire alla gravità ed alla devozione.”
31. Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 15, pp. 98–100, “Diversità fra la maniera più lodevole d’emulare
gli antichi nell’invenzion delle favole, e in quella de’concetti. E che cosa sia simiglianza di stile.”
See also Bellini, “Scrittura letteraria e scrittura filosofica,” pp. 116–19.
32. Several authors have remarked upon this “un-baroque” preference: Elena Mazzocchi, “La
riflessione secentescha su retorica e morale,” Studi secenteschi, 38 (1997): 35; Bellini, “Scrittura
letteraria e scrittura filosofica,” pp. 173–7; Pierantonio Frare, “Per istraforo di perspettiva.” Il
“Cannocchiale aristotelico” e la poesia del Seicento (Pisa and Rome, 2000), p. 91.
33. This comparison appears several times, for example in Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 4, p. 26.
See Ernst R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter (Berlin, 1948), pp. 144–6, for
the history of this topos.
35. Bernini, Vita, p. 40, see n. 8 above.
36. On the role of the giudizio dell’occhio in Bernini’s architecture, see Christof Thoenes, “Bernini
architetto tra Palladio e Michelangelo,” in Giuseppe Spagnesi and Marcello Fagiolo (eds), Gian
Lorenzo Bernini architetto e l’architettura europea del Sei–Settecento (Rome, 1983), pp. 105–34.
37. See Martin Kemp, “From ‘Mimesis’ to ‘Fantasia’: The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation,
Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts,” Viator, 8 (1977): 347–98; Robert Klein, “‘Giudizio’ et
‘gusto’ dans la théorie de l’art au Cinquecento,” in La forme e l’intelligible (Paris, 1970), pp. 341–52;
Ernesto Grassi, “La mania ingegnosa,” Studi di estetica, s. 3, 25 (thematic issue: Genio/Ingegnio,
16) (1995): 9–35; Philip Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 2001), pp.
112–18.
38. Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, pp. 332–74, with the quote on p. 360; Klein,
“‘Giudizio’ et ‘gusto,’” p. 346; David Summers, The Judgment of Sense (Cambridge, 1987), pp.
317–20.
39. The locus classicus here is Michelangelo’s life in the second edition of Vasari’s Vite; see for instance
Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori (Florence, 1568), ed. Giuntina, p. 8:
“E [Domenico Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo’s teacher] rimase sbigottito della nuova maniera e della
nuova imitazione che, dal giudizio datogli dal cielo, aveva un simil giovane in età così tenera, che
in vero era tanto quanto più desiderar si potesse nella pratica d’uno artefice che avesse operato
molti anni. E ciò era che tutto il sapere e potere della grazia era nella natura esser citata dallo
studio e dall’arte.” Pietro Aretino is quoted in Klein, “‘Giudizio’ et ‘gusto,’” p. 348: “Guardate
dove ha posto la pittura Michelagnolo con lo smisurato de le sue figure, dipinte con la maestà
del giudizio, non col meschino dell’arte.” Similar statements can be found in other late sixteenth-
century Florentine treatises; see, for instance, the Trattato delle perfette Proporzioni of Vincenzio
Danti (1567), in Paolo Barocchi (ed.), Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento (3 vols, Milan and Naples,
1971–77), vol. 2, p. 1563.
40. “… un’ordinazione concordia, e quasi un’armonia occultamente resultante dalla composizione,

unione, e commistione di più membri diversi, e diversamente da sé, e in sé, e secondo la propria
qualità e bisogno, bene proporzionati, e ’n un certo modo belli: i quali, prima che alla formazione
d’un corpo si uniscano, son tra loro differenti e discrepanti,” quoted from Paolo D’Angelo and
Stefano Velotti (eds), Il “non so che.” Storia di una idea estetica (Palermo, 1997), p. 17.
41. I quote the translation from Richard Scholar, The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe. Encounters
with a Certain Something (Oxford, 2005), p. 27.
42. See also Patricia A. Emison, Creating the “Divine” Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo (Leiden, 2004),
pp. 37–49.
43. See Samuel H. Monk, “A Grace beyond the Reach of Art,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 5/2 (1944),
p. 137, with reference to Francesco Patrizi’s treatment of poetic furor. Excellent critical histories of
the notion and its semantic field are provided by D’Angelo and Velotti, Il “non so che”; Scholar, The
Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi; and Sohm, Style in the Art Theory, pp. 190–94.
44. See for instance D’Angelo and Velotti, Il “non so che,” p. 53.
45. Bernini, Vita, pp. 32–3.
46. Filippo Baldinucci, Vita del cavaliere Gio. Lorenzo Bernini scultore, architetto, e pittore (1st edn Florence,
1682), ed. Sergio Samek Ludovici (Milan, 1948), p. 4.
47. Bernini, Vita, p. 5: “Accortosi [Pietro] un giorno, che nel ritrarre un disegno haveva mutato uno
scorcio di una figura, in atto però più naturale, e spiritoso, e supponendo la variazione più
tosto colpo di sorte, che tiro di maestria, lo ripigliò come mancante, e poco attento all’esemplare
propostogli. Gio: Lorenzo modestamente rispose, che l’avidità dell’operare l’haveva fatto trascorrere,
e forse passar oltre al suo dovere, ma che s’egli doveva sempre andar dietro altrui, non sarebbe giammai
arrivato a passar facilmente avanti ad alcuno. Da questa risposta comprese finalmente il Padre, che
degno Maestro d’un tal discepolo era il suo solo ingegno, onde lasciò a lui libero il modo di
operare, facendo quindi argomento, con qual motivo di speranze maggiori, facesse presentemente
il Figliuolo progressi sì grandi.” Compare also the “supponendo la variazione più tosto colpo
di sorte” with the “essere riuscita bene a caso” (ibid., p. 39) of the Baldacchino. See also Cesare
D’Onofrio, “Un dialogo-recita di Gian Lorenzo Bernini e Lelio Guidiccioni,” Palatino, 10 (1966),
p. 129.
48. Bernini, Vita, p. 149: “Ad un’altro … nel dir che gli fece Esser i panneggiamenti del Rè, & i crini del
Cavallo, come troppo ripiegati, e trafitti, fuor di quella regola, che hanno a Noi lasciata gli antichi Scultori,
liberamente rispose [Bernini], Questo, che da lui gli veniva imputato per difetto, esser il pregio maggiore
del suo Scalpello, con cui vinto haveva la difficultà di render’il Marmo pieghevole come la cera, & haver con
ciò saputo accoppiare in un certo modo insieme la Pittura, e la Scultura. E’l non haver ciò fatto gli antichi
Artefici esser forse provenuto dal non haver loro dato il cuore di rendere i sassi così ubbidienti alla mano,
come se stati di pasta.” This discussion takes place in relation to the equestrian statue of Louis XIV.
49. See esp. ibid., p. 79, where Borromini is named as the evil force behind Bernini’s disgrace over the
Vatican bell towers. See Sarah McPhee, Bernini and the Bell Towers: Architecture and Politics at the
Vatican (New Haven, 2002), pp. 172–5; and with regard to the authorship of the Baldacchino, see
Sabine Burbaum, Die Rivalität zwischen Francesco Borromini und Gianlorenzo Bernini (Oberhausen,
1999), pp. 16–45.
51. On the intersection of literary debates with seventeenth-century artistic practice and theory,
see, apart from the literature quoted in the Introduction, Maria H. Loh, “New and Improved:
Repetition as Originality in Italian Baroque Practice and Theory,” Art Bulletin, 84 (2004): 477–504;
Elizabeth Cropper, The Domenichino Affair. Novelty, Imitation, and Theft in Seventeenth-Century Rome
(New Haven and London, 2005), ch. 3.
52. D’Onofrio, “Un dialogo-recita.” A reference to the demise of Antonio Querenghi—one of the
interlocutors in Del Bene—allows us to date the dialogue to October. On the dialogue, see most
recently Sebastian Schütze, “‘Liberar questo secolo dall’invidiare gli antichi.’ Bernini und die
‘Querelle des Anciens et Modernes,’” in Johannes Myssok and Jürgen Wiener (eds), Docta Manus.
Studien zur italienischen Skulptur für Joachim Poeschke (Münster, 2007), pp. 354–5.
53. On Guidiccioni, see “Guidiccioni, Lelio,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1960–), pp. 330–
34; Schütze, “‘Liberar questo secolo dall’invidiare gli antichi,’” pp. 353–5; John Kevin Newman and
Frances Stickney Newman (eds), Lelio Guidiccioni. Latin Poems: Rome 1633 and 1639 (Hildesheim,
1992).
54. D’Onofrio, “Un dialogo-recita,” p. 129a: “L [Guidiccioni]: Troppi gusti son guasti, ed io per tutti i
gusti del mondo non lascerei la strada, che sempre conobbi esser la buona.”
55. Oreste Ferrari, “Poeti e scultori nella Roma seicentesca: i difficili rapporti tra due culture,” Storia
dell’arte, 90 (1997), p. 153. On the relationship of Marinist poetics to Bernini’s art, see Andrea
Bolland, “‘Desiderio’ and ‘Diletto’: Vision, Touch, and the Poetics of Bernini’s ‘Apollo and
Daphne,’” Art Bulletin, 82 (2000): 309–30; and the literature cited in Ch. 6, n. 23–4. On the Stigliani–
Marino controversy, see Franco Croce, Tre momenti del barocco letterario italiano (Florence, 1966), pp.
95–135.
56. See, for instance, the famous statement of Marino quoted partially in Croce, Tre momenti, p. 165:
“Io pretendo di saper le regole più che non sanno tutti i pedanti insieme, ma la vera regola (cor
mio bello) è saper rompere le regole a tempo e luogo, accomodandosi al costume corrente ed al
gusto del secolo.”
57. On the prehistory of these topoi, see for instance Martin McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian
Renaissance. The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford, 1995).
58. D’Onofrio, “Un dialogo-recita,” pp. 129a–30a: “GL: “Non v’è più d’una strada? / L: Per molte vie
si camina alla gloria, che sono le nobili arti, le discipline, et le scienze. Mà ciascuna d’esse, ch’è
genere, tien le sue specie constituite con le sue differenze et ciascuna specie nel ristretto de i suoi
precetti, apre una strada, che se ne và ben serrata, et guardata da folte siepi, … / GL: Dunque
non si può innovare, né trovar di proprio, né aggiunger cosa alcuna all’inventato da gli altri? Et
habbiamo à tor sempre la misura, et la norma da i primi, et porre il piè nelle pedate degli antichi?
/ L: Non per certo, niuna è di queste cose. Anzi dobbiamo in tutto et per tutto far del nostro, col
venerare gli antichi vestigi; et da quei grand’huomini pigliare il passeggio, ma non i passi, né
del lor piè fare il nostro. … / GL: Più glorioso stimavo il caminare per nuova strada che andando
per l’antica, perderla trà la moltitudine che v’ondeggia per entro. / L: Falso. Si vuol caminare per
la strada vecchia, ma con nuovo valore, non fuggire il concorso, et la moltitudine, ma segnalarsi
da essa, et abhorrendo la trivialità, sollevarsi al perfetto, né solo aspirare alla vicinanza di quegli
ottimi, ma se fusse possibile à trapassargli.”
59. Alina A. Payne, “Architectural Criticism, Science, and Visual Eloquence: Teofilo Gallaccini in
Seventeenth-Century Florence,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 58 (1999): 146, n. 10,
traces the historiography of the Marino–Bernini identification. See also n. 137 below.
60. D’Onofrio, “Un dialogo-recita,” p. 130b.
61. See Eraldo Bellini, Agostino Mascardi fra “ars poetica” e “ars historica” (Milan, 2002), pp. 164–79, with
an extensive bibliography; see also Sohm, Style in the Art Theory, esp. pp. 116–21 and 186–8.
62. Agostino Mascardi, Dell’Arte istorica (1st edn Rome, 1636), ed. Adolfo Bartoli (Florence,
1859) (photographic reprint, Modena, 1994), bk 6, ch. 6, pp. 283–8, with the quote on p. 288:
“L’interrogar alcuno in che stile egli scriva, è scioccezza; perchè non può in altro stile comporre
che nel suo proprio, dettatogli dall’ingegno, ….” As first noted by Anthony Blunt, Mascardi’s
approach to style is absorbed in Poussin’s Osservazione sopra la pittura, published by Gian Pietro
Bellori in 1672; see Gian Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects:
A New Translation and Critical Edition, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, intro. Tomaso Montanari and
notes Hellmut Wohl (Cambridge MA, 2005), pp. 338–9 and esp. n. 157. For a discussion of this
passage, see Bellini, Agostino Mascardi, pp. 164–79. For the association with the non sò che, see
Sohm, Style in the Art Theory, p. 190.
64. Ibid., pp. 100 and 110: “… una gran Cathedra di somigliante materia [di Bronzo], sopra la quale
si aprisse maestosamente la Gloria del Paradiso con quantità di Angeli, che trà loro framischiati, e
con vago ordine confuso, si mostrano riverenti, & ossequiosi a quella preziosa Reliquia.”
65. Ibid., p. 148. The theme of judicious transgression emerges when an anonymous critic accuses
Bernini of having exaggerated the folds of the king’s robe and the crest of his horse; see ibid., p.
149, quoted above, n. 48.
66. Ibid., p. 167. On the role of this account in Domenico’s narrative, see Catherine M. Soussloff,
“Old Age and Old-Age Style in the ‘Lives’ of Artists: Gianlorenzo Bernini,” Art Journal, 46 (1987):
115–21.
67. Bernini, Vita, pp. 32–3 (my emphasis).

68. Ibid., p. 2 (my emphasis).
69. Ibid., p. 177. See also Robert Williams, “‘Always like Himself.’ Character and Genius in Bernini’s
Biographies,” in Delbeke et al., Bernini’s Biographies, pp. 181–99.
70. Vasari, Vite, vol. 6, pp. 3–4, 110: “Et invero Michelagnolo collocò sempre l’amor suo a persone
nobili, meritevoli e degne, ché nel vero ebbe giudizio e gusto in tutte le cose.” Robert Williams,
Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy. From Technè to Metatechnè (Cambridge MA,
1997), argues that the notion disegno emerges in the sixteenth century in order to designate a
“superintendent” form of knowledge extending from art into every human endeavor; see esp.
pp. 45–57 with regard to Michelangelo and giudizio. Michael W. Cole, Cellini and the Principles
of Sculpture (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 118–27, stresses the ethical content of the notion, as a deed
performed in order to acquire virtue. If disegno is understood in this sense, Bernini’s composto can
be read as its actualization.
71. See Chapter 1, under the heading “A Life in Papal Rome.” Eraldo Bellini, Umanisti e Lincei:
letteratura e scienza a Roma nell’età di Galileo (Padua, 1997), pp. 301–2.
72. Primi lampi della relatione delle feste, e fuochi di giubio, fatti risplendere nel Teatro di Roma per la Nascità
del Real Delfino di Francia. Della generosità dell’emin. Sig. Card. Antonio Barberini (Rome, 1662), fol. 3r:
“… che sà ridurre la più irregolate, e deforme situatione della natura ad obbedire a i precetti, &
alle regole del suo pellegrino sapere, s’insperanzò di poter fare cose grandi, e sodisfare non meno
al suo gran genio, che all’aspettatione di tutta Roma, solita ad attendere, & à vedere da questo gran
Cardinale memorabili attioni.” Partly quoted in Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, La festa barocca (Rome,
1997), p. 408.
74. Fioravante Martinelli, Roma ricercata nel suo sito (3rd edn Rome, 1658), “Dedication”: “Compendiò
in se tutte le di lui [il Mondo] maraviglie.”
75. This idea is also present in the relazione quoted above in n. 72.
76. Bernini, Vita, p. 136: “ … essa [the queen], il Rè, e tutti que’Grandi lo riceverono con applauso non
ordinario, e con ammirazione sempre maggiore delli’ingegno del Bernino, che in tutte le occasioni
si mostrava così fecondo di Concetti.”
77. Ibid., p. 104.
78. Ibid., pp. 95–9.
79. Ibid., p. 129.
80. I have used the edition in Tomaso Montanari, “Pierre Cureau de la Chambre e la prima biografia
di Gian Lorenzo Bernini,” Paragone, s. 3, 24–25 (1999): 103–32, here pp. 115–16, /4–5/. The passage
begins as follows: “Je me sens d’ailleurs animé par la passion que tout sujet doit avoir pour son
prince, et pour un prince aussi admirable que le nostre, à tirer du silence et le l’oubly ce que
j’ay appris de la propre bouche du cavalier Bernin touchant Louis le Grand. Comme il avoit un
talent tout particulier pour juger du fond et du merite des personnes—par l’adresse singuliere
avec laquelle il sçavoit s’insinuer dans leur esprit et en découvrir par ce moyen toute la force et
l’étendue—, il m’a souvent avoüé, … qu’il avoit examiné soigneusement Sa Majesté dans le temps
qu’il travailloit à son buste, mais qu’il n’avoit jamais connu un genie si vaste et si sublime, un
esprit de si bonne trempe, ou, pour me servir de ses propres termes … “di così buon metallo,” et
que tous les autres qu’il avoit veus jusqu’alors ne servoient qu’à luy en faire mieux comprendre
la grandeur et la beauté. Un témoinage si authentique et de la bouche d’un si illustre étranger ne
contribuëra, peut estre, pas moins à consacrer la gloire de nostre auguste prince à l’immortalité
que la statuë equestre que ce nouveau Praxitele vient d’élever à l’honneur de son Alexandre. Ses
victoires, ses triomphes, le regne pacifique où il a reduit son grand courage sont connus de tout le
monde.”
81. I have used the edition in André Félibien, Receuil de descriptions de peintures et d’autres ouvrages
faits pour le Roy (Paris, 1689), pp. 69–94. See Eric Pagliano, “Le discours sur l’art par prétérition.
Décrire les représentations du roi. La galerie de Versailles et ‘Le Portrait du roi’ par Félibien,”
in Christian Michel and Maryvonne Saison (eds), La naissance de la théorie de l’art en France
(1640–1720) (thematic issue: Revue d’esthétique, 31–2) (1997), pp. 170–72. Montanari, “Pierre
Cureau de la Chambre,” p. 112, points out some parallels in La Chambre’s and Félibien’s critical
vocabulary.
82. Félibien, Receuil, p. 75: “Il a peint sur une toile d’une moyenne grandeur l’Image de V.M. & a
renfermé dans un espace fort mediocre le Portrait d’un Roy, dont le nom remplit toute la terre.”
83. Chantal Grell and Christian Michel, L’école des princes, ou, Alexandre disgracié: essai sur la mythologie
monarchique de la France absolutiste (Paris, 1988), pp. 71–3. See also Marc Fumaroli, Le api e i ragni. La
disputa degli Antichi e Moderni (Milan, 2005), pp. 142–50; Louis Marin, Le portrait du roi (Paris, 1981),
pp. 251–60, where this notion is developed in reference to Félibien’s Portrait du roi; and Giancarlo
Mazzacurati, “Alessandro Tassoni e l’epifania dei ‘Moderni,’” Rivista di letteratura italiana, 4/1
(1986): 88–92, for the association of the “modernes” with the notion of the absolutist state. For the
comparison of Louis XIV with Alexander the Great, see Irving Lavin, “Bernini’s Image of the Sun
King,” in Past–Present. Essays on Historicism in Art from Donatello to Picasso (Berkeley, Los Angeles
and Oxford, 1993), pp. 161–6.
84. Dominique Bouhours, Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1st edn Paris, 1671), ed. Bernard Beugnot
and Gilles Declercq (Paris, 2003), pp. 313–16, with the reference to Juvenal, Satire 10.
85. Claude Charles Guyonnet de Vertron, Paralèlle de Louis le Grand avec les princes qui ont esté
surnommez Grands (Paris, 1685); idem, Le nouveau Pantheon ou le rapport des divinitez du paganisme,
des heros de l’antiquité, et des princes surnommez grands, aux vertus et aux actions de Louis le Grand
avec des inscription Latines & Françoises en Vers & en Prose, pour l’Histoire du Roy, pour le revers de
ces Médailles, pour le Monuments publics érigez à sa gloire, & pour les principales Statuës du Palais de
Versailles (Paris, 1686). This book consists of two separately numbered volumes. The Paralèlle, an
oration, is the basis for Guyonnet de Vertron’s Louis le Grand Poeme heroique dedié à Monsieur Le
Dauphin. All these publications follow exactly the same logic, casting Louis as the compendium of
all royal virtues by means of comparisons with gods, heroes and kings.
86. Guyonnet de Vertron, Paralèlle de Louis le Grand, p. 66: “Par tes rares vertus, & par milles travaux /
remplit l’éclat du beau nom qu’on luy donne / Tout l’Univers admire en sa seule personne / Toutes
les qualitez des DIEUZ & des HEROS.”
87. Ibid., p. 68: “penetrant, prudent, prompt, heureux, agreable, affable, equitable, glorieux,
magnifique, agit sans erreur, … par les lumieres de son esprit / est appliqué à toutes choses.”
88. Guyonnet de Vertron, Le nouveau Pantheon, “Lettre,” pp. [9]–[10]: “pour representer au naturel le
Conquerant des Princes, le Grand des Grands, & le chef-d’oeuvre des Cieux, il faudroit sçavoir
parfaitement le langage divin ….”
89. See Elfrieda Dubois, René Rapin. L’homme et l’oeuvre (Lille, 1972), pp. 567–81; Corrado Viola,
Tradizioni letterarie a confronto. Italia e Francia nella polemica Orsi-Bouhours (Verona, 2001), pp. 14–33;
Anne Delahanty, “From Judgment to Sentiment: Changing Theories of the Sublime, 1674–1710,”
Modern Language Quarterly, 66/2 (2005): 152.
90. “Singularis in singulis, in omnibus unicus.” See Williams, “‘Always like Himself,’” pp. 182–3. Also
mentioned in Bernini, Vita, p. 147. On the vignette of La Chambre’s biography, see Bernardini and
Fagiolo dell’Arco, Bernini, no. 18. It is tempting to read this vignette as a visual paraphrase of the
frontispiece to the French translation of Vitruvius published by Claude Perrault in 1673, especially
as Vitruvius portrayed the architect as a master of all arts.
91. La Chambre, Préface, in Montanari, “Pierre Cureau de la Chambre,” p. 17, /7/.
92. Bernini, Vita, p. 130: “Mà il Rè, che in lui conosceva un’idea d’ingegno elevata, & un composto di
doti tutte eccellenti ….”
93. Ibid., p. 144: “Intanto il Cavaliere pubblicava per Rome le doti impareggiabili di quel Monarca
con un’ardore tale, che ben diceva potersi impiegare il tempo in sostenere i disagi del viaggio
per solamente vederlo: Tanto ei grande appariva e nella vastità dell’Intelletto, e nella fecondità
dell’Ingegno, e nella magnificenza della Corte, & in tutto ciò che può rendere riguardevole un gran
Principe, che fosse simile ad esso.”
94. Ibid.
95. See the quote above, n. 65.
96. See the quote above, n. 80.
98. Ibid., p. 134, see Chapter 2, n. 117.
99. Paul Fréart de Chantelou, Journal de voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France, ed. Milovan Staniç (Paris,
2001), p. 205.
100. Guidiccioni’s letter, BAV, Barb. Lat. 2958, fols 202–7, was first published by Cesare D’Onofrio,
Roma vista da Roma (Rome, 1967), pp. 381–8. I have used the transcription in Philip Zitzlsperger,
Gianlorenzo Bernini: die Papst- und Herrscherporträts. Zum Verhältnis von Bildnis und Macht (Munich,
2002), pp. 179–83, which has been verified by Joris van Gastel. On the letter, see also Sebastian
Schütze, “Busto di Urbano VIII,” in Anna Coliva and Sebastian Schütze (eds), Bernini scultore. La
nascità del Barocco in Casa Borghese (Rome, 1998), no. 28, pp. 248–50.
101. Guidiccioni, “Letter,” fol. 203v, in Zitzlsperger, Gianlorenzo Bernini, p. 179, lines 10–14: “Non sò
io che il gloriosissimo Papa Urbano Nostro Signore fra l’altre laudi, che può meritarsi d’essere
stato artefice di nobili artefici, che svegliati dalla sua virtù fanno fiorire il suo tempo (perche l’api
non si veggono dove i prati non siano fioriti) con ogni ragione può gloriarsi che Vostra Signoria è
suggetto et creatura che fa miracoli facendo parlare i marmi.”
102. See Schütze, “Busto di Urbano VIII”; Zitzlsperger, Gianlorenzo Bernini, pp. 55–87, cat. no. 8.
103. Guidiccioni, “Letter,” fol. 203v, in Zitzlsperger, Gianlorenzo Bernini, p. 179, lines 20–23.
104. Ibid., p. 180, lines 29–34: “ma se l’investigargli fù studio d’industria, l’eliggergli virtù di giudizio
et l’esprimergli sua … menza d’imaginatione, il convincergli et mettergli insieme fù opera di
tutte queste cose, et fù disentione d’arteficio essendo chiaro che la disentione entra in ogni virtù
… entrano tutti. Così si vede quel ritratto pensoso con allegria, dolce con maestà, spiritoso con
gravità; ride et è venerando; …”
105. Ibid., fol. 204r, p. 180, line 41: “Così si fanno i ritratti de’i Principi.”
106. Bernini, Vita, p. 25: “… tuttavia non vi fù alcuno, … a cui questa stretta communicazione recasse
nè pur ombra di dispiacere, ò di sospetto, riconoscendo tutti in lui non sò che di singolare, …”
107. Ibid., p. 50: “Il Cavaliere a quest’honore [of Urban’s visit] restò maggiormente obbligato, quanto
che scorgeva nel Papa non solo il desiderio di honorarlo, mà una non sò quale particolare
propensione verso di lui, ch’ei stimava affetto, mà in sostanza era in Urbano stima della sua
Virtù.”
108. Frank Fehrenbach, “Kohäsion und Transgression. Zur Dialektik lebendiger Bilder,” in Ulrich
Pfisterer and Anja Zimmermann (eds), Animationen/Transgressionen. Das Kunstwerk als Lebewesen
(Berlin, 2005), pp. 15–16, traces the history of this idea with regard to the use of color in painting, a
development that culminates in the biographical representation of Michelangelo.
109. Bouhours, Entretiens, pp. 279–80. The bibliography of this edition lists most of the critical studies
devoted to the Entretiens up to 2001. For a succinct discussion of this “Entretien,” see Nicholas
Cronk, The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature (Charlottesville VA,
2003), pp. 61–4.
110. Bouhours, Entretiens, p. 285.
111. Ibid., p. 293.
112. Ibid., pp. 294–5 and n. 49 for the Augustinian references. For a discussion of this passage and its
transformation in subsequent editions of the Entretiens, see Scholar, The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi, pp. 63–9.
113. Scholar, The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi, p. 115.
114. This earned Bouhours much criticism, see ibid., pp. 59–69; Bouhours, Entretiens, p. 286, n. 23. It
is actually hard not to detect a note of irony in Bouhours’ text, as it states that, according to “[la]
bruit dans les écoles,” grace can be almost anything, and is therefore a perfect je ne sais quoi; see
Bouhours, Entretiens, pp. 292–3.
115. Cronk, The Classical Sublime, p. 61, makes a similar point. For an expansive approach to the same
general question, see Eyolf Østrem, “‘The Ineffable.’ Affinities between Christian and Secular
Concepts of Art,” in Nils Holger Petersen, Claus Clüver and Nicolas Bell (eds), Signs of Change:
Transformations of Christian Traditions and their Representation in the Arts, 1000–2000 (Amsterdam
and New York, 2004), pp. 265–92, with a discussion of the non sò che, pp. 281–3.
116. The sixth Entretien on devices of Bouhours’ Entretiens frequently quotes Tesauro; see the name
index. For instance, Bouhours explains the distinction between the device and metaphor
by referring to Tesauro’s definition of the metafora in fatto of his Cannocchiale aristotelico, ch.
14. Dominique Bouhours, La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (Paris, 1688)
(photographic reprint, Hildesheim and New York, 1974) lists Tesauro twice in the index, but
quotes him much more often, see p. 38 or p. 391, a quote from Tesauro’s Cannocchiale aristotelico,
p. 406.
117. See Viola, Tradizioni letterarie a confronto, pp. 1–43, for the prehistory of this controversy, and pp.
48–61 and 188–90 for the part played by the Entretiens. See also Michael Moriarty, “Principles of
Judgment, Probability, Decorum, Taste and the ‘Je Ne Sais Quoi,’” in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The
Cambridge History Literary Criticism, vol. 3, The Renaissance (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 522–8.
118. Bouhours, Entretiens, p. 287: “Les Italiens qui font mystère de tout, emploient en toute rencontre
leur non sò che; on ne voit rien de plus commun dans leurs Poètes.”
119. Ibid., p. 119.
120. On Bouhours’ ideas on style, see Sophie Hache, La langue du ciel: le sublime en France au XVIIe
siècle (Paris, 2000), pp. 275–83; Viola, Tradizioni letterarie a confronto, pp. 61–76; Cronk, The Classical
Sublime, pp. 51–8.
121. See also Bouhours, Entretiens, p. 287, n. 25, where the editors astutely suggest that Bouhours’
extensive citation of Tasso to prove the Italian predilection of the non sò che is an implicit dismissal
of the poet’s poetics of marvel.
122. Ibid., “Préface,” pp. 18–19, argues that the coherence of the work emerges through the many
correspondences and echoes between the different dialogues.
123. Ibid., p. 116. See also Cronk, The Classical Sublime, pp. 51–3, with the same quote p. 53.
124. Bouhours, Manière, pp. 363–4: “Tout cela me fait souvenir du Cavalier Bernin, dît Philanthe: il
fut appellé en France pour le dessein du Louvre, & il fit le Buste du Roy en marbre. Ce buste luy
attira l’applaudissement de toute la Cour, & donne lieu à un Poéte d’Italie de faire des vers sur le
pié-d’estal qui n’estoit pas encore fait. Entrò Bernino in un pensier’profondo, / Per far al Reggio busto
un’bel’sostegno: / E disse, non trovandone alcun degno; / Piccola basa à un’tal’Monarca è il Mondo. A quoy
le Bernin répondit luy-mesme: Mai mi sovenne quel’pensier’profondo, / per far’di Ré si grande appoggio
degno; / Van sarebbe il pensier’, che di sostegno / Non è mestier, à chi sostiene il mondo.” Bouhours works
from La Chambre’s biographical sketch of Bernini. Compare La Chambre, Préface, pp. 123–5,
/21–4/, with Bouhours, Manière, pp. 364–5. Bouhours’ comments on the epigrams have been
pointed out by Jacques Vanuxem, “Quelques témoinages français sur le Bernin et son Art—l’abbé
de la Chambre,” Actes des journées internationales d’étude du baroque, Montauban, 1963, Série Baroque,
A, 2 (Toulouse, 1965), here p. 164.
125. Bouhours, Manière, pp. 95–6, pp. 529–30 and esp. p. 98: “Ce qui m’étonne, repartit Philanthe, c’est
que le Cardinal Pallavicin n’ait pas pensé juste dans un livre qui traite de la justesse du stile, & où
l’Auteur accuse de faux de bons Ecrivains; ….” Still, Pallavicino is hailed as “un des plus fameux
Ecrivains de delà les monts,” ibid., p. 529.
126. Ibid., pp. 98–9; the reference is to Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 17, p. 106. See Chapter 3, n. 4.
127. Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue, “Il concetto di ‘gusto’ nell’Italia del Settecento,” in Il gusto nell’estetica
del Settecento, Aesthetica Preprint, Supplementa, 11 (Palermo, 2002), pp. 40–41, 52–7; Eraldo Bellini,
“Il vero e il falso in Muratori,” in Scarpati and Bellini, Il vero e il falso dei poeti, pp. 194–202 and esp.
210–13; Giovanni Baffetti, “Muratori tra ‘ingegno’ ed ‘evidenza,’” in La retorica, l’ingegno e l’anima.
Studi sul Seicento (Pisa, 2006), pp. 127–42.
128. Anna Laura Bellina and Carlo Caruso, “Oltre il barocco, la fondazione dell’Arcadia,” in Enrico
Malato (ed.), Storia della letteratura italiana (Rome, 1998), pp. 239–45.
129. Klein,“‘Giudizio’ et ‘gusto,’” pp. 342–6.
130. D’Angelo, “Il gusto in Italia e Spagna,” pp. 12–13, 22–3.
131. Morpurgo-Tagliabue has argued that Italian literary theory remained rooted in an Aristotelian and
rhetorical tradition and, as a consequence, concerned itself essentially with the rules and principles
of creation, and not with defining beauty or the aesthetic experience, see Morpurgo-Tagliabue, “Il
concetto di ‘gusto’ nell’Italia del Settecento,” pp. 31–4.
132. See above, n. 112.
133. See, for instance, Vernon Hyde Minor, The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste
(Cambridge, 2006).
134. See Chapter 3, under the heading “The Prophetic Effect and Historical Truth.” It is worth noting
that in the Entretiens Bouhours profusely cited Ménestrier’s work on emblems and imprese; see the
name index to Bouhours, Entretiens.
135. Claude-François Ménéstrier, La philosophie des Images énigmatiques ou il est traité des Enigmes,
Hieroglyphes, Oracles, Propheties, Sorts, Divinations; Loteries, Talismans, Songes, Centuries de
Nostradamus, De la Baguette (Lyon, 1694), “Preface,” n.p. The citation continues as follows: “Posuit
tenebra latibulum suum, in circuitu ejus tabernaculum ejus (Psalm 17). Cette obscurité n’est pas en lui,
elle est au dessous de lui, c’est-à-dire dans la foiblesse de nos esprits. C’est un voile qu’il met entre
lui et nous, semblable à ce nuage lumineux qui éblouït les Disciples sur le Tabor au Mystère de
la Transfiguration, & sur la Montagne des Olives quand le Sauveur monta au Ciel. Ainsi toutes
les obscuritez de notre Religion sont des voiles semblables à ceux du Temple de Jerusalem, qui
couvroit le sanctuaire pour tenir les peuples dans le respect. Toute nôtre Religion est donc une
Religion énigmatique. Le Mistere de la Trinité, l’Incarnation du Verbe Divin, l’Eucharistie, la
Justification, la Predestination, sont des Enigmes, dont nous ne découvrirons parfaitement le sens,
qu’à la saveur des lumières de la gloire. C’est ce grand jour qui doit nous instruire parfaitement
dans le séjour des lumieres. Toutes nos connaissances en cette vie que des nuits obscures, & des
Enigmes difficiles à déveloper.”
136. When exactly Domenico Bernini wrote the biography of his father is uncertain. A first mention
of the manuscript is made in 1705, in an editor’s note to the first volume of his Historia di tutte
le heresie (1705–1709), and since the 1670s Bernini’s sons had been gathering material to craft
an apologetic biography of their father; to what extent these early efforts led to a fully fledged
manuscript that would be used by Filippo Baldinucci and Domenico remains unclear. In any case,
by the time Domenico handed the Life of his father over to the editor Rocco Bernabò, he was an
author of renown, respected in circles of ecclesiastical historians and other letterati. Whether or not
Domenico was entirely au fait with the latest literary controversies is unknown. On the genesis of
Domenico’s Vita, see Maarten Delbeke, Evonne Levy and Steven F. Ostrow, “Prolegomena to the
Interdisciplinary Study of Bernini’s Biographies,” in Delbeke et al., Bernini’s Biographies, pp. 17–23,
with reference to the earlier contributions of Cesare D’Onofrio, Catherine Soussloff and Tomaso
Montanari; also see Tomaso Montanari, “At the Margins of the Historiography of Art: The Vite of
Bernini between Autobiography and Apologia,” in Delbeke et al., Bernini’s Biographies, pp. 73–8
and 103–4.
137. See, for instance, Karl Noehles, “Rhetorik, Architekturallegorie und Baukunst an der Wende vom
Manierismus zum Barock in Rom,” in Victor Kapp (ed.), Die Sprache der Zeichen und Bilder. Rhetorik
und nonverbale Kommunikation in der frühen Neuzeit (Marburg, 1990), p. 190; Jean-Cyrille Sow, “Les
guides d’Italie au XVIIIe siècle et la formation d’une critique française de l’art italien moderne,” in
Gilles Chabaud, Evelyne Cohen, Natacha Coquery and Jérôme Penez (eds), Les guides imprimés du
XVIe au XXe siècle. Villes, paysages, voyages (Paris, 2000), pp. 156–7.
6
Sacred Art
Domenico Bernini’s description of the Baldacchino discerns four phases

in his father’s design process, the second of which consists of selecting its
components such as the twisted columns and the cross.1 These components
are treated as the elements of the visual and spatial composition of the
Baldacchino, not as bearers of meaning. There is no gloss, for instance, on
the design of the bronze columns, enlarged copies of the stone columns
traditionally considered to derive from the Temple in Jerusalem.2 But it
is hard to imagine that Domenico would have been impervious to the
religious symbolism of the Baldacchino. He is, after all, a historian of the
Church. Indeed, after the description of the Baldacchino he refers to the
Ara Maxima Vaticana, the long poem by Lelio Guidiccioni briefly mentioned
in the previous chapter written on the occasion of the Baldacchino’s
inauguration. Domenico cites Guidiccioni’s text as additional proof of
the esteem that Bernini’s labor had warranted “in those days,” and he
paraphrases the poem’s first lines to cast the Baldacchino as “a worthy
home of Apostles, treasury of heaven, eternal machine, and sanctuary of
devotion,” a hint at the symbolism of the construction.3
Still, this symbolism has little to do with what the Baldacchino
signifies in Domenico’s Vita. Domenico’s description revolves around
the contrapposto, which serves to claim a kind of secular divinity for his
father but circumvents other possible meanings of the artifact. For his part,
Pallavicino saw antithesis as a means to render ideas and notions palpable,
part of the repertory of good style, a crucial necessity in communication.
After all, there is no such thing as naked truth.4 This chapter will argue that
Pallavicino’s ideas on style not only apply when it comes to writing, but
also with regard to the visual aspect of Catholic religion and its institution,
the Church. As discussed in Chapter 4, according to the Storia del Concilio di
Trento the Church requires a material component, lest it remain incomplete.
The Storia is pervaded by the idea that “gold is nowhere better than in
the church,” and that pleasure and religion should cooperate. With this in
mind, good style as the source of beauty acquires a peculiar urgency. The
stylistic ideals later adopted by the proponents of good taste contribute to
the Christian’s quest for salvation; style finds its rationale in the relation of
humanity to divine Creation.
Guidiccioni’s Ara Maxima Vaticana positions Pope Urban VIII as the
mediator in this relationship. The pope guarantees the close relationship
between the symbolical meaning of the Baldacchino, the stylistic features
that also appealed to Domenico Bernini, and the realm of the divine.
Already in his letter on Bernini’s bust of Urban VIII and Scipio Borghese,
Guidiccioni celebrated the Baldacchino and Bernini’s other interventions in
Saint Peter’s with words that prefigure Domenico’s description: “[Bernini]
was most fertile in invention, judicious in arranging, solid in ornamenting,
clean in execution, and elevated in manner …”5 This similarity signals
the conceptual compatibility between the exaltation of the patron as the
source of creation and the creativity of his scion, the artist. Guidiccioni’s
interpretation of the Baldacchino in the Ara, too, is less a patron’s claim
by proxy on the object and the artistic process that engendered it. Rather,
it shows how particular aesthetic ideals, put into practice by exceptional
artists, correspond with a view on the visual and material manifestation
of religion.
Guidiccioni’s Ara is part of a larger poetic production aiming to describe
the feasts and artifacts of religion and to define their proper form. In so
doing, this poetry establishes a parentage between these spectacles and
the sacred. The central issue is again the relation of art to truth: how do
artificial objects of beauty express the truths of religion? This question
revolves around the stylistic features of variety and novelty. Appealing to
an innate human desire, they not only characterize the objects that religion
requires, but also induce art to evolve over time, acquiring ever-new forms
to express the unchanging truths of faith. In fact, as Pallavicino’s views on
meditation will show, variety and novelty are the features that distinguish
the imperfect vision of humankind from true paradise. But if variety
and novelty dissolve in the divine apotheosis, they also transform the
imperfection of sublunar existence and the vicissitudes of human history
into a spectacle whose very contingency points towards the unchanging
truths that underpin Creation and the Church.
The Baldacchino and the Reform of Art under Urban VIII
Like the unpublished dialogue on artistic innovation and the letter on

Bernini’s busts of Urban VIII and Scipio Borghese, discussed in the previous
chapter, Lelio Guidiccioni’s Ara Maxima Vaticana dates from the second half
of 1633. Of the known pieces Guidiccioni wrote to celebrate the patronage
sacred art 175
of Urban VIII it is by far the most extensive and the only one in Latin.6 An
elaborate dedication to the pope and a much shorter address to the reader,
concluding with three epigrams on the baldachin, introduce the poem. The
Ara Maxima Vaticana itself opens with an exhortation to revere Saint Peter’s
and the Baldacchino and then proceeds to praise the Virgin Mary, and the
apostles Peter and Paul, the founders of the Church, who were succeeded
by Urban VIII, the present ruler of Rome. Urban’s career as a cardinal
active in European diplomacy and in the congregation overseeing the
Vatican basilica is remembered. Guidiccioni then offers a brief history of the
Vatican site, harking back to the dark days of the emperor Nero, and relates
Constantine’s construction of Old Saint Peter’s and the decision of Julius
II to rebuild the church; Urban’s crowning contribution to the basilica’s
building history encompasses its dedication in 1626 and the construction
of the Baldacchino, which Guidiccioni evokes energetically and in detail.7
A long section recalls the royal honors that have been bestowed upon Saint
Peter’s, culminating in an exhortation of the “awesomeness” of the church
that truly embodies its position “ad limina,” on the threshold between the
human and divine sphere.8 This position, Guidiccioni proceeds, has found
its full realization “under the princedom of Urban.” Again the Baldacchino
is praised, as one of the many good works that Urban performed for Rome,
such as the restoration of churches, the expansion of the Quirinal Palace
or the elimination of famine, with chief amongst them the defenses of the
city and the molding of new cannon.9 The poem culminates with an exalted
evocation of the bronze shrine, to conclude with a celebration of Urban’s
most splendid achievement, his mastery of eloquence and poetry.
Lelio Guidiccioni describes the Baldacchino as the prefect shrine, or (in
the opening line of the poem’s dedication) “Arae thalamum.” Guidiccioni
immediately indicates the signification of the word thalamus: “For God
indeed long lay hidden deep in the Virgin’s womb, and from that womb
He made a chamber [thalamus] for himself and a Divine Treasury, to which
Heaven’s palace yields.”10 This allows the reader, or listener, to fully
understand Guidiccioni’s final exhortation of the Baldacchino itself, at the
end of his poem:
And at last amid these gentle pastimes of kindly peace, [Astraea] would see the
burning beauties of the heavenly ones molded from Corinthian bronze, statues sweet
with speech; and that revered Chamber [thalamus], and the columns set at the behest
of a better Hercules, columns beyond which it is not lawful for human labors to hope
to approach by any enterprises.11
The Baldacchino is cast at once as a shrine and a treasury, a protective structure

housing the most holy of prizes.
In the course of the poem, the perfect shrine of the Baldacchino serves
as a figure for Saint Peter’s, Rome, Jerusalem and Christianity as a whole,
assuming the same figural meanings as the Solomonic temple and the
heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation. These associations all revolve around
the identification of the tabernacle with the Virgin, both as shrine erected
in her honor and as a building representing her as a figure of the Mother
Church.12 In this respect, it is worth remembering that the word talamo or
thalamus could mean both “bedchamber,” opening up possible associations
with Mary’s body or womb, and “canopy” or “baldachin,” referring rather
to the shrine appropriate for a sacred object or person; this ambiguity was
strong enough for the nineteenth-century publisher of Pallavicino’s Vita of
Alexander VII to feel the need to explain in detail that, when Pallavicino
wrote that Christina of Sweden attended mass in Saint Peter’s seated in a
talamo (in all likeliness erected right next to the Baldacchino), the author
most definitely did not have a nuptial bed in mind.13
If Guidiccioni’s ample references to the precious material and stupefying
artistry of the Baldacchino can be read as invocations of the biblical
prototypes of Temple and Jerusalem,14 the lines from the Ara Maxima
Vaticana just quoted also suggest that the Baldacchino, like the Temple,
represents the limit of what is humanly possible. This astounding feat is
accomplished by the ultimate demiurge, Pope Urban VIII. Guidiccioni,
repeating ideas also found in the letter and the dialogue, writes that Urban
not only designed the construction but also created the artist who brought
Urban’s sublime idea into being.15 In their commentary on the poem,
Newman and Stickney Newman have pointed out the extent to which
Guidiccioni stresses the animating powers of Urban, their ability to enliven
dead matter, and thus to inspire visitors, faithful and unfaithful alike,
with unprecedented awe.16 On this ground, the basilica of Saint Peter’s
and Urban share the quality of majesty, an attribute of the priest-king or
sacerdos, “the new Founder.”17 It is Urban VIII alone who carefully tallies,
selects and arranges not only the stone and marble of Saint Peter’s, but
also the bronze of the Baldacchino. This craftsmanship in turn serves as
an image for his tallying of the soul of every Christian in his flock, to form
the harmonious, peaceful and well-arranged Church. Urban’s capabilities
derive from his extraordinary persona:
Then his [Urban’s] piety shone forth, and grace of character; his energy in swaying
hearts, his strong bravery in every difficulty, his burning intellect, his high and living
courage, his watchful care, weighty counsel, farsighted mind, undeviating respect for
law, his constant toil, wisdom, daring, majesty and love, uprightness and standard of
rule.18
Here the Ara recalls Guidiccioni’s letter on Bernini’s portrait of Urban VIII.
If the letter, more than the Ara, stresses the contrasting aspects of Urban’s
personality, both texts signal Urban’s accumulation of virtues, which explain
his achievements as artifex. Because Urban is at once author of the Baldacchino
sacred art 177
and, by extension, of Saint Peter’s, and the priest-king, Saint Peter’s and
Catholic ritual are analogues and exert a similar effect on the beholder, who
is “drawn into the awe of the Roman rite.”19 Guidiccioni invokes the “secret
utterances” of the angels standing on the four columns of the Baldacchino,20
reminiscent of “the harpings of the prophetic king,” Moses, an exemplum of
Urban VIII himself.21
Lelio Guidiccioni here refers to a specific venture of Urban’s, his assiduous
efforts to instigate a reform of poetry in the service of religion. Thirty years
after the publication of the Ara Maxima, Pallavicino’s Arte della Perfezion
Cristiana would still recall this endeavor in order to condemn the poetical
excesses committed out of “desire for the sole excellence of art,” a criticism
aimed at Giambattista Marino and his followers. In the Arte, Pallavicino
praises the Jesuits Famiano Strada and Vincenzo Guinigi, Urban VIII and
Giovanni Ciampoli as the most worthy defenders of sacred poetry.22 These
writers were closely linked to Urban’s court and the Jesuit Collegio Romano,
where Famiano Strada and Vincenzo Guinigi laid down the precepts for
sacred rhetoric based on reformed cicerionianism.23 At the same college,
the Poemata written by Urban VIII were used to teach poetry. The edition
of 1631 carried an introductory elegy that exhorted the reader to emulate
Urban’s noble example, and lend the pen only to sacred subject matter.24
The Pope himself ordered the hymns of the Roman breviary to be rewritten
by the Jesuits Strada, Mathias Casimir Sarbiewski, Tarquino Galluzzi and
Girolamo Petrucci so as to fuse traditional worship with the literary forms
of the antique Golden Age.25
The Ara Maxima Vaticana suggests that Urban’s program of reform is not
confined to the realm of poetry but concerns all expressions of the sacred.
Urban’s persona of poet-pope is part of a liturgical framework, marking
the sacred as the unifying factor of his many artistic endeavors. Urban’s
poetic prowess serves to raise the dignity and indeed the effect of liturgy,
as much as his Baldacchino perfects liturgical space: “Your new order of
worship and most gentle laws have made you an Augustus.”26 Guidiccioni
discerns the same creative source in the most sacred poetry and the design
of the Baldacchino.27 The bronze shrine houses “the Altar, where alone that
Priest [Divina Sacerdos] fulfills the divine rites,” “the foundation of [Urban’s]
rites [sacris fundamina vestris].”28 Moreover, the Ara Maxima stresses the close
connection between the erection of the Baldacchino and the dedication of
New Saint Peter’s on 18 November 1626, when the building was finally
sacralized after more than a century of planning and building activity.29 This
connection was still perceived in the 1670s, when a tapestry illustrating the
res gestae of Urban VIII depicted the dedication with, in the background, the
Baldacchino, finished only in 1633 (Fig. 6.1).30
The link between sacred poetry, ritual and holy artifacts is emphasized
in another contemporary poem on sacred art, Giovanni Ciampoli’s Poetica
6.1 Pope Urban VIII Consecrates the Basilica of Saint Peter, tapestry in silk
and wool, 1671–73, Musei Vaticani (Inv. no. 3923)
sacra.31 Written between 1625 and 1629, it was first published in 1648 as part
of Ciampoli’s Rime by Sforza Pallavicino, shortly after his own Del Bene
and the first edition of the Trattato dello stile.32 In the Poetica sacra Ciampoli
presents the Baldacchino both as the perfect subject matter for holy poetry
and as its visual counterpart. In its artifice, Ciampoli writes, the Baldacchino
reaches the limits of human endeavor. Just like the new sacred poetry, it
is a re-invention of all preceding examples, conceived by Urban VIII. Just
like a sacred poem, the construction mediates between the earthly and the
heavenly sphere.33
Pallavicino’s own proof of sacred poetry, the Fasti sacri, expresses the same
idea. Started around 1630 as an imitation of Ovid’s Fasti celebrating the main
Christian feast days, Pallavicino abandoned work on the cycle of poems
probably around 1636, but a section was published in 1686 as part of an
anthology that included some of Ciampoli’s poetry as well, edited by Stefano
Pignatelli and dedicated to Christina of Sweden.34 This section covers the first
six months of the year and ends with the feast of Saint Peter, when the pope
sacred art 179
receives his annual tribute from the Kingdom of Naples, the Chinea. The Fasti
describe this yearly procession in detail, as a sequence of antitheses between
different forms of artificial and true light. After the splendor of the ceremony,
the ephemeral illumination of Saint Peter’s by night and the fireworks, the
sun rises to flood the procession with light.35 Then Urban VIII appears, the
ultimate light source, who is carried to the altar above Saint Peter’s grave.
There rises the Baldacchino:
Now here, Urban, prepare your gazes

To contemplate with pleasure the admirable works from your hand;
Four columns, actually more golden towers,
Here art learns to conquer both Nature and age,
Her ancient imitators;
These columns give the feast its limit,
Even a great king cannot go beyond them.
[Quando il Sol poi l’ombre notturna ha vinto, / E’l celebrato Di tragge dal Mare; / Di
Baroni, e di mitre, e d’ostri cinto, / Nè men cinto di gemma Urbano appare; / Portasi
in Trono, ove di Pietro estinto / Copre l’ossa adorate il Regio Altare / Dove in ostia
innocente a lui sol lece / Offrir quel Nume, ond’ei sostien la vece. // Or qui de la tua
mano opre ammirate / URBAN gli sguardi a vagheggiar prepara; / Quattro Colonne,
anzi pur Torri aurate, / Ove l’Arte col fasto ha nobil gara; / Di vincer la Natura, e in un
l’Etate / Emule antiche me qui l’Arte impara; / Queste Colonne al Fasto imposer meta,
/ Varcar più altre anche a i Gran Re si vieta.]36
Sacred Art: Principles and Problems
As the line “Here art learns to conquer both Nature and age” suggests, the
Fasti defend and justify art in the exposition and celebration of Christian
faith.37 Pallavicino’s introduction to the poem, discovered by Eraldo Bellini in
an interrupted imprint of the Fasti sacri, further develops this idea.38 Written
as a dialogue between Religion and Pleasure, it assures us that Religion,
“having been the one who came to bless the human race, … will not prohibit
any of the pleasures that are not the fruit of vice or the root of greater harm.”39
She hopes that Pleasure will adorn the churches with the treasures of India,
the wax of Ibla, the incense of Arabia, the marble of Africa and the cedars of
Lebanon, and urges excellent painters and sculptors to portray sacred history,
and musicians to celebrate the divine offices and various displays during the
Forty Hours devotion, in processions, in consecrating churches, and in the
celebrations of Holy Years.40 Thus, the celebration of religion necessitates
a revival of the arts.41 At the same time, writers should avoid mythological
subjects, as they are inappropriate for Christians, but it is also necessary lift
the painful and superfluous division between art and religion that made them
seem “idolaters in writing, and Christians in mind.”42 Pallavicino characterizes
Maffeo Barberini’s rise to prominence as a turning point. He is the leader and

the generous patron of the letterati who wish to reconcile classical literature
with Christian civilization.43
These same ideas are developed at length in the writings of Ciampoli that
Pallavicino would publish. Similar to Pallavicino’s Discorso introducing the
Fasti, the Poetica sacra opposes personifications of Devotion and Poetry, who
gently quarrel over the precepts of sacred poetry. Devotion calls upon Poetry
to leave behind lascivious and idle subject matter in favor of ideas sanctioned
by Catholic religion. And in Ciampoli’s Prose, published one year after the
Rime, the fourth essay or Discorso, dedicated to “sacred and profane letters,”
compares the Christian application of classical eloquence to the spoliation of
idolatrous temples and the riches of the East in the honor of God:
Eloquence gleams in idolatry. What a shame for the world, that the doctrine of a
Plato, or an Aristotle; the eloquence of Demosthenes, and of Cicero; the wittiness of
Livius, and of Tacitus, be foodstuff defiled by the sacrilegious rites! But this is not
why the Devil believes to starve the appetite of the ingegni or to divert the religion
of the affetti. Let’s rather enter with the spoils of Egypt in that land where the milk
of wisdom flows, and the honey of eloquence. We will chase the idols from it, and
consecrate it to God. The carriages will go to Tyre, and the ships to Osiria to bring
us the stems of gold and the woodpiles of cedar. We’ll know how to build with the
treasures of the profane nations the palace and the temple of Jerusalem. Nor will it
be idolatry to worship in these transfigured materials the true godhead, for the same
bronze, that was Jupiter on the Capitol, is now adored for Peter in the Vatican with a
transformed effigy.
[In una contingenza assai proportionale si trova in materia di lettere il Christianesimo

presente. L’eloquenza risplende nell’Idolatria. Gran disaventura del Mondo, che
la dottrina dei Platoni, e de gli Aristotili; la facondia di Demostene, e di Cicerone;
l’acutezza di Livio, e di Tacito siano vivande profanate con i riti sacrilegi! Non per
questo si pensi il Demonio ò di affamare l’appetenza de gl’ingegni, ò di sconvertire
la religione de gli affetti. Entriamo o pure con le spoglie d’Egitto in quella terra, dove
scaturisce il latte della sapienza, & il mele della facondia. Ne scacciaremo gl’Idoli,
e la consacreremo à Dio. Vadano i carriaggi in Tiro, & i navilij in Osir per portarci
le verghe d’oro & i legnami di cedro. Sapremo co i tesori delle nationi profane
fabbricare il palazzo & il tempio in Gierusalem. Nè sarà Idolatria l’adorare in quelle
materie trasfigurate la Deità verace, mentre il medesimo bronzo, che fù Giove in
Campidoglio, si adora hoggi con effigie trasformata per Pietro in Vaticano.]44
Holy scripture used ancient verse too, Ciampoli proceeds, while authors like
Homer or Pindar offer models for the “mosaic history” and the exaltation
of martyrs. He concludes: “It seems, finally, that literature is not revered as
majestic when it is not Religious, and that religion is less enjoyable, when it
is not literature,” as for instance the writings of Saint Augustine demonstrate
[“Pare finalmente, che non si riverisca per maestevole la letteratura, se non
è Religiosa, e che riuscisse meno gradibile la religione, quando non fusse
letteratura”].45
sacred art 181
Perhaps more strongly than Pallavicino, Ciampoli sees the reform of sacred
art as an appropriation of history’s spoils, now put into the service of religion.
These spoils are the classical style, excellent artistry guaranteed by superior
artists and appropriate ornament. His passionate celebration of art and its
classical heritage, however, raises anew the question of how this art relates
to the truths of religion. Is sacred art only different from idolatry because
of its subject matter? Will the ancient spoils of art leave this subject matter
untainted? Or does the sacred perform a more fundamental transformation
of these spoils so as to render them not only harmless, but truly beneficent?
The previous chapters have dealt at length with Pallavicino’s notion of
art’s untruthfulness, a radical and assertive answer to the epistemological
part of this question: style leaves higher truth untainted because it gives
shape to images that are by definition untrue. Still, the texts discussed so far
in this chapter bring to bear art on liturgy as well, the ritual manifestation of
religion, recalling “the pact between the senses and reason, between pleasure
and devotion” described in Pallavicino’s Storia del Concilio di Trento.46 Style
here connects with revelation much more directly than in poems, tragedies
or paintings representing sacred histories. Indeed, it would seem less than
appropriate to treat religious rituals and their material surroundings as an
untrue representation. Do they bestow the image with the “hidden divine
mystery” that Pallavicino ascribed to the legitimate anagram in the Trattato
dello stile?47 Both he and Ciampoli seem to suggest so, when they cast
religious feasts and rituals like the Chinea as sacred poetry’s subject matter
of choice. Are such resplendent displays of higher truths a matter of an
ineffable non sò che or is there such thing as sacred style?
Writing more than a decade before his friend discussed the prima apprensione
as a means to gather error-free knowledge of the truths of faith, in the Poetica
sacra Ciampoli argues that an individual never seizes an actual object but
always its appearance. In the dialogue, Devotion in fact admits that all the
imitative arts, like painting and poetry, necessarily “are forced to lie,” for they
can never completely reveal the truth.48 For this reason, poetry needs to be
founded on a truth whose light is strong enough to encompass also the most
diverse forms and manifestations. The only way to guarantee that the artful
semblance of truth partakes in truth and not in deceit, Devotion suggests, is
to root invention in sacred history.49 Ciampoli presents the poetry of Urban
VIII and the paintings of Titian, Raphael and Michelangelo as successful
results of this practice.50 Conversely, and Ciampoli deals with this issue at
great length, idolatry does not stem from a perverse desire to worship images
but from the use of images, the “guise of truth,” in order to represent false
gods. The statues and temples of Egyptians and Romans abuse the falseness
that is an inevitable part of every image.51 According to Ciampoli, however,
the falseness of the image does not render it inappropriate for worship and
explorations of the divine; humanity cannot escape the image, it is its only
access to God. And for precisely this reason the image should be used for only
the most noble of missions. The arts fall under the moral obligation to render
the divine visible. This mechanism is perverted by idolatrous practices and
negated by iconoclasts. At the same time, the necessity of the image leaves the
door open for the appreciation of classical forms, as long as they are used in
the service of a rightful message.
To Ciampoli, the image thus never entirely casts off suspicions of heresy or
idolatry. But, as his reference to spoliation suggests, this conundrum points
the way to a more general reflection on the historical evolution of forms.
Ciampoli contemplates the elements of time and change in art. Pallavicino
argues that truth is never naked; Ciampoli adds that her wardrobe is rich and
subject to fashion. Similar forms are able to operate on truth and falsehood,
and a diversity of forms possibly pertain to the same sacred truths. The
Poetica sacra explores this problem when the personification of Devotion
aims to describe the beauty of truth to Poetry, who doubts whether religious
subject matter can make for worthy literature. This description examines how
variety and change relate to truth or falsehood. It describes what could be
termed the morphology of the true and deceitful images and their appropriate
constitution.
Devotion tells how one day she visited the lonely cave of a hermit, who
dedicated his life to “sculpting new hymns.”52 With such a song, he invited
Devotion to see “two carved stones,” “where Truth and Deceit appeared
clothed in different habits.”53 Truth is represented as a woman standing on a
heavenly globe, holding a lighting bolt and a scepter in her right hand. From
within her breast shines the sun, visible through a heart-shaped glass. Her
shining heart casts a subtle veil, revealing the parts of her body as if they
were “the stars in the sky.” The shape is surrounded by beams, and speckled
by ruby lips, starry eyes and the splendor of her hair.54 Next to the figure,
the viewer discovers a “beautiful theater.” A silver river leads to a small
lake. Doves are playing in the water and they seem to open their snow-white
wings as in a dance. The misty drops of water they splash around reinforce
the suggestion of a uniform, glowing haze. Herds of all sorts of animals gather
together. Even the lion and the leopard are tame and innocent.55
Only two animals are excluded from the theater of truth, the fox and the
serpent, and they appear as attributes of the other sculpture, Deceit. Devotion
characterizes the figure of Deceit as a disjointed composite of a lying heart, an
ugly face and a monstrous disguise. The flaws of Deceit’s face are hidden by
a mask, and her false character generates a repulsive person, who is forced
to hide from head to toe in an ever-changing cloth, “monstrous to look at.”
Just as Truth is qualified by a uniform white glow, so Deceit’s main aspects
are always different colors: “Oh how many various aspects are to be admired
in [its cloth],” exclaims Devotion. Now the cloth appears as a sapphire sky,
as an emerald meadow, as a wheat field on a hot day, as flames or ashes or
sacred art 183
like a silver wave, and often it blurs into a thousand appearances of different
colors. Idly she invents ape-men, centaurs and other chimeras.56 The scene
represented next to Deceit, the “counterfeited theaters,” shows a labyrinth
of caves immersed in eternal night, a lair of treason. A river twists between
woody shores, turning and hiding its source and mound. After the two
lengthy descriptions, Devotion admits how she managed only with difficulty
to turn away from the work, which left her both glad and sad. The hermit, too,
was pleased to see her enjoyment.57
The ekphrasis of the two sculptures serves a double purpose. The accurate
and gripping description of the statues generates evidenza, exemplifying
poetry’s revealing powers. Devotion’s rendering of the two statues actually
doubles the hermit’s song about the two sculptures, which she praises
as “pittura bella.”58 The ekphrasis also explains how truth and deceit each
produce images: they are “clothed in different habits,” and the description
indicates what the images of Truth and Deceit share and where they diverge.
Both images are conceived as theaters, with the personification at the center
of a multitude of animals and other elements of nature, referencing the topoi
of variety and abundance.59 But in the composition of their image, Truth and
Deceit embody opposite principles. The image Truth produces is revealed
by the light emanating from her heart, inviting the poet to carefully describe
every single component of a harmonious whole. Her theater is composed by
the light that shines its luster over all there is, shaping appearances into a well-
regulated variety. On the other hand, the mask and cloth hiding the ugly face
and tortured mind of Deceit defy definition and nearly escape description.
The appearance of Deceit is in constant flux over time. Ciampoli is careful to
use verbs that indicate how her veil resembles or imitates other materials or
objects, leaving open the question whether the impression of changing variety
is caused by the permanent transformation of the veil or by the faltering
perception of the beholder, who is left behind confused and sad.60
In order to explain this difference between Truth and Deceit, after the
ekphrasis Devotion elaborates on the revelatory powers of truth. She exalts
truth as the queen and generator of all that exists on earth and in heaven.
Because she brings forth Creation and tinges it with beauty, she reveals the
divine.61 When asked how deceit is conceivable if every object stems from
truth, Devotion states that humankind has to grasp the world through
appearances seized by the senses, which are then presented to the intellect.
If every object is “truth in action” and celebrates God, then every “fantasma”
in the human mind is “a true effigy.” This is where falseness may occur. The
liveliness of the mental effigies allows them to change shape and to form
“unknown monsters,” just like the wind shapes clouds into recognizable
figures “without art.”62 Falseness can lure individuals because it dresses itself
in the outward signs of beauty, like gold and exuberant colors, thus imitating
“the voice and the aspect” of truth.63
Further on in the Poetica sacra, as we have seen, Ciampoli points out that only
the truth of sacred history shines forth strongly enough so as to select, arrange
and unify all there is into a meaningful image. In its light, objects, events, ideas
appear as in one beautiful theater, and their brightness, beauty and color are
subsumed into a glowing whole. Still, Ciampoli does not distinguish Truth
and Deceit by their artificiality; both images are equally complex. Like the
chimera of Deceit, the figure of Truth, too, is not a natural given, but an artifice
marshalling the most innovative forms of expression. If Truth and Deceit are
equally artificial, the paragone revolves around what happens when artificial
appearances become unmoored. The ever-changing colors of the cloth hiding
Deceit reference the colors of eloquence, metaphors and enlivening imagery.
Ciampoli does not claim that deceit originates in these metaphors per se.
Rather, when appearances are cut off from the white light of truth, they break
into a dazzling multiplicity of colors and form a mirage of unrelated images.
In Ciampoli’s view, Deceit is revealed or even unmasked by the instability
of the images it projects. The light of Truth, on the other hand, stabilizes and
unifies all there is in order to produce a homogeneous whole.
The Theater of Truth: Meditation and the Image of Paradise
Ciampoli’s ideas on the appearance of Truth are well exemplified by the

apparati built for the Quarant’hore or Forty Hours adoration of the sacrament,
billed as worthy subject matter of sacred poetry in Pallavicino’s Fasti sacri. A
contemporary description of one such apparato, installed in the Jesuit Oratorio
di Francesco Saverio (or Caravita) in Rome in 1619 or 1620 evokes the same
harmony of objects established by the artifice of light. In this “bright theater”:
… thanks to admirable artifice one sees exactly what is in the air the splendor of the
sun, its rays and the succession of the light. This allows one to delight in the most
graceful perspectives, where one sees hills, valleys, woods, forests, cities, seas, which
seem to be very far away due to the variety of the lights, and the eye is often deceived
by the enticing object, which it reckons to be natural, while it is part of art.
[Cosi con mirabile artificio si mira quale è apunto nell’aria lo splendore del sole, i suoi
raggi la successione della luce et in questa guisa si godono vaghissime prospetttive,
dove si veggono colli valli selve bosche città mari, che rimotissimi si fingono per la
varietà de lumi restando ben spesso l’occhio ingannato dall’lusinghiero ogetto, che
egli stima di Natura, che pure è parte dell’Arte.]64
The description boasts that modern Rome masters the art of imitating “the Sun,
who disperses through the air her light, which, even though it is continuous,
is inequal because of the lesser or greater abundance of its rays” [“il Sole, che
diffonde per l’aria la sua luce se bene continuata ineguale però con minore [per]
ò maggiore copia delli suoi raggi”]. With an antithesis recalling descriptions
sacred art 185
of visits to the catacombs, the author celebrates the new way that has been
invented “to admire this light in defiance of this most splendid planet and
to greater advantage, also in the darkest bosom of the deepest night,” in
the underground oratory [“inventò modo di poter vagheggiarla ad onta del
splendidissima pianeta e con più vanto, anche nel seno tenebroso della più
cieca notte”].65 Artificial illumination creates a theater of truth, producing a
lustrous and perfect image.
This theater, of course, serves a purpose, and its style performs to particular
effect. Chapter 4 discussed how Pallavicino’s Storia del Concilio compares the
Church to a human body in order to justify the primacy of the pope and
ecclesiastical splendor. Nature teaches humankind to feed itself in order to
survive, Pallavicino writes, and in the same way, human imperfection requires
visible rewards in order to seize the true, invisible goods of faith. This is why
material beauty is both important and valuable.66 Similar requirements befall
the expression of the truths of faith. One of the masterpieces of sacred poetry
admired in Ciampoli’s Poetica sacra is the book of Revelation. It illustrates that
the “arcane secrets” of faith will remain buried in “eternal silence” if they are
not dressed in ornament. Only then they will enter the “interior theater” of
the human heart.67 The same example, with a similar reference to decoration
or “fregi,” occurs in the last book of Pallavicino’s Arte della Perfezion Cristiana.
Now, however, the subject is not sacred poetry but the meditated image.
As we have seen in Chapter 3, in Del Bene and especially the Arte della
Perfezion Cristiana Pallavicino examines whether external stimuli are able to
perform a lasting conversion of the soul. He weighs the effect of Bernardo
Stefonio’s Christian tragedies or the Spanish preacher’s thundering evocations
of hell’s horrors on the different faculties of the sinful public. Pallavicino
is well aware of the limited impact of these sermons and tragedies.68 After
all, real conversion comes about only through an intricate play between the
fantasia, the intellect and the will.69
With these limits in mind, Pallavicino requires that any image aimed
at conversion, verbal or other, attains evidenza, a convincing and even
overpowering clarity.70 In the Arte, this is explained by comparing the sun
to a painting of Titian. When we look into the sun, the eye “forms within
itself a more alive and more resembling image than Titian can paint, and this
is called vision.” But even this image disappears when the beholder turns
away from the original object [“Il nostro occhio se rimira il sole, ne forma in
sé una immagine più viva e più simigliante di quante ne sapesse dipigner
Tiziano, la qual si chiama visione; ma tosto che’l guardo si volge altrove,
quell’immagine svanisce senza lasciar di sè pur un’ombra nella pupilla”].71
The word “vision,” or “visione,” suggests a parentage of the lively image by
meditation and religious experiences. Indeed, in the Arte Pallavicino writes
that because the truth of faith is so hard to imagine, the fantasia can assist the
intellect by representing “divine promises,” as in a dream.72 The aim of the
Arte, of course, is to lead the reader towards embracing these divine promises.
The final stage of this process, after repentance and purification, is sustained
meditation.
Pallavicino treats the meditation on paradise in the third and final book
of the Arte.73 The theme had already inspired the wistful remark that he
“could write about it for ever, if this wouldn’t result in curiosity rather than
profit.”74 Pallavicino’s exposition is based on his epistemology of conversion.
The meditation of hell is dismissed. Its carnal aspects tend to generate as
many illicit pleasures as benefits. Paradise and the face of God, on the other
hand, contain in absolute measures the qualities only partly present in earthly
objects.75 Pallavicino recalls a conversation with his fellow Jesuit Antonio
Perez, who at the height of summer ate just a few delightful strawberries and
mused that “if tasting these fruits is so pleasurable, how will it be to taste with
a so much more intimate and lively knowledge the essence of God?”76
How can such knowledge be obtained? Pallavicino recognizes that
everyone’s image of paradise depends on acquired knowledge. The differences
between all these personal visions, however, disappear when compared with
the lapse between those images and real paradise, just like two peasants who
each have their own idea about Rome will both be completely overwhelmed
on their first visit to the city.77 Indeed, in every desirable good, even imperfect
ones, there is something of God which allows us to catch a glimpse of the
divine.78 These goods most perfectly address our innate sense for beauty, a
rather more effective means to make the Christian choose God rather than
fear. What we desire is the “clear knowledge of God, gathered through
experience, which we metaphorically call vision, because there is no other
sense that perceives its object with more clarity and distinction than the eye”
[“E certo che la cognizione chiara e sperimentale di Dio, chiamata da noi con
metafora visione perchè fra tutti i sensi niuno apprende con più evidenza e più
distinzione il suo oggetto che la vista, …”].79 Just as in the fourth chapter of
the Arte’s first book, vision here serves to denote an image of absolute clarity
and presence.
After his arguments in favor of paradise as the most effective subject of
meditation, Pallavicino turns to what could be termed the aesthetics of its
image. Indeed, some say that “this uniform perpetual contemplation of a
same face [God] is tedious, because we experience that whichever pleasure
when it prolongs itself too much, just like a pyramid which becomes ever
smaller, and in the end changes into boredom.” After all, “only the variety of
an object guarantees the continuity of pleasure”:
D’una falsa immaginazione convien che l’uomo nel meditar la gioja della divina
vista si purghi: ed è il concepire come tediosa quell’uniforme contemplazione
perpetua d’un medesimo volto, sperimentando noi che qualunque piacere quanto più
s’allunga, a guisa di piramide più impiccolisce, anzi al fine si cambia in noia: onde la
sola varietà nell’obbietto mantien l’uniformità nel diletto.80
sacred art 187
Our author dismisses this prejudice by arguing that the divine image is a true
and all-encompassing good, exceeding human expectations and therefore
fulfilling every desire. Since the desire for variety is triggered by dissatisfaction
with a particular object or aspect, the perfection of paradise will satiate even the
most curious beholder. The same goes for the objection that meditation does
not fulfill the human craving for novelty. In response Pallavicino points out
that compositions of “some ingenious poet” or arguments of “some profound
philosopher” marvel at first, but become annoying when heard over and
over again. Their attraction wears off because our desire for novelty, too, is
born out of the difference between a known and owned good, and something
new, more attractive than the first because more present and actual. Even the
most marvelous compositions become familiar in the end, and less exciting
than the next invention. This dynamic, however, only exists when there are
more or less pleasurable things. This is true for human, imperfect objects of
desire. Also, human joy is bound to time and memory; people require the new
because they cast aside the old. When beholding God, however, every joy is as
great as the next, and equally actual.81
In the meditated image evidenza, variety and novelty become subsumed into
the absolute uniformity of the perfect divine image. Nonetheless, Pallavicino
recognizes that most will need some assistance in order to attain such image.
To that end, the meditator may employ known images, “almost as a fringe
or cornice.” This is what Saint John did in his description of the heavenly
Jerusalem. Likewise, the meditator is invited to picture the following scene:
That is why it is useful to imagine the beati dressed in candid and purple light, with
golden hair crowned with stars, with faces of superior beauty to all what eyes can
see in earth and heaven; or seated on thrones of glory, holding in their right hands
scepters of diamonds, signs of eternal rule; or more agile than the winds they perform
sacred and mysterious dances on a square paved with gold, inlaid with jewels
unknown in India or Eritrea, applied with such fine craft that the works of Titian
compare as the decoration on the boards of stools; where are told the marvelous
works of God both in the creation and the government of the world, and in the
redemption of mankind; the benefits of his mercy, the punishments of his justice,
each as joyful to behold; the heroic acts of the saints, the countless worldly events
contained in the course of the centuries, the secrets of Nature unknown to human
consideration, the ways of mercy also impenetrable to angelic understanding. Around
this are meadows and gardens with all the variety of the most beautiful colors and the
most delightful arrangements that the eye can contain; and all this with the fragrances
most lovely to the smell. Where the echoes resonate melodies everywhere, and
seraphim are the poets of the hymns, and the masters of the arias, the musicians of
the sounds and songs ….82
After this description, Pallavicino turns again to the question of appropriate

style. He points out that “heaven is not reserved for writers.”83 The remark
is made to refute the common misunderstanding that “good meditation
consists in finding new and subtle concetti in the meditated [meditata] matter,
as would be expected from one who considers [medita] to make the points
of epigrams.” Meditation is contrasted explicitly with concettismo, the desire
for “fine witticisms and marvelous reasonings.”84 These, Pallavicino argues,
transform meditation in curiosity, devotion in vanity. Nonetheless, when the
ingegno “spontaneously and without special effort” finds a “pious and gentle
concetto” it should not be spurned. After all, the sun too generates precious
metals and gems in the good earth, from which some of its light reflects;
likewise, the intellect produces splendid thoughts reflecting the divine light.
Thus “natural instinct [of the human mind] conspires with the aura of grace to
make sure the spirit tastes [these thoughts]; approves of them as convincing;
and feels moved by them.” Many sacred texts are characterized by a similar
literary sophistication. Yet, Pallavicino repeats, these concetti are not required,
and letterati have no special prerogative on heaven:
… le cui [dei più fervidi santi] scritte meditazioni si trovan piene di questa pia ed
ingegnosa fecondità. … Ed essendo l’uomo inclinato ad amar i suoi parti, non solo
del corpo, ma della mente, che sono più suoi perch’egli più sa quel che opera quando
il produce; l’instinto della natura conspira con l’aura della grazia a far che l’animo
si fermi a gustarne; gli approvi per convincenti; e sentasi da lor commosso. Ma non
però questo è necessario a meditar con frutto e con merito: altrimenti sarebbe troppo
il disavvantaggio dei grossolani e degl’idioti, a cui nondimeno è aperto il cielo
egualmente che a’letterati; ….85
This passage rehearses the ideas on style first developed in the Trattato dello
stile. In the Arte della Perfezion Cristiana they become associated with religious
experience. Contrary to the ineffable grace of the non sò che, Pallavicino
proposes a gentle conspiracy between grace and style to lead Christians
towards God. They are assisted by “natural” ornament dissipating the divine
light. At the same time, however, the ideas that style helps to bring to mind
are resplendent yet utterly incomprehensible, such as “the secrets of Nature
unknown to human consideration, the ways of mercy also impenetrable to
angelic understanding.” Still beyond the grasp of the human intellect, they
invite repeated contemplation, slowly transforming the Christian’s craving for
variety and novelty into a sustained beholding of the ultimate and complete
truth.
History as a Morphology of Multiplicity
The process described by Pallavicino is delicate, yet is the only way to God
available to humanity.86 For this reason, too, variety and novelty are of crucial
importance in the imperfect sublunar existence of humankind. After all,
these qualities attract the worshipper while offering a preliminary display
of the splendors of paradise. Pallavicino, like his contemporaries, is very
sacred art 189
much preoccupied with defining or circumscribing their morphology. As

we have seen, the description of the Quarant’hore stressed how the artificial
light generates a spatial sense of depth, and Ciampoli’s reflection on Truth
and Deceit introduces the temporal dimension of change and variety. The
cloth of Deceit is a fast-changing display of forms and figures. Only when
shone upon by the light of sacred history does the diversity of forms and
figures arrange itself into a theater of truth. In his Prose Ciampoli develops
this point to explain why novelty serves to clarify the truths of faith, as part
of the argument on “sacred and profane letters” briefly discussed above.87 He
is especially interested to know whether “novelty” is permitted in “sacred
matters” and argues that immutable things, too, can be expressed in different
forms, as metaphorical language proves.88 The argument here is in essence
the same as in the Poetica sacra. Metaphors render things visible. Even if its
image does not correspond exactly to the object or concept it represents, and
therefore contains falsity, it is a legitimate means to represent sacred subject
matter. Idolatry and heresy in fact stem from the tendency to read metaphors
literally: “In this way, metaphor would be magic which, superseding the
powers of Nature and the laws of almightiness, with the impropriety of piled-
up words would become accidental metamorphoses” [“In questa maniera
la metafora sarebbe una Magia, che, superando le forze della natura, e le
consuetudini dell’onnipotenza, con improprietà di parolette accattate sarebbe
metamorfosi repentine”].89 When metaphor is misunderstood, truth becomes
deceit.
This section of the Prose thus clarifies novelty’s possible association with
heresy. Since the same sacred truths are restated time and again over the
course of human history, they will assume ever-new and varying forms of
expression. This is how metaphor is born. History shows that this process
incurs the risk of idolatry and heresy but also, and Ciampoli’s concern lies
here, generates true religiosity. Whether the effect of metaphor is beneficial
or not, he argues, depends on the choice of subject matter and the intentions
of the public. Sacred history and a faithful disposition will ward off the
temptations of impious metamorphoses.90
Ciampoli’s essentially positive valuation of novelty in the service of religion
fits into a larger preoccupation with evolution and change during the 1620s
and 1630s. Andrea Battistini and others have argued that in the first decades of
the seventeenth century letterati and intellectuals all over the Italian peninsula
were pervaded with a sense that the world was in perpetual transformation.91
This impression could translate into expressions of pessimism and despair,
as humankind was being stripped from its bearings.92 But there was also a
sense of freedom, especially with regard to the overbearing authority of the
ancients. The best-known expression of this sensation is Alessandro Tassoni’s
Pensieri diversi, first published in 1612 but expanded in 1620 with a tenth
book proposing a paragone between ancient and modern ingegni. Tassoni’s
comparison aimed to show that both ages have their areas of superiority and
inferiority, the net result being a serious blow to the authority of antiquity and
its models.93
This attitude towards the past—the germ of the Querelle des anciens et
modernes—generated considerable debate about the proper attitude towards
historical models.94 An important predecessor to Tassoni is Louis Le Roy,
whose De la vicissitude ou variété des choses en l’univers was translated into Italian
in 1585, ten years after its first publication in French; an English translation by
Richard Ashley would follow in 1594.95 Le Roy ridicules the pedantry of those
who collect and restore all knowledge from the past. Book 12 of the treatise
concerns “philology,” the critical study of the ancients in order to arrive at
the purest versions of their work and the best possible understanding of their
intentions, and weighs its merits against innovation and invention. Since
everything is in continuous movement and always changes, for better or for
worse, Le Roy sees no interest in attempts at reconstructing the past.96
Le Roy’s view of philology surfaces in close vicinity to Ciampoli and
Pallavicino, as it is propagated by Agostino Mascardi in the third part of
his Discorsi morali su la Tavola di Cebete Tebano, published in 1627. Mascardi
acknowledges the legitimacy of philology, but condemns the arrogance of
philologists with regard to the texts of the ancients, which only serves to mask
the weakness of the modern mind, busy with minimal and often questionable
restorations of the writings of others rather than creating new works. As
Ezio Raimondi first remarked, exactly at this point of his argument Mascardi
inserts praise for Gianlorenzo Bernini. Contrary to contemporary sculptors
who are more occupied with restoring the remnants of antiquity, Bernini is
the only artist able to give life “to an entire piece of marble” out of nothing.97
With this example, Mascardi celebrates the creation of modern forms as the
only legitimate form of intellectual or artistic creativity.
Le Roy, Tassoni, Mascardi and others thus evince a profound sense of the
contingency of historical forms.98 This contingency allowed for new strategies
of exploration and composition. Conversely, if all forms are to a certain extent
contingent, few, if any artifacts or ideas can claim special prerogatives as
authoritative models. Nothing is perfect. That human limitations account
for the unending production of ever-new but always imperfect artifacts is
further explored in Secondo Lancellotti’s book L’Hoggidì, discussed in the first
chapter as the disseminator of Pallavicino’s epithet of “fenice degl’ingegni.”
The book’s chapters are called “disinganni” or disenchantments. Inspired by
Tassoni and probably Le Roy, each Disinganno treats one issue that illustrates
how the present is no worse than the past.99 Those in need of “disenchantment”
are the “hoggidiani,” who derive their name from the “hoggidi” or “today”
that introduces their laments on the sorry state of the present, as in “today
there are no great writers left ….” To prove them wrong, Lancellotti addresses
a wide array of subjects. More often than not the present is defended by
sacred art 191
showing that its evils only equal and do not surpass those of the past. Indeed,
mankind’s forfeiting of paradise has necessarily weakened its strength and
moral fiber, and subjected it to the unchanging laws of Nature, the cosmos
and geography. There is no room for improvement.
This fatalist view of human history knows no Golden Age. In fact, the
long Disinganno 42 is entirely dedicated to laying bare this fallacy. Lancellotti
credits poets with the invention of the idea and is deeply dismayed that
serious historians like Lactantius, too, gave it credence. If one turns to sacred
history, Lancellotti argues, there is but one moment that could qualify as
“Golden Age,” namely the time before the fall of humankind. Since paradise
was forfeited so quickly, Lancellotti suggests that this “age” cannot have
lasted much longer than a day, and moreover was quite ill-suited to the
dispensation of Liberality, Justice and Peace, since there were only Adam
and Eve.100
Lancellotti’s sections on the arts of painting, architecture and sculpture
are nonetheless underpinned by the conventional view that the arts suffered
a long period of neglect and incompetence during the Middle Ages, and
progressively recover to reassume their former greatness. In a long digression
Lancellotti actually confesses that he favors the preservation of the buildings
of antiquity, a position that he himself feels as sitting awkwardly with his
own professed cult of the present.101 On the other hand, his condemnation
of medieval art, architecture and urbanism is ferocious. This condemnation
is most elaborately voiced not in his chapter on architecture, but in a cluster
of chapters dealing with the state of the Church. There, our author criticizes
those who think that “today” the clergy build too sumptuously. In line with
contemporary controversialists such as Roberto Bellarmino and prefiguring
Pallavicino’s defense of ecclesiastical splendor in the Storia del Concilio di
Trento, Lancellotti argues that churches and monasteries now look richer
than those of old because earlier people did not know how to build. Until the
arrival of Raphael and Michelangelo there were no proper models available,
so necessarily all architecture built since then will be better and look more
rich and sumptuous than before. This does not, however, mean that these new
buildings result from excessive expenditure or neglect decorum.102
Lancellotti thus offers a summary explanation for why everything
necessarily evolves and changes, even art forms like religious architecture
that are tied to institutions defined by their unchanging nature. To Lancellotti,
primitivism makes no sense because all historical development is relative to
an essentially unchanging condition. As a consequence, no historical era or
stage can claim any kind of absolute superiority and obtain the status of a pre-
eminent model. At the same time, the multiplicity of historical forms is not
valued for its own sake, since it is a necessary and inevitable byproduct of the
unchanging yet volatile human condition. Contrary to the philological view
of history, which tries to document each step in the evolution of certain forms
to prove their underlying continuity and retrace their original, pure source,
Lancellotti fully accepts the historical contingency of forms.103
Lancellotti’s dismissal of both primitivism and the Golden Age may
well have been a bridge too far for his contemporaries. The dedication
of the first L’Hoggidì (1623) boasts a favorable reception of Lancellotti’s
anti-hoggidianismo on the part of Urban VIII. His belief in the present
chimed well with the expectations for the new Golden Age of science and
letters voiced by many, including Lancellotti, obviously despite his own
misgivings about the idea. This endorsement may be one reason why in
the mid-1620s Lancellotti attempted to insert himself into the intellectual
and cultural milieu around Urban VIII and his nephews. Secure patronage
never materialized, however, and not much later Lancellotti had become
a persona non grata. Sometime in 1630 he escaped from his Benedictine
monastery of Monte Oliveto, where he had been imprisoned on charges
of disobedience. When he headed for Rome and appealed for shelter to
Sforza Pallavicino on the strength of their earlier acquaintance, Pallavicino
refused to receive him, declaring: “Reverend don Secondo, the entire court
thinks of you as an agitated and rebellious boor. I can tell you but one
thing: recommend yourself to God and ‘bella finita.’”104
Reading L’Hoggidi tends to render Pallavicino’s harsh dismissal more
comprehensible as literally nothing is safe from Lancellotti’s scathing pen.
But the book is not an aberration, as similar compendia surfaced in England
and France, written by George Hakewill (1627) and Daniel de Rampalle
(1641).105 As we have seen, other authors like Agostino Mascardi, whose
official description of the possesso of Urban VIII Lancellotti would quote
extensively, shared a similar reluctance to venerate the past and its particular
forms.106 Finally, if it disavowed a notion so central to the endeavors of
an entire political and religious elite as the Golden Age, L’Hoggidi also
signaled that the arts and sciences were liberated from primitivism, be it
oriented towards classical antiquity or early Christianity. Lancellotti, like
Le Roy, implies that the unending process of innovation takes place on the
unchanging substratum of God’s providence.107 Providence has manifold
articulations, and humankind is never fully capable of either recognizing its
work or emulating its principles. Exactly this deficit should induce humans
to seek ever new ways to exercise their faculties and innate religiosity.
The Ethics of Variety
How the vicissitudes of the material world, artificial and natural, point
towards God surfaced in Sforza Pallavicino’s theory of meditation, developed
in the Arte della Perfezion Cristiana. Perhaps surprisingly, this theme also
emerges as the final conclusion of the Trattato dello stile, after all a treatise
sacred art 193
on literary style. There, when Pallavicino addresses the issue of variety, he

arrives at an essentially ethical and religious explanation of humans’ pleasure
in variety, connecting prescriptions for style with a sustained reflection on the
larger questions surrounding the notion of multiplicity itself.
Pallavicino echoes the theme of Ciampoli’s ekphrasis of Truth and Deceit
when he states that varietà is “the most delicious garden for our cognitive
powers.”108 But he breaks new ground with his brief explanation of the causes
of variety’s pleasurableness. According to Pallavicino, variety pleases because
of the “liberty to act” and the “immortality of being” of each individual. To
prove this, Pallavicino argues that a uniform argument is a sin against human
nature, which is characterized by its unrelenting quest for happiness. But
because of humankind’s innate freedom, this unchanging desire becomes
attached to various “particular goods.” Humans achieve happiness through
a great and continuously evolving variety of means. The exercise of this
freedom is guaranteed by humankind’s immortality, which provides the
human soul with the necessary peace of mind to occupy itself with the
quality of its existence.109 In sum, the longing of all for well-being implies the
management of an abundance of objects that vary in the course of time. As the
only creatures with immortal souls, humans are able to attach their activities
and desires to a multiplicity of objects. If people betray this freedom they
degrade themselves to the level of animals, which blindly follow unvarying
laws of Nature and are thus incapable of producing or recognizing variety.
Much more than Lancellotti, Pallavicino accepts the aesthetic prerogatives
of the variety of forms: well-regulated multiplicity provides pleasure because
it appeals to what is essentially human, freedom and immortality. In fact,
only in dealing with variety does mankind becomes aware of its own pre-
eminently human qualities.110 This process of discovery has an important
temporal component: desires become attached to a multiplicity of objects
over time. Exactly this dimension guarantees that variety exists within a
“closed” conception of truth and doctrine: while truth does not change
over time, the forms it assumes do. As Pallavicino writes, “After God, who
contains all fullness and therefore all beauty of being, there is nothing more
delightful to behold then varietà, containing divided that which cannot be
united in creatures ….” That is why this principle of correspondence lays out
a “stairway of the most fitting and comfortable stairs to ascend to God.”111
If Ciampoli argued that the multitude of images should be tamed by
anchoring them in sacred history, Pallavicino suggests that the variety of
forms, recognized by a willing subject, will lay bare the truths underlying
that history. To Pallavicino, then, history should not be represented as the
accumulation of documented facts, but as a compelling story acting in the
present. In this sense, it is not without significance that Pallavicino’s final
justification of variety occurs when he describes the advantages of the genre
of the dialogue, an effective vehicle to address a reader because it seems to
develop the argument almost in their presence.112 Conversely, successful

multiplicity in the present is an enticing analogue to the contingencies
of a history guided by providence. If the “good” that can be derived from
works of art assumes the form of aesthetic pleasure, this pleasure originates
in multiplicity produced within a condition characterized by unchanging,
immortal freedom. Pallavicino’s ideas thus explain why for instance progress
or change in religious art and architecture might be considered as a pre-
eminent proof of the eternal status quo of the institution of the Church.113
Acceptable change can only exist in the presence of a truth that appeals to
immortal men. Conversely, an engagement with multiplicity resulting in
composite and variegated forms bespeaks simultaneously of an acceptation
of the contingencies of any human creation and the essential role of those
contingencies in finding truth.
In sum, the multiplicity and variety of forms is inevitable. Also, in a more
positive and simultaneously normative way, such variety is desirable and
even necessary. Dealing with the multitude of forms and ideas provided by
history provides a model for working with a variety of different forms and
ideas in the present. An artful play with the contingent forms surrounding
humanity, in past and present, generates the kind of well-ordered multiplicity
that invites humankind to exercise the faculties that distinguish it from all
other creatures and lets its members approach divine truth.
In more general terms, and in reference to Giovanni Ciampoli’s poetic
descriptions, the multiplicity and compositeness of a good work of art and
architecture allow one to recognize and approach the light of truth that shines
from within. This light can be shaped or represented by the artist’s ingegno,
or the animating powers of the patron, in the sacred history it makes manifest
(either through what the work depicts or how it is composed), or in the liturgy
and pageantry that it accommodates. It allows humans to exercise their free
will. But, as we have seen, this freedom is preconditioned by the existence of
a higher truth. It is by recognizing the difference between truth and deceit,
and distinguishing between those images whose appearances are shaped by
a true light and others that are mere mirages, that the beholder gains true
knowledge.
Notes
1. Domenico Bernini, Vita del cavalier Gio. Lorenzo Bernino, descritta da Domenico Bernino suo figlio (1st
edn Rome, 1713) (photographic reprint, Perugia, 1999), pp. 39–40.
2. Barbara Nobiloni, “Le colonne vitinee della basilica di San Pietro a Roma,” Xenia, 6 (1997): 81–142.
3. Bernini, Vita, pp. 41–2: “Degna casa d’Apostoli, Erario del Cielo, Machina Eterna, e Sacrario di
Devozione.” The reference is to the first lines of Lelio Guidiccioni, Ara Maxima Vaticana, in John
Kevin Newman and Frances Stickney Newman (eds), Lelio Guidiccioni. Latin Poems: Rome 1633 and
1639 (Hildesheim, 1992), lines 5–7: “… integram Aedam Apostolorum, an Pietatis Sacellum, ipsius
Caeli Aerarium, Conditorium Aeternitatis.”
sacred art 195
(Reggio Emilia, 1824) (photographic reprint, Modena, 1994), ch. 4, p. 26. See Eraldo Bellini,
“Scrittura letteraria e scrittura filosofica in Sforza Pallavicino,” in Carlo Scarpati and Eraldo Bellini,
Il vero e il falso dei poeti. Tasso, Tesauro, Pallavicino, Muratori (Milan, 1990), pp. 99–102; Giovanni
Baffetti, Retorica e scienza. Cultura gesuitica e Seicento italiano (Bologna, 1997), pp. 231–2.
5. Lelio Guidiccioni, “Letter,” BAV, Barb. Lat. 2958, fol. 207r, in Philip Zitzlsperger, Gianlorenzo
Bernini: die Papst- und Herrscherporträts. Zum Verhältnis von Bildnis und Macht (Munich, 2002), p. 183,
lines 155–6: “[Bernini] sia fecondissimo d’inventione, et giudicoso nel disporre, sodo nell’ornare,
polito nell’eseguire, elevato nella maniera ….”
6. William Chandler Kirwin, Powers Matchless. The Pontificate of Urban VIII, the Baldachin, and Gian
Lorenzo Bernini (Frankfurt, 1997), pp. 205–20; Oreste Ferrari, “Bernini e i letterati del suo tempo,”
in Olivier Bonfait and Anna Coliva (eds), Bernini dai Borghese ai Barberini. La cultura a Roma intorno
agli anni venti (Rome, 2004), pp. 61–3, with older literature. I have used the edition in Newman and
Newman, Lelio Guidiccioni. Latin Poems. References will be given to the “Dedication,” the “To the
Reader” and the Ara Maxima Vaticana, with the verse number.
7. Guidiccioni, Ara Maxima Vaticana, 547–604.
8. Ibid., 605–759.
9. Ibid., 831–48.
10. Ibid., 140–42.
11. Ibid., 868–73.
12. Ibid., 927–30.
13. Sforza Pallavicino, Della vita di Alessandro VII. Libri cinque, Opera inedita di P. Sforza Pallavicino della
Compagnia di Gesù. Accademico della Crusca e poi Cardinale di S. Chiesa (2 vols, Prato, 1839–40), vol. 1,
pp. 422–5.
14. Guidiccioni, “Dedication,” 79–88; Ara Maxima Vaticana, 581–604, 796–821.
15. Guidiccioni, “Dedication,” 88–99; Ara Maxima Vaticana, 1–18.
16. For instance, Guidiccioni, Ara Maxima Vaticana, 764–6; Newman and Newman, Lelio Guidiccioni.
Latin Poems, pp. 51–2, 55–6.
17. Guidiccioni, “To the Reader,” 22.
19. Guidiccioni, “Dedication,” 50.
21. Ibid., 900, 914–15; see Peter Rietbergen, Power and Religion in Baroque Rome: Barberini Cultural
Policies (Leiden, 2006), pp. 118–28.
22. Sforza Pallavicino, Arte della Perfezion Cristiana, bk II, ch. 10, in Opere del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino
(Milan, 1834), vol. 2, p. 695a–b: “Nè t’assolve il dire, che tu sei mosso a ciò [that is, lascivious
poetry] da onesta vaghezza per la sola eccellenza dell’arte: manca forse l’arte e più nobile e più
ingegnosa in materie eroiche, morali e sante? Perchè potendo tu ritrarre più bella luce dalla purità
della cera, la cerchi dall’immondizia del sevo? Sopra quest’argomento, per quanto appartiene
a’libri, hanno scritto egregiamente in prosa due uomini del mio Ordine, Famiano Strada con tre
delle sue prolusioni, e Vincenzo Guinigi con una sua allocusione: e in verso sì un mio benignissimo
principe Urbano VIII, che alzò l’inclita bandiera contro a’corruttori di Parnaso nella prima elegia
posta in fronte delle sue poesie; si un mio familiarissimo amico Giovanni Ciampoli suo seguace e
familiare, nella poetica sacra.” This passage is read as an anti-Marinist statement in Franco Croce,
Tre momenti del barocco letterario italiano (Florence, 1966), pp. 218–19. Other references to the poesia
sacra can be found in Pallavicino, Arte, bk II, ch. 8, p. 689; ibid., bk II, ch. 10, p. 695b; to Urban as
poet, ibid., bk II, ch. 7, p. 687b; bk III, ch. 5, pp. 734b–735a.
23. Marc Fumaroli, “Cicero Pontifex Romanus. La tradition rhétorique du Collège Romain et les
principes inspirateurs du mécénat des Barberini,” Mélanges de l’école Française à Rome. Moyen
Age. Temps Moderne, 40 (1978), pp. 809–20; idem, L’âge de l’éloquence. Rhétorique et res literaria de
la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva, 1980), pp. 175–202. On Strada’s Prolusiones
Academicae (1617), see Florence Malterre, “L’esthétique romaine au debut du XVIIe siècle d’après
les Prolusiones academicae du P. Strada,” Vita Latina, 66 (1977): 20–30; Jozef Ijsewijn, “Scrittori Latini
a Roma dal Barocco al Neoclassicismo,” Studi Romani, 36 (1988), pp. 242–3.
24. Andrée Thill (ed.), La lyre jésuite. Anthologie de poèmes latins (1620–1730) (Geneva, 1999), pp.
242–7. On Urban’s Poemata, see Eraldo Bellini, Umanisti e Lincei: letteratura e scienza a Roma nell’età
di Galileo (Padua, 1997), pp. 5, 144–5; Tristan Weddigen, “Tapisserie und Poesie. Gianfrancesco
Romanelli’s Giochi di Putti für Urban VIII,” in Joseph Imorde, Fritz Neumeyer and Tristan
Weddigen (eds), Barocke Inszenierung: Akten des Internationalen Forschungscolloquiums an der
Technischen Universität Berlin 20.–22. Juni 1996 (Emsdetten and Zurich, 1999), pp. 72–103; Marc
Fumaroli, L’école du silence. Le sentiment des images au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1994), pp. 94–116;
Sebastian Schütze, “‘Urbano inalza Pietro, e Pietro Urbano.’ Beobachtungen zu Idee und Gestalt
der Ausstattung von Neu-St. Peter unter Urban VIII,” Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana,
29 (1994): 213–87; Maria Castagnetti, “Distici per una gallaria,” in La Caprarola e altre “galerie.”
Gli epigrammi su opere d’arte di Aurelio Orsi e Maffeo Barberini (Palermo, 2003); Rietbergen, Power
and Religion, pp. 95–142.
25. Aemilius Springhetti, “Urbanus VIII P.M. poeta latinus et hymnorum Brevarii emendator,”
Archivum Historiae Pontificiae, 6 (1968): 163–90; Frederick Hammond, Music and Spectacle in Baroque
Rome. Barberini Patronage under Urban VIII (New Haven and London, 1994), pp. 177–80; Pontificale
Romanum: Editio Princeps (1595–1596), ed. Manlio Sodi and Achille M. Triacca (Vatican City, 1997),
pp. viii–ix.
27. Ibid., 56–60, 886–7.
28. Ibid., 47–52.
29. Jack Freiberg, The Lateran in 1600: Christian Concord in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge and
New York, 1995), pp. 184–5, n. 44; Kirwin, Powers Matchless, p. 83; James Harper, “The Barberini
Tapestries of the Life of Pope Urban VIII. Program, Politics and ‘Perfect History’ for the Post-Exile
Era,” unpubl. PhD thesis (Pennsylvania, 1999), pp. 324–38.
30. On the tapestry, see Catherine Johnston, Gyde Vanier Shepherd and Marc Worsdale, Vatican
Splendour. Masterpieces of Baroque Art (Ottawa, 1986), no. 48; Harper, The Barberini Tapestries,
pp. 293–339, 560, no. 1.6.a.
31. Giovanni Ciampoli, “Poetica sacra, ovvero Dialago (sic) tra la poesia, e la devotione,” in Rime
(Rome, 1648), pp. 235–350. The second part starts on p. 301. The Poetica sacra is also included in
Ciampoli’s posthumous Poesie Sacre, published in Venice, 1648 and 1662. On the Poetica sacra,
see Marziano Guglielminetti and Mariarosa Masoero, “Lettere e prose inedite (o parzialmente
edite) di Giovanni Ciampoli,” Studi secenteschi, 19 (1978), pp. 136–46; Ezio Raimondi, Il colore
eloquente. Letteratura e arte barocca (Bologna, 1995), pp. 26–8; and Eraldo Bellini, Stili di pensiero
nel Seicento italiano. Galileo, i Lincei, i Barberini (Pisa, 2009), pp. 179–88, with previous literature.
Ciampoli’s contribution to the Poesia Sacra is also celebrated in Sforza Pallavicino’s introduction
to the latter’s 1648 edition, p. [6]: “Et aggiugnendosi [il Ciampoli] agli spiriti del nativo suo
genio gl’incitamenti, e gli esempj del gran Cardinal Maffeo Barberino, adorato poscia dal Mondo
col nome d’Urbano Ottavo, machinò egli à pro de mortali una nuova lega non pur fra le Muse,
e la Verità, ma fra le Muse, e la Pietà,” quoted in Ireneo Affò, Memorie della vita e degli studi di
Sforza Cardinale Pallavicino (Parma, 1794), p. 8, who leaves out the phrase “egli à pro de mortali.”
Affò continues: “Sentendosi quindo Sforza eccitato a poetare, ed avendo già gustato le pure fonti
de’Scritturi de’buoni secoli per ciò che appartiene allo stile; per l’innocenza de’suoi costumi, e la
pietà che gli fu sempre compagna, s’invaghi d’imitar Ciampoli nella scelta de’soggetti o sacri, o
morali.”
32. The text must have been written between 22 March 1625 and 22 April 1629, since it mentions
the canonization of Elizabeth of Portugal on the earlier date, but not Andrea Corsini’s reception
in the heavenly hierarchy, even though Ciampoli was actively involved in this celebration; see
Hammond, Music and Spectacle, p. 76, 264, no. 19.
33. Ciampoli, “Poetica sacra,” p. 341.
34. Sforza Pallavicino, “Principio de’ Fasti sacri del … marchese Sforza Pallavicino, composti
avanti che si facesse prelato e ch’entrasse nella Compagnia di Giesù,” in Francesco Baglioni,
Scelta di poesie italiane non mai per l’addietro stampate de’più nobili autori del secolo (Venice, 1686),
pp. 160–335.
35. Pallavicino, “Principio de’ Fasti sacri,” p. 332: “Ne s’estinguon le pompe in un col Sole / Ma
splendor fra la notte ancor più belle: / Del Vatican l’incomparabil Mole / Sembra per mille lumi
un Ciel di stelle / E Roma intera coronar si suole / Vita allungando al Di d’auree facelle”; ibid., p.
333: “Ecco l’estinto Di rinascer pare, / E di ragge versar per l’aria un Mare. / Sta de la Rocca in su
l’eccelsa parte / Di polve marzial copia infinita, / Ch’entro a l’angustia di pieghevol carte / Schierato
Campo in mille globi imita.”
sacred art 197
36. Ibid., pp. 334–5. The translation is taken from Eraldo Bellini, “From Mascardi to Pallavicino:
The Biographies of Bernini and Seventeenth-Century Roman Culture,” in Maarten Delbeke,
Evonne Levy and Steven F. Ostrow (eds), Bernini’s Biographies. Critical Essays (University Park,
2006), p. 294.
37. Pallavicino, “Principio de’ Fasti sacri,” pp. 173–4.
38. Sforza Pallavicino, Fasti sacri, Biblioteca Casanatense (Rome), Rari 784, pp. 1–142. Alois de Backer
and Carlos Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la compagnie de Jésus (Heverlee, 1960), vol. 6, c. 121, no.
8, mentions an edition of the first two cantos dated 1636. This paragraph follows Bellini, “From
Mascardi to Pallavicino,” pp. 293–6.
39. Ibid., pp. 294–5.
40. Pallavicino, Fasti sacri, p. 31, as in Bellini, “From Mascardi to Pallavicino,” p. 295.
41. “Sorger farò più d’un moderno Apelle, / che stupir faccia i secoli futuri: / che d’iride i colori e de
le stelle / renda con l’arte del pennello oscuri. / E de l’eterna man l’opre più belle / saran dipinte
in consacrati muri: / dentro a i marmi di Paro e di Numidia / scolpirà sagre istorie arte di Fidia,”
in Pallavicino, Fasti sacri, canto 1, p. 69; Pallavicino, “Principio de’ Fasti sacri,” p. 174. Compare
with Ciampoli, “Poetica sacra,” pp. 313–14. See Bellini, “From Mascardi to Pallavicino.”
42. Bellini, “From Mascardi to Pallavicino,” p. 294.
43. “Discorso intorno al seguente poema,” in Pallavicino, Fasti sacri, pp. 1–25, with the quoted passage
on p. 2.
44. Giovanni Ciampoli, Prose (Rome, 1649), pp. 115–16.
45. Ibid., p. 117.
46. Chapter 4, n. 135.
47. Chapter 3, n. 80.
48. Ciampoli, “Poetica sacra,” pp. 319–20: “Non hà mortale ingegno occhi lincei / Di sì fina
acutezza. / Che attenebrati dal corporeo velo / Possan di Dio mirar là sovra il Cielo / L’invisibil
bellezza. / Dunque ò sepolti entro al silentio eterno / De i secoli infiniti / Staran quei sacri arcani,
O di fregi non suoi sian revistiti, / Se nel Teatro interno / Introdur gli vorrai de i petti humani.
/ Solo da quei colori, / Che in tavoletta angusta uniti accoglie / Immitator fedele, / I lumi, e
l’ombre toglie / Per figurar le tele: / E l’humano Intelletto / Per dipinger di Dio gli eterni honori,
/ E dal senso mortal foschi splendori / A mendicar costretto.” The image of the “occhi Lincei”
probably refers to the eponymous academy. On this topic, see also Pierantonio Frare, “Per
istraforo di perspettiva.” Il “Cannocchiale aristotelico” e la poesia del Seicento (Pisa and Rome, 2000),
pp. 145–53.
49. Ciampoli, “Poetica sacra,” p. 272: [Poesia] “Mà se in Parnaso insegni, / Che i prodigij non falsi
IDDIO produce, / Sacro Oriente di novella luce / Hoggi s’apre à gl’Ingegni, / E con celeste suono /
Di nuova Cetra à Verità fai dono.” Devotion then proceeds by explaining how every mythological
story can be substituted with a biblical one, which will arouse equal admiration, see p. 281: “…
hor s’Io / Credibili stupori / Al mondo espor desio, / Convien, che vada dove / Onnipotente forza
hoggi s’adori; / Ch’in luce addure le meraviglie nuove / & solo arte di Dio.” See also p. 316: “Già
non ti concede / Falsar gli annali all’immutabil Fede.”
50. Ibid., p. 275.
51. Ibid., pp. 305–28.
52. Ibid., p. 250.
53. Ibid.: “D’ellera incoronate / Fecero al guardo mio leggiadri inviti / Due Pietre effigiate. / Bel diletto
à vedersi! / Il Vero e’l Falso ivi apparian vestiti / Con arnesi diversi.”
54. Ibid., pp. 250–51: “Sovra un globo celeste / Ricca di rai la Verità sorgea, / E con fiamme modeste /
D’adorata beltà l’anime ardea. / Suoi labbri eran rubini / Gli occhi stelle apparian, splendori i crini:
/ E par dal seno al piè ch’ella somigli / Albor di neve, e purità di gigli. / Odi stupor, ch’ogni stupor
eccede: / Dal petto trasparente / Qual per vetro lucente / Fatto in forma di cuore il sol si vede: /
Scende dal collo in sù l’eburneo piede / Sottilissomo velo, / Che di modestia è dono: / Mà celate ivi
sono / Le membra sue come le stelle in cielo / Croci di lampi ardente / Fulmine, e scettro è nella
mano possente: / Fulmine di vendetta, / Che di Giganti, e Dei l’armi saetta, / Scettro pomposo oltre
ogn’human costume, / Scettro stelligemmato, / Ch’al sol comparte il lume, / Il moto al Cielo, e da le
leggi al Fato.”
55. Ibid., pp. 251–2: “Presso alla bella imago / Apre gioconde scene / Un Teatro ben vago.” The
“colombe alabastrine” have “Non men semplici il cuor, che bianco il petto.” They open their “ali
nevose, / Spruzzando in aria perle / Di stille ruggiadose.”
56. Ibid., pp. 252–3: “Ove con altre tempre è colorita / La bugia cuor mentita. / Mà che mentita il
cuor? Mentita il volto, / Mentita il corpo tutto; / Perche à i guardi si celi horror sì brutto / Ella lo
tiene involto / Dalle spalle alle piante / In un drappo cangiante / Mostruoso à vedersi. / Oh quanti
aspetti varij ivi rimiri! / Hor par ciel di zaffiri / Hor prato di smeraldi, / Sembra hor campo di
biade à di più caldi, / Tal hor ceneri, e fiamme io vi scopersi, / Altre volte argentato imita l’onde;
/ E spesso in un confonde / Mille apparenze di color diversi, / Qual pompa ivi non mente? / Della
faccia i difetti ivi nasconde / Maschera fraudulente; / Mà fuor che larve, e vesti / Null’altro in lei
vedresti; / Che sol ne i lisci, e nel gli ammanti è vaga / Quella sì falsa maga.” Ibid.: “E con industria
vana / Studia in fingersi un huom Scimmia Affricana. / Centauri, e Gerioni / Enceladi, e Chimere.”
57. Ibid., p. 254: “Io non sapea levarmi / Con faccia hor lieta, hor trista / Dalla curiosa vista / De’
figurati marmi. / Godea nel mio diletto / Il Santo Eroe del solitario tetto.”
58. The description concludes, ibid., p. 254: “Mà pittura men bella / non fù per l’alma mia la sua
favella.”
59. On these topoi, see Danièle Duport, Le jardin et la nature. Ordre et variété dans la littérature de la
Renaissance (Geneva, 2002).
60. Ciampoli, “Poetica sacra,” p. 253: “Sembra hor campo di biade … Altre volte arentato imita l’onde,
… Mille apparenze di colore diversi” (my emphasis).
61. Ibid., pp. 255–6: “Nel basso mondo, e sù nel Ciel superno: / Ad ogni nostro oggetto / Di Verità
prodotta il nome io metto. / Non ti stupir; nessuna lingua il niega. / Verace all’hor trà noi si chiama
un detto / Quando del cuore interno / Nuntio leale occulti sensi ei spiega: / E Verità s’appelli anco
ogn’effetto. / Mentr’ei parla con l’opre, / E gli arcani di DIO nel mondo scopre” … “Non vedi tù,
che Verità vi regna, / e con veduti accenti / Al guardo de i viventi / Del Nume regnator le glorie
insegna!” … “Mà che? non sol nello stellato impero / Ella si fè palese; / Manifestando il vero; / In
terra anco discese; / Nè sì scura caverna / Additar mai potrai / Ov’ella Alba di DIO non sparga rai.”
62. Ibid., pp. 264–5: “Dentro al globo rotondo / Ove lo spirto human formai pensieri, / con simulacri
veri / Splendon le stelle, e si compendia il mondo. / Sai che se sogni, ò pensi / Trovi sì chiaro il
sol, tant’alto un monte / Dentro la propria fronte, / Quanto apparir lo fanno / Della terra, e del
ciel gli spatij immensi. / Per natura sempr’hanno / Arte da DIO così stupenda i sensi: / Là dentro
d’ogn’oggetto / La veritiera imagine si forma. / E nel vasto Intelletto. / Che d’infini mondi anco
è capace, / Entra sol di sensibil apparenza / Simulacro verace. / Il falso, che fù sempre orbo
d’essenza, / Di sua sembianza finta / Introdur non vi può larva dipinta. / Così del mondo ogni
corporea mole / E Veritate in atto; / Così dell’alma ogni fantasma intatto / E vera effigie, che del
Vero è prole / Senti hor come si suole / Produrre il Falso entro alla fronte humana / Con forza di
parole. / Quella plebe infinita / D’immagini animate / Con meraviglia strana / Là dentro hà moto,
e vita: / I membri suoi sconette / In cento parti, e cento, / E ne sà fabbricar larve inusate. / Poi, se
vuol, gli rimette / Nel primiero sembiante in un momento. / Hora in esse produr quei mostri ignoti
/ Può facondia eloquente, / Che trà i nembi sovente / Con variati moti / Forma senz’arte il vento.”
63. Ibid., p. 268: “Solo hà di bello il Volto / Quanto al tesor di Veritate hà tolto.” Ibid., p. 270: “Così
di verità voce, & aspetto / Di prendere hà costume / Se l’humano Intelletto / Cauta Bugia tir
anneggiar presume.”
64. Maarten Delbeke, “An Unknown Description of Baroque Rome: Michelangelo Lualdi’s ‘Galleria
Sacra Architettata dalla Pietà Romana Dall’anno 1610 sino al 1645,’” Bulletin de l’Institut historique
belge à Rome, 74 (2004), pp. 149–50.
65. Ibid.
66. Sforza Pallavicino, Storia del Concilio di Trento del cardinale Sforza Pallavicino, bk 9, ch. 9, in Opere
del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino (Milan, 1834), vol. 1, p. 420a: “Se dunque l’umana imperfezione è
tale che le ricompense visibili tanto vagliono di stimolo a quelle fatiche le quali son utili per far
acquistar agli altri i veri beni invisibili ….” On this topic, see also Jens Baumgarten, Konfession,
Bild und Macht. Visualisierung als katholische Herrschafts- und Disziplinierungskonzept in Rom und im
habsburgischen Schlesien (1560–1740) (Hamburg and Munich, 2004), pp. 59–66.
67. Ciampoli, “Poetica sacra,” pp. 317–20, with the quote on p. 320: “Dunque ò sepolti entro al silentio
eterno / De i secoli infiniti / Staran quei sacri arcani, O di fregi non suoi sian revistiti, / Se nel
Teatro interno / Introdur gli vorrai de i petti humani.”
68. With regard to tragedy, this point is made explicit in the “Discorso” published as part of
Pallavicino’s Ermenegildo martire.
sacred art 199
69. See Chapter 3, under the heading “Zeno’s Paradoxes and Sforza Pallavicino,” esp. n. 27.
70. Pallavicino, Arte, bk I, ch. 2, p. 644b: “… il che tutto fec’egli piu tosto vedere che udire, con tragica
e viva eloquenza; ….”
71. Ibid., ch. 4, p. 647b.
72. For the image of the dream, see also Sforza Pallavicino, Del Bene Libri Quattro del Cardinale Sforza
Pallavicino, bk III, ch. 53, in Opere del Cardinale Sforza Pallavicino (Milan, 1834), vol. 2, p. 530b.
73. Pallavicino, Arte, bk III, ch. 2, p. 722a: “Quanto, e come giovi alla vita spirituale l’assidua
considerazione del paradiso.” On Jesuit views of meditation, see Ralph Dekoninck, Ad imaginem.
Statuts, fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du XVIIe siècle (Geneva, 2005),
pp. 129–208.
74. Pallavicino, Arte, bk I, ch. 12, p. 657b: “… della quale potrei ragionare a lungo se ciò non riuscisse
anzi a curiostià che ad utilità.”
75. Ibid., bk III, ch. 2, pp. 722a–b.
76. Ibid., p. 723b: “Se il gustar queste frutte à così giocondo, che sarà il gustar con una cognizione
tanto più intima e più vivace l’essenza di Dio.”
77. Ibid., p. 723a. This is a medieval topos.
78. Ibid., p. 723b. This logic is, of course, at work in the anecdote with the fly.
79. Ibid., p. 724a.
80. Ibid., p. 723b.

81. Ibid., pp. 724b–5a: “È da considerare che il piacer della novità ne’beni surge in noi dal vivo
conoscimento de’due termini opposti; cioè del termine in cui eravamo innanzi di possedere il
bene, e di quello in cui siamo dopo l’acquisto; onde in comparare l’uno con l’altro, l’animo gioisce
del conseguito vantaggio; il qual conoscimento si va poi attenuando rimanendoci a poco a poco
solo una ricordanza molto svanita del primo estremo: … Ma i veditori di Dio mirano sempre in
lui così vivamente gli altri obbietti sì passati, sì venturi, che niun occhio tanto chiari gli scorge
quando gli si mira presenti.” The desire for novità is explained in similar terms in Pallavicino, Del
Bene, bk IV, ch. 27, p. 555a: “Ma l’insegnare non si fa quando si mostrano cose che già son palesi e
trite. Adunque non è maraviglia se le delizie di questi due sentimenti sieno o la novità, o almeno
le cose non sì conosciute che nel sentirle non se ne acquisti o più distinta o più certa o più viva la
cognizione. Dissi: o più viva, imperocchè quindi avvienne che dopo qualche intervallo ci piace
di rivedere un bel giardino o d’ascoltar di nuovo da uno stesso cantore la stess’aria di musica,
giovando ciò a ravvivar nella mente nostra le immagini di quegli oggetti già scolorite dal tempo.”
82. Pallavicino, Arte, bk III, ch. 2, p. 725a–b: “Tornerà dunque in acconcio il figurarci i beati vestiti
di candida e purpurea luce, con aurea chioma coronata di stelle, con volti superiori in bellezza
a quanto ammirano gli occhi in terra ed in cielo; or assisi in troni di gloria sostener nella destra
scettri di diamante, insegne di eternal principato; or agili più che venti formar sacre e misteriose
danze in larghissima piazza lastricata d’oro, intarsiata di gioie incognite all’Indie ed all’Eritreo, e
commesse con lavoro sì fino che l’opere di Tiziano sarebbono rimpetto ad esso fregi di sgabelli;
ove appaiono istoriate l’opere maravigliose di Dio sì nella creazione e nel governo del mondo, sì
nella redenzione dell’uomo; i beneficj della sua misericordia, i gastighi della sua giustizia, gli uni
e gli altri egualmente colà giocondi a mirarsi; le azioni eroiche dei santi, le innumerabili mondane
vicende contenute nel giro di tutti i secoli, i segreti della natura ignori all’umana speculazione, le
vie della grazia inaccessibili anche all’angelico intendimento. Quivi d’intorno prati e giardini con
tutta la varietà de’più vaghi colori e dei più leggiadri spartimenti che siano contenuti nell’oggetto
dell’occhio; e con tutte le fragranze più amabili all’odorato. Ove gli ecchi per ogni banda
rimbombano di melodie, nelle quali i poeti degl’inni, i maestri dell’arie, i musici del suono e del
canto sono i Serafini: ….”
83. Ibid., ch. 3, p. 728a. See also Bellini, “Scrittura letteraria e scrittura filosofica,” pp. 160–66, where
Pallavicino’s wariness of Tesauro’s preaching style is attested on the basis of a letter by Pallavicino
to Paolo Segneri.
84. Pallavicino, Arte, bk III, ch. 3, p. 727b: “Il quarto errore è l’avvisarsi che la buona meditazione sia
posta in trovar concetti nuovi e sottili nelle materie meditate, come se fosse intento di colui che
medita far conclusioni di epigrammi.”
85. Ibid., pp. 727b–8a. Here again, as in his dismissal of prophecy, Pallavicino distances himself
from any possible conflation between artifice and revelation. On this tradition, see the analysis of
Erasmus’s argument that obscurity arouses the exegetical prowess or “holy cunning” of man in
Michel Weemans, “Herri Met de Bles’s ‘Way to Calvary.’ A Silenic Landscape,” Art History, 32/2
(2009), pp. 307–8.
86. Pallavicino, Arte, bk I, ch. 12, p. 657b: “Dappoichè l’intelletto aiutato dall’amor proprio a vincer
la resistenza dell’immaginazione ha vivamente e saldamente credute più e più volte per vere
le divine promesse dei sempiterni guiderdoni, l’immaginativa ne dipinge tai simulacri che indi
l’intelletto, senza più rivolgere il pensamento a quelle ragioni onde ciò gli fu persuaso, ed eziandio
nel sogno, quando l’uso del discorso è viziato, qual volta concepisce i prenominati oggetti,
li reputa per veri, e gli ha in eccelsa stima; perchè tali li concepisce, quali da quei concordi e
signoreggianti fantasmi gli sono rappresentati.”
87. Ciampoli, Prose, pp. 131–72; see the remark on p. 131 that points this out. “Discorso sesto, della
novità.”
88. Ibid., pp. 149–51, ch. 11: “Della metafora, e come in essa s’ammetta la falsità.”
89. Ibid., p. 150. In the Bible, Ciampoli argues, “Vissi forma la metafora, non vi si idolastra la
proprietà.” Pallavicino, in the Trattato dello stile, ch. 26, p. 168, compares the excessive use of
literary ornament with “the ancient laws of the idolaters.”
90. The same idea can be found in contemporary histories of religion; see for instance Michelangelo
Lualdi, L’origine della christiana religione nell’Occidente. Istoria ecclesiastica (Rome, 1650),
“Argomento,” pp. [1]–[5], where Lualdi’s apologetic use of history is justified on the assumption
that the history of religion is marked by a progressive loss of unity caused by erroneous
representations of God and the Trinity, which leads to superstition, heresy, idolatry or iconoclasm.
On the evolution of this idea, see Pascal Griener, “Ottaviano di Guasco, intermédiaire entre la
philosophie française et les antiquités de Rome,” in Letizia Norci Cagiano (ed.), Roma triumphans.
L’attualità dell’antico nella Francia del Settecento (Rome, 2007), pp. 26–30.
91. Andrea Battistini, “Il molteplice e l’uno: la cultura barocca tra vocazione al disordine e ricerca
dell’ordine,” in Sebastian Schütze (ed.), Estetica barocca (Rome, 2004), pp. 31–45.
92. See, for instance, the passage from Torquato Accetto’s Della disimulazione onesta (1641) quoted in
Ezio Raimondi, “Il Seicento: un secolo drammatico,” in Ivano Dionigi (ed.), Seneca nella coscienza
dell’Europa (Milan, 1999), pp. 181–2: “Sono molti i dispiaceri dell’uomo ch’è spettator in questo
gran teatro del mondo nel quale si rappresentano ogni dì comedie e tragedie; e or non dico di
quelle che son invenzioni de’poeti antichi e moderni, ma delle vere mutazioni del mondo stesso,
che da tempo a tempo, in quanto agli accidenti umani, prende altra faccia e altro costume.”
93. Giancarlo Mazzacurati, “Alessandro Tassoni e l’epifania dei ‘Moderni,’” Rivista di letteratura
italiana, 4/1 (1986): 65–92, with the edition history of the Pensieri on p. 69, n. 7.
94. Sebastian Schütze, “‘Liberar questo secolo dall’invidiare gli antichi.’ Bernini und die ‘Querelle
des Anciens et Modernes,’” in Johannes Myssok and Jürgen Wiener (eds), Docta Manus. Studien
zur italienischen Skulptur für Joachim Poeschke (Münster, 2007), pp. 345–58; Marc Fumaroli, Le api e
i ragni. La disputa degli Antichi e Moderni (Milan, 2005); Andrea Battistini, Il barocco. Cultura, miti,
immagini (Rome, 2000), pp. 235–61, where this debate is linked to the controversies with Bouhours
discussed in Chapter 5.
95. Louis Le Roy, De la vicissitude ou variété des choses en l’univers, et concurrence des armes et des lettres
par les premieres et plus illustres nations du monde, depuis le temps où a commencé la civilité, & mémoire
humaine jusques à present (Paris, 1575).
96. See also Michel Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion. Changing Shapes in the Renaissance from Da Vinci to
Montaigne (Baltimore, 2001), esp. pp. 171–2.
97. Bellini, “From Mascardi to Pallavicino,” pp. 279–80.
98. Stefano Benedetti, “‘Varietas’ e ‘cangiamento.’ Appunti sui Discorso morali di Agostino Mascardi,”
in Lucia Strappini (ed.), I luoghi dell’immaginario barocco (Naples, 2001), pp. 429–48.
99. On the European transmission of these ideas, see Joseph M. Levine, “Ancients and Moderns
Reconsidered,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15/1 (1981), pp. 75–6.
100. Secondo Lancellotti, L’Hoggidi, o vero Il mondo non peggiore nè più calamitoso del passato … Terza
impressione (Venice, 1630), p. 521: Disinganno 42, “Che in fatti non è vero, ch’il Mondo sia
HOGGIDI più cattivo, malitioso, e pieno di vtij, che per l’adietro fosse, e che quella sì famosa Età
dell’Oro non solamente celebrata da’Poeti, ma creduta etiamdo dai gravi autori, non fu mai, anzi è
un mero sogno de gli antichi, e moderni HOGGIDIani,” with the calculation of the duration of the
Golden Age on p. 526.
sacred art 201
101. Secondo Lancellotti, L’Hoggidi, o vero Il mondo non peggiore nè più calamitoso del passato … Parte
Seconda (Venice, 1646), pp. 286–314: Disinganno 15, “Che per conto dell’Architettura, Pittura, e
Scoltura a gl’Ingegni HOGGIDI non deve darsi taccia maggiore imperfettione.”
102. Lancellotti, L’Hoggidi … Terza impressione, Disinganno 40: “Che se’Religiosi tal’hora peccano nel
far le loro fabbriche più sontuose del dovere, non è peccato d’HOGGIDI, e moderno,” p. 505:
“Diciamo dunque, che’l vedersi molte fabbriche antiche de’Religiosi basse, rozze, oscure, e non
punto vaghe, non debbono in nome di Dio farci credere, o che tutte in quel tempo fussero tale,
o che se tali erano, si come non erano, fossero chiaro argomento dell’universal santità loro,
di maniera che, perche tutti habitavano molto vilmente, tutti perciò fossero santi, ò almeno
tutti migliori di tutti i Religiosi del nostro secolo, li quali molto più acconciamente che quegli
antichi habitano. Fà di mestiere a gli HOGGIDIani considerare, che meno di 150. anni adietro,
particolarmente avanti che fossero al Mondo Raffaello da Urbino, Michel’Agnolo Buonaroti,
e qualche altro, l’Architettura, si come ogni scienza, & arte, ò per le continue guerre che non
permettevano, che s’attendesse, se non con grandissima difficultà a gli studi, ò per quel che si fossi,
era quasi estinta affatto. Veggansi le case, le chiese vecchie. Per lo più senza regola, senza modello,
senza proportione, senza prospettiva, in somma senza un garbo al Mondo. Le porte delle Chiese in
particolare più piccole delle finestre, le finestre, ò piccolissime e quasi seritote da stare in guardia
per la mira, e tirar co’balestroni, ò lunghissime, e strettissime dal tetto fino in terra. Il Campanile
ò sopra la porta, ò in mezzo, ò dinanzi giusto all’altar grande. Bel vedere? le colonne, quel di
marmo, qual di mattone, questa colla base, e col capitello, e quella senza l’una, e l’altro; e così mille
spropositi, e stroppiamenti da far ridere non sò chi mi dire s’avvertono da chi non va dormendo
ne’grandi, ò piccoli tempi antichi.” This “Disinganno” is prepared by numbers 36 through 39 on
the present state of religion and the Church.
103. Franco Arato, “Secondo Lancellotti: un erudito barocco,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 112
(1995), pp. 512–13.
104. Secondo Lancellotti, Vita in prosa e versi, ed. M. Savini (Rome, 1971), p. 223: “Entrato don Secondo
in casa del Pallavicini, questo gli fece poco buona cera e gli disse che quivi non era stanza per lui,
essendo molto angusti; e poi fuora de’denti: ‘Reverendo don Secondo, voi siete tenuto da tutta la
corte un cervellaccio inquieto e sedizioso. Io non so che dirvi altro: raccomandarsi a Dio, e bella
finita,’”
105. George Hakewill, An Apology of the Power and the Providence of God, or an Examination and
Censure of the common error touching nature’s perpetuall & universal decay (Oxford, 1627); Daniel
de Rampalle, L’erreur combattüe, discours académique, où il est curieusement prouvé que le monde
ne va point de mal en pis (Paris, 1641), with, on p. 332, the following reflection on architecture:
“… mais qui sçait si de leurs cendres, comme le Phoenix, elles ne sont pas ressorties plus
belles, & plus magnifiques? Au lieu de croire que dans le Monde tout va de mal en pis.
Remarquez plustost qu’il y a beaucoup de choses, qui dans la fin de leur durée ont trouvé le
commencement d’un nouvel éclat: on esleve tous le iours des Edifices superbes, & reguliers,
sur le ruines d’une Architecture confuse.”
106. Arato, “Secondo Lancellotti,” p. 525, n. 46, points out that a codex from the Barberini library
contains transcriptions of the sections of L’Hoggidi treating the state of the Church; on Lancellotti’s
citation of Mascardi, see ibid., p. 531.
107. For this idea in Le Roy, see Claude-Gilbert Dubois, La conception de l’histoire en France au XVIe siècle
(Paris, 1977), pp. 85–6; Jean-Luc Martinet, “L’excellence de l’homme dans le livre ‘De la vicissitude
ou variété des choses et l’univers …’ de Louis le Roy,” in Françoise Argod-Dutard (ed.), Histoire et
littérature au siècle de Montaigne. Mélanges offerts à Claude-Gilbert Dubois (Geneva, 2001), pp. 304–8.
108. Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 38, p. 242: “La varietà è il più delizioso Giardino delle nostre
potenze conoscitrici.”
109. Ibid., p. 243: “Chi opera per necessità di natura non muta l’inclinazione; perocchè gli ordini della
Natura sono immutabili. Così la pietra sempre dalla natura gravezza è tirata al centro; e il fuoco
dall’innata sua leggierezza è sospinto al Cielo. I bruti parimenti, siccome quelli che sono mossi
dal predominio della Natura in ogni loro appetito, non cambiano voglie se non per qualche
alterazione, o esterna nell’oggetto, o interna nel corpo. Anzi l’uomo similmente che per impeto
necessario di natura desidera la felicità, mischia in tutti gli affetti suoi quest’invariabil desiderio
d’esser felice. Ma perchè egli poi è libero nella scelta dei beni particolari, perciò intorno ad essi il
veggiamo sì vario nelle sue compiacenze. Ciò della libertà: già dell’immortalità. Le cose mortali
hanno per fine potissimo dell’operazioni loro il conservarsi nell’essere, ch’è il fondamento di tutti
i beni. E perchè duranti le medesime circostanze, alla conservazione d’un medesimo essere la
medesima qualità sempre conferisce d’un modo, quindi è che le forme caduche hanno sempre le
stesse inclinazioni, ed operazioni: Ma delle forme immortali che vivono sicure dell’essere, il fine
è il ben essere, e il signoreggiar coll’intendimento un vasto Reame d’oggetti. E non potendo per
la loro virtù limitata conseguir ciò in un medesimo tempo, son così bramose di variare, cioè di
possederli almeno in diversi tempi.”
110. This idea was already explicit in Le Roy and harks back ultimately to Augustine; it illustrates the
fusion of Christian optimism with the psychological assumption of man’s attraction to variety
discussed by Henry V.S. Ogden, “The Principles of Variety and Contrast in Seventeenth-Century
Aesthetics and Milton’s Poetry,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 10/2 (1949): 159–73.
111. Quoted in Chapter 2, n. 37. See also Arno Witte, The Artful Hermit. The Palazzetto Farnese as a
Counter-Reformation Diaeta (Rome, 2008), pp. 98–101.
112. Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, ch. 32, pp. 224–5: “… così … il Dialogo soglia quasi animare la diritta
imitazione ch’egli fa dell’altrui parole, con l’obbliqua dell’azioni, de’gesti, degli affetti, ond’egli
veste le persone introdotte”; ibid., p. 239: “Quell’ascoltar il suono delle parole, quel vedere i volti,
e i gesti di chi le proferisce, sono tante martellate che scolpiscono altamente le immagini delle cose
insegnate nell’animo de’discepoli. Simigliante efficacia è quella del Dialogo; siccome egli per quelle
operazioni stesse che da’ riprensori appellansi perdimenti di tempo, ha simiglianti vivacità.”
113. The emergence of this point of view could help to explain why the “philological” approach in the
restoration of church architecture championed by Cesare Baronio, amongst others, lasted only for
a short time. On this approach, see Alexandra Herz, “Cardinal Cesare Baronio’s Restoration of SS.
Nereo ed Achilleo and S. Cesare de’Appia,” Art Bulletin, 70 (1988): 590–620.
Conclusion:
Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome
This book has dealt with two questions. What did Sforza Pallavicino
contribute to art theory? And how does his contribution reflect the crucial
art theoretical questions of Bernini’s times? These queries were motivated
by the closely related assumptions that Pallavicino’s work mattered in
seventeenth-century Rome and voiced ideas that spoke to theoretical
problems in the visual arts. On a basic level they imply that art theoretical
reflection is not confined to the genres of the treatise, the ekphrasis or
the artist’s biography. In fact, as the exchanges between Pallavicino and
Bernini’s biographies demonstrate, art literature too exists within a network
of intertexts pertaining to different kinds of discourse. Moreover, since art
is an important actor in culture writ large, ideas regarding culture—be it
scientific, religious, political or economic—will bear upon art. Approaching
the art of seventeenth-century Rome through the oeuvre of a prolific
writer on many aspects of contemporary culture provided insight into
contemporary expectations with regard to the visual arts, their practitioners
and their viewers.
In the course of this book Sforza Pallavicino has emerged as an
important presence in papal Rome, a confidant of Urban VIII, Innocent X
and especially Alexander VII. Echoes of his ideas can be found in artists’
biographies, in treatises on art and the theater, as in the work of Domenico
Ottonelli, and most pervasively in the controversies over literary style of
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in the works of authors
like Dominique Bouhours or Ludovico Muratori. Still, Pallavicino left little
traces in art theory understood in the narrow sense of the word, as sets
of rules defining a successful artistic practice. If seventeenth-century Rome
certainly saw exchanges between theories of literature and art, as when
Nicolas Poussin borrowed Agostino Mascardi’s view of style, Pallavicino
does not seem to have been the most obvious or popular source. When his
concepts emerge in art literature, they assume guises their author may have
found hard to recognize. Ottonelli reduced Pallavicino’s subtle examination
of art and its cognitive functions to a conventional argument about decorum.
Bernini’s biographers availed themselves of his anecdotes concerning the
bust and the fly or Zeno’s paradoxes but transformed the instrumental view
of art carefully argued in the Jesuit’s treatises into a celebration of Bernini’s
genius voiced by a starstruck member of the papal court.
As a prominent actor in those circles Pallavicino does define an ideal
of style. Expression should be ornate, with antithesis as a highly prized
attribute; variation is key to the aesthetic success of a work; splendor
should convey majesty; and finally, liveliness should guarantee the affective
involvement of the beholder. If these requirements generate precise rules
for practice only in the realm of literature, they are easily recognized in
the visual arts of Pallavicino’s times. It would be wrong, however, to
explain the artistic developments of seventeenth-century Rome by means
of Pallavicino’s work, if only because Pallavicino’s requirements are quite
generic in visual terms. But his writings demonstrate how general qualities
of art works relate to fundamental theoretical problems. In other words, if
the case for Pallavicino’s direct involvement in contemporary artistic theory
and practice is limited, his writings register some of the crucial theoretical
issues of his times and indicate future developments.
This is most obvious in the theory of the prima apprensione. Writing at
a time when abstract art was fully emerging, Benedetto Croce enthused
that the concept liberated the arts from the shackles of verisimilitude. The
real meaning of the concept is at once more limited and far-reaching. More
limited, because the apprensione is conceived as the solution to a specific
problem, how to know the truths of faith without error. More far-reaching,
because it assigns the arts a precise place in the economy of salvation, as
the only conduit to those very truths. Pallavicino is able to bestow this
function upon art by dissociating its emotive effect from its truth-value; the
sensation of liveliness is independent from our belief in the truth of what
we see, read or hear. By offering an epistemological explanation of this
quite commonsensical observation, our Jesuit provides a radical solution
to a problem that had haunted poetics since the rediscovery of Aristotle’s
Poetics and continued to trouble writers long after the seventeenth century.
It also repositions illusionism in the economy of representation. Illusion is
no beneficent lie arousing wonder and amazement, but an inherent part of
art whose effect does not depend on the viewer’s misapprehensions but on
its immediate emotive appeal.
The questions raised by the prima apprensione point towards two other
related issues, those of idolatry and the ineffable. When considered against
the background of contemporary discussions of sacred art, the prima
apprensione is also an answer to lingering suspicions about the religious
conclusion: sforza pallavicino and art theory in bernini’s rome 205
image and ecclesiastical splendor. The careful considerations that guided

the self-representation of Alexander VII demonstrate that the specter of
idolatry had far from disappeared by the mid-seventeenth century. With
this in mind, Alexander’s decisions about his Capitoline statue, his residence
and the decorum of the Church are an attempt at representation that steers
clear of the idol while being more lustrous and inspiring than the mere
historical record. Pallavicino’s views also suggest that the papacy was little,
if at all, preoccupied with vainglorious attempts to compensate for a loss
of real power. It devised visual strategies that were deeply imbued with
age-old convictions about the righteousness of ecclesiastical magnificence,
profoundly shaken by the confessional struggles of the sixteenth century,
but necessarily aware of the lure of the idol. If these strategies would help
to shape the royal imagery of Louis XIV, the French king also eagerly
reactivated the magic surrounding the effigy carefully circumvented by his
Roman counterparts.
The aura of the idol is ineffable, just as the perfect witticism or concetto
embodies ideas or concepts otherwise beyond words. This magical
sphere is claimed by monarchs, artists and writers alike, but Pallavicino’s
epistemology of art finds little use for it: if the untrue representation of
art points the viewer to higher truth, the ineffable is not required to hint
at divine mysteries. As a consequence, Pallavicino’s ideas enabled us to
disentangle the conflation of style, expression and truth suggested by an
author like Emanuele Tesauro. Still, our Cardinal’s view of art’s relation
to higher truth found few followers, even if his writings were well known
in the century after their publication. The reason for this can be found in
the fundamental distinction Pallavicino made between rational and higher
truths, each appealing to different cognitive faculties. Undoubtedly inspired
by the forceful emergence of a distinct scientific discourse and new practices
of empirical observation, this distinction was no longer accepted from the
1680s onwards, when truth became one. With that, the alliance between
a naturally ornate style and higher truth defended by Pallavicino and his
fellow theoreticians of sacred art collapsed as well. But exactly this collapse
induced the introduction of notions like the non sò che, the sublime and good
taste. They emerged as part of a new epistemology of art, where art is no
longer deemed capable of expressing eternal yet incomprehensible religious
ideas, but religion and the religious experience remain crucial, if implicit,
points of reference for the aesthetic experience. The age of the idol does not
end, but the idol assumes a new guise, shrouded in the ineffable.
In the view of Pallavicino and closely allied thinkers like Giovanni
Ciampoli, the eternal presence of religion and its unchanging principles
also explained the historical variability of art. Driven by humanity’s innate
craving for novelty, art assumes ever new shapes to express the same ideas.
This notion of the contingency of historical forms, engendered by the same
desire that requires all objects of art to appear as new and complex in
order to entice intellectual and affective engagement, provides a powerful
justification for the kind of formal inventiveness witnessed in Pallavicino’s
day and age. Novelty and the variety it produces become markers of our
quest for salvation, in the present as well as throughout history. Like
Pallavicino’s views on the relation between art, style and religion, this
notion of historical evolution in art suggests a conceptual succession from
the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, when historicism truly emerged.
At the same time, only a few decades later Giambattista Vico, who knew
and admired his work, reconsidered providence and its relation to history,
signaling a fundamental shift in the view of religion’s place in the history
of civilization.
In Pallavicino’s system religious faith is the central concern. Art and
human creativity exist because they provide access to God and furnish the
appropriate means for worship. From this assumption emerges a powerful
and striking plea for formal experiments and artistic innovation. This plea
implies a quiet disavowal of imitation as the final justification of artistic
practice, since imitation becomes but one of all the possible means to
generate images able to evoke the divine. It also carries the seeds of cultural
relativism, as there is no absolute standard to judge the beauty of forms other
than their efficiency in making manifest the divine in particular historical
circumstances. In this sense, the keystone of Pallavicino’s subtle justification
of the arts is also its weakest point. Once religion is removed as the central
concern of humanity, innovation and relativism pose fundamental challenges
to artistic theory, and human processes of observation and cognition have to
find a new, equally elevated finality.
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della Compagnia di Giesù per l’anno centesimo dopo la fondazione di essa (Rome:
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Pallavicino, Sforza, Ermenegildo Martire Tragedia recitata da’Giovani del Seminario
Romano, e da loro data in luce, e dedicata all’ementiss.mo Signor Card. Francesco
Barberini con un breve discorso in fine (1st edn 1644) (Rome: Eredi del Corbelletti,
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Index
References to illustrations are in italics
Accademia dei Lincei 12, 98, 120 160, 181; see also painting, poetry,
Accademia dell’Arcadia 161 theater, sculpture
affetto 22, 39–47, 53, 73–4, 75, 86, 144, arte 32–4, 38, 45, 49, 63, 144, 149; see
156, 180, 204, 206; see also fantasia, also creation, principles
heart, marvel, will artifice 21–2, 64–9, 74–5, 79, 82, 98,
Alberti, Leon Battista 142 104, 143–4, 176, 179–85, 188; see
Alexander VII 12, 13, 29, 49–50, 76, also color, ingegno, ornament
78, 97–119, 123, 136, 149, 150, 176, Augustine, Saint 32, 158, 180,
203, 205 202n110
capitoline statue 97–112 Augustus 111, 177
Alexander the Great 111, 151–2 authorship 136–8, 139, 147–57, 162–3,
anagram 76, 79–84, 160, 181 176–80, 190; see also composto,
anecdote 4, 29–33, 35, 37, 45, 46, creation, fame, genius, ingegno,
49–53, 64, 67–9, 136, 138, 146, non sò che, patronage, singularity,
204 style
antithesis, see contrapposto
architecture 1–2, 4, 17, 24, 64, 117, Balde, Jacob 92n66
119, 123, 136–9, 145–6, 150, 156, Baldinucci Filippo 16, 21, 24, 29, 30,
163, 173, 191, 194; see also church 51, 64–9, 75
building Barberini, Antonio 9, 147
Argan, Giulio 2, 65 Barberini, Francesco 13, 102
argutezza, see wit Barberini, Maffeo 51, 180; see also
Aristotle 17, 42, 68, 69, 71, 80, 82–3, 85, Urban VIII
121, 141, 181, 204 baroque 1, 2, 4, 9, 17, 65, 66, 136, 140,
art theory 1–5, 23, 41, 48, 136, 203; see 143
also treatises of art beauty 29, 37, 41, 44–5, 50, 67, 122,
art, mimetic 17, 21–2, 33, 39–41, 47, 53, 136–7, 141, 142, 144, 146, 157,
63, 65, 72–4, 78, 85–6, 98, 112, 140, 159, 174, 182–7, 193, 206; see also
elegance, harmony, ornament, Bocchi, Francesco 48–9

splendor body 30, 32, 36, 108, 114, 118–19, 120–24,
bel composto 2–3, 136; see also composto 142, 144, 149, 176, 185; see also
Bellarmino, Roberto 25n9, 113, composto, form, movement, unity
133n135, 191 Bona, Giovanni 123–4
Bellini, Eraldo 11, 12, 17, 179 Borboni, Giovanni Andrea 97–8, 101,
Bernini Domenico 2–4, 16, 21, 23, 24, 108–13
29–30, 32, 49–53, 64, 67–8, 127n35, Borromini, Francesco 134, 135, 146,
136–40, 144–7, 148–51, 152–3, 156, 148, 162
162–3, 173–4 Bosio, Antonio 123
Bernini Gianlorenzo 2–5, 16, 23, Bouhours, Dominique 151, 158–62,
29–31, 49–53, 64–9, 110–11, 136–40, 203
146–7, 148–56, 162–3, 173–4, 176,
190 Cappellari, Michele 76, 78, 81
Baldacchino 134, 135–9, 144–6, 147, Castelvetro, Lodovico 40, 85
162–3, 174–9 Catholicism 2, 32, 46, 71, 86, 101,
Bust of Alexander VII 29–31, 31 115, 121, 130n90, 146, 173, 177,
Bust of Jacopo Foix de Montoya 51 180; see also Church, Counter-
Bust of Louis XIV 50–51, 159 Reformation, papacy
Bust of Richelieu 153 Cato 105, 111
Bust of the Savior 149 Cesarini, Virginio 9, 10–12, 150
Bust of Scipio Borghese 154, 155 chance 33–4, 79–80, 84–6, 121, 137,
Bust of Urban VIII 154, 154–6 139–41; see also anagram, arte,
Capitoline statue of Urban VIII 102 concetto, contingency
Cathedra Petri 149 change 36, 182–4, 189–92; see also
Crucifix 17, 19 history, novelty, varietà
Equestrian of Louis XIV 149, 159 Chantelou, Paul Fréart de 51, 76, 154
Four Rivers Fountain 3, 148–9 Chigi, Fabio 12, 13; see also Alexander
Medal for with Androcles and the VII
Lion 99–101, 100 Chigi, Flavio 150
Portrait drawing of Sforza choice 22, 33–4, 72, 124, 137, 142, 144,
Pallavicino 17, 18 147, 186, 193–4; see also affetto, arte,
Saint Peter’s Square 117, 149 will
Sant’Andrea al’Quirinale 15, 17 Christ 111, 114, 118–19, 123
Scala Regia 116, 117 Christina of Sweden 130n90, 150, 176,
Statue of Santa Bibiana 51–2 178
Tomb of Sforza Pallavicino 15 Church 45, 69, 75, 86, 98, 113–14,
Bernini, Pier Filippo 3, 16 117–24, 136, 173–6, 185, 191, 194,
biography 13, 108, 112, 119–20, 124; 205; see also Catholicism, papacy
see also exemplum, historiography, church building 122–4, 173, 175, 179,
portrait 191, 202n113; see also splendor of
artist’s 2–5, 16, 23, 30, 53, 64, 151 the Church, temple, Temple of
Blunt, Anthony 1, 17, 65, 66, 72, 74 Solomon
index 235
Ciampoli, Giovanni 12, 177, 181–3, Costanzo, Mario 1, 17

185, 189, 190, 193–4, 205 Counter-Reformation 16, 60n106,
Prose 13, 180, 189 111; see also Catholicism, Church,
Rime (Poetica sacra) 13, 177–85 papacy
Cicero 1, 141–2, 146, 160, 180 creation
Clement IX 13, 76 divine 21–4, 32, 34–7, 64–6, 84,
Clement X 76–7, 133n141 111–12, 174, 183, 187; see also
Clement XII 104 Nature, providence
Collareta, Marco 17 human 22–3, 32, 35, 37–8, 63–4, 80,
Collegio Romano 9, 12, 13, 21, 102, 112, 124, 135–8, 142, 144–8, 150–57,
104, 177 162–3, 174, 177, 190, 194, 206; see
color 22, 45–6, 49, 52–3, 183–4; see also also authorship, contingency,
artifice, ornament ingegno, principles
common good 34–5, 114, 119, 124 Croce, Benedetto 17, 21, 89n43, 204
Comolli, Angelo 3 Croce, Franco 17
compendium 10, 16, 150, 152, 176; see Cureau de la Chambre, Pierre 151,
also composto 171n124
composite, see composto
composto 22, 121, 135, 139–45, 149–56, Deceit 182–4, 189, 193
163, 182, 194; see also body, deception 39, 46, 53, 63–6, 74, 79,
compendium, multiplicity, 97, 181–4, 189, 193–4; see also
novelty, unity, varietà illusionism, untruth
concetto 2, 79, 81–4, 135, 139, 143, decorum 46, 74, 79, 85, 119, 121, 143,
150, 157, 159, 187–8, 205; see also 191, 204
anagram, chance, contrapposto, Dedalos 34–5
enigma, ineffable, ingegno, marvel, desire 22, 73, 104, 123, 158, 174, 177,
metaphor, novelty, ornament, non 181, 186–8, 193, 205; see also affetto
sò che, prophecy, wit devotion 21, 43–5, 46, 115, 121–2, 173,
concinnitas 142 179, 188
consecration 98, 117, 123–4, 175, 177 Devotion 180–83
contingency 33, 139, 157, 174, 180, discorso 38, 45, 71, 73, 141; see also
190–94, 205; see also arte, chance, reason
choice, history, providence disegno 43–6, 50, 168n70; see also
contrapposto 24, 37, 82–4, 135, 138–44, creation, form
152–7, 162–3, 173, 204; see also Donatello 48–9
concetto, non sò che, varietà D’Onofrio, Cesare 3
Cortona, Pietro da 4, 21, 42
Allegory with Androcles 106, 107 effect 1, 4, 22–3, 40, 44–6, 63, 65–6, 74,
Frontispiece of Storia del Concilio 136–41, 145–6, 177, 185, 189, 204;
17–21, 20 see also marvel
Trattato della Pittura 41–6, 47, elegance 44, 46, 140–44, 156; see also
49, 111; see also Ottonelli, Gian beauty
Domenico enargeia, see evidenza
enigma 83–5, 161–2; see also Gibbes, James Alban 76, 78, 81
contrapposto, non sò che, prophecy giudicio 38–41, 45, 47, 72–4
error 45, 63–4, 72–3, 97, 152, 181, giudizio dell’occhio 136–8, 144–5; see
204; see also fantasia, idolatry, also ingegno, judgment
judgment, untruth God 21, 22, 24, 30, 32–7, 48, 49,
evidenza 73–4, 108, 124, 183–7; see also 56n29, 64, 69, 70–72, 75, 82, 112,
light, marvel, ornament, splendor, 119, 122–4, 150, 158, 160, 162,
vivacità, vision 175, 180–83, 186–8, 192–3; see
exemplum 48, 76, 106, 117–22, 124; see also creation, Nature
also biography, model, portrait, Golden Age 9, 82, 155, 177, 190–92
public display Gonzaga, Ferdinando 10
expression 1–5, 21–2, 41, 43, 48–9, 63, goût, see taste
64, 66, 78–84, 101, 106, 111–12, 120, grace 43, 137, 142, 145, 150, 158–60,
124, 135, 139–41, 143, 147, 157, 176, 184, 188; see also non sò
159–62, 177, 184–5, 189, 204; see che
also artifice, ornament, style Grassi, Ernesto 82
Eudimonio, Andrea 13 Gregory XIII 99
Gregory of Nyssa, Saint 45, 46
falseness 38, 41, 47, 53, 65, 68, 72–3, Gualdi, Giuseppe 3
83, 110, 181–3; see also untruth Guidiccioni, Lelio 146–7
fame 9–12, 102, 110–12, 118, 150–52; Ara Maxima Vaticana 147, 173–7
see also authorship, modesty, Dialogue with Bernini 16, 146–8,
portrait, public display, 157
singularity, vanity Letter on Bernini’s busts 154–6
fantasia 51, 58n56, 63, 70, 185; see Guinigi, Vincenzo 9, 177
also error, evidenza, falseness, gusto, see taste
judgment, meditation, memory, Guyonnet de Vertron, Claude Charles
prima apprensione, untruth 152
Favoriti, Agostino 76, 78–9, 81, 85–6
Febei, Francesco Maria 99, 103 Hakewill, George 193
Félibien, André 151 harmony 38, 55n12, 121, 139, 141–4,
Figrelius-Gripelheim, Edmundus 110 156, 159–60, 176, 183–4; see also
Firenzuola, Angelo 144–5 beauty, proportion, rhyme,
fly 29–35, 37, 49–50, 52, 121–2, 204 rhythm
form 36–8, 84–5, 105, 122–4, 135, 137, heart 22, 34, 43, 45, 70, 72, 74–5, 86,
142, 144–6, 149, 159, 161; see also 157, 182, 185
body, composto, creation, disegno, portrait in 53, 105–8, 111, 123,
unity 127n35
furor 53, 63–4, 75; see also ornament temple of 123
historiography 40–41, 63, 74, 78, 85,
Galilei, Galileo 12, 13, 16, 30, 87n15 98, 112–13; see also biography,
genius 23, 50, 64–5, 150–51, 156, 204; exemplum, inscription, fame,
see also authorship, ingegno history, verisimilitude
index 237
history 24, 79, 81, 83–6, 174, 188–94; iudicium aurium 141, 144; see also
see also change, historiography giudizio dell’occhio
sacred 43–4, 179–81, 184, 193
Holstenius, Lucas 12, 98, 113, 117, 118 je ne sais quoi, see non sò che
Scritture 114–15, 121 Jesuit Order 1, 9, 12, 16, 21, 102; see
Horace 45, 92n66 also Collegio Romano
Huarte, Juan de 82 judgment 43–4, 47, 65, 68–70, 79, 145,
humility 111, 114–15, 118; see also 147, 150, 160; see also error, giudizio
modesty dell’occhio, taste
iconoclasm 101–4, 110–11, 113, 182, Kircher, Athanasius 106

200n90; see also idolatry Kuhn, Rudolph 66
idolatry 32, 35, 47, 98, 101, 108–13,
123, 179–81, 189, 204–5; see also Lactantius 25n12, 123–4, 191
Counter-Reformation, iconoclasm, Lancellotti, Secondo 9, 10, 192, 193
error, falseness L’Hoggidi 9, 190–92
illusionism 4, 17, 42, 47, 64, 65–6, 72–5, 79, Lavin, Irving 3
86, 204; see also deception, untruth Le Noir, Jean 23
imitation 23, 39–44, 48–9, 50–52, 63–4, Leo X 99
74, 94, 101, 110–11, 119, 145–8, Lepautre, Jean 76
160, 178–80, 183–90, 206; see also lifelessness 33, 35–41, 49, 53
authorship, invention, model, light 44, 122, 152, 179, 181–5, 187–9,
novelty, style 194; see also ornament, splendor
immortality 34, 49, 53, 112, 193–4; see likeness 2, 29–33, 35, 38, 41–2, 44,
also biography, fame 46, 49–53, 80, 105, 153; see also
ineffable 75, 111, 135, 138–40, 144–5, portrait, vivacità
157, 160–62, 181, 188, 204–5; see Lionne, Hugues de 53, 106, 152
also grace, non sò che liturgy 114–15, 119, 122–4, 177,
inganno, see deception 181, 194; see also public display,
ingegno 9, 11–12, 29–30, 50–52, 69, sacrality
81–3, 143–5, 147–8, 150, 152, 156–7, liveliness, see vivacità
160, 163, 188, 189–90, 194; see also living image 40–41, 43–4, 45, 48–9,
authorship, composto, concetto, 51–2, 64, 108, 110–12, 120, 122–3,
fame, genius, giudizio dell’occhio, 156, 176, 183, 204; see also idolatry,
imitation, non sò che, novelty, vivacità
singularity, style, taste, virtue, wit Lomazzo, Gian Paolo 42, 148
Innocent X 13, 16, 99, 102, 103, 148, 203 Louis XIV 51, 150–53, 158, 205
inscription 92n68, 99, 101–8, 110–12, Luther, Martin 81
124; see also biography, concetto
invention 17, 40–43, 47–8, 63, 78, 97, Malvezzi, Virgilio 13, 26n24, 93n82,
137–9, 143–4, 150, 174, 178, 181, 120
183, 187, 190; see also concetto, maniera, see style
disegno, imitation, ingegno Marangoni, Giovanni 127n45
Marino, Giambattista 17, 64, 147, 160, Nature 33, 35, 36, 43, 46, 48–9, 142,
177 146, 158–60, 179, 183, 185, 187–9,
marvel 17, 44–7, 79–80, 84, 120, 140, 191, 193
143–5, 149–50, 187, 188; see also non sò che 139–40, 144–8, 156–63,
affetto, concetto, effect, illusionism, 181, 188; see also beauty, grace,
novelty ineffable, ingegno, singularity, style
Mascardi, Agostino 5, 203 novelty 39, 47, 143, 144–8, 157,
Arte istorica 143, 147–8, 160 174, 178, 187–8, 188–92, 205; see
Pompe 192 also change, composto, concetto,
Tavola di Tebete 190 imitation, ingegno, invention,
Maurizio di Savoia 9, 10 marvel, model, singularity, style
medal 10, 11, 99, 100, 106–8, 107; see
also inscription Oliva, Gianpaolo 16
meditation 23–4, 37, 45, 75, 175, 184–8, ornament 44, 46, 49, 83, 86, 97, 110,
193; see also vision 122–3, 137, 140–44, 150, 159, 174,
memory 38–40, 44–6, 187; see also 181, 185, 188; see also beauty,
fantasia, heart, prima apprensione concetto, elegance, expression,
Ménestrier, Claude François 84–5, 161–2 splendor, style
metaphor 17, 68, 74, 82–4, 157–61, 189; Orsini, Alessandro 13
see also concetto, ornament Ottonelli, Gian Domenico 204
Michelangelo Buonarotti 4, 31, 32, 33, Moderatione del Theatro 42, 46–7
35, 43, 44, 70, 110, 111, 144, 145, Trattato della Pittura 41–6, 47, 49, 111
147, 150, 181, 191
Last Judgment 33 painting 2, 4, 29–30, 33–5, 39–53, 63,
Mirandola, Pico della 10–11 66–9, 72–5, 85, 105, 145–8, 150–51,
model 1–2, 21, 29, 31, 35, 40, 42, 48–9, 156, 174, 179, 181, 185, 191
50–53, 82, 101, 103, 105, 110, 112, Paleotti, Gabriele 112
120, 122, 146, 148, 151, 153, 156, Discorso intorno alle imagini 48,
162, 180, 189–91, 194; see also 60n106, 111, 127n45
exemplum, history, imitation Pallavicino, Sforza
modesty 98–108, 137, 197n54; see also Arte della perfezion cristiana 21, 29,
fame, humility, public display, 31–5, 46, 49, 64, 66, 68, 69–71,
vanity 133n142, 177, 185–8, 192
Modesty 112 Considerazioni dello stile 13
Montanari, Tomaso 3, 16 Del Bene 13, 21, 33, 35, 38–47, 72–4,
Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Guido 17, 65 113, 118, 178, 185
moto, see movement Ermenegildo martire 13, 21
movement 29, 36–8, 41–2, 48–53, 67–8, Relazione 12, 21, 104
71–2, 110, 120, 190, 198n62; see also Storia del Concilio 13, 16, 21, 22, 71–2,
body, form, likeness 98, 120–23, 173, 181, 185, 191
multiplicity 22, 139, 182–4, 188–94; see Trattato dello stile 21, 63–4, 65, 72,
also varietà 80–81, 138, 140–44, 157, 163, 178,
Muratori, Ludovico 140, 160, 203 181, 188, 192–4
index 239
Trattato sulla provvidenza 21, 33–8, 70 principles, artistic 1–3, 5, 17, 31,
Vita di Alessandro VII 3, 15, 97, 68–9, 135–8, 141, 143–9, 157, 160,
103–8, 119–20, 176 171n131, 203; see also art theory,
papacy 5, 24, 75–6, 97–8, 113–24, 205; model
see also Church Prometheus 42–3
paradise 45, 121, 174, 184–8, 191; see prophecy 23, 75–6, 78–86, 139–40, 145,
also Golden Age, meditation 162, 177; see also concetto
paragone 30, 52, 105, 108, 123, 146, 184, of St. Malachy 76–8, 84
189 proportion 37–8, 43, 48, 50, 137–9, 141,
patronage 1, 2, 16, 17, 117, 119, 144–5; see also harmony
156, 174–5, 180, 194; see also providence 80, 84, 86, 192, 194, 206; see
authorship, fame also creation
Paul, Saint 84, 123, 135, 175 public display 76–7, 79, 86, 98, 114–15,
Paul III 99 117–19, 124, 150, 174, 178–9, 181;
Paul IV 101–3 see also exemplum, modesty
Paul V 1, 147
Pellegrini, Matteo 5, 13 Querelle des anciens et modernes 190; see
Perez, Antonio 13, 26n24, 93n82, 186 also novelty
Peter, Saint 111, 114–15, 118, 135, 175, Querenghi, Antonio 10, 13, 166n52
178–9; see also Rome, Saint Peter’s Quintilian 40, 46, 142
Phidias 32
phoenix 9–11, 16, 21 Raimondi, Ezio 1, 17, 190
Plato 68, 111, 180 Rampalle, Daniel de 192
Pliny the Elder 42, 127n43 Raphael 4, 145, 181, 191
Pliny the Younger 105 Rapin, René 152
Plutarch 105, 123 ratio, see reason
poetry 39–43, 47, 73–5, 78–86, 97–8, reason 22, 32, 67, 69–75, 80, 84–5,
140, 143, 147–8, 160, 174–5; see also 122, 140, 143–4, 159, 161, 163, 181,
furor, historiography, ornament, 188, 205; see also error, fantasia,
prima apprensione, verisimilitude judgment, prima apprensione,
sacred 12, 177–85 will
Poetry 180–82 Reni, Guido 4, 43
Polygnotos 42 rhetoric 1–2, 17, 40, 45–6, 48, 72, 74,
portrait 23, 24, 29–30, 40–41, 49, 79, 137, 140, 141, 175, 177, 180; see
50–53, 97, 105–6, 108, 110–11, also exemplum, evidenza, sermon
121–3, 151–6; see also composto, rhyme 140–43; see also harmony,
exemplum, likeness, singularity, ornament
virtue rhythm 140–44, 160; see also harmony,
Poussin, Nicolas 167n62, 203 ornament
prima apprensione 38–41, 45–6, 65, Ricci, Juan 76
72–4, 89n43, 160, 181, 204; see also Rome
affetto, evidenza, fantasia, memory, idea of 10, 97–8, 106, 113–24, 150,
untruth, vivacità 175, 184, 186
Rome (continued) singularity 10, 11, 51, 120, 136,

buildings 138–9, 144, 146, 148, 150, 152,
−− Palazzo dei Conservatori 157; see also authorship, composto,
98–105, 99 ingegno
−− Quirinal palace 113–20 Sixtus V 99, 101–3, 114, 115
−− Saint Peter’s 34, 98, 114–19, capitoline statue of 101, 102, 103
122, 135–6, 138, 149, 157, splendor 22–3, 45, 106, 142–3, 182–5,
174–9 188, 204–5; see also color, elegance,
−− Sant’Andrea al’Quirinale 15, light, ornament
17 of the Church 22, 97–8, 115, 119,
−− Santa Maria in Aracoeli 10, 122–4, 173, 179–80, 191, 204–5
102 spoliation 180–82; see also idolatry
−− Santa Maria in Campitelli 99 Stefonio, Bernardo 91n56, 185
−− Santa Maria Maggiore, Paoline Strada, Famiano 177
chapel 43 style 23–4, 64, 84–5, 135, 139–44, 146–
−− San Salvatore in Lauro 13 8, 156–63, 167n62, 173–5, 181, 185,
−− Vatican palace 98, 113–20 187–8, 193, 203–6; see also ingegno,
sites imitation, ornament, taste
−− Capitol 77, 97–113, 123, 180 sublime 35, 44, 143–6, 150–56, 159,
−− piazza del Popolo 99 162, 175–6, 205; see also composto,
−− Vatican 111, 113–19, 174–80 splendor
Rospigliosi, Giulio 13, 76, 127n35; see symbolism 84–5, 123, 161–3, 173–6; see
also Clement IX also enigma
Roy, Louis Le 190
Tassoni, Alessandro 189–90
sacrality 98, 114–15, 117–18, 121–4, taste 140, 142, 147–8, 156, 159–61, 174,
176–80; see also shrine 205; see also ingegno, non sò che
Saraceni, Gherardo 13 temple 124, 180–81; see also church
Sarpi, Paolo 13, 98, 132n130 building, idolatry, spoliation
sculpture 29–30, 33–5, 38, 42–3, Temple of Solomon 122, 162, 172n135,
48–53, 64, 97–113, 123–4, 136, 173, 176, 180
142, 145–6, 150, 152–6, 182–3, Tesauro, Emanuele 5, 84, 135, 139, 157,
191 158, 160–63, 205
Senate, Roman 99–106 Cannocchiale aristotelico 81–3, 84
Seneca 25n5, 26n24, 93n82, 111, theater 23, 46–7, 70, 72, 74, 79, 85,
119–20, 123, 131n119 119–20, 124, 150, 182–5, 189, 203;
sensory perception 22, 44, 51, 88n23, see also affetto, evidenza, exemplum,
122, 141, 144, 160; see also giudizio history, tragedy, virtue
dell’occhio, iudicium aurium, Titian 4, 181, 185, 187
light, prima apprensione, rhyme, tragedy 13, 21, 181, 185
rhythm Trajan 105
sermon 45, 70, 143, 185, 199n83 treatises of art 1, 5, 21, 23, 42, 48, 97,
shrine 162, 175–7; see also heart 110, 203; see also art theory
index 241
truth 21, 32, 38–41, 45, 47, 53, 63–75, Vasari, Giorgio 43, 165n39
78–86, 98, 103, 122, 124, 135, 140, verisimilitude 17, 23, 39–40, 43, 46–7,
143, 157–63, 173–4, 181–5, 188–9, 73–4, 85–6, 204; see also evidenza,
193–4, 204–5 historiography, poetry
first 22, 32–4, 38–9, 69–75, 85, virtue 3, 10, 16, 41, 43, 45, 47–9,
159–63, 181–2, 188–9, 204–5; see 51, 53, 97–8, 101, 105–6, 110–13,
also prima apprensione 118–19, 124, 139, 149–53, 156,
Truth 182–4, 189, 193 162, 176; see also exemplum,
ingegno
unity 22, 36–8, 48, 121–2, 135, 144, vision 78, 83, 173, 185–6; see also
148–9, 176–7; see also composto, evidenza, meditation
varietà Vitruvius 31–2, 169n90
untruth 22–3, 42, 45, 74–5, 83–5, vivacità 22–3, 35, 38–44, 48–9, 52–3,
97, 143, 159–61, 181, 205; see 74, 108, 112, 120–21, 183, 204; see
also deception, error, falseness, also evidenza, expression, likeness,
illusionism, prima apprensione ornament, prima apprensione,
Urban VIII 1, 9, 12, 13, 16, 99, 102, 103, verisimilitude
135, 147, 155–8, 174–7, 179, 192, 203
his reform of poetry 157, 177–8, 181; wax 35, 141–2, 146, 179
see also poetry will 22, 33–4, 44–6, 70, 185, 193–4; see
also affetto, choice
vanity 49, 104–5, 188; see also modesty wit 50, 81–4, 158, 180, 197n48, 205; see
Varchi, Benedetto 42 also ingegno
varietà 22–3, 37, 44, 47, 52, 141, 144, 156,
184–8, 193–4, 205; see also change, Zeno of Elea 64–75, 78, 136, 204
contrapposto, multiplicity, unity Zeuxis 39, 42, 46

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The Art of Religion

Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory

Maarten Delbeke, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning,

in the same series

Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism

At the Edges of Vision

The Look of Van Dyck

Time and Place

Dealing with the Visual

Modernism and the Mediterranean

Grasping the World

Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-754-63485-0 (hbk)

List of Illustrations  vii

Introduction: Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome  1

1 Sforza Pallavicino and Roman Baroque  9

2 The Pope, the Bust, the Sculptor and the Fly  29

3 Art as Revelation: The Revelation of Art  63

4 The Image of the Pope  97

5 The Composite Work  135

6 Sacred Art  173

Conclusion: Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome  203

1 Sforza Pallavicino and 1.6 Pietro da Cortona, frontispiece of

4.6 Giambattista Falda, “Scala 6 Sacred Art

Because the argument developed here hinges on a close reading and

BAV Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

BNF Bibliothèque Nationale de France

the companionship of fellow explorers in the realm of historical research and

Valerie Van de Velde assisted with exemplary commitment in editing the

“This worldly, emotional, anti-intellectual kind of religion produced its

poetics of the 1620s, which were deeply influenced by rhetoric, set up a

of the persona with his age, promising an exhaustive explanation of Bernini’s

appearances in, especially, Domenico’s Life, where he repeatedly grants

Sforza Pallavicino and Roman Baroque

When, on 3 September 1625, Sforza Pallavicino publicly disputed his doctorate

Similar sentiments prevailed in 1628 when Pallavicino defended his

1.1 Engraving based on the medal issued at the funeral of Virginio Cesarini,

Rome,”10 transferring Pico della Mirandola’s emblematic epithet, la fenice

prodigious demonstrations of ingegno. And as was the case with Pico,

A Life in Papal Rome

Pallavicino greatly benefited from Urban’s protection in his early years.15

1.3 Workshop of Gianlorenzo Bernini, Tomb of Sforza Pallavicino, Sant’Andrea

If Sforza Pallavicino’s exceptional reputation of the 1620s revived in the

Pallavicino and Art Theory?

As in many early modern texts on a variety of subjects, art and artists do

codes of representation, social conventions, historical circumstances and

and without the Catholic Church. An acerbic pamphlet written by Jean Le

Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la compagnie de Jésus (Heverlee, 1960), vol. 6, c. 141, a. Carneades is a

The Pope, the Bust, the Sculptor and the Fly

In order to flesh out the ideas introduced in the previous chapter, we

2.1 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Bust of Alexander VII, marble, 1657, private collection,

The Art of Christian Perfection

come più quantità d’eccellenti edifici, e in più efficace maniera ha fabbricati, e

The Superiority of Divine Art

By adding the anecdote to the Arte, Pallavicino connects different aspects of

If we discern in the making of an ear of wheat or of a fly considerably more artistry

Human art is therefore not inferior because Dedalos is “deprived of

The Divine Artifex versus the Anima Formatrice

its appointed task. A non-gratuitous relationship between the components

Or dopo Iddio, il quale comprende in se tutta la pienezza e però tutta la bellezza

Dunque acciò che le potenze conoscitive e specialmente l’intelletto, in cui grazia al

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction: Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome 1

1 Sforza Pallavicino and Roman Baroque 9

2 The Pope, the Bust, the Sculptor and the Fly 29

3 Art as Revelation: The Revelation of Art 63

4 The Image of the Pope 97

5 The Composite Work 135

6 Sacred Art 173

Conclusion: Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome 203