| dc.description.abstract | Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (1667-1740) is well known as a major Roman patron of music,
theater, and painting. This study is the first characterization of his architectural
patronage. In it, I identify the architects who worked in his court in the Cancelleria,
from Filippo Juvarra to Domenico Gregorini, and the dozen in between in the half
century from 1690 to 1740. His resident architects included Simone Felice del Lino,
Carlo Enrico di San Martino, Giovanni Francesco Pellegrini, Nicola Michetti, Filippo
Juvarra, Domenico Gregorini, and G.B. Oliverio. Never entered in the cardinal’s
official rolls although given projects from time to time were Ludovico Rusconi Sassi,
Alessandro Mauri, and Francesco Ferrari. Ottoboni had brief contacts with Carlo
Fontana and Filippo Cesari.
I begin this study by discussing the architectural holdings of the Ottoboni family in
Venice and Rome. I chronicle the projects of Cardinal Ottoboni in his official residence
of the Cancelleria as Vice-Chancellor of the Church, and in the basilica of San Lorenzo
in Damaso enclosed within the palace grounds. I characterize and suggest locations
for his several palace theaters by assembling data never previously considered. For
the first time, three permanent theaters are identified in his palace, the initial space
by Simmone Felice del Lino on the ground floor as a commercial venture. I locate
and reconstruct the cardinal’s lost theater from Filippo Juvarra’s drawings, room
measurements, and palimpsests of decorations and architectural details in the palace.
The findings are based on extensive documentation from Ottoboni family archives
in the Vatican and Lateran holdings, the diary accounts of Francesco Chracas and
Francesco Valesio, and the Correspondances of the French Academy in Rome.
Ottoboni’s projects for the basilica of San Lorenzo in Damaso included chapels
by Sassi and by Gregorini, and over the years numerous grand devotional machine
by most of his architects. His architectural commissions, both permanent and
ephemeral, were almost exclusively official and public. The cardinal’s participation
in the competition for the façade of St. John Lateran in the early 1730s was the result
of his function as the basilica’s archpriest. His voice was but one of several in the final
decision, causing him gradually to lose interest in the process.
A National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Independent Study and
a Fulbright Hays Fellowship in support of a sabbatical year project in 1979-1980 on the
art patronage of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni produced volumes of intact and unpublished
material from the Fondo Ottoboni of the Vatican Library’s Barberini Archives, and the
Archivio Ottoboni in the Archivio Storico del Vicariato at St. John Lateran. | |
