| Abstrakt: |
Cardinal Pietro Vidoni, born in 1610, was appointed as papal Legate of Bologna by pope Alessandro VII Chigi in the years from 1662 to 1665. Like his predecessors Bernardino Spada and Girolamo Farnese, Vidoni commissioned a fresco decoration in the apartment at the second floor of the Palazzo Comunale (Town Hall), where the legates lived, and realized the room still bearing his name, the “Galleria Vidoniana". A contemporary short poem of 186 verses, composed in Latin by the literary man Vincenzo Maria Marescalchi, the Aula Vidonia, proves to be an important source in order to understand the decoration frescoed on the vault of the gallery by the Bolognese painters Domenico Santi, called Mengazzino, and Giovan Battista Caccioli. Published in 1665, the poem celebrates the patron, the pope to whom the decoration is devoted, and the frescoes. The article offers the first systematic study of these paintings, never approached before, dealing with the decorative patterns, the iconography, and their relations with Marescalchi's verses. It also discusses the function of the room in the Legate apartment, considering both the meaning of the gallery (“galleria") in XVIIth century Italian culture, and the fact that Marescalchi always refers to it using the latin word “aula". The study shows that the frescoes are an erudite tribute to pope Chigi's political virtues, expressed through emblems and copious references to ancient myths and allegories: these features and the perfect knowledge of the decoration suggest that Marescalchi (an influent member of the Accademia dei Gelati in Bologna) could have been the, or one of the, authors of the programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
