The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 24 (2018) No. 1

Le “giustificazioni” dell’Archivio Barberini: Inventario. Vol. 1, Le giustificazioni dei cardinali. By Luigi Cacciaglia. Studi e Testi 485. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2014. [412 pp. ISBN 978-88-210-0917-4.]

Reviewed by Margaret Murata*

1. Introduction

2. The Barberini Cardinals

3. Postscript

References

1. Introduction

1.1 From August 1623, when Maffeo Barberini was elevated to the papacy as Urban VIII, the men of the Barberini family dominated Roman institutions, governance, and politics for over twenty years. After Urban’s death, the wealth that the pope’s brothers and three nephews amassed in those years assured that the family could survive in grand style into the next century, except that the pope’s namesake and great-great-nephew, Prince Urbano Barberini, who headed the dynasty from 1685 to 1722, produced no son who could carry on the family name. When the prince’s daughter married in 1728,^[1] her husband’s family agreed that their first son would inherit Bassanello, the duchy of the Colonna di Sciarra, and that their second son would inherit his grandfather’s Barberini name and titles. After the integration of the old noble houses into the new Kingdom of Italy after 1870, the line has continued into this century. The possessions and collections of a number of “old” Roman families, however, changed hands after the Unification; a large portion of the Borghese library, for example, went up for international auction in 1892 and 1893. In 1902 the Vatican itself, having lost the Papal States, purchased the vast and rare Barberini library, along with the family archives; both are now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. The papers of the Rospigliosi, the family of Pope Clement IX, entered the Archivio Segreto Vaticano in 1931.^[2] The Barberini palace at the Quattro Fontane, which today houses a part of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, was given to the Italian government in 1949.^[3]

1.2 During the five hundred years since the Renaissance, all the grand Roman families bought and sold fiefs, palaces, and properties in the city and outside of it; horses, art, enormous quantities of fine clothing; and financial instruments known as censi and monti. They paid tolls on imported goods; distributed monthly stipends in cash and in kind to those serving the households, as well as providing them with livery; bought or brought in great quantities of food and candles; and spent fortunes on maintaining or remodeling their dwellings. The most prominent built and endowed family chapels and had the funds to celebrate services in them. Extraordinary expenses included funeral catafalques, fireworks for celebrations, and the occasional joust in a public piazza. Regulation of such a household and its activities was under the supervision of the maestro di casa, an administrative position recently examined by Natalia Gozzano.^[4] Carefully kept account books tracked such outlays across the centuries, forming the bulk of family archives along with legal instruments and correspondence.^[5]

1.3 The principal documents of household account keeping in seventeenth-century Rome are of three kinds. Volumes of mandati and contromandati (orders to issue a mandato) preserve payment orders—for example, to make withdrawals from a deposit account. These are usually serially numbered (like modern checks) within years and are entered day by day. Barberini mandato no. 166 for 1624, for example, dated March 29, orders Tommaso and Vincenzo Saoli, “nostri depositarij,” to pay lutanist and composer Kapsperger 50 scudi as an unspecified gift.^[6] In 1686, mandato no. 43 for April 23 orders the Bank of Santo Spirito “to pay Sig.r Francesco Maria de’ Cavalieri, son and heir of the late Sig.r Emilio de’ Cavalieri” the amount of 18.50 scudi, for reasons not specified.^[7] In the same volume, Prince Urbano orders payment of 60 scudi (later voided) from his funds at the bank of the Monte di Pietà for a box at the Teatro Capranica during Carnival.^[8]

1.4 A second principal type of account book is the libro mastro, in which aggregated expenses are entered by categories, typically monthly. The categories include regular outlays, for example, for salaries or for the stables; or perhaps a single sum represented expenses of an affiliated but dependent household, such as a mother-in-law’s. These volumes juxtapose summaries of monthly income and expenses and as such represent totals that were calculated and entered weeks, or even months, after the actual payments were made—which were often not timely either.

1.5 The book under review here, however, inventories the most specific and particular aspects of household financial transactions—the giustificazioni, which are requests (conti) or receipts (recapiti) for payment accompanied by the reasons (the justifications) for payment and, usefully, usually the signature of the payee. Sometimes purchases are itemized, such as lace cuffs or a used saddle; sometimes the description is frustratingly general, as when Tarquinio Lanciani was paid 9 scudi in 1689 to complete payment for a job of music copying.^[9] Such receipts are typically unbound, on various kinds of paper of different sizes, and written by or on behalf of people from all walks of life—from carpenters and butchers to embroiderers, musicians, and creditors.

1.6 Vatican archivist Luigi Cacciaglia has not only been inventorying the Barberini documents for decades,^[10] but he also had to begin by putting the giustificazioni in some kind of order. Some were bound up in earlier times; loose ones have been sorted into numbered paper folders and given fascicle numbers, within their original “buste.”^[11] In his introduction Cacciaglia explains, “When the packets were complete, I kept them as I found them, whereas I collected together the fascicles and loose folios, seeking to place them in the series to which they belonged, according to their provenance and date.”^[12] The current call numbers, then, represent the most recent reordering of this material, which in some cases will differ from shelfmarks cited in earlier publications, even studies from the earlier part of this century.^[13]

2. The Barberini Cardinals

2.1 This first volume of Cacciaglia’s inventory provides a finding tool to the papers of the six cardinals from the Barberini family, the well-known five who lived in the seventeenth century and the nineteenth-century cardinal, Benedetto Barberini.^[14]

2.2 The documents from the Seicento begin with thirty-eight volumes from the household of Maffeo Barberini, for the years in which he was a cardinal, from 1607 to his elevation as pope in 1623.^[15] The analytical entries for each volume or busta give general descriptions of the documents—so that names or titles contained within fascicles do not all appear in the fifty-one-page index of names, places, and “notable things” at the end of the volume.^[16] To give just a very few examples, among Cardinal Maffeo’s Conti e mandati di pagamento for 1608–1609, Cacciaglia categorized these items:

• salari per la famiglia, 1 gennaio 1608
• spese della stalla, 6 gennaio 1608
• conto dei cantori per la messa cantata, 2 aprile 1608
• conto di spedizione delle lettere [August 1608]
• scudi 60 … per il prezzo di una sfera, un quadrante e altri strumenti matematici, 17 gennaio 1609
• conti di libri, 23 aprile 1609

You would need to call up the volume itself to find the names of who was on salary, and what was bought for the stables, and perhaps who might have been paid for the Mass and what books might have been bought. The last giustificazione of this volume, on folio 490, records 100 scudi for “Domenico Passignano per i lavori nella cappella di Sant’Andrea della Valle, 31 dicembre 1609.”^[17]

2.3 Cardinal Maffeo’s brother had three sons. Francesco, the eldest, became a cardinal soon after Maffeo became pope; the middle son, Taddeo, became prince prefect of Rome, while the youngest, Antonio, became a cardinal in 1628 (in pectore in 1627). Responsibilities and riches quickly came to all three, in the form of offices with tenure for life. Cardinal Francesco (died 1679) served as archpriest of St. Peter’s from 1629 and became vice-chancellor of the Church in 1632. Cardinal Antonio (died 1671) obtained the office of chamberlain (camerlengo) in 1638, upon the death of the previous holder, Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini. The two cardinal nephews have been well-studied in the history of art, music, architecture, and Italian politics of the period.^[18] Cacciaglia inventories 196 sets of giustificazioni pertaining to Cardinal Francesco,^[19] patron of the musicians Giovanni Kapsperger,^[20] Girolamo Frescobaldi, Virgilio Mazzocchi, Stefano Landi, and others. They begin in 1623 and continue past his death to 1686, with giustificazioni concerning his legacy and a final group of inventories from 1630 to 1685, for both Francesco and Antonio. This last set includes Antonio’s weapons (armi) and items of silver, as well as “vestiti per mascherate,” probably costumes for carnivals past. Bound separately among Cardinal Francesco’s giustificazioni are sets of accounts for at least two operas that he had staged at the Cancelleria. One, for the 1638 S. Bonifatio by Giulio Rospigliosi and Virgilio Mazzochi, has been recently incorporated into a thesis on that work by Aldo Roma.^[21] The other contains the 1641 accounts for the staging of Rospigliosi and Mazzocchi’s La Genoinda. Along with payments for binding 2,860 librettos, for stockings, boots, and stage weapons, and for silvering ten straw chairs, we learn of payments to the instrumentalists:

per li 2 cimbali

Franceschino è stato alle sei attioni, et a 3 prove—scudi 6

Matteo è stato alle sei attioni, et ha recitato, et ha sonato nelle prove continuamente un mese, e mezzo; mi par meriterebbe 25, o 30 scudi—scudi 25

per leuto

Giuliano è stato a cinque attioni, e 2 prove—scudi 5

per violone

Giacinto è stato alle sei attioni, et a 3 prove—scudi 6

Francesco è stato alle sei attioni et a 3 prove—scudi 5

cimbalaro

Cortona ha messo in ordine 2 cimbali sei volte nelle sei attioni—scudi 6^[22]

2.4 For the younger cardinal, Cacciaglia inventories fifty sets of giustificazioni that date from 1624 to 1700, thirty-nine from his lifetime. In terms of music, several contemporary scholars have sifted through these documents, especially for the young Antonio’s purchases of musical instruments, such as Chiara Granata in her study of the Barberini harp made for Marco Marazzoli.^[23] The years after Antonio’s return to Rome from France in 1653 still hint at musical involvements, apart from the singers still in his household. For 1670, Cacciaglia’s inventory turns up payments for five months of lessons for harpsichord, violin, and singing for one “monsù Luigi cameriero.” In the last year of his life, the cardinal was still having his harpsichord tended to.^[24]

2.5 For all the cardinals, the present inventory makes apparent the extent to which they contributed to numerous churches, monasteries, and convents, and chapels inside of Rome and out in its environs, not only in terms of their fabric, donations, and pensions, but also for music. Still, it is nearly impossible to connect specific compositions with known occasions, as for example, when Filippo Vitali provided music for S. Maria in Via Lata, after Cardinal Antonio became Cardinal Deacon there. Even when Cardinal Antonio was in exile in France, he ordered music for that church’s feast day.^[25] The sacred music that Cardinal Antonio commissioned from Kapsperger in 1628 and 1629 seems completely lost, including a Mass and Vespers for Sant’Agnese fuori Porta Pia.^[26] Antonio’s nephew Cardinal Carlo paid for the music for the saint’s day at S. Sebastiano al Palatino,^[27] where he held a “baiulivato”(baliaggio)—that is, a high endowed rank—within the Knights of Malta, which would in turn pass to one of his nephews (Taddeo, not a cleric). For February 13, 1684, Carlo commissioned music from Antonio Foggia for a sung Mass and a Te Deum at the church of San Stanislao, in celebration of the victory over the Ottomans at the Battle of Vienna.^[28] In total, Cacciaglia indexes five columns of references to churches within Rome and a nearly equal number outside of the city.

2.6 The next two Barberini cardinals are the nephew and the great-nephew of Francesco and Antonio; both have been relatively little studied as patrons of the arts and architecture. Carlo, already mentioned, became a cardinal in 1653, transferring the title of prince of Palestrina to his younger brother. Cardinal Francesco Junior, as mentioned earlier, received his red hat in 1690; he died in 1738, the last direct male descendant from Urban VIII’s family. Cacciaglia inventories 95 sets of giustificazioni of the former and 220 of the latter. Since Carlo’s father (Prince Taddeo Barberini) died while he and his children were in exile in Paris, Carlo’s earliest accounts, from 1650, are signed by his uncle “il card. [Francesco] Barberini curatore.” The passing on of the estate with its titles and attendant financial responsibilities included making interest payments to his mother from her own dowry.^[29] One of the most non-liturgical musical occasions evidenced in these documents is the 1687 banquet that Cardinal Carlo prepared for a formal visit of the English ambassador, Roger Palmer, earl of Castlemaine, at which the band of fourteen strings was headed by Arcangelo Corelli. At least some of the music appears to have been composed by Angelo Olivieri.^[30] Cardinal Carlo also had a box at the Teatro Tor di Nona.^[31] In 1696 he paid for a libretto for an opera staged there; the giustificazione declares that it was for his sister, the duchess of Modena.^[32] And what do we make of the 3.60 scudi paid to a leather-worker for ten cushions for the same theater?^[33] Carlo also maintained at least three harpsichords, one of which was restrung and re-quilled in 1686.^[34] Another, described as a “cimbalo armonico cromaticho,” was ruined in a flood of the Tiber and put to rights by Carlo Lagardi in 1687.^[35]

2.7 The activities and influence of the last seventeenth-century Barberini cardinal, Francesco Junior, remain to be established, but he is potentially a pivotal figure, in part because unlike his father and uncle, he appears to have traveled often to the north of Italy, for instance to Venice in 1687. One of the earliest Barberini volumes of Venetian opera, copied in Venice, has arias from the 1687 Mauritio and Gierusalemme liberata.^[36] Later, in 1692–1697, Francesco, now a cardinal, served as papal legate to the Romagna. In 1692 in his official capacity as nuncio, he was received and entertained by Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, papal legate to Bologna. This visit seems to explain how two arias from the Bolognese production of Amilcare in Cipro, dedicated to Pamphili, ended up in a Barberini miscellany of arias.^[37] Francesco’s duties as legate then took him to Ferrara in 1693. That sojourn is clearly connected to an aria by Marc’Antonio Ziani in V-CVbav Barb. lat. 4138, from the Ferrarese Il Lisimaco. The opera performance was dedicated to Cardinals Barberini and D’Adda, and a Barberini singer appeared in it.^[38] Francesco’s aunt was the duchess of Modena (died 1699), and her son had spent 1688 to 1694 in Rome as a cardinal, before he had to renounce the appointment to become duke of Modena. An opera dedicated to Rinaldo d’Este was the popular and perpetually revised Giustino, given in Modena in 1697. Four arias also in Barb. lat. 4138 are not found in any earlier productions of Giustino and surely come from the Modenese staging at the Teatro Fontanelli. One of Francesco’s sisters, the countess of Arona, married into the Milanese family of the Borromei, which had a lively interest in opera. When her husband served briefly as viceroy of Naples between 1710 and 1713, five operas given there were dedicated to her.^[39] Although Cacciaglia’s present inventory notes only one encounter between Cardinal Francesco Junior and Countess Camilla, there is likely more to be found when the Borromeos’ visits to Rome are investigated.^[40] Cacciaglia’s entries for 1723, when the cardinal was administering funds for his widowed mother and his widowed sister-in-law, turn up a payment to his brother’s illegitimate adult son, Maffeo Callisto Barberini, as well as 80 scudi for a box at the Teatro Capranica for the whole year.^[41]

2.8 Remittances of course can never tell the whole story, and for several family-sponsored entertainments, funds were drawn upon by all brothers. Collaboration among their musicians was common, and some, like Kapsperger (who was not a commoner) provided music for one brother as well as for another.^[42] The composer Angelo Olivieri passed into the household of Cardinal Carlo after the death of Prince Maffeo. Luigi Cacciaglia’s eagerly awaited parallel volume of giustificazioni for the seventeenth-century princes of Palestrina—Taddeo (died 1647), Maffeo (died 1685), and Urbano (died 1722)—will add to our knowledge of the vibrant and expansive culture that was Baroque Rome. The giustificazioni and mandati fill out and make specific expenses that are only summarized in the libri mastri. There is expected redundancy among the three, but often a new name, place, or date can be provided by different corresponding entries. Any one type of document can lead to chasing down others. In the case of Cardinal Francesco Junior, the records help to track him when he is outside of Rome and show that both his aunt and his sister paid him visits from Modena and Milan, respectively, when he was in the north.^[43] Cacciaglia’s miraculously compact first volume will serve as a judicious Virgil for many future explorations, to help us understand in what ways and to what extent the Barberini created a new Rome and filled it with new music.

3. Postscript

3.1 Apart from the obvious value of the contents of such archival documents, the paper on which they are written is often full-sized sheets that bear datable watermarks. The standard reference work for seventeenth-century watermarks remains Edward Heawood’s Watermarks, Mainly of the 17th and 18th Centuries;^[44] but no one city or decade is sufficiently represented there for the kinds of paper that music is generally written upon. Especially since musical scores are often in half- or quarter-folio sizes, slices of watermarks are lost in sizing and later trimming for binding. Thus, even paging through accounts for grain, hay, wine, and oil can yield full-size, datable variants of local watermarks. This is appealing for those working in any archives in the later portion of the early modern period. The extensive study of sixteenth-century paper was prompted by bibliographic work on incunabula. Many collections of family correspondence note characteristics of letter paper, but this is usually different in size and weight from music paper. The online Gravell Watermark Archive has been adding the records of the Briquet Archive in Geneva (previously unpublished images that go beyond the date of C.-M. Briquet’s 1907 printed catalogue, Les Filigranes), but none of its samples identifies the kind of document that the image has been taken from.^[45] Thus, an image from the Archivio di Stato in Naples may be from a letter written elsewhere. Although this kind of philological information gathering is old-fashioned, it can be made more and more useful with a larger set of exemplars. Provenance becomes increasingly important in the later part of the seventeenth century, when scores begin to circulate more widely in Italy and beyond the Alps, in copies made in the city of origin or in copies made elsewhere for collection or performance. The Barberini music manuscripts, for instance, include Venetian opera arias copied in Venice and sent or brought down to Rome; but there are also arias originally composed for Venice but copied in Rome—conceivably for or from performances that may not have taken place in Venice itself.