The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 32 (2026) No. 1

Noble Magnificence: Culture of the Performing Arts in Rome 1644–1740. Edited by Anne-Madeleine Goulet and Michela Berti. Épitome musical. Belgium: Brepols, 2024. [619 pp. ISBN 978-2-503-61312-3.]

Reviewed by Stefanie Tcharos*

1.1 Scholars of seventeenth-century music, theater, and dance face a well-known research conundrum: they may know a certain cultural practice was pervasive and influential, but they lack evidence to conduct a thorough and cohesive investigation. In the case of early modern Rome—a city whose diverse patronage made it a thriving center of the performing arts—scholars have long understood that some of the richest documents may exist in family archives, sometimes difficult to access. And, even when single monographs have produced rich studies of the performing arts, charting relationships between key baronial or clerical families (e.g., Barberini, Colonna, or Ottoboni), these relationships may remain a small segment of a much larger integrated network whose complex family alliances and rivalries span multiple generations.

1.2 To address this problem, and to rethink the history of the performing arts in Rome, scholars leading the “PerformArt Programme” launched a six-year project, a research tour de force that used a diverse team of twenty-seven investigators to conduct extensive archival research on high-ranking aristocratic families who lived in, settled in, or had contacts with Rome between 1644 and 1740.^[1] Directed by Anne-Madeleine Goulet and coordinated by Michela Berti, the first phase of this tremendous endeavor resulted in an edited volume published in French in 2021, along with a publicly accessible database launched in 2023 that holds the massive collection of documentation for this project.^[2]

1.3 The second phase of this project resulted in the volume reviewed here, also edited and coordinated by Goulet and Berti. This book expands the project’s scope and comprises a multi-authored, thirty-chapter collection with critical, interdisciplinary contributions from historians, musicologists, dance and theater studies scholars, economic historians, archivists, and specialists in documentary information systems. If the functional aim of the larger project was to compile and analyze documents related to Rome’s aristocratic families, then this latest book’s main conceit explores the notion of magnificence, a concept so fundamental to Baroque culture that we might wonder what more could be investigated. What Noble Magnificence elucidates in great detail, however, is that the quest to assert greatness was not just a given of aristocratic life, but a complex process that fundamentally launched a thriving practice of and market for the performing arts.

1.4 Through the diverse chapters of this book, readers will be reminded, but also newly persuaded, that the performing arts had a strong role in shaping the daily life of Rome’s aristocracy. Maintaining one’s magnificence demanded constant upkeep (and labor!), and it was asserted most effectively through large-scale spectacle, when it was carefully orchestrated and well timed to mark a family’s dynastic influence or its powerful alliances. These events disrupted the quotidian realities of aristocratic life, and when possible, that of the public as well. Patrons directed their artists and organizers to create wondrous experiences of being and feeling other, by activating as many senses as possible in the observer in order to generate alluring and engrossing experiences of awe. Magnificence was both a catalyst and an outcome of the market for attention.

1.5 Using the standard divisions of a seventeenth-century drama, the editors have organized Noble Magnificence into five main sections—thus, an introductory “overture” followed by five “acts,” interspersed with a series of informative “intermezzi.”^[3] As with any edited volume, consistency and quality across chapters can vary. Some essays, though informationally rich, do lose the larger thematic thread, or save the most interesting points until the very end, rather than integrate frameworks of magnificence and performance throughout their abundantly detailed analysis. Though it seems that some studies revisit familiar connecting points (such as the relationship between dynastic representation and opera), this apparent rehash is the inception of a much deeper investigation. Several chapters integrate the more familiar needs for magnificence with new and unknown details on theatrical production, using a mix of textual, musical, and iconographic evidence, as well as crucial sources of accounting to reveal the complex economic systems upon which magnificence depended. These studies uncover fascinating alliances and dependencies up and down social ranks: between secular and sacred baroni, financial lenders who floated them loans for much needed cash (especially to pay artists and artisans), and household employees who procured and managed artists, performers, merchants, and craftspeople—with all of these actors working as agents of magnificence.^[4]

1.6 The volume’s most novel analyses push beyond a work-based scholarly focus and adapt anthropological frameworks of praxis in order to scrutinize the unfolding and inner workings of how music, dance, and theater—as an experiential combination—“made it possible for an aristocratic house to exist.”^[5] This approach demands a robust cross-disciplinary scope, which Noble Magnificence frequently demonstrates, and some of its most revealing analyses emerge by placing select chapters or sections of the book in dialogue with one another.

1.7 Take, for example, an important paradox the book highlights: that magnificence was both ephemeral and eternal. Émilie Corswarem explores this crucial contradiction by investigating the celebrations deployed by Girolamo Colonna (appointed Cardinal-Protector of the Holy Roman Empire) to celebrate the coronation of Emperor Ferdinand IV in July 1653.^[6] Colonna spared no expense to organize a three-day festa, filled with concerts, banquets, and the visible largesse of fountains of wine, choruses of singers, and a nightly sequence of pyrotechnic machines (the most expensive of all festive displays) emblazoned with heraldic imagery that aligned celebrations of greatness for the Imperial Crown with that of the House of Colonna.^[7] In practical terms the spectacles were ephemeral, erected one day and destroyed the next; even so, they magnified the capacious generosity of a household and conveyed its power to remain eternal. The symbolism of image, sound, narrative, and spectacle was, however, neither fully stable nor limited to a single reading, and as Antonella Fabbriani Rojas posits, these ephemeral theaters could also be “representatives of human frailty, destined to be destroyed by fire.”^[8]

1.8 In fact, the threat of ruin often was the principal motivating force to performing one’s magnificence, since it remained a constant reality. In their insightful chapter on the seventeenth-century caduta, José María Domínguez, Gloria Giordano, and Chiara Pelliccia take the symbolism of a “fall” (from grace or greatness) and investigate its ubiquitous integration in prologues, operas, intermezzi, oratorios, and balli, as heightened through iconography, sounded through musical madrigalisms, or communicated through the descent from a leaping dance step. They conceive of greatness and ruin less as contrasting extremes and more as “tightly connected” concepts of magnificence, that underscored a necessary tension throughout a family’s dynasty.^[9] Yet, even if elusive or risky, seeking magnificence offered the irresistible promise of mobility and legitimacy, especially for those not fully ensconced within Rome’s most localized noble circles (see, for example, Michela Berti’s study of the emerging Vaini household), or those arriving from foreign empires (such as the Portuguese ambassador, as researched by Cristina Fernandes), who sought to penetrate the impervious networks of the Roman system.^[10]

1.9 Some of the book’s most revealing analyses come from the treatment of magnificence across the longue durée of early modern history, particularly in the face of new, enlightened philosophies and emerging institutions of a modern age. Diana Blichmann reveals how Roman magnates, as they aligned themselves with new institutions of aesthetics and cultural reform, had to reconcile and adapt their persistent need for magnificence with a modern sense of rational discipline and sobriety, as the “the tangled complexity of the seventeenth-century spectacular was to be replaced by its opposite: extreme, refined linearity.”^[11] From a different point of view, the chapter by Giulia Veneziano and Margaret Murata uses production and circulation of opera’s commercial markets (specifically between Rome and Naples in the 1720s) as a lens through which to examine how geopolitics, tourism, and markets for new music indelibly transformed practices of magnificence into a distinctly eighteenth-century guise.^[12]

1.10 Though it is perhaps a tall order to read all thirty chapters, Noble Magnificence is an essential resource. The book’s wide-ranging scope offers multiple routes of engagement, from finding new archival details as discussed in an individual chapter or appendix, to uncovering key facets of magnificence emergent across larger sections of the book. Several of the chapters are well referenced with both familiar and newer scholarship from a host of international authors; moreover, the volume’s orientation to resources from the PerformArt Database makes it a valuable starting point for further research. Above all, Noble Magnificence’s conceptual reach and its diverse intellectual partnerships challenge the isolation of disciplinary habits and assumptions. This book is a testament to the intellectual strength, innovation, and value of a well-designed interdisciplinary collaboration.