SACCHI, Andrea

The picture shows the painting on the ceiling vault of the hall in the apartment of Anna Colonna in the north wing of the Palazzo Barberini. It represents the Triumph of Divina Sapientia.

The Palazzo Barberini, residence of the papal family Barberini, set a new standard for Roman palace architecture and its painted decoration. Planning for the expansion of the sixteenth-century structure was first undertaken by Carlo Maderno, then transferred after his death to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who here distinguished himself as an architect for the first time.

The first commission for the painted decor was given to Andrea Sacchi who in 1629-30 painted the ceiling of the largest room in the wing occupied by Anna Colonna, Taddeo Barberini’s wife. Sacchi painted here the fresco identified as Triumph of Divina Sapientia (divine wisdom). Sirens in the room corners hold up small sun disks that extend up into the fresco. They anticipate the theme of the ceiling, in which the sun plays a central role.

The design of the ceiling omits architectural elements completely. Viewers find themselves confronted with a startling heavenly vision including, among other things, realistically depicted astronomical bodies - Earth and the sun hand directly above them. The personification of Divine Wisdom is seated on the Solomonic lion throne, crowned by two Barberini bees, before a huge radiating solar disk in yellow-gold. Imaginative cloud formations fill the greater part of the picture surface, creating a perspective pull that graphically suggests the vast distance between the smaller Earth at the bottom edge of the picture and the gigantic sun.

It is obvious that Sacchi’s ceiling presents a commentary on the then current issue of Galileo Galilei’s heliocentric worldview.

Hagar, the Egyptian hand maiden of Sarah was the mother of Ishmael, Abraham’s first son. When Isaac, Sarah’s son, was born Ishmael mocked his younger brother so that Sarah asked Abraham to banish him, together with his mother. Abraham provided them with bread and a bottle of water and sent them off into the desert of Beersheba. When the water was spent Hagar put Ishmael under a bush to die and then sat some way off, weeping. But an angel appeared, by tradition the archangel Michael, and disclosed a well of water near by, so they were both saved. Two scenes, the banishment, and the appearance of the angel are common in 17th century Italian and Dutch painting.

Pasqualini (1614-1691) was the leading male soprano of his day. He joined the choir of the Sistine Chapel in 1630, and from 1632 was a protagonist of many operas produced at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome.

Andrea Sacchi’s Portrait of Monsignor Clemente Merlini, painted in circa 1630, shows this sharp-witted jurist, Latin scholar and Epicurean, with his books casually displayed behind him, turning to look directly at the spectator.

Sacchi probably undertook the rare subject of Francis marrying Poverty at the request for Cardinal Francesco Barberini, who had a special devotion to Francis, his name saint. According to legend, Francis was walking in a street in Siena, when he encountered three similar women who represented the three virtues of the Franciscan order; poverty, chastity and obedience. Francis greeted them extending a particular welcome to poverty, saying, “you are welcome, Lady Poverty”. The saint loved poverty and truly considered that virtue to be his wife: thus the legend of the saint’s marriage to Poverty was born.

The format and measurements of the canvas remind us that the painting was originally meant as an altarpiece. The subject reminds one immediately of Sacchi’s work at the Church of the Cappuccini, which the Barberini had decorated right at the beginning of the 1630’s, and which still houses two important works by the artist.

Carried out during the years of Sacchi’s polemical argument with Pietro da Cortona and the baroque style painting in general, this painting shows Sacchi radicalising his ideas. The result is a very simple composition based on two monumental figures set in an open landscape.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 33 minutes):

Michael Haydn: St Francis Mass

Holding a book that seems to thrust forward out of the picture plane is St Anthony Abbot, identified by the tau- (T-) shaped walking stick he used in later life. He also wears a black habit, which his followers, the Antonine monks, later adopted. Next to him, slightly set back, is St Francis of Assisi, with his dark brown friar’s habit and a bloody wound on his hand. This is one of the stigmata – the five wounds suffered by Christ on the Cross, which were miraculously visited on the saint.

Sacchi has created a simple but effective contrast between the two meditative saints. They appear to share the same physical space, lit by a bright, raking light from the left, but they seem unaware of each other. Saint Anthony is immersed in his studies; Saint Francis’s hands are crossed in religious submission, and his gaze is turned heavenwards.

This painting was first recorded as a work by Andrea Sacchi in a 1692 inventory of the collection of Pope Alexander VII’s nephew Cardinal Flavio Chigi. It is the oil sketch for a larger canvas version (270 x 184 cm) of the same subject, once at the convent of S. Salvi and now at on deposit at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. According to Bellori, who describes the picture in precise detail, Sacchi’s protector Cardinal Antonio Barberini commissioned it directly from the artist.

Considering the highly unusual subject (the three Magdalenes: St Mary Magdalene of Japan, St Mary Magdalene and St Mary Magdalene dei Pazzi), this composition must have been designed for a particular place. A scenario was proposed in which the large altarpiece was sent in 1634 by Urban VIII to the Florentine Convent of Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, where the pope’s two sisters lived as cloistered nuns from 1628 to 1639. The oil sketch differs in certain details from the larger Florentine picture. The most notable of the changes is that the putti, nude in the oil sketch, are covered by drapery in the altarpiece: evidently this was done out of a sense of decorum for the cloistered ambient for which the painting was destined. Painting just after Pietro da Cortona undertook the grand vault of the Palazzo Barberini, and during the years of the bitter polemical exchange between Sacchi and Cortona about the baroque style, this painting re-proposes a classical pyramid composition. In the picture the three figures, firmly defined in their space, acquire a solemn monumentality in their classic, measured gestures. A preparatory drawing, datable to 1633, is conserved at D�sseldorf.

Romuald (c. 952-1027) was a Benedictine monk who entered the Order as an act of atonement after his father had murdered a relative. Finding the monastic life of his day in need of reform he founded communities that were vowed to solitude and silence, of which the best known was the monastery of Camaldoli in the Appenines near Arezzo. Romuald is old and white-bearded and is dressed in the habit of the Camaldolese Order, a striking loose-flowing white garment with wide sleeves. He holds a crutch.

It was said that Romuald dreamed, like Jacob, of a ladder ascending to heaven and that the monks of his Order were going up it clad in white He is seated with his brethren under a tree, pointing to the vision in the background. It was after this dream Romuald declared that the Order should henceforth be dressed in white.