January 2009

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Fumaroli sounds a slightly cautionary note about Vouet, however, in observing that his brilliant career in Paris was unaccompanied by any contribution to the literature of art, unlike the situation in the Italian peninsula, and indeed in the previous epoch in France, which saw the publication in 1600 of Les peintures convenables aux basiliques et palais du Roi by Antoine de Laval. The rivalry between Vouet and Poussin probably contributed to the latter’s decision to curtail his stay in Paris and return to Rome permanently in 1642. The prominent position accorded to Poussin in Fumaroli’s writings is easily understood by the intellectual complexity of his paintings, but in 1998, two years after his election as president of the Amis du Louvre, he derived particular pleasure in the discovery on the Paris art market of a painting by Poussin, St Francesca Romana Announcing to Rome the End of the Plague, previously known only from engravings (Fig. 6). It was acquired by the Louvre, and Fumaroli wrote an extended essay on it, revised for Peinture et pouvoirs.

Rome plays a major role in Fumaroli’s intellectual and spiritual life, and the subtitle given to Peinture et pouvoirs is De Rome à Paris aux XVII et XVIIIe siècles. One of Fumaroli’s major contributions to historical discourse is his interest in the long pontificate of Urban viii Barberini, from 1623 to 1644. ‘Long’ is the operative word, as Urban’s reign was the longest since the 12th century, and Fumaroli argues that, after the ‘reaction’ of the Hispanophile Innocent x Pamphilj, pope from 1644 to 1655, the two subsequent pontificates, of Alexander VII Chigi and Clement IX Rospigliosi, continued the Barberini tradition, justifying the title of his brilliant essay ‘Le “siècle” d’Urbain VIII’. Fumaroli’s interest in Urban VIII is the more important as his pontificate has, despite work by John Beldon Scott and Louise Rice and the musicologist Frederick Hammond, not received the attention it deserves from historians of art, even less from political historians.

Urban VIII fits Fumaroli’s interests remarkably well. Serving as papal nuncio in France from 1604 to 1607, Maffeo Barberini established a number of friendships at the French court, which he and his family preserved. On his election as pope (6 August 1623) he charged his nephew Francesco with the task of making Rome the cultural capital of Christendom, building on the earlier work of the Borghese and Ludovisi Popes. For the visual arts the Barberini family relied upon two artists, Bernini and Pietro da Cortona. If Rome was to be elevated by Barberini cultural patronage, the Barberini needed a symbol of their role in its transformation, a palazzo.

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