Carlo Di Giuliano RONCALLI Aka Trombetta by Agnese Vastano - Biographical Dictionary of Italians - Volume 88 (2017)

Carlo di Giuliano RONCALLI aka Trombetta by Agnese Vastano - Biographical Dictionary of Italians - Volume 88 (2017) When and where he was born, the son of a Giuliano, has not yet been revealed from the sources: he disagrees with the criticism of the place of birth, being Roncalli for some from Marche, originating in Colbordolo, a small town in the province of Urbino, and Roman for others. To Colbordolo, in reality, Roncalli lived for a brief period, having married in third wedding, November 4, 1719, Eusebia Caterina Paciotti, native of the place (State Archive of Urbino, Notary Luminati Bartolomeo , filza 3223, years 1718-19, cc 274-279): from this probably the identification of the place as native land, while in the archive document relating to the baptism of the daughter of the painter Pietro Paolo Vasta, pupil or perhaps collaborator of Roncalli, the master is mentioned as «illustrissimo cav. Carlo Roncalli, Roman "(Vatican secret archive, baptism register of the parish of San Lorenzo in Damaso , year 1728). The oldest source referring to the painter, cited by local historians also with the surname Roncagli, dates back to 10 February 1710, the date when his son Giuseppe Antonio was baptized in Urbino, his wife Angela Moni, a Roman, and the other two sons Gianfrancesco and Andrea. The family then resided in the ducal city. On 24 February 1711 Roncalli witnessed a new baptism, that of the last one arrived at home, Anna Maria Bernardina (Parish Archive of the Cathedral of Urbino, Books of the baptized and the dead , 1711). Left a widower, he contracted a new marriage the following year with a certain Elizabeth, from whom he had Angela Antonia Loreta ( ibid ., 1714). Urbino welcomed him again within its walls in 1720: as of September 1, in fact, he lived in a house in via S. Margherita, having left Colbordolo. In light of this information, the date of birth could be around the year 1680. The first twenty years of the eighteenth century saw him put his hand to the nucleus of works linked to the urban phase of his activity, placed under the benevolent wing of Pope Clement XI Albani and his nephew Annibale, patrons and architects of the Urbino revival after the decline marked by the end of the duchy. In this ascending parable, Roncalli, who somehow embodied the figure of "Albani painter" (Vastano, in Papa Albani , 2001, p. 240), lent his work for the reorganization of churches and palaces whose vestiges acquired characters and styles of the new ruling taste. One of the first to be interested in this renewal campaign was the Oratory of St. Joseph, particularly dear to the Albans, devoted to that place and always linked to the confraternity: for Roncalli, also a confrere, was undoubtedly the most committed important for prestige and vastness, engaged in the realization of the overall decoration of the single building of the building, with a compositional machine related to the illusionistic models typical of the Roman Baroque, to those visions arising from the mastery and ingenuity of Giovanni Battista Gaulli, of Andrea Pozzo and by Pietro da Cortona, to that taste of the great scenic representations of suggestion, borrowed for Roncalli through Carlo Maratti and the latter's approach with the art of Cortona. While Roncalli manages to offer a pleasant optical enjoyment, a classically composed and distributed orchestration, far from the whirlwind of Bacchic memory, despite the renunciation of great architectural breakthroughs and large spatial illusions. A refined monochrome colourism, played on shades of gray and warm terracotta, gives rise to pilasters adorned with candelabras, flowers and medallions with images of the Prophets . Angelic figures in the act of supporting the emblems of the Albani family populate the sky, at the peak of which, in a large ovate, dominates the glory of s. Giuseppe . Integral parts of the decorative apparatus are the four large canvases, costing 70 Roman shields each, with episodes from the life of the Virgin: The Marriage , The Nativity , The Flight into Egypt , The Death of Saints Giuseppe . In these paintings more than in others the painter is tangible the 'creed' marattesco, marked by "an acrobatic and difficult balance between ancient and modern, between classicism and baroque". In Roncalli the adherence to the one who was the pivot of his artistic journey, mainly set on the exercise of the copy of the masters of the past, was so unconditional that he was able to reproduce perfect examples by imitating his style. In the scenes of the life of the Virgin transpired also Correggese and Renian accents next to reminiscences derived from the Carraccis, as well as perceptible, albeit veiled, Baroque influences. The Urbino labors also include the decorations of the palace of the princes Albani, a factory that saw the peak of its splendor in the eighteenth century, so much so that it included among its walls paintings by Raffaello, Correggio, Tiziano, Federico Barocci. To the brush of Roncalli we must, on the first floor, The triumph of the emblems of the Albani house , taken entirely from the fresco of the same subject executed by Pietro da Cortona for Ferdinando II Medici in the hall of Mars in the Pitti palace in Florence, and on the noble floor The allegories of the seasons . Placed in the space of squares supported by sirens, the seasonal symbologies decorate the string course cornice, and together with the Aurora , depicted in the centrality of the ceiling, and lost in an unspecified date, constituted the decorative layout of one of the building's rooms. Also inscribed in Roncalli is the ornamental ensemble of the small sacellum, located along the path of the noble floor, where, in a slice of the sky, small pious excitement float rhythmically The glory of the Holy Spirit (the preparatory drawings are preserved today in the castle collections of Windsor). The design and color component brings us mentally back to the vision of St. Joseph's ornamentation and the close ties that run and are reflected in the identical identity matrix, a coherent manifestation of the dictates and of the pictorial extraction that guide the master's hand. Ileana Chiappini di Sorio (1980) ascribes to the work of the painter one of the ceilings of Villa Montegallo in Osimo. The banquet of the gods and the figures of the plumes, Aurora , Twilight and the Four seasons , speak the language common to many works of our painter, confused by the historical sources, for the homonymy of the surname, with the most famous Cristoforo, moreover already dead well before the osimano cycle. This new attribution extends the perimeter of action of the artist in the Marche. After the Marches' parenthesis, Roncalli's activity, always supported by the prestigious protection of the Albani family first and then of Benedict XIII, then moved to Rome, where he appeared from January 1724 and where he held two years later, at the behest of the pontiff Orsini , the position of superintendent of Vatican works to replace Agostino Masucci as a "scream painter" (Valesio, 1978, p. 718), a position formerly owned by Maratti. On the Piazza dell'Urbe, Roncalli had, at least in the years of papal protection, a prominent role and the reality of a shop, or rather of a team , of which other illustrious strangers such as the aforementioned Vasta and Emanuele Alfani were part, shared in decorative enterprises at some churches in the capital. From Rome they were sent to Urbino by Pope Clement XI and by his nephew, Cardinal Annibale Albani, four devotional paintings by Roncalli: the two ovals with the Saints Antonio and Giuseppe for the chapel of the Albani at the church of S. Francesco, the S. Grato for the church of S. Andrea Avellino, as well as the copy of the Madonna del Gatto by Barocci, commissioned by the senator Orazio Albani, brother of the pope, today at the Diocesan Albani Museum. The pictorial process of the artist, still dotted with so many gaps and shadow areas, has recently been enriched with new contributions thanks to which we are able to outline a more precise picture of the lively Roman activity, an activity that enjoyed moments of notoriety in privileged environments and elite yards, not useful, however, to raise it to glory, because of that modus pingendi common to many and lacking any momentum, always to the dependence of the so- called leaders. In Rome the only dated undertaking of Roncalli is in the chapel of S. Domenico, in S. Maria sopra Minerva, commissioned by Pope Benedict XIII: cost of the works, including stuccos, 200 Roman shields. In the vault of the sacellum The glory of the Holy Spirit among putti with the allegories of Hope and Charity , and always by Roncalli the canvas of the high altar depicting The miracle of s. Domenico . In the same church the artist worked near a further chapel, that of the Crucifix, of which today only the painted portion above the altar with St. Barnabas and the Virgin remains, while the glory of the Cross among cherubs has been lost . Roncalli was also interested in the reorganization operations in S. Sisto all'Appia, although there are no references to identify what has been achieved. Again thanks to the news taken from the Vatican archives, the corpus of Roncalli's mobile works acquires a series of paintings, however linked to pontifical orders, produced in the time period between 1725 and 1728. Eight canvases depicting respectively two Madonnas with numerous saints, the two martyrs St. Lawrence and St. Catherine , Le stigmata of s. Francis , a Pietà and saints , S. Felice , The Virgin with the Child and s.

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