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Reflections on the Bernini-Rosa Feud of 1639

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Reflections on the Bernini-Rosa Feud of 1639 04Dickerson:131 20-02-2012 15:29 Pagina 29 A Path to Détente? Reflections on the Bernini-Rosa Feud of 1639 C. D. Dickerson III The recent exhibition Salvator Rosa: Bandits, reparable. While they may never have become Wilderness, and Magic, held at Dulwich Picture close friends, certainly not intimates, there are Gallery, London, and the Kimbell Art Museum, signs that an easing of tensions came over them Fort Worth, presents an opportune moment to re- and that, as the years passed by, they came to eye flect on one of the more colorful stories to come one another with respect-even if a guarded respect. down to us regarding Rosa’s earlier career: his spat In 1639, the year in which Rosa and Bernini re- with the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini over is- portedly first crossed paths, Rosa was approach- sues of theater. Our source for the row is a partic- ing twenty-five years old, while Bernini was ularly reliable one, Giovanni Battista Passeri, who already forty. To the younger Rosa, the difference claims to have been present when the controversy in age must have seemed a lot more, as Bernini erupted in 1639. In his biography of Rosa, he pro- had already attained unimaginable heights as a vides a lengthy description of what happened, a sculptor. In 1639, he had just finished putting his description that has proven irresistible to art his- stamp on the crossing of St. Peter’s with his giant torians, who have repeatedly pointed to it as proof statue of Saint Longinus, which added one more that, from the very beginning, Rosa’s temperament jewel to his professional crown, then already was fiery, independent, and rash. The episode is studded with such marvels of marble carving as also typically given as a major reason why Rosa the Apollo and Daphne. By comparison, Rosa fled soon after to Florence, that Bernini made life was a virtual nobody. He had achieved some for him too difficult in Rome.1 commercial success with genre scenes and land- Ten years after the move, Rosa returned to Rome, scapes but was still struggling to make a name and if there were any lingering problems with for himself.2 On his return to Rome in 1639 from Bernini, they are not reported - neither by Rosa’s provincial Viterbo, he hatched a grandiose plan biographers nor by Rosa himself. Indeed, Bernini to do just that-a plan centered on theater. drops completely from Rosa’s story, which is odd Since Rosa’s earliest days, he had been attracted given Rosa’s rising reputation and Bernini’s con- to the stage. In Naples, he had grown up along- tinued dominance of the Roman art world. It is side poets, musicians, and dramatists and learned enough to make one go in search of links between quickly that public performance perfectly suited the two artists and to attempt to characterize how his exhibitionist personality.3 At the Carnival of they may have viewed one another. Did they ever 1639, he introduced Rome to his talents. While move past their quarrel of 1639? Was it truly as most of the city paraded in masks and poked fun contentious and personal as it is usually portrayed? at neighbors, Rosa and his friends pretended to A careful review of the evidence urges caution in be quack doctors, offering fake medicines and seeing the rift as so incendiary as to have been ir- reciting fantastic remedies that were the inven- 29 04Dickerson:131 20-02-2012 15:29 Pagina 30 tion of the well-known playwright Giovanni opinion, this constituted a major breach of theatri- Briccio.4 Rosa named his character Formica, cal decorum. Rosa subscribed to the school of donning the traditional costume of Pasciarello, thought, first articulated by Aristotle, that any el- from the commedia dell’arte. Wherever the ement superfluous to a plot should not be allowed merry band went, reports Passeri, crowds always on stage.6 Castelli, presumably with Bernini’s con- formed, and the attention heartened Rosa to no sent, had violated this principle, and Rosa made end. He could not stand the thought of having to sure that Bernini knew it. shelve Formica once Carnival ended and thus If Bernini’s initial response to Rosa was cool, he hatched a plan to bring him out again during the could not help but to fire back - or so suggests summer, when he could perform Formica on a Passeri. Later that summer, Bernini produced an- real stage before a proper audience. other comedy with Castelli, and it opened with a Enter Bernini, who attended the second of these pointed jab at Rosa. During the prologue, Castelli performances. According to Passeri, as summer came on stage dressed as Formica and was joined came, Rosa asked some of his actor-friends to join by a fortune teller who proceeded to describe him in improvising comedies. The celebrated Formica’s previous life in Naples. The discussion preacher Niccolò Musso agreed to direct the young then turned to Formica’s arrival in Rome and a se- troupe, while Rosa secured the use of a vineyard ries of thefts he reportedly committed in his pa- outside the Porta del Popolo on which to erect a tron’s house. It was the next clue, however, that stage. Word of the performances evidently spread erased any doubts that Rosa was the person being quickly. By the second one, Bernini was not the targeted. The fortune teller proceeded to lambast only important person in attendance. Passeri came, the painter’s profession - which proved decidedly sitting on the same row as Bernini and the well- unwise. Passeri rose in indignation and marched known painters Giovanni Francesco Romanelli and out of the theater, followed by Romanelli and Guido Ubaldo Abbatini. The play opened with Bernini himself. Realizing that he had overstepped, members of the cast lamenting the heat and re- Castelli chased after Bernini, offering apologies marking that a good comedy might ease the dis- and claiming that it had not been his intention to comfort. Rosa, playing Formica, then came to the attack painters so broadly. The backfire was doubt- front and uttered the words that ignited the feud: «I less fortunate for Rosa, although it does not appear do not want us to act comedies like certain people to have diffused the situation totally. Passeri indi- who spread dirt all about here and there because, in cates that Rosa faced suspicion from various quar- due course, you can see that the dirt spreads faster ters and that his standing in Rome remained than the poet’s ink. And I do not want us to bring on unsettled. His strategy was to try to rise above the stage couriers, brandy-sellers, goatherds, and rub- fray, which was reportedly successful. While his bish of that sort, which are the folly of an ass».5 name was certainly sullied, no further escalations Instantly, Passeri understood the reference, taking came, and he was able to return to painting, where a sidewise glance at whom he assumed was its in- he started to make appreciable gains once again. tended target, Bernini, who reportedly stayed Passeri then passes on to the next major chapter in calm, pretending to be unfazed. Earlier that sum- Rosa’s life: his call from the Medici. mer, Bernini had put on a play of his own, and it In Passeri’s account of the quarrel, Bernini and is an aspect of this play, according to Passeri, that Rosa are only two of the main players. The third is is at the center of the lines quoted above. As Castelli, inviting the question of whether or not we Passeri reports, in order to make one of the scenes should locate the origins of the feud not in Rosa’s look more realistic, the person charged with di- bitterness toward Bernini but in his bitterness to- recting the play, Ottaviano Castelli, a longtime fa- ward Castelli. This is possible, although it would vorite of Bernini, decided to bring on stage all the require our assuming that Rosa blamed Castelli for things that Rosa condemned in his soliloquy: the breach of theatrical decorum involving the couriers, brandy-sellers, and goatherds. In Rosa’s couriers, brandy-sellers, and goatherds. There is 30 04Dickerson:131 20-02-2012 15:29 Pagina 31 some basis for this line of thought. First, Passeri indicates that the play featuring the in- decorous elements was Castelli’s invention.7 Secondly, he leads us to believe that, even when the play was Bernini’s, Castelli was not afraid to take certain liberties in staging or acting it, as with his attack on painters.8 Clearly, Castelli sat in a privileged posi- tion relative to Bernini, one he had earned during the 1630s with a string of successes as a librettist and a musician.9 He was also a talented jurist and physician, as well as the personal secretary to the French ambassador in Rome, Cardinal Jules Mazarin. It was for Mazarin that, between 1638 and 1639, Castelli wrote and di- rected his two most famous op- eras: La Sincerità trionfante and Il Favorito del principe ovvero L’Erculeo ardire. These there- fore came right at the moment Rosa’s own theatrical career was ramping up, which makes it all the more probable that, as the summer of 1639 approached, Rosa had already made up his mind about Castelli: he was a threat, someone to be disparaged. Not helping their relationship, of FIG. 1 After Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Portrait of Ottaviano Castelli course, was that Castelli’s style water looked as though it would spill into the au- of theater was closely aligned with Bernini’s - and dience, barriers rose up and diverted the water so ran opposite Rosa’s.10 away.
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