The project offers an overview of the material, social, economic, and political history of the performing arts in Rome between 1644 and 1740. We seek to shift attention from papal commissions for art and architecture to the many performances involving theatre, music, and dance commissioned by the leading aristocratic families of the day. Until now, research has focused on the specific patronage of a particular pope, cardinal, or prince. Our goal is to replace this fragmented approach with a broader view of the Roman cultural scene that does not privilege any one art, but instead considers music, theatre, and dance as elements of the same artistic environment. We focus on eleven families, about half of the great Roman aristocratic families of the time: the Aldobrandini, Borghese, Caetani, Chigi, Colonna, Lante della Rovere, Orsini, Ottoboni, Pamphilj, Ruspoli, and Vaini. Each family’s archives are cross-referenced with notarial and institutional archives, such as those of academies, educational institutions, and theatres.
The period we study was a time of intense competition between Roman aristocratic families, who vied with one another for political influence through the patronage of the arts. In this context, the arts became a vehicle for political action. The project starts in 1644, with the election of Pope Innocent X after the reign of Pope Urban VIII (which we have deliberately left out since the performing arts of this period have already been studied in depth); it ends in 1740, with the death of the great patron Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. This date marks the end of what is known as ‘minor nepotism’ (the tendency of certain pontiffs to favour relatives, often nephews, with papal political appointments). The study of the Roman performing arts scene in the 17th and 18th centuries through family archives offers interesting comparisons with contemporary cultural activity, allowing us to reflect upon the birth of entrepreneurship, the notion of cultural consumption, the quest for legitimacy, and the importance of cross-cultural transfers on a European scale.
PERFORMART is organized around three main research questions:
(1) How can we transform very diverse texts, objects, facts, institutions, and individuals into usable data?
(2) How can we take up the challenge of writing the history of past performances, which have left only fragmentary traces?
(3) How can we analyze the economy of 17th and 18th century performances through categories of their own time, without imposing on them the distorting prism of our modern vision?
Our extensive archival survey has documented more than 2,300 performance events and resulted in the creation of a database of new information on ‘spectacle events’ in 17th- and 18th-century Rome (publicly available in November 2022). Our approach, based on the critical concept of performance, has brought to light a surprisingly diverse network of actors, interconnected on friendly, family, and professional levels. The comparative analysis of very diverse case studies has revealed, if not a model, at least an operating strategy common to the great Roman families, based on practices that were used repeatedly for various types of spectacle events. Moreover, the production of performance events required various kinds of financial and technical support, which until now have been largely unknown. These events set off a cascade of activities involving a large number of specialized craftsmen, generating a veritable economy of entertainment in the city. The PERFORMART research team has proven that these productions were central to social activities of the time by analysing thousands of accounting documents and their role in the production process, identifying the operations they record, and reconstructing the banking system that allowed the families to finance their shows. The project has thus contributed to a better understanding of the dynamics of political legitimation through wealth and the arts, which form the backbone of family histories of Roman elites.
