ABOUT
During the preparation phase of the research proposal that eventually led to the actualization of the ‘Capturing the Present’-project, Jan Blanc and Marije Osnabrugge published the edited volume Roma 1629: una microstoria dell’arte with the publisher Artemide, as part of the book series ‘Pensieri ad Arte’.
While the book focuses on artistic and cultural life in Rome in the year 1629 and thus falls outside the geographical scope of the FNS Sinergia project, its preparation, the introduction and intensive collaboration with a group of passionate contributors allowed the editors to explore methodological questions related to the perception of time, which is at the core of the current project. As such, the book part of the project’s extended prehistory.
DESCRIPTION OF THE VOLUME
This volume is a methodological experiment, which seeks to try to apply the considerable progress made in the field of microhistory to art history. Each of the eleven essays collected in this book deals with a cultural or artistic event that took place in Rome in 1629. Far from being an extraordinary year in the history of the papal city, 1629 in fact shows us ‘business as usual’ in the artistic life of the Urbe. The choice of a limited geographical and chronological framework, on the other hand, offers the opportunity to focus on the details of individual vicissitudes. Moreover, read together, the essays paint a multifaceted picture of the cultural life of modern Rome. They allow us to meet the main actors of Roman life in 1629 (from the Barberini and Cassiano dal Pozzo to Sandrart and Giulio Mancini), as well as to understand the dynamics of family networks, social (the Bentvueghels) and professional (the Academy of St. Luke) networks, and to open a research window on the practices of everyday life in the atelier (Antonio Bosio in front of his desk and Filippo Napoletano’s house-museum), in the building sites (Ciampelli in the Fabbrica di San Pietro and Valentin in the Barberini Palace) and in the street (Duquesnoy studying antiquities or the Florentines celebrating one of their new saints).
(source: back cover, translated from Italian)
