Ludovico Chigi – Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta

Roman with many titles had powerful ancestors

Ludovico Chigi, pictured in
his ceremonial uniform

Ludovico Chigi Albani della Rovere was born on this day in 1866 in Ariccia, a town in the Alban Hills to the southeast of Rome.

Chigi was the son of Imperial Prince Mario Chigi della Rovere-Albani and his wife, Princess Antoinette zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn. His father’s family, the Chigi, was one of the most prominent noble Roman families and they were descended from the rich and powerful banker, Agostino Chigi.

Another of their ancestors was Pope Alexander VII, who in the 17th century had conferred upon his nephew, Agostino Chigi, the hereditary princedoms of Farnese and Campagnano and the dukedoms of Ariccia and Formello. Chigi made his money in Siena but moved to Rome, taking his vast wealth with him, and he lent considerable sums of money to his uncle, the Pope.

For all the descendants of the Chigi male line, Pope Alexander VII had procured the title of Imperial Prince and Princess from the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I.

Agostino Chigi had also helped Pope Julius II financially and had been made treasury and notary of the Apostolic Camera. Julius II had authorised the Chigi family to augment their name and arms with his own, Della Rovere, and he had become their relative through lines of descent from his illegitimate daughter, Felice della Rovere.

Ludovico married Donna Anna Aldobrandini, the daughter of Pietro, Prince Aldobrandini, in 1893. They had two children, Prince Sigismondo and Princess Laura Maria Caterina.

In 1914, Ludovico succeeded his father and became eighth Prince of Farnese and Campagnano and inherited many other titles.

He was responsible for three papal conclaves and became an honorary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Agostino Chigi, the banker who
founded the Chigi dynasty

In 1931, Ludovico was elected Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Both of his parents had been members of the Order.

The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, to give it its full name, is a Roman Catholic organisation based in Rome with about 13,000 members worldwide. 

It was founded in 1048 by merchants from Amalfi, who were in Jerusalem as a monastic order and ran a hospital to tend to Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land.

At the height of its power, the Order was also tasked by Rome with the additional military function of defending Christians from the local Muslim population.

The Knights of St. John were just one of the Christian military orders founded during this period.

When the Sultan of Egypt retook Jerusalem in 1291, the Knights of St. John went into exile, settling in Rhodes 20 years later. In 1523, they were forced from Rhodes by the Sultan’s forces and settled in Malta, which they ruled until they were dislodged by Napoleon’s army in 1798. 

It is for that reason that the organisation began to be known as the Order of Malta or Knights of Malta.

After the defeat by the French, the Order then settled in Rome in the mid-19th century, where it remains to this day.

The Knights have had no military function since leaving Malta and have since sponsored medical missions in more than 120 countries. Under Ludovico’s leadership during World War II, the Order conducted hospital and charity work on a large scale.

In 1947, Ludovico was appointed president of an international committee to oversee the rebuilding of the Abbey of Monte Cassino.

Ludovico died in 1951 in Rome at the age of 85.  

Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Collegiata di Santa Maria
Assunta is a feature of the town of Ariccia

Travel tip:

Ariccia, where Ludovico was born, is one of the Castelli Romani towns, situated in the Parco Regionale dei Castelli Romani. Some 25km (15.5 miles) from Rome, Ariccia has become famous for its porchetta, which is cooked slowly with wild fennel. The Sagra della Porchetta festival takes place every year during the first weekend of September, when the town celebrates with music, dancing, stalls and exhibitions. This festival began in 1950 and is one of the most traditional festivals in the Lazio region, which helps to promote porchetta to other parts of Italy and the world.  As part of the Castelli Romani, the town is also known for its wine production. Ariccia's main church, the Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta, completed in 1664, was designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

The Chigi family's legacy in Rome includes the
Palazzo Chigi, the prime minister's official residence 

Travel tip:

The 16th-century Palazzo Chigi, which overlooks the Via del Corso in Rome, was completed by Carlo Maderno in 1580 for the Aldobrandini family. It was in the ownership of the Chigi family from 1659 until the 19th century. After a period as the residence of the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador to Italy, it was bought by the Italian state in 1916. It was used first as the residence of the Minister for Colonial Affairs and later the Minister of Foreign Affairs before, in 1961, becoming the official meeting place of the Council of Ministers, whose president is the head of the Italian government - the prime minister - and can now use the palace as his official residence.

Also on this day:

138: The death of the Roman emperor, Hadrian

1510: The death of Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus

1954: The death of Mafia chieftain Calogero Vizzini

Home

Pietro Aretino – writer

Satirist was both admired and feared by the nobility

Pietro Aretino, captured by his friend, the
Venetian painter Titian in around 1545

Poet, playwright and prose writer Pietro Aretino was born on this day in 1492 in Arezzo in Tuscany.

Aretino became famous for his satirical attacks on important figures in society and grew wealthy from the gifts he received from noblemen who feared being exposed by his powerful pen.

Although he was the son of an Arezzo shoemaker, he pretended to be the natural son of a nobleman and took his name from Arretium, the Roman name for Arezzo.

He moved to Perugia while still very young and lived the life of a painter, but in 1517 when he was in his early twenties, Aretino moved on to Rome, where he secured the patronage of the rich banker, Agostino Chigi.

When Pope Leo X's pet elephant, Hanno, died, Aretino wrote a satirical pamphlet, The Last Will and Testament of the Elephant Hanno, cleverly mocking the leading political and religious figures in Rome at the time. This established his fame as a satirist. He then wrote a series of viciously satirical lampoons supporting the candidacy of Giulio de’ Medici for the papacy. Giulio duly became Pope Clement VII in 1523.

Despite being supported by the Pope and his patron, Chigi, Aretino was finally forced to leave Rome because of writing a collection of ‘lewd sonnets’, sonetti lussuriosi, in 1524.

The painter Titian became a good friend
and supporter of Aretino

By 1527 Aretino had settled in Venice where he was admired but also feared by those in power and he received enough money to be able to live in a grand - albeit dissolute - style.

He became a close friend of the painter Titian and sold paintings on Titian’s behalf to Francis I, the King of France.

Titian’s portrait of Aretino, painted in around 1545, shows him wearing a gold chain that he had received as a gift from the King of France.

It is claimed Francis I of France and Charles V of Spain both paid him a pension at the same time, each hoping he would damage the reputation of the other.

Aretino wrote six volumes of letters that were published from 1537 onwards which reveal his cynicism and justify the name he gave to himself, ‘flagello dei principe’ - scourge of princes.

He was particularly vicious in his attack on Romans, not forgetting that they had forced him to move to Venice. In his Ragionamenti - Discussions - written between 1534 and 1536, Roman prostitutes reveal to each other the moral failings of many of the important men in the city and in his Dialogues, he examines the carnality and corruption among Romans at the time.

Aretino’s dramas present well observed pictures of lower-class life, free from the conventions that burdened other contemporary dramas. The best known is Cortigiana - The Courtesan - published in 1534, a lively and amusing insight into the life of the lower classes in Rome.

Aretino captured in another portrait
by Titian, painted in 1512

Aretino also wrote a tragedy, Orazia, published in 1546, which has been judged to be the best Italian tragedy written in the 16th century.

Pietro Aretino died in 1556 in Venice aged 64. It was claimed at the time that he either suffocated because he could not stop laughing, or fell backwards and hit his head while laughing.

He was buried in the Church of San Luca, which lies between St Mark’s Square and the Rialto bridge in Venice.

In 2007, the composer Michael Nyman set some of Aretino’s Sonetti lussoriosi to music under the title 8 Lust Songs. Aretino’s texts again caused controversy when the songs were performed in London in 2008 as the printed programmes containing extracts had to be withdrawn after there were allegations of obscenity.

The interior of the 13th century Basilica di San Francesco
in Piazza San Francesco in the heart of Arezzo

Travel tip:

Arezzo, where Pietro Aretino was born and acquired his surname, is an interesting old town in eastern Tuscany, which was used as the location for the 1997 film Life Is Beautiful. One of the scenes in the film took place in front of the Badia delle Sante Flora e Lucilla, a medieval abbey. Right in the centre of the town, the 13th century Basilica di San Francesco in Piazza San Francesco is the most famous sight in Arezzo and attracts many visitors as it contains Piero della Francesco’s cycle of frescoes, The Legend of the True Cross, painted between 1452 and 1466 and considered to be his finest work.

The church of San Luca in Venice, which can be found
between Piazza San Marco and the Rialto bridge

Travel tip:

Pietro Aretino was buried in the Church of San Luca close to Salizzada San Luca in the St Mark’s sestiere of Venice. On his tombstone was the epitaph: ‘Here lies Aretino, poet Tosco, that everyone spoke poorly about, except Christ, who apologised saying: ‘I do not know him.’’ This inscription was later removed, either by the Inquisition, or during restoration work on the floor of the church in the 18th century. It is claimed many journalists, writers and non-believers used to visit the church looking for Aretino’s tomb. On either side of the altar there used to be paintings from the 16th century, in which Aretino was portrayed as part of the crowd. It has been claimed that the paintings were removed by one of the priests in the 19th century to discourage the interest and they have still not been put back.

Also on this day:

1317: The death of Sant’Agnese of Montepulciano

1949: The birth of Massimo D’Alema, Italy’s first Communist prime minister

1951: The death of anti-Fascist politician Ivanoe Bonomi


Home

Baldassare Peruzzi - architect and painter

Pupil of Bramante who left mark on Rome

The portrait of Baldassare Peruzzi in
Giorgio Vasari's 1568 book Lives of the Most
 Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

The architect and painter Baldassare Peruzzi, who trained under Donato Bramante and was a contemporary of Raphael, was born on this day in 1481 in a small town near Siena.

Peruzzi worked in his home city and in Rome, where he spent many years as one of the architects of the St Peter’s Basilica project but where he was also responsible for two outstanding buildings in his own right - the Villa Farnesina and the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne.

The Villa Farnesina, a summer house commissioned by the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi in the Trastevere district, is unusual for its U-shaped floor plan, with a five-bay loggia between the arms.

Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo were among those who helped decorate the villa with frescoes, but Peruzzi is acknowledged as the chief designer, possibly aided by Giuliano da Sangallo. He was relatively inexperienced at the time but was personally selected by Chigi despite the huge array of talent on offer in the city at the time.

Some of the frescoed paintings on the walls of the interior rooms are also by Peruzzi. One example is the Sala delle Prospettive, in which the walls are painted to create the illusion of standing in an open-air terrace, lined by pillars, looking out over a continuous landscape.

Peruzzi's brilliant Sala delle Prospettive, with its illusion
of an open-air terrace, inside the Villa Farnesina

Originally known as the Villa Chigi, the house in 1577 became the property of the Farnese family after whom it was renamed. Michelangelo at one time proposed linking the villa with Palazzo Farnese on the other side of the Tiber. The project was never completed, although there are remnants of a few arches still visible in the back of Palazzo Farnese.

The Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne on the present-day Corso Vittorio Emanuele II is still more unusual, featuring a curved facade, dictated by the shape of the foundations of the building that had previously stood on the site - destroyed during the 1527 Sack of Rome by mutinous troops of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V - which had owed their pattern to the semi-circular Odeon of Domitian, an ancient Roman theatre.

Commissioned by Pietro Massimo, descendent of one of the oldest noble families in Rome, the palace has an entrance characterised by a central portico with six Doric columns. Inside, a courtyard and a loggia feature more Doric columns, hence the palace’s name.

The monument to
Peruzzi at the Pantheon

Peruzzi, born in the town of Sovicille, about 10km (6 miles) southwest of Siena, began his career as a painter of frescoes in the Cappella San Giovanni in Siena’s cathedral. He moved to Rome in his 20s, receiving the commission for the Villa Farnesina in 1509.

With the death of Raphael, in 1520 he was appointed as one of the architects engaged on the massive programme to build a new St Peter’s Basilica.

However, he fled Rome following the events of 1527 and returned to Siena, where he was employed as architect to the Republic. He built new fortifications for the city, remodelled the Church of San Domenico and designed a remarkable dam on the Bruna river near Giuncarico.

From 1531 he was back in Rome and again working at St Peter's, where he was appointed the principal architect to the basilica in 1534.

Other works attributed to Peruzzi include a mosaic ceiling for the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, paintings in the churches of Sant'Onofrio and San Pietro in Montorio and in Santa Maria in Portico a Fontegiusta in Siena.

Peruzzi’s son, Giovanni Sallustio, was also an architect. Another son, Onorio, learned painting from his father but then became a Dominican priest in the convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome.

He died in Rome in January 1536, aged 54.

The Villa Farnesina is one of Baldassare Peruzzi's two
masterpieces from his time working in Rome

Travel tip:

The Villa Farnesina can be found on Via della Lungara in the Trastevere district of Rome.  After the Farnese family, the villa belonged to the Bourbons of Naples and in 1861 to the Spanish Ambassador in Rome, Bermudez de Castro, Duke of Ripalta. Today, it is owned by the Italian State and accommodates the Accademia dei Lincei, a long-standing academy of sciences. The main rooms of the villa, including the Loggia, are open to visitors from 9am to 2pm on Monday to Saturday, and on every second Sunday of the month from 9am to 5pm. For more details, visit http://www.villafarnesina.it

The beautiful Romanesque-Gothic
cathedral in Siena

Travel tip:

Siena’s Duomo - the Cathedral of St Mary of the Assumption - was designed and completed between 1215 and 1263 on the site of an earlier structure. It has a beautiful façade built in Tuscan Romanesque style using polychrome marble. There had been plans to build an enormous basilica, which would have been the largest in the world, but the idea was abandoned because of lack of funds due to war and the plague. Nonetheless, the cathedral built in its place to plans drawn up by Giovanni di Agostino, with a pulpit designed by Nicola Pisani, is considered a masterpiece of Italian Romanesque-Gothic architecture.

Siena hotels from Booking.com


More reading:

Raphael, the precocious genius who became one of the Renaissance greats

How Agostino Chigi became one of Europe's richest men

The mutinous army that laid waste to Rome

Also on this day:

1274: The death of the philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas

1678: The birth of Turin architect Filippo Juvarra

1785: The birth of novelist Alessandro Manzoni

Selected books:

Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists (Oxford World's Classics)

(Picture credits: Peruzzi monument by cmholm;Villa Farnesina by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra; Siena cathedral by Myrabella; all via Wikimedia Commons)


Home

Agostino Chigi - banker and arts patron

Nobleman from Siena became one of Europe’s richest men

A Roman coin bearing the image of Agostino Chigi,
who was one of the 16th century's richest bankers

The banker Agostino Chigi, who was a major sponsor of artists during the Renaissance, was born on this day in 1466 in Siena.

At its height, Chigi’s banking house in Rome was the biggest financial institution in Europe, employing up to 20,000 people, with branches throughout Italy and abroad, as far apart as London and Cairo.

Chigi invested a good deal of his wealth in supporting the arts, notably providing financial backing to almost all the main figures of the early 16th century, including Perugino, Sebastiano del Piombo, Giovanni da Udine, Giulio Romano, Il Sodoma (Giovanni Bazzi) and Raphael.

Perugino painted The Chigi Altarpiece, dated at around 1506-1507, which hangs in the Chigi family chapel in the church of Sant'Agostino in Siena. 

Chigi’s significant legacy to Rome was to have built a chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Pace, another - his mortuary chapel, the Chigi Chapel - in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, and the superb suburban villa in Trastevere, on the banks of the Tiber, which since 1579 has been known as the Villa Farnesina. 

The altarpiece painted by Perugino
for Agostino Chigi in Siena

Agostino Chigi was the son of the prominent Sienese banker Mariano Chigi, from an ancient and illustrious Tuscan family. He moved to Rome around 1487, taking with him a rich fund of capital.

He grew the wealth of his own bank by lending considerable sums to Pope Alexander VI and others, and by diversifying from regular banking practice by buying monopoly control of salt mining in the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples, as well as that of alum, a mineral used in the textile industry.

After the death of the Borgia pope Alexander VI and his short-lived Sienese successor Pius III Piccolomini, Chigi helped Pope Julius II, in return for which he became treasurer and notary of the Apostolic Camera.  Agostino even accompanied Julius in the field in his military campaigns and went to Venice on his behalf to buy Venetian support for the papal forces in the War of the League of Cambrai.

Work began on his magnificent palace in Trastevere in 1506. Chigi took the unusual step of commissioning an untried pupil of Bramante, Baldassare Peruzzi, to design and oversee the construction of the villa, although he may have been helped Giuliano da Sangallo, the favored architect of Lorenzo de' Medici.

Raphael's fresco The Triumph of Galatea.
in the loggia at the Villa Farnesina

His design differed from that of the typical urban palazzo, which tended to be rectangular, with an enclosed courtyard. This villa, intended as an airy summer pavilion, had a U-shaped plan with a five-bay loggia between the arms, facing north, which was the main entrance.

The best known element of the sumptuous decorations are Raphael's frescoes on the ground floor, both in the loggia depicting the classical and secular myths of Cupid and Psyche, and in the east-facing loggia, depicting The Triumph of Galatea. 

This was a mythological scene from an intended series inspired by the Stanze per la giostra of the Florentine poet Angelo Poliziano. It shows the near-naked sea nymph Galatea on a shell-shaped chariot drawn by two dolphins, surrounded by other sea creatures.

It has been noted that Raphael’s Galatea bore similarities to the courtesan, Imperia Cognati, who was Agostino Chigi's lover and is said to have posed for Raphael on more than one occasion. The art historian and Raphael's near-contemporary, Giorgio Vasari, noted, however, that Raphael had said that Galatea was the product of his imagination, an idealised beauty.

It was at this villa that Chigi held sumptuous banquets. He was recognised as the richest man in Rome but was said to have affected a contempt of money by throwing silver dishes into the Tiber at the end of the parties, although it is thought his servants were on hand to collect them in nets draped under the windows.

The villa was called the Viridario in Chigi's time. It became the property of the Farnese family in 1577, more than a half-century after his death.

The Palazzo Chigi, the current official residence of Italian prime ministers, was bought by Fabio Chigi, related to Agostino as a descendent of his father’s brother, shortly after he became Pope Alexander VII in 1655.

The northern aspect of the Villa Farnesina, which was
Agostino Chigi's summer palace in Rome

Travel tip:

The Villa Farnesina can be found on Via della Lungara in the Trastevere district of Rome.  After the Farnese family, the villa belonged to the Bourbons of Naples and in 1861 to the Spanish Ambassador in Rome, Bermudez de Castro, Duke of Ripalta. Today, it is owned by the Italian State and accommodates the Accademia dei Lincei, a long-standing academy of sciences. The main rooms of the villa, including the Loggia, are open to visitors from 9am to 2pm on Monday to Saturday, and on every second Sunday of the month from 9am to 5pm. For more details, visit http://www.villafarnesina.it

The Palazzo Chigi in Rome was built originally for the
Aldobrandini family before passing to the Chigi family in 1659

Travel tip:

The 16th-century Palazzo Chigi, which overlooks the Piazza Colonna and the Via del Corso in Rome, was begun in 1562 by Giacomo della Porta and completed by Carlo Maderno in 1580 for the Aldobrandini family. It was in the ownership of the Chigi family, who had it remodelled by Felice della Greca and Giovan Battista Contini, from 1659 until the 19th century. It became the residence of the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador to Italy in 1878 before being bought by the Italian state in 1916, when it became the home of the Minister for Colonial Affairs. Later it was the official residence of the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and in 1961 became the official meeting place of Council of Ministers, whose president is the head of the Italian government - the prime minister - and can now use the palace as his official residence.


More reading:

Raphael: The precocious genius from Urbino

How the courtesan Imperia Cognati became a 16th century celebrity

Pope Alexander VI - the scheming Borgia pope

Also on this day:

1463: The birth of antiquities collector Andrea della Valle

1797: The birth of composer Donizetti

1850: The birth of Agostino Richelmy, the cardinal who fought with Garibaldi

Home

Imperia Cognati - courtesan

Prostitute who became a celebrity

Raphael's Galatea in his frescoes at the Villa
Farnesina in Rome is thought to be Imperia

Imperia Cognati, who acquired celebrity status in Rome in the early 16^th century as a courtesan to a number of rich and powerful figures, was born on this day in 1486.

Courtesans were originally the female companions of courtiers of the papal court, whose duties required them to be educated and familiar with etiquette, so that they could participate in the formalities of court life and take part in polite conversation.

In time, however, in some cases their companionship became of a more intimate nature and they became the mistresses of their courtiers, who in the papal court were clerics nor permitted to marry.

It was common, too, for courtesans to be the companions of several clients simultaneously.  They were in effect a new class of prostitute, refined and educated enough to hold their own in polite society.

Imperia Cognati acquired her elevated status mainly through being the chosen companion of Agostino Chigi, a Sienese banker closely associated with Pope Alexander VI and others and a patron of the Renaissance.  At one time he was thought to be the richest banker in the world.

He lavished Imperia – as she was usually known – to the extent that she could afford to keep both a palace in Rome and a country villa.

The statue named Imperia at Konstanz is said to have been
 inspired by Balzac's fictional portrayal of a courtesan

Chigi remained her main client but she took others, maintaining her status – and income – by being very selective over the men with whom she would consort.  Her exclusive list included Angelo di Bufalo, who was another banker, Angelo Colocci, a papal secretary under Leo X, Tommaso Inghirami, a papal librarian, and the painter Raphael, of whom Chigi was a sponsor.

Imperia posed as a model for Raphael on a number of occasions.  It is thought that the nymph Galatea in the frescoes Raphael painted for the Villa Farnesina in Rome, built by Chigi, is actually Imperia.

Imperia’s background is not entirely clear. Some sources suggest she hailed from Ferrara but the consensus is that she was born in Rome, the daughter of a prostitute, Diana di Pietro Cognati, and raised in Via Alessandrina in the district of Borgo.

It was speculated that her father was Paris de Grassis, who would later serve as master of ceremonies under Pope Julius II, which may explain how she acquired an education, and why she at times referred to herself as Imperia de Paris.

She gave birth to a daughter, named Lucrezia, at the age of 17, of whom the father was assumed to be Chigi.

The artist Raphael was among Imperia's
lovers at the time she posed for him

Imperia died in 1512, at the age of just 26, apparently from poisoning, thought to be self-administered.

Various theories have been put forward as to what might have prompted her to take her own life. One is that she was distraught that Angelo di Bufalo, supposedly her true love, decided to end their relationship, another is that she felt pushed out when Chigi took a new, younger mistress. 

Whatever the reason, she was given a stately funeral in Rome, fit for a noblewoman rather than a prostitute, paid for by Agostino Chigi.  She was buried at the church of San Gregorio Magno al Celio in Rome, although the monument erected in her name has not survived.

Apart from her image being preserved in works by Raphael, Imperia is thought to have been the inspiration for Honoré de Balzac’s 1832 story La Belle Impéria, set in the time of the Council of Konstanz, which ended the Western Schism in the Catholic Church, in which a courtesan is given the name Imperia.

The character in Balzac’s novel has been portrayed by the German painter Lovis Corinth in 1925, and also inspired the larger-than-life Imperia statue in the harbour of Konstanz, the town on the lake in Germany of the same name, erected in 1993.

Travel tip:

Via Alessandrina is a street, nowadays closed to vehicles, that runs alongside the Roman ruins of the Italian capital, from the Forum in the direction of the Colosseum, joining up with Via dei Fori Imperiali.

The Villa Farnesina in the Trastevere district in Rome

Travel tip:

The Villa Farnesina, built by Baldassare Peruzzi for Agostino Chigi, can be found in the Via della Lungara, in the district of Trastevere in Rome. Owned at different times by the Bourbons of Naples and the Spanish Ambassador in Rome, it is today owned by the Italian State and accommodates the Accademia dei Lincei, a renowned Roman academy of sciences.  The main rooms of the villa, including the Loggia, are open to visitors.

Home