#ferdinando fuga

[neapolis-neapolis]

Giovanni Antonio Medrano, Antonio Canevari, Ferdinando Fuga e Antonio Niccolini, Reggia di Capodimonte (1738 - 1838), Napoli.

[premoderno]

Palazzo della Consulta | Roma | Ferdinando Fuga | 1732-1735

[neapolis-neapolis]

Giovanni Antonio Medrano, Antonio Canevari, Ferdinando Fuga e Antonio Niccolini, Reggia di Capodimonte (1738 - 1838), Napoli.

[neapolis-neapolis]

Domenico Fontana, Francesco Antonio Picchiatti, Ferdinando Fuga, Gaetano Genovese e altri, Palazzo Reale (1600-1850), Napoli.

[neapolis-neapolis]

Giovan Antonio Dosio, Dionisio Nencioni di Bartolomeo e Ferdinando Fuga, Chiesa dei Girolamini (1592-1780), Napoli.

[premoderno]

Palazzo della Consulta | Roma | Ferdinando Fuga | 1732-1735

[chiasmo-opuscofoglio-blog]

URBAN NEAPOLITAN UTOPIAS  CHIASMO for @artwort magazine #3    From Albergo dei Poveri to Scampia Vele here more info

[labelleitalie-blog]

Ferdinando Fuga. Palazzo Corsini, garden façade (1-2), former apartment of Queen Christina of Sweden (3).  1738-50s. Rome.

On thursday and friday I was very sick, but I nevertheless managed to make my way to the Palazzo Corsini friday evening. This eighteenth-century palace houses the Galleria Corsini, one of the many museums that make up the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Rome. The Palazzo Corsini was designed by architect Ferdinando Fuga, who, in 1738, was commissioned by Cardinal Neri Corsini, nephew of the reigning pope, Clement XII, to convert the sixteenth-century palace built for Cardinal Raffaele Riario into a grand princely residence, suitable for a member of the papal family. By the seventeenth-century, the family palace had become the quintessential status symbol for papal families who sought to exhibit their newly acquired wealth, prestige, and influence. By commissioning the construction of a grand residence, the family of the reigning pope was able to demonstrate that it now had sufficient financial means to carry out such an ambitious architectural project, but also that it now had the power to carve out a large enough space from the Roman urban fabric to accommodate such an immense structure. Following in the footsteps of the Farnese in the sixteenth-century, seventeenth-century papal families such as the Borghese, the Barberini, and the Pamphilj took advantage of their new influential and financial assets to build magnificent palaces, which came to represent the power of these papal families, even after the death of their pontifical family members.  The construction of these residences was made possible through the practice of nepotism, which allowed the relatives of the pope, and, in particular, the papal nephews, to have access to lucrative titles, benefices, and other sources of considerable income, thereby providing them with the financial resources to carry out such expensive building campaigns. Following the enactment of Romanum decet pontificem in 1692, however, a papal bull which prohibited the practice of nepotism and prevented pontiffs from using apostolic funds to enrich their own families, the construction of papal family palaces, a ubiquitous practice in seventeenth-century Rome, was made extremely difficult. The Palazzo Corsini was, in fact, one of only two such papal family palaces to be constructed in Rome during the eighteenth-century. This second palace, the Palazzo Braschi, constructed during the pontificate of pope Pius VI (1775-99), was, like Palazzo Corsini, the result of strategic financial maneuvering. Unable to take advantage of the financial resources of his papal uncle as had his seventeenth-century predecessors, like Scipione Borghese or Francesco Barberini, Cardinal Neri Corsini needed to resort to other means in order to amass enough capital to finance the construction of his family palace. Neri Corsini, therefore, became cardinal protector of the Kingdom of Portugal, lobbying for Portuguese interests at the papal court in exchange for financial support from King John V of Portugal. Neri Corsini also engaged in less legitimate business practices, as Heather Hyde Minor has noted, including bribery and embezzlement.

The eighteenth-century was a time of dramatic change throughout Europe, culminating in the French Revolution of 1789 and the imprisonment of Pope Pius VI by Napoleon and his forces in 1799. Even by the first half of the century, the great pomp and ostentatious display that had characterized the papacy of the seventeenth-century had been limited by the weakened economic and political position of the papal states and the introduction of new reforms like the Romanun decet pontificem. Nevertheless, Cardinal Neri Corsini succeeded in constructing a magnificent palace, one every bit as grand as the residences built by the papal families of the seventeenth-century. Ferdinando Fuga, one of the greatest architects of his day, gave the old Riario palace an impressive facade, a grand salone preceded by a series of luxurious anti-chambers, and a number of staircases, including a spectacular stairway with three large entrances, allowing for three carriages to enter the palace simultaneously. The palace also features one of Rome’s most beautiful gardens, and a fine collection of paintings, including works by Caravaggio, Guercino, and Giovanni Lanfranco.

In addition to the Corsini and Riario families, one of the palace’s most illustrious inhabitants was Queen Christina of Sweden, who moved into one of the palace apartments––then still belonging to the Riario family––in 1659, and resided there off and on until her death in 1689. The room in which she stayed still exists, although its current decorations date to Fuga’s building campaign in the eighteenth-century.