Accounting for Affection

Mothering and Politics in Early Modern Rome

C. Castiglione

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137315724
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Accounting for Affection examines the multifaceted nature of early modern motherhood by focusing on the ideas and strategies of Roman aristocratic mothers during familial conflict. Illuminating new approaches to the maternal and the familial employed by such women, it demonstrates how interventions gained increasing favor in early modern Rome.

1

Practicing Motherhood When the Definition of “Family” Is Ambiguous

Anna Colonna and the Barberini Dynasty, 1627–47

Even in a city where exemplars of maternal virtue were abundant, Anna Colonna Barberini (1601–58) stands apart from her peers.¹ Her heroic attention to dynastic interests and her devotion to her husband and her children were intertwined with her enthusiasms for Catholic Reformation piety, a tangle of commitments that she reinvented throughout her life. As the wife of Taddeo Barberini (1603–47), nephew of Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini, r.1623–44), her experiences incorporated all the intense demands that could be brought to bear upon a mother of her stature (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). She served brilliantly as the nexus between the Colonna and Barberini dynasties, expanding the connections between them for the benefit of both. Since she was the wife of the pope’s nephew, she played an important public role in Rome, receiving dignitaries on behalf of the pontiff, writing letters, and reciprocating visits to other aristocratic families.² From the late 1620s through the 1640s, she also faced the burdens of childbearing and the rearing of her four children who survived the perils of infancy. Mothering consumed her days, caused her anxiety and simultaneously inspired her affections. When the Barberini fell under intense scrutiny after the death of Urban VIII in 1644, Anna remained in Rome as the beleaguered family’s staunch defender while the Barberini men sought safety by fleeing to Paris. She was the mater litigans par excellence, left to save what the men of the Barberini dynasty were in no position to defend.

The origins of Anna’s heroic Roman motherhood are sometimes linked to the failure of the Barberini to support her. Greatness in this equation was thus a compensatory strategy for the defects of marital kin. Yet Anna’s maternal dilemmas were by no means unique to her. Divided and complex loyalties characterized the allegiances of Roman aristocratic mothers. There was no single entity called the family to which such women belonged.³ In medieval and early modern Europe, as in antiquity, the family (familia, famiglia) included not only the kin group but the servants as well. This was the sense in which Anna still used the word famiglia, although increasingly in the seventeenth century more of the male servants were lodged in a dwelling separate from the family palace.⁴ Anna referred to the Colonna as “la mia casa paterna” [my paternal house]. In her letters to Taddeo she referred to the Barberini as “la vostra casa” [your House]. Aristocratic case [houses] in Rome were typically ruled by their high-ranking clerical members,⁵ and included a far-flung set of relations linked through a venerable male ancestor. In Anna’s lifetime, the Barberini family had no fewer than three high-ranking clerics – Pope Urban VIII, Taddeo’s older brother Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597–1679), and his younger brother Cardinal Antonio Barberini (1608–71).

Figure 1.1 Attributed to Gabriele Renzi, Princess Anna Colonna Barberini. Courtesy of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.

Figure 1.2 Bernardino Cametti, Prefect Taddeo Barberini, 1704. Courtesy of Museo di Roma.

Most dear to Anna was the nameless unit of herself, the children, and Taddeo. Although she hoped to promote good will among all these familial enterprises, she clearly favored the unit of madre-figli-Taddeo and tried to argue for its interests first, while never completely dismissing the other dynastic undertaking.⁶ Anna’s concept of the family is best glimpsed in her correspondence with Taddeo, which reveals how she acknowledged the multifaceted dimensions of the dynastic, but still insisted upon the preeminence of an entity for which she had no specific name. Anna operated on its behalf in a world where there was a highly evolved iconography of aristocratic identity and discourse of dynastic loyalty, both richly elaborated first in the Renaissance and re-elaborated in Italy often thereafter. Against this venerable historical framework, Anna had to improvise without vocabulary and with little precedent for prioritizing the madre-figli-Taddeo unit. There were many nuances in her improvisation, a complexity borne from witnessing the grave difficulties of her natal and marital families. There was danger in her solutions as well, since the noblewoman insisted on prioritizing the nuclear family, but this fragile configuration would not survive the near annihilation of the Barberini dynasty in the 1640s. Anna’s struggle to reorient the dynastic enterprise to the nuclear family brings into view both her improvised alternatives and the complex web of obligations, loyalties, and interests in which Roman aristocratic mothers operated in the seventeenth century.⁷ Its patterns were intricate but its threads could easily fray, as the life of Anna Colonna underscores.

The Future of Two Dynasties: The Union of Anna and Taddeo

At the relatively late age of 26, Anna Colonna was married to Taddeo Barberini, a man two years her junior. Like her sisters, she was religiously devout and dreamed of becoming a nun. Her family decided otherwise.⁸ Taddeo was so deferent to his father and his uncle, Pope Urban VIII, that he allowed them to pick his bride.⁹ The marriage in 1627 was decidedly one of dynastic strategy. The ceremony sanctifying the political union was celebrated by the pope himself in Castel Gandolfo.¹⁰ During the 1620s, the destiny of the Barberini soared in Rome: two of Urban VIII’s nephews had already been made cardinals, and Taddeo secured a prestigious alliance for the family with his marriage to Anna, daughter of the Conestabile of Naples, Filippo Colonna.¹¹ Such an alliance accomplished key goals for each side. It united the Neapolitan branch of the Colonna family with the rulers of one of the most prestigious states in Italy. All great aristocratic families throughout the peninsula sought such ties to the papacy. The marriage also allowed the Barberini, a relatively modest family of newcomers to Rome, to make an alliance with a dynasty far more ancient and prestigious than they.

The rightfulness of the union was incorporated into the design of the Barberini’s innovative family palace on the Quirinal hill. Begun during the late 1620s and unique in its design, the Palazzo Barberini alle Quattro Fontane enshrined in architecture and celebrated in its ceiling paintings the significant place of the family in Rome.¹² Its design embodied the bifurcated strategy of Roman aristocratic families: the north wing was intended for Taddeo, the brother who was designated to carry on the lineage, and the south wing was planned for the clerical brother, Cardinal Francesco¹³ (see Figure 0.3 in the Introduction). The wing of each brother, though joined by a connective loggia, was conceived as a separate palace.¹⁴ Because of her significant diplomatic role, Anna’s apartments – in the wing of the palace designated for Taddeo – were more impressive than those of her husband.¹⁵ It was she, more than he, who would play a critical ceremonial function in the city. She received important visitors after they had made their official visit to the pope.¹⁶ Taddeo’s mother, Costanza, had formerly and unhappily played such a role, and she gladly relinquished it to Anna after her marriage to Taddeo. Thereafter, Costanza required no more of the palace space than simple rooms for her religiously austere lifestyle and an attic room for her chickens.¹⁷

Anna’s role was significant in helping the Barberini avoid the controversies over precedence that frequently occurred in the encounters between aristocratic men in Rome, where tempers and titles were inflated during the reign of Urban VIII.¹⁸ For the Barberini, such conflicts had intensified after Taddeo was awarded the ceremonial title of Prefect of Rome in 1631.¹⁹ He assumed that he had preeminence in all encounters, including in meetings with visiting dignitaries, who preferred to avoid meeting with Taddeo altogether in order to avoid insults to their honor or potential challenges to the honor of the pope’s nephew.²⁰ Taddeo sought to avoid similar encounters, so great was the intensity of such controversies.²¹ By contrast, men tended to accord precedence to women, simplifying the encounter between Anna and visiting dignitaries and other well-born Roman aristocrats.²²

Anna Colonna’s apartments in the family palace were, therefore, designed with great care in light of her ceremonial activities. In her apartments, architecture and painting did much of the boasting about the rightfulness of Barberini rule. Visiting dignitaries such as Cardinal Richelieu of France could observe in Anna’s apartments on the piano nobile a complex iconographical program, which legitimated Barberini power and illustrated the intertwined destiny of the two families joined by the marriage of Anna and Taddeo.²³ The ceiling painting in her salotto, Divine Wisdom by Andrea Sacchi, for instance, allegorized wisdom as woman whom the worthy ruler must pursue and love²⁴ (Figure 1.3). The complex scriptural allegory announced the union of the two families in its details. Barberini bees, lions, and suns furthered the allegorical argument that the Barberini were indeed “lovers of wisdom” and that their rule was thereby divinely sanctioned.²⁵ Subtle details incorporated symbols of the Colonna family, including the family emblem of the column, depicted as the cloud upon which Wisdom dwells.²⁶ Sirens, which had appeared in Colonna family crests since the mid-sixteenth century, materialized in the paint and in the plaster in the corner of the ceiling cornice.²⁷ With arms raised, the sea creatures hoisted Barberini suns into the celestial realm in which Divine Wisdom ruled.

Figure 1.3 Andrea Sacchi, Allegory of Divine Wisdom, 1629–33. Courtesy of Galleria Nazionale D’Arte Antica in Palazzo Barberini.

From the salotto, visitors could enter the family chapel, where depictions of the Holy Family sanctified the procreative future of the family.²⁸ A critical role for Anna was to bear the next generation of the Barberini, and this aspect of the marriage found its allocation in palace architecture in a private stairway that connected the noble couple’s two apartments.²⁹ During the planning of the salotto and chapel Anna was pregnant with her son Carlo, born in early 1630.³⁰ One of the earliest public events in the chapel was the baptism of Anna’s daughter, Lucrezia, in September of 1632.³¹ The Palazzo Barberini alle Quattro Fontane not only incorporated the glories of Urban VIII’s papal rule, but also illustrated the future of the dynasty that would continue beyond his papacy, a future that began with Taddeo’s marriage to Anna.

Anna was the critical nexus in the collaboration between these two dynasties, old and new. She had to balance her activities on the part of natal and marital kin alongside the considerable physical and psychological demands of raising the Barberini heirs amidst the reality of high childhood mortality. She attended to this latter task with the utmost seriousness and anxiety. Her activities were multivalent, consuming her days; as she summarized life during her children’s early years, “I don’t have time to eat.”³² Anna’s difficulties in her life with the Barberini are well known, better known than her successes. Her adversities have been traced to her marriage to the pope’s nephew, a union which supposedly doomed her to difficulty and betrayal. Taddeo was considered by some a proud and difficult man.³³ In this context, it might be assumed that Anna’s attitude toward him remained in the realm of “dutiful respect required of a woman in seventeenth-century society.”³⁴ The whole of their marriage has sometimes been extrapolated from the events following the death of Urban VIII, when Taddeo and his brothers found themselves under intense and perhaps life-threatening scrutiny by the succeeding pope, Innocent X (Pamphilj, r.1644–55). In fear for their lives, they fled for Paris, taking Anna’s children with them, but leaving Anna behind, against her wishes, without letting her know their plans, and without the financial means to sustain herself.

In an emotional letter to her son, Carlo, in 1646, An...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter: 1 Practicing Motherhood When the Definition of “Family” Is Ambiguous: Anna Colonna and the Barberini Dynasty, 1627–47
• Chapter: 2 “The Interests Common to Us All”: Olimpia Giustiniani on the Governing of the Roman Aristocratic Family
• Chapter: 3 At the Nexus of Impossibility: The Medical and the Maternal in Seventeenth-Century Rome
• Chapter: 4 Ippolita’s Wager: Letting Daughters Decide in the Early Eighteenth Century
• Chapter: 5 Extravagant Pretensions: The Triumph of Maternal Love in the World of Rome
• Conclusion
• Appendices: Family Trees
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index