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Accademia di San Luca

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The Accademia di San Luca, (the "Academy of Saint Luke") was an association of artists in Rome, founded in 1593 with the directorship of Federico Zuccari, with the purpose of elevating the work of "artists" above that of craftsman. Also involved in the founding were Girolamo Muziano and Pietro Olivieri. Over the first centuries after its inception, Papal patronage and control dominated the institution. The academy was named after the evangelist Saint Luke, who, legend has it, made a portrait of the Virgin Mary, and thus became the patron saint of painters' guilds. It has for its modern descendant the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca

Its predecessor, the Compagnia di San Luca, a guild of painters and miniaturists, had its statutes and privileges renewed much earlier, under Pope Sixtus IV, on December 17, 1478.

In 1605, Pope Paul V granted the academy the right on the feast of St. Luke to pardon a condemned man. In 1620s, Urban VIII extended broad rights to the academy to decide who was considered an artist in Rome. The academy came under the patronage of his nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini. It was he who installed Giovan Francesco Romanelli as Principe in 1638 . In 1633, Urban VIII gave the Accademia the capacity to tax all artists as well as art-dealers, and monopolize all public commissions. These latter measures raised strong opposition and apparently were poorly enforced.

Over the years, the papal authorities exerted large degree of control over the leadership of the institution. Some modern critics have stated "with the ostensible purpose of giving artists a higher education and the real one of asserting the Church's control over art," . The prìncipi (directors) of the institution have included some of the pre-eminent painters of the the following centuries, including Domenichino, and Bernini. However, many prominent artists never joined or were admitted to the academy.

Other controversies debated within the Academy included the Sacchi- Cortona controversy (see Andrea Sacchi) about the number of figures per painting. Or the disdain of many academicians for the Bamboccianti. Giovanni Bellori gave famous lectures on the painting in the Academy. Painter Marco Benefial in the early eighteenth century criticized the academy as an outsider, was inducted, and then expelled for criticizing the academy as an insider.

The Academy is still active. From the very beginning the statutes of the Academy directed that each candidate-academician was to donate a work of his art in perpetual memory and, later, a portrait. Thus the Academy, in its modern premises in the sixteenth-century Palazzo Carpegna in Piazza dell'Accademia di San Luca, has accumulated a unique collection of paintings and sculptures, including about 500 portraits, as well as an outstanding collection of drawings.

Principi

Prominent names to become Principi of the academy over the first two centuries include Cherubino Alberti, Baldassare Croce, Domenichino, Ottavio Leoni, Lazzaro Baldi (1679-); Bernini, Paolo Guidotti, Domenico Guidi, Luigi Garzi, Antiveduto Grammatica, Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi, Alessandro Turchi, Filippo Gagliardi, Filippo Lauri (1684–5), Tommaso Maria Conca (1792-1795) Pietro da Cortona, Pier Francesco Mola, Filippo della Valle, Carlo Marchionni, Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari, Carlo Cesi, Sebastiano Conca, Simon Vouet, Charles Le Brun, Camillo Rusconi, Antonio Canova,Vincenzo Camuccini, Filippo Agricola,Gasparo Landi, and Niccola Consoni.

The Academy can also boast modern members, including sculptors Ernesto Biondi and Piccirilli Brothers.

External links

References

  • Haskell, Francis (1993). Patrons and Painters: Art and Society in Baroque Italy. Yale University Press.



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