The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590–1635

Welcome to The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590–1635: Documents from the Archivio di Stato di Roma. This site makes available archival documents and other research materials concerning one of the first artists’ academies in Europe. These resources document the breadth of the Accademia’s activities, drawing from the proceedings of meetings, financial and legal transactions, property rentals, and other records. New documents and research materials are added to the site periodically, all cross-referenced to people connected with the academy’s institutional and professional concerns and the places where they interacted.

First launched in 2010, the site was initially created using Extensible Markup Language (XML) within the parameters of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) [1]. In 2014 the site was migrated to the platform used by the National Gallery of Art website to ensure its long-term sustainability and extensibility. Search parameters initially developed in 2010 were enhanced after the 2014 site migration. The site’s original documents and features have been re-edited and updated to correct errors and inconsistencies as well as to incorporate new information.

The current site is driven by the National Gallery of Art's content management and site design platform. High resolution images are managed through the Java Script Object Notation (JSON) file format, compatible with Application Programming Interface (API) viewing applications using the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), specifically Mirador and IIPMooViewer. The site is built on Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript Framework (jQuery).

The study of academies of art in early modern Europe has always turned on current perceptions of the role of such institutions in the training and support of artists. Depending on one’s cultural and historical context, the academy assumes the role of hero (ushering in self-governance and the end of the guild system) or villain (opposing the avant-garde) in a continuous drama. This story spans nearly five hundred years, from about 1563, with the founding of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, to the present day. These debates persist—especially within the fine arts departments of American universities that were modeled, to varying degrees, on European fine arts academies.  

The Roman Accademia di San Luca—as one of the oldest, most influential, and longest lived (it flourishes now)—provides a telling example of the critical fortune of European art academies more generally. When the original members of the Accademia met before the notary and laid out their founding principles in March 1593, the deputies cited the nobility of art, the glory of God, and the honor of their profession as their raisons d’être (see below, “Toward a Documentary History of the Accademia di San Luca”). They also mentioned the importance of the practical education of young artists. Only the last of these points might find resonance in the promotional literature of today’s academies of art.[2] Rather than couching the goals of the profession under the abstract rubrics of nobility or divinity, the Yale University School of Art, on one hand, foregrounds notions of quality, creativity, criticality, and innovation.[3] The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, on the other hand, describes its mission as providing a global education, as well as instruction in history and theory, within a humanistic curriculum. Its stated objective is to encourage diverse and creative students to discover and develop (their) individual excellence in the visual arts.[4]

Our understanding of the early history of the Accademia di San Luca has long depended on the initial published accounts, one written at the beginning of the seventeenth century by the academy’s secretary, Romano Alberti, and the other at the beginning of the nineteenth century by then-secretary Melchiorre Missirini.[5] In the two hundred years that separate these chronicles, many of the documents that the Accademia kept for its own records had been lost. We have several anchors—including the brief from Pope Gregory XIII in 1577 and the bull from Pope Sixtus V in 1588 calling for the founding of an academy for the painters and sculptors of Rome, as well as the two earliest publications, both under the authorship of Alberti, Trattato della nobiltà della pittura (1585) and Origine e progresso dell’Academia del Dissegno, de pittori, scultori, et architetti di Roma (1604), referenced above—but there have, until recently, been many gaps in the narrative.[6] The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590‒1635: Documents from the Archivio di Stato di Roma undertakes as one of its principal goals the restitution of the notarial records of the first 45 years of the Accademia that were once in the institution’s archive.

Whereas many of these documents concern property rentals, collection of dues and alms, appraisals, and internal disputes, in other cases we find evidence of monumental decisions. One of the most important of these is the document that proposes to found an Accademia (formare una Academia) on March 7, 1593, when the six deputies—Giovanni de Vecchi, Tommaso Laureti, Scipione Pulzone, and Federico Zuccaro, as well as possibly Nicolò da Pesaro (il Trombetta) and Jacopo Rocchetti—presented to the members of the “Congregazione delli Pittori di Roma” the principal tenets for the new institution.[7]  Among these were the intention that it serve for the benefit of instruction for giovani (young boys) and for all those who wished to follow the correct path of the study of painting. The Accademia also provided support for youths in financial need. Second, the members of the Accademia were meant to be free from a guild and any mechanical or servile obligations. The document further addressed the meaningful work to be produced by the academicians: paintings that would inspire piety and devotion as, it was then understood, the holy church fathers intended. In like fashion, the deputies proscribed, for reasons of reverence and decorum, that members hang paintings of saints or even secular works from the windows of their workshops or in public. Those who practiced painting in workshops (as opposed to private studios) were admitted as members of the Compagnia (confraternity), but not the Accademia. Finally, the deputies pointed to the vile state in which their formerly exalted profession then found itself and offered an alternative vision that would inspire the youths to work hard and imitate the most esteemed artists in order to practice painting nobly.

The early years of the Accademia di San Luca bear witness to the fitful growing pains of an inchoate institution. Although statutes were created in the 1590s, they were not officially promulgated until 1607 and were finally published only in 1609.[8] In addition, the teaching curriculum that Zuccaro introduced in 1593‒1594, which faltered after his tenure as principe (prince), was short lived.[9] If Romano Alberti is to be believed, the succeeding principi, one per year from 1595 through 1600, did not focus on education.[10] Unlike the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, where the luogotenente invigilated at the meetings of the artist members, the cardinal protector of the Accademia rarely set foot in the academy or in the confraternal church of San Luca until the 1620s. As argued in The Accademia Seminars: The Accademia di San Luca in Rome, c. 1590‒1635, the first three decades of the institution’s history are not marked by a unified vision; rather, they attest to the relative energy, vision, and engagement of both its princes and its protectors to effect change.[11]

A­ series of documents from 1624 chronicles the removal of the principe Antiveduto Grammatica on October 24, 1624 for reasons related in part to his tendency to make consequential decisions through the select group of academicians called the colletta, rather than through the larger body of the Accademia, and in part to his desire to sell their prized possession: Raphael’s (or so it was then thought) Saint Luke Painting the Madonna and Child in the Presence of Raphael.[12] Grammatica was relieved of his duties and replaced by a French painter, Simon Vouet, who remained as prince until June 29, 1627 when he was recalled to France by the king, Louis XIII.[13]

This period also marks important changes to the powers of the Cardinal Protector Francesco Maria del Monte and the transition to the reign of Pope Urban VIII Barberini, who understood how useful the Accademia could be to his cultural agenda. During those nearly three years of service, Vouet reformed the educational program of the Accademia and created a provisional détente between the artists from Northern Europe and their Italian peers.[14]  This was the period, too, when the new cardinal protector, Francesco Barberini, made his (and the pope’s) will known to the Accademia, occasionally through his secretary, the antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo.

The Accademia was henceforth both less autonomous and more financially secure. In 1634 the principe Pietro da Cortona ordered excavations of the crypt of the Church of San Luca, where the remains of Santa Martina and other saints were miraculously discovered. However skeptically we might now view these discoveries, they were sufficiently convincing to elicit a 6,000-scudi donation from Cardinal Francesco Barberini.[15] The building of Cortona’s imposing Church of Santi Luca e Martina, begun in 1635, raised the Accademia’s profile and asserted its presence in the Eternal City.

The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590-1635: Documents from the Archivio di Stato di Roma brings together notarial records from the Trenta Notai Capitolini (TNC) found in the Archivio di Stato di Roma (ASR). It provides access to a complete transcription of extant notarial records of the period from the Archivio di Stato di Roma, identified by the project team, along with images of the original documents. The transcriptions and images are viewable side by side. Many of these documents concerning the institutional history of the Accademia di San Luca were previously thought to be lost. They include rental agreements; transactions with the workers who were charged with the renovation of the Accademia's original, derelict church; inventories of the collections used for didactic purposes; evidence of the institution's increasing control over production and appraisal of works of art; and details of the internal strife that marked the Accademia's first decades of existence.

The transcriptions may be searched by personal name (under all known variant spellings), place name, key term, document type, notary name, and year. The documents included are not only newly available to researchers of early modern Italy but also accessible in a way that promotes their wider use and allows for the identification of additional archival material.

The documents may be accessed from the search page.

Transcription Conventions

The Accademia Seminars: The Accademia di San Luca in Rome, c. 1590–1635, edited by Peter M. Lukehart

This volume reexamines the establishment and early history of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, one of the most important centers of governance, education, and theory in the arts for the early modern period and the model for all subsequent academies of art worldwide. Eleven essays by an international group of historians, archivists, and art historians provide the most comprehensive history of the Accademia to be published in more than 40 years, and the first in nearly 200 years to be based almost entirely on primary and documentary material. The authors examine the institution’s founding and development through unpublished documents as well as reinterpretation of technical materials and theoretical treatises. In so doing, they also provide new means for following the progress of the most significant artists—in addition to a host of lesser-known painters, sculptors, and architects—who were working in Rome in the early seventeenth century. Published by the National Gallery of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.  back to top