Laurie Nussdorfer

Rome in the decades from 1590 to 1630 was a city of people, men for the most part, on the move. In 1600 the population burst past the 100,000 mark for the first time since late antiquity, but immigrants and visitors flowed in and out so frequently that a static census scarcely gestures at its dynamism.[1] Although we can start to measure growth only at this moment, all evidence points to a cresting wave that began around the middle of the century and broke sometime during the Borghese and Barberini pontificates (1605–1644). Among the migrants, men predominated because of the special nature of economic opportunity in papal Rome; what jobs there were, chiefly in service, construction, and bureaucracy, drew a largely male labor force. As is well known, many of these mobile men arrived in Rome seeking work in the art trades, and in the hundreds and perhaps thousands they found it.[2] The public wealth of the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy combined with the private fortunes of cardinals, bankers, and aristocrats to lure talent, skill, and brawn from as far as Flanders and as near as the Sabine hills. When the Umbrian painter and theorist Federico Zuccaro for a second time joined the throngs on the road to Rome in the early 1590s, he brought along a recent Florentine experiment, the idea of an association of selected men devoted to or skilled in disegno, an accademia where artistic education would flourish. On those same roads he probably barely noticed among his fellow travelers men with the distinctive pen and inkwell of the notarial profession, men often from the hill towns of central Italy who were hoping to find jobs in Rome.[3] We do not know whether Zuccaro paid closer attention to these quill bearers when he discussed his great plan with artists in Rome who had been pursuing a similar project since the 1570s, but we do know that the notaries were paying attention to him. They were present at the meeting of March 7, 1593, that established an academy, and at meetings before and after.[4] Indeed, scholars are discovering that much of what we can know about the early decades of the experiment to establish an accademia for artists in Rome we owe to the attention of notaries.

Notaries are a helpful point of entry into the history of any institution, and especially Roman institutions in this period of rapid change, because they remind us that the fixed, stable units about which we would like to write are fictions. Real institutions seldom proceed with the clarity and predictability that historians describe, and the records that we use to draw these portraits are rarely the transparent documents that they appear to be. But the organizational effervescence, indeed turbulence, of late 16th- and early 17th-century Rome was such that it would be particularly misguided to believe in the firm contours and crisp boundaries of its institutions. Because Roman notaries documented the gatherings of groups of many shapes, sizes, and aspirations, they leave a singularly authentic picture of the fragility, chaos, and mutability of associations in these decades.

Why were forms of urban collective life in such flux at the turn of the 17th century? Immigration and population increase are certainly part of the answer, but religious and political factors also played a significant role. The renewal of Catholicism both before and after the Council of Trent (1545–1563) stimulated the founding of new sodalities for charitable and devotional activities, many of which focused their energies on the city of Rome.[5] It also invigorated existing confraternities, such as the one dedicated to Saint Luke, to which the painters and allied art workers belonged, leading frequently to new projects or ambitions and the changes in governance and procedure necessary to pursue them. This bending and stretching of corporate bodies in the 16th century has left its mark in the many examples of revised or new rules (capitoli, ordini, institutioni) that scholars find in Roman libraries and archives.[6] Generically but inaccurately called statuti—a term that, strictly speaking, should be reserved for the rarer versions confirmed by appropriate municipal or papal authorities—these documents in all their variety testify to the strong feelings invested in the few early modern institutions in which participants had a voice. For trade guilds the decades from around 1550 to 1650 stand out in particular as a period of new foundations, secessions, and aggregations with a feverish revision of regulations in both manuscript and print.

While the splintering and combining of craft organizations may owe something to the spiritual motions of confraternities, which were often their matrix, it may also reflect a canny political strategy. The pontiffs themselves intervened radically to transform many established Roman institutions in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, from the cardinalitial congregations to the municipal tribunal and its notaries. Centralization of control in the hands of the state (that is, the papal government) may have been their aim, but their means often had the opposite effect. When the popes created privileged associations in order to exploit their collaboration with policies of state, they inadvertently advertised the benefits of forming new groups. Rome’s artisans and tradesmen were not slow to catch on. Institutional fluidity was favored by another paradox. Despite the concentration of authority over church and state in the hands of the pontiffs, political power in Rome was dispersed more widely among the elite than in a normal dynastic capital. The 70 members of the college of cardinals, one of the unique features of this ecclesiastical kingdom, functioned as centers of influence and patronage that royal courtiers might well have envied.[7] Competing organizations thrived where patrons multiplied.

Although this picture emphasizes the vitality of these efforts to create new forms of collective life in Rome, the agents and actors themselves must often have felt frustration and disappointment, for it was a struggle in which many aspirants failed. The corporate spectrum might range from occasional gatherings of a few like-minded men to traditional privileged bodies with their own tribunals on the Capitoline hill, but few were satisfied with their place along the spectrum. Even in this dynamic city there were not enough resources—money, influence, prestige, patronage—to go around. Moreover, arbitrary power could deal painful setbacks. How must the members of the painters’ confraternity have felt when, after decades of saving to rebuild their church on the Esquiline, Pope Sixtus V expropriated the property in 1588 and sent them to the dilapidated Santa Martina near the Forum?[8] We know from the notarial protocols that some groups, such as the sculptors in 1608, tried to become independent organizations and were prevented from doing so.[9] The same sources also show us many evanescent professional associations, which never managed to move far enough up the institutional hierarchy to acquire property and a meeting place, let alone formal recognition in official statutes.[10] Institution building in Rome between 1590 and 1630 was a process with well-defined strategies and goals, but with uncertain and uneven results. It was fraught with conflict, not a neat process, and it did not advance at a regular and predictable pace. Once set in motion, it could just as easily halt, momentarily or forever.

The story that the notaries reveal about the early years of the Accademia di San Luca conforms in most of its key features with this general pattern. They gave multiple, overlapping names to their client (universitas, collegio, congregatio, societas, accademia), probably because it was so unclear what the identity of the group actually was. Attempts to write and rewrite the rules of the organization have left us with four or perhaps five sets of so-called statuti in less than 40 years. Years go by when there is hardly any sign of life in the association, to be followed by months of frenzied meetings.

Yet the notaries also reveal that the Accademia di San Luca stands out from the pack for its remarkable rise in institutional status. In its first four decades, it achieved an unparalleled social ascent, leaving behind the lowly condition of the manual worker and forging an image of gentlemanly expertise. Even more significant was the fact that it broke away from the political structures that pinned down artisanal organizations and achieved the freedom of those engaged in noble and liberal pursuits. Before 1570 the painters, like the stone carvers and all other artisans, were subject to the jurisdiction of the municipality, the Senate and Roman People, with the Conservatori as their judges.[11] In 1577 Pope Gregory XIII, recognizing their sensitive theological role as makers of sacred images, shifted them to the jurisdiction of the cardinal vicar.[12] In 1624 they sought to shake off the vicar’s court and achieve the privilege of relative autonomy under their own cardinal protector.[13] Such freedom demanded assiduous clientage to the powerful, especially after 1627 when the pope’s nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, became their protector; it was, nonetheless, the height of prestige in the Roman context. In the history of Roman institutions, therefore, the early years of the Accademia di San Luca mark an important chapter.

The Notarial Tradition

Around 1970 two art historians on parallel tracks opened a new window onto the early years of the Accademia di San Luca with their discovery that among the thousands of volumes (called protocols) of notarized contracts kept in the Roman state archive were records of meetings of artists’ sodalities, including the academy.[14] Systematic efforts to mine these sources were not attempted until the past two decades, and it is only with the development of The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590–1635: Documents from the Archivio di Stato di Roma that they have been collected and made accessible.[15] In her 1972 study of Simon Vouet’s leadership of the academy, Noelle de La Blanchardière wondered what meeting records were doing in the notarial protocols and speculated on what the notaries’ relationship to the Accademia might have been.[16] Historians have also turned their attention to the services performed by notaries for artisan organizations, finding that notarial traces may well be the only evidence left by substantial portions of the laboring classes of early modern Rome.[17] We are now in a better position to answer de La Blanchardière’s questions and to shed light on the nature of these indispensable records of the early Accademia.

The practice of gathering to deliberate on common concerns was customary in early medieval Europe. In Italy in the Middle Ages use of a notary to record the names of those present at a meeting and a synthetic account of the decisions made took hold in ecclesiastical institutions and in the nascent communes.[18] In his professional capacity as bearer of pubblica fides, the notary represented the public face of authority and endowed the documents that he sealed or signed with a specific, quantifiable probative value. Although medieval jurists might quibble about just what quantity of proof the notary added, it was generally agreed that his writings were worth the equivalent of two or three witnesses, which was about as high a standard as unaided human beings could achieve.[19] Neither jurists nor notarial handbooks say anything about meeting records,[20] although the handbooks do supply models for many kinds of instrumenta (as contracts were called) that clients like the Accademia di San Luca might want, such as receipts, obligations, or acts taking possession of property. Although they give no direction, therefore, on the form that meeting records should take, the manuals do acknowledge the practice by providing examples of powers of attorney in which corporate bodies establish proxies.[21] It was essential in such texts to name those for whom the agent was authorized to act, and the legal principle that consent was personal and specific undoubtedly underpinned this custom. Notaries wrote down the decisions that the men who attended and voted bound themselves to carry out. Since these resolutions often had financial repercussions, it was imperative to formalize the obligation, and, since it was often desirable to bind a group to enforce a common policy, it made sense to have a notary present as a matter of course.[22] By the same token, of course, such gatherings as lectures and classes that had no organizational implications or financial agenda were unlikely to be described in the notary’s protocols.

Whatever its origins, the practice of using notaries to document meetings must have spread widely in late medieval Italian cities. In Rome the picture is obscured by the absence of surviving notarial sources before the mid-1300s and by heavy subsequent losses, but the wool guild statutes preserve such a record from 1421.[23] We can assume that the painters who formulated statutes for their confraternity in 1478 were familiar with the practice, and we would expect their 16th-century descendants to have paid notaries not only for instruments but also for their work as corporate scribes.[24] The difficulty for researchers is not that we do not understand why the notaries attended meetings of collectivities, but that in Rome at least it is so hard to find these records before the 1580s.

The New Capitoline Notaries and Their Records

Ironically, it was the very Sixtus V who forced the painters’ association to move from the Esquiline in 1588 who was also responsible for the systematic survival of their notarial activity and thus of our new insight into the origins of the Accademia. In 1586 Sixtus intervened radically in the workings of the notarial profession in Rome, which, unlike that of most Italian cities, was double. Civic, or Capitoline, notaries catered to the needs of citizens and prepared court documents for the municipal tribunal located in the Palazzo del Senatore. Curial notaries, many of them foreign, worked instead in the papal bureaus and papal courts that focused on the needs of ecclesiastics. In practice this division was blurry to clients, with laymen using curial notaries and clerics patronizing those of the Capitoline, but the two groups of notaries were indeed distinct because lay and clerical tribunals followed different legal procedures.[25] What Sixtus did was to restrict the previously unlimited number of Capitoline notaries to 30 and for the first time sell their offices, thus initiating the process of turning a free and very loosely organized profession into a closed corporation of venal officeholders.[26] Fifteen of the newly created notarial offices provided judicial services to each of two civil judges (collaterali) in the Senator’s tribunal. Over the preceding century, the popes had made all curial notaries venal, so now ownership of notarial offices became the norm in Rome. However, within 25 years, the popes made a unique concession to the Capitoline notaries. In 1612 Paul V granted them the right to bequeath or sell their offices as if they were any other form of property.[27] While the actual titleholders of the office had to be notaries, had to expedite their titles through civic officials, and had to be admitted to the new college of notaries of the Capitoline court (notarii curiae capitolii), anyone could purchase the office either in whole or in part and dispose of it freely.

In the 50 years between 1583 and 1634 the various painters’ associations, including guild, confraternity, and academy, as well as the confraternity of stoneworkers in which the sculptors found themselves trapped, employed Capitoline notaries to redact their formal obligations and record payments, receipts, property transfers, inventories, and, importantly, their litigation. Seven notaries worked for the Accademia in these years: Ottaviano, Marco Aurelio, and Alessandro Saravezzi and Giovanni Antonio Moschenio, Erasto Spannocchia, Lorenzo Tigrino, and Tommaso Salvatore. We know their names and can find out who their clients were as a result of Sixtus V’s imposition of venality on the Capitoline notaries and of Paul V’s insistence on new archival practices for notarial documents. The period from 1586 to 1612 wrought revolutionary changes in the way in which Roman notaries did their work, and it is no coincidence that the Accademia di San Luca emerges from obscurity in this same arc of time.

His signum, the unique logo that Roman notaries used to stamp the first page of their protocols and the public copies of their instruments, identified the Roman-born Ottaviano Saravezzi as a Capitoline notary even before Sixtus V’s intervention of 1586.[28] He had worked for the carpenters and masons in the early 1580s and even joined the carpenters’ confraternity in 1584, the year in which he also made out a receipt for a purchase of wood by the painters’ guild (universitas).[29] For the next 10 years, and then again from 1600 to 1607, Saravezzi continued to produce instruments for the painters, both guild and confraternity, and of course recorded the meeting of March 7, 1593, in which they organized an academy. While dozens of notaries in the ambit of the Capitoline tribunal lost their professional status in 1586, the pope’s new policy permitted Saravezzi to purchase for 500 scudi the notarial office that he had been operating all along, in a sense turning his business into a form of property.[30] The property consisted not in the physical space in rione Pigna where his clients found him, but rather in the volumes of protocols containing their contracts and testaments and in the documents of their litigation. Scholars sometimes overlook the revenues that notaries earned from their conduct of lawsuits because they have left such meager traces compared to the business acts in the protocols, but Sixtus V had expected lawsuits to be the lure that would entice notaries to buy their offices. Ottaviano Saravezzi had now become one of 15 Capitoline notaries who produced and filed litigation papers with the second collaterale, one of the four judges in the tribunal of the Senator. Each month he and the other 29 professionals in the college of notaries of the Capitoline court pooled a percentage of their judicial earnings.[31] Although his gleanings ranked him in the middle rather than at the top of the group, they prove that clients used him for court papers as well as contracts.[32] As Antonia Fiori’s article “The Cameral Obligation in the Documents of the Accademia di San Luca” explains, court notaries were the beating heart of the judicial system. All legal actions started with an appearance before one of them, and they operated with considerable independence since the magistrates trusted them to fill out the summons and warrants (mandati) to which the judges had already put their signatures.

Venality had an immediate, as well as a long-term, impact on Saravezzi. In 1584 the instruments he produced for his clients in a single year filled one bound volume; seven years later they occupied three volumes. The contraction in the number of city notaries resulted in more business for Saravezzi. In addition, since the acts he rogated for his clients were now a substantial investment, he had a powerful incentive to preserve them carefully. Inventories of the protocols in the possession of the 30 Capitoline notaries document a sea change in the 1580s, with virtually complete series for most offices for the next three centuries. We can get a good idea of the state of conservation of clients’ acts prior to venality from looking at the stray pre-1580s volumes that survive in some of the 30 offices; these often consist of a hodgepodge of disordered instruments rogated by several different notaries.[33] Even more dispiriting is the collection of protocols in the Roman state archive labeled Notai Capitolini (Capitoline Notaries). In actuality this represented an attempt beginning in the 1560s to halt the loss of volumes that occurred when a notary died and his family inherited the little cache of notebooks from which he had made a livelihood. This series, which contains most of what we have in the way of surviving protocols in Rome before 1586, consists largely of those that the authorities managed to capture from the heirs after a notary’s death. The excessive freedom of the Roman notarial profession before Sixtus V explains why it has been so hard to track the activities of artists’ associations in earlier decades.

A second effect of venality, which showed up gradually from the 1590s on, was to increase the size of the notary’s workforce. The documents we find in the protocols are rarely in the hand of Ottaviano Saravezzi.[34] A titleholder might employ one or two, and by the 1620s perhaps as many as four or five, young men to do much of the actual writing of the office, some authorized as notaries and others mere scribes.[35] With the padrone at the head, the notarial office had a hierarchy.[36] Sostituti were employees who were official notaries; they had full authority to certify contracts (business acts or instruments) and undertake judicial work, such as taking witness testimony or writing out legal summons. Giovani were the men, usually young, who transcribed the rough notes of transactions into full texts to be kept in the protocols; they had not yet served enough time to qualify for sostituto status or for some reason had not sought it. Giovani also prepared the tables of contents to be inserted into the protocols before they went out for binding, following office practice or their own inclination in determining what name to give to clients. Saravezzi himself attended the important meeting of March 7, 1593, but by the 1620s it was much more common to find sostituti documenting academy gatherings. Although there was usually rapid turnover in the staff, some employees remained in a given office for years, even while the titleholder changed. Joseph Palmuctius, for example, who worked in office 15 from 1621 to 1627, spanned the tenure of three Capitoline notaries, Spannocchia, Tigrino, and Salvatore. His name appears frequently as the recorder of meetings of the Accademia in that busy period.[37]

The increasing number of employees represented growth in the notaries’ business under the impact of venality, but also reflected intensified government regulation of notarial acts. From the middle of the 15th century, Capitoline notaries were required to bind their instruments yearly and put their names on the covers, but rules for notarial writing grew much stricter between 1580 and 1612. New municipal and papal laws demanded that full transcriptions be made within one month (1580),[38] that notarial volumes be bound every three months (1612), that an alphabetical table of contents listing the client’s name and the folio number of the instrument be placed at the beginning of each volume (1612), and that sostituti sign their names at the bottom of the acts they had rogated (1612).[39] Most of these measures aimed to protect the integrity of the records against tampering, but they had the corollary effect of making it easier to keep track of them.

The Accademia di San Luca and Its Notaries

More rigorous control of writing practices meant more labor and hence more scribes, but it also generalized the use of the table of contents in Roman notarial protocols, which makes it easier to find the acts and meetings of artists’ associations like the Accademia di San Luca. Nevertheless, state rigor did not extend to linguistic usage, and, as we have seen, it often fell to subordinate employees to decide what name to give a corporate client in the notarial records. Confraternity (societas) and guild (universitas) were familiar, conventional terms, but what to call unprecedented modes of association or new formations? Ottaviano Saravezzi’s index for the first volume of 1593 lists the meeting of March 7, 1593, as a congregatio (“congregatio pictorum”), which, in the word’s general sense of a gathering, it surely was.[40] The notary and his staff preferred not to make fine discriminations. They erred on the side of more titles rather than fewer, so we frequently see them coupling the painters’ “collegio et universitas” (1589), “collegio et societas” (1600), or “collegio et accademia” (1626).[41] This inclusiveness may also have a deeper significance. That the leaders of the initiative resulting in the March 1593 meeting used the services of Saravezzi, the same notary who had been working for some years for the painters’ guild and confraternity, implies that they wanted to reform from within rather than break away in a new organization. Dissident or disgruntled members of groups turned to different notaries when they set out on a new course.[42] The founders of Rome’s academy in 1593 did not see themselves as creating a separate institution for artists.

For more than 20 years, the painters’ guild, confraternity, and academy used Saravezzi’s office 11 for meetings, business acts, and litigation.[43] When Ottaviano mysteriously disappears from the college of Capitoline notaries from 1594 to 1600, the artists employed Marco Aurelio Saravezzi, and when Ottaviano returned in 1600 they remained with him and his next successor, Alessandro Saravezzi, until 1609. Notaries liked to have institutional clients and especially to have formal appointments to serve as an association’s secretary. In the age of venality, such positions increased the value of the office. Notaries appointed as corporate secretaries were often paid a yearly retainer and were thus guaranteed steady income. Moreover, ancillary business could arise when members went for their personal needs to the same notary they had come to know at confraternity meetings or in the guild tribunal. The guild of carpenters even required this, treating it as a form of compensation for its notary.[44] Some institutions, for example the hospital of the Santissimo Salvatore in Rome, offered such a captive market for document making that it sold the right to be its secretary to the highest bidder.[45] Although the numerous revised statuti of the Accademia di San Luca do not refer to its notary as a secretary, Erasto Spannocchia does identify himself as such.[46] In 1623 Spannocchia negotiated an annual provision of 3 scudi from the artists’ “confraternity or Academy.”[47] The enduring relationship between the various painters’ associations and specific Capitoline notarial offices is clear, and was indeed the norm in Rome. It made sense for an institution to stay with one office, particularly when the common practice was to reference instruments by the notary’s protocol and date rather than to pay for a personal copy.[48]

Notwithstanding their long attachment to office 11 in Via del Gesù, in 1609 the artists switched to office 15, not far away, just east of Piazza Sant’Eustachio, where they kept their business for the next 25 years. The presumed death of Ottaviano Saravezzi sometime after 1607 could not be the only explanation for the shift because the painters had stayed with his office during the late 1590s, when Marco Aurelio Saravezzi was titleholder. Moreover, later on they registered no reaction to the death of their secretary Spannocchia in the midst of a very active period of meetings and decisions in fall 1624, remaining loyal to office 15 as it went through another change of padrone three years later. How to explain the sudden departure to a new notary in 1609?

It appears to be a fresh twist on the practice whereby rebels took themselves to a different notary when they had grievances against their leaders. The details are murky, as is so often the case in the academy’s early history, but they point to Gaspare Celio’s term as principe (prince, director) of the Accademia in 1609 as the flash point. Celio was the focus of an intense conflict within the artists’ association, as a well-known but undated plea to the pope from the painters’ guild makes clear.[49] The petition asks the pontiff to order the judge with jurisdiction over the painters, Guazzini de Guazzinis of the cardinal vicar’s court, to punish Gaspare Celio. The painters charge that Celio broke into the archive of the confraternity of San Luca and removed its documents. They insinuate that he was an illegitimate principe, and they also accuse him of making new rules (capitoli) “against freedom and the public good” and posting them publicly without the consent of the collectivity. Although we lack further details about Celio’s alleged poster campaign, the principe did take proud responsibility for printing the somewhat authoritarian 1607 statuti of the Accademia early in 1609. On the final page of the first edition of the Accademia statuti, he wrote in his own hand: “I, Gasparo Celio, now principe of the Illustrious Accademia of the Painters of Rome, had the present volume printed at the request of the entire Illustrious Accademia, and I confirm this in my own hand today, January 27, 1609.”[50] Subsequent events raise questions about whether the “entire” academy really had made such a request.

Just a few months later, four members of the “generale congregatione” of San Luca appeared in Alessandro Saravezzi’s office 11, on May 12, 1609, to appoint an attorney, Severo Particelli, to undertake litigation on their behalf.[51] On June 3 their camerlengo made a payment “on behalf of the Academy and congregatio” to one Joseph Cidonius to represent them before judge Guazzini de Guazzinis.[52] This document of June 3, 1609, is the last trace of the painters in notarial office 11. The next dated transaction by the academy, a routine stima obligation of July 23, 1609, is found in Giovanni Antonio Moschenio’s office 15, as are subsequent instruments, lawsuits, and meetings.[53] Since the Roman-born Moschenio was Celio’s personal notary, it seems likely that Celio found the painters so completely united against him that the only way to hold onto power was to remove the business of the Accademia to a notary loyal to himself.[54] Moschenio proved appealing to other members, however, winning their trust so fully that for six years he even served as their treasurer (camerlengo), a very rare occurrence in notarial relations with institutional clients.[55] Moschenio was not the only one involved who survived Celio’s eclipse after 1612. Agabito Visconti, documented in the painters’ confraternity from 1595 and the man who delivered the petition against Celio to the pope, was still deeply engaged at the meeting held on January 8, 1619, when he was one of two representatives from the compagnia chosen to rewrite the statutes of 1617.[56]

By then Capitoline notary Erasto Spannocchia of San Polo in Sabina had taken over office 15. We first see his name in a document concerning the rental of the buildings next to the painters’ church in January 1618; he died in the summer or early fall of 1624. Under Spannocchia, or perhaps later, the meeting records for the period 1618 to 1621 were not bound in the protocols but gathered in a separate volume, now in the archive of the Accademia di San Luca, which was an occasional practice among other Roman corporations.[57] Spannocchia’s office must have been well run, for the strenuous conflicts over the form and leadership of the academy that marked 1624, the year Antiveduto Gramatica was forcibly replaced as principe by Simon Vouet, were recorded without interruption by a staff who had lost their padrone.[58] Spannocchia’s successor was briefly Lorenzo Tigrino, who is first documented at work for the painters in June 1625.[59] In 1627 Tommaso Salvatore of Spoleto, who over the next 20 years made office 15 one of the busiest in Rome, was signing documents as a sostituto for Tigrino.[60]

Conclusion

The notaries who worked for the variously named associations of painters in the years 1590 to 1630 filed the instruments and meetings they produced, with few exceptions, in their protocols. As we have seen, these years were marked by a transformation in the way in which notarial protocols, objects of new scrutiny by state and investors, were treated and valued. In these decades, tensions and conflicts among the community of artists and art workers in Rome erupted frequently, and they often targeted the documents that seemed most important to their organizations, whether universitas, collegio, congregatio, societas, or accademia. Quite apart from the many, largely peaceful revisions of the rules for running the Accademia, assaults on the San Luca archives were not unheard of. Even the obsessive inventorying of the contents of the cupboards in the academy’s rooms betrays some anxiety about its control. In the context of such passions, the most important contributions of the Accademia’s notaries were probably to remain in the background: to be present, to witness, to record, to transcribe, to copy, to file, and to bind. In a city marked by men on the move, the notaries too were necessarily fluid. They showed up and disappeared with efficient agility. Avoiding the spotlight, the notaries paid attention, and then slipped away. On their shelves, the protocols that marked their success as venal officeholders silently accumulated. Fortunately, no one had noticed, and the testimony to the early years of the Accademia would keep safely for the next five centuries.

Notes

This text is a revised and updated version of an essay of the same name, originally published in 2009 in The Accademia Seminars: The Accademia di San Luca in Roma, c. 1590–1635, edited by Peter M. Lukehart.

My work on this essay was supported in part by a grant from The Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs First (1740–1823) Fund, which was created with the funds left by Dorothy Mix Meigs and Fielding Pope Meigs, Jr., of Rosemont, Pennsylvania, in memory of that soldier of the revolution, whose home was in Middletown, Connecticut, from 1740 to 1787.

I acknowledge with gratitude the assistance of Nicholas Adams, Eleonora Canepari, Patrizia Cavazzini, and Peter M. Lukehart.

Abbreviations

AASL: Archivio Storico dell’Accademia di San Luca
ASR: Archivio di Stato di Roma
CNC: Collegio dei Notai Capitolini
TNC: Trenta Notai Capitolini
Uff: Ufficio

[1] Francesco Cerasoli, “Censimento della popolazione di Roma dall’anno 1600 al 1739,” Studi e documenti di storia e diritto 12 (1891): 169–199; Jean Delumeau, Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1957–1959), 1:135–220; Eleonora Canepari, “Stare in ‘compagnia’: Strategie di inurbamento e forme associative nella Roma del Seicento” (PhD diss., Università degli Studi di Torino, Dipartimento di Storia, 2005).

[2] Patrizia Cavazzini, Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome (University Park, PA, 2008), chap. 1.

[3] A sample from 1630 revealed that at least half of the 30 Capitoline notaries at that date were born outside Rome; Laurie Nussdorfer, Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (Baltimore, 2009), 231–234.

[4] ASR, TNC, uff. 11 (Ottaviano Saravezzi), 1593, pt. 1, vol. 25, fols. 425r–427v. For earlier and later meetings, see “Introduction,” The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590–1635: Documents from the Archivio di Stato di Roma, https://www.nga.gov/accademia/en/intro.html.

[5] For an overview, see Gregory Martin, Roma Sancta (1581), ed. George Bruner Parks (Rome, 1969).

[6] Sergio Rossi, “La Compagnia di San Luca nel Cinquecento e la sua evoluzione in Accademia,” Ricerche per la storia religiosa di Roma 5 (1984): 373–374; Antonio Martini, Arti, mestieri e fede nella Roma dei papi (Bologna, 1965).

[7] Mary Hollingsworth, Miles Pattenden, and Arnold Witte, eds., A Companion to the Early Modern Cardinal (Leiden, 2020).

[8] See Isabella Salvagni, “The Università dei Pittori and the Accademia di San Luca: From the Installation in San Luca sull’Esquilino to the Reconstruction of Santa Martina al Foro Romano,” in The Accademia Seminars: The Accademia di San Luca in Roma, c. 1590–1635, ed. Peter M. Lukehart, CASVA Seminar Papers 2 (Washington, 2009), 69–121.

[9] Peter M. Lukehart, “Carving Out Lives: The Role of Sculptors in the Early History of the Accademia di San Luca,” in Collecting Sculpture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Nicholas Penny and Eike D. Schmidt, Studies in the History of Art 70 (Washington, 2008), 185–217.

[10] Laurie Nussdorfer, “Writing and the Power of Speech: Notaries and Artisans in Baroque Rome,” in Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800), ed. Barbara Diefendorf and Carla Hesse (Ann Arbor, MI, 1993), 105.

[11] Rossi 1984, 371n7.

[12] For the papal brief of 1577, see Monica Grossi and Silvia Trani, “From Universitas to Accademia: Notes and Reflections on the Origins and Early History of the Accademia di San Luca Based on Documents from Its Archives,” in Lukehart 2009, 40n17.

[13] ASR, TNC, uff. 15 (Erasto Spannocchia), 1624, pt. 3, vol. 101, fol. 209r–v.

[14] Cited by Noelle de La Blanchardière, “Simon Vouet, prince de l’Académie de Saint-Luc,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de l’art français (1972): 80n2, 90 postscript.

[15] The present site gathers research carried out by Noelle de La Blanchardière, Roberto Fiorentini, Matteo Lafranconi, Peter M. Lukehart, Pietro Roccasecca, and Isabella Salvagni.

[16] De La Blanchardière 1972, 80.

[17] Nussdorfer 1993; Angela Groppi, “Fili notarili e tracce corporative: La ricomposizione di un mosaico,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome: Italie et Méditerranée 112 (2000): 61–78.

[18] Armando Petrucci, Notarii: Documenti per la storia del notariato italiano (Milan, 1958), 29; Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (London, 1980), 161–162.

[19] Laurie Nussdorfer, “Lost Faith: A Roman Prosecutor Reflects on Notaries’ Crimes,” in Beyond Florence: The Contours of Medieval and Early Modern Italy, ed. Paula Findlen, Michelle M. Fontaine, and Duane J. Osheim (Stanford, CA, 2003), 109–111. See also AASL, Statuti, 1609 [1607], fol. 35v.

[20] Termed adunantia or congregatio by the Roman notaries.

[21] Rolandinus de Passageriis, Summa Totius Artis Notariae (Venice, 1546), 225. See also the form for a meeting of a rural community in Leo Speluncanus, Artis Notarie Tempestatis huius Speculum (Venice, 1538), fols. 211r–212v. (I also use the 1574 edition of this work.)

[22] For an illustration of this common practice, see the meeting of the confraternity of San Luca on November 7, 1599, that authorized the drawing up of an instrument terminating the censo (payment rights) on the house left to the painters by Girolamo Muziano in 1592: ASR, TNC, uff. 11 (Ottaviano Saravezzi), 1599, pt. 4, vol. 44, fols. 387r–388v. For the instrument itself, rogated three days later, see fol. 384r.

[23] ASR, Biblioteca, Statuti, 1421, no. 879, 84.

[24] Rossi 1984; Salvagni 2009.

[25] Renata Ago, “Una giustizia personalizzata: I tribunali civili di Roma nel XVII secolo,” Quaderni storici 34 (1999): 399; Maria Luisa Lombardo, Il notaio romano tra sovranità pontificia e autonomia comunale (secoli XIV–XVI) (Rome, 2012).

[26] “Erectio” (1586), in Statuta Venerabilis Collegii D.D. Notariorum Curiae Capitolii eorumque Facultates et Privilegia (Rome, 1831) [hereafter Statuta 1831], 41–53.

[27] “Reductio ad Perpetuitatem Officiorum DD. Notariorum Collegii Curiae Capitolii” (1612), in Statuta 1831, 54–62.

[28] ASR, TNC, uff. 11 (Ottaviano Saravezzi), 1584, vol. 4, fol. 30. The first instrument bears the date December 29, 1584 (rather than 1583), because the new Roman year began on December 25.

[29] ASR, TNC, uff. 11 (Ottaviano Saravezzi), 1584, vol. 4, fol. 452r. My thanks to Paul Anderson for the information on Saravezzi’s membership in the carpenters’ confraternity, and also to Peter M. Lukehart for informing me of his membership in the confraternity of the Virtuosi al Pantheon.

[30] We do not know for a fact that Saravezzi owned office 11, but if an investor had bought it, the new proprietor retained Saravezzi as titleholder. All Capitoline notarial offices were identified by the name of a practicing notary, regardless of who owned them.

[31] ASR, CNC, Registro delle congregazioni, Libro della massa, vol. 8 (1588–1598), fol. 16r. A percentage of judicial earnings (massa) were pooled and divided among the 30 members of the college. In addition to a judge of appeals, the Senator’s court consisted of the Senatore himself as well as a criminal judge and two civil judges, the first and second collaterali.

[32] Although manuali (records of the office’s daily judicial activities) for Ottaviano Saravezzi’s tenure have not survived, an early 18th-century inventory records his volumes of witness depositions and judicial sentences: ASR, Camerale II, Notariato, busta 25, unpaginated, inventory of the office of Dominicus Ursinus. Cf. ASR, Tribunale Civile del Senatore, Inventory 286 I. The notary received a payment for writing out a judicial order from the Marmorari in 1606: Mauro Leonardo, “Gli statuti dell’Università dei Marmorari a Roma: Scultori e scalpellini (1406–1756),” Studi romani 45 (1997): 283n73. On the large-scale loss of the judicial acts of the Capitoline notaries, see Laurie Nussdorfer, “Roman Notarial Records between Market and State,” in “The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe,” ed. Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters, Alexandra Walsham, Past and Present 230, Supplement 11 (November 2016): 87–89.

[33] See, for example, ASR, inventory of office 1 of the TNC, uff.

[34] Only the titleholder could make so-called public copies of documents, but public copies, which cost more, are the type researchers are least likely to see, since they were given to the clients.

[35] Although these men are difficult to trace before the legislation in 1612 requiring that they sign their work, some of Ottaviano Saravezzi’s employees can be tracked in the libri della massa. They include Pompeo Orsali (September 1593), Benedetto Orchus (October 1593), and Angelo Falcinelli (July 1594): ASR, CNC, Registro delle congregazioni, Libro della massa, vol. 8 (1588–1598), unpaginated.

[36] This hierarchy is discussed in more detail in Nussdorfer 2009, chap. 5.

[37] Some of Palmuctius’s scribal labors for office 15 are represented in ASR, TNC, uff. 15 (Spannochia), 1621, pt. 3, vol. 89, fol. 260r–v; 1624, pt. 1, vol. 99, fols. 47r, 402r, 739r–v, 799r; 1624, pt. 3, vol. 101, fols. 25v, 274r; 1625, pt. 1, vol. 103, fols. 87v–88r, 103r; 1627, pt. 1, vol. 114, fol. 833r.

[38] Shortened in 1612 to one day: Bullarium Diplomatum et Privilegiorum Sanctorum Romanorum Pontificum, 25 vols. (Turin, 1857–1872) [hereafter Bullarium 1857–1872], 12:90, no. 43.

[39] Statuta Almae Urbis Romae (Rome, 1580), bk. 1, art. 33. The papal constitution of 1612 “Universi agri dominici” reforming curial and civic tribunals paid considerable attention to notarial writing practices: Bullarium 1857–1872, 12:86–97, in particular 90 (nos. 42, 44). Nussdorfer 2009, 85–91.

[40] ASR, TNC, uff. 11 (Ottaviano Saravezzi), 1593, pt. 1, vol. 25. One 14th-century notarial handbook defined a congregatio as two men and a collegio as three; Leo Speluncanus, Artis Notarie Tempestatis huius Speculum (Venice, 1574), fol. 338r. See Nussdorfer 2009, chap. 3.

[41] “Accademia” was used frequently in the body of documents made in Saravezzi’s office, but does not appear in the table of contents of a protocol until the painters’ switch to notarial office 15 in 1609; ASR, TNC, uff. 15 (Giovanni Antonio Moschenio), 1609, pt. 2, vol. 45.

[42] Nussdorfer 1993, 112; Lukehart 2008, 206.

[43] The offices of the 30 members of the college of notaries of the Capitoline curia received archival numbers in the 19th century, but these were later changed. I use the modern numeration. For the list of officeholders, see Romina De Vizio, Repertorio dei Notari Romani dal 1348 al 1927 dall’Elenco di Achille Francois (Rome, 2011). On recent efforts to update this information, see Paolo Buonora, “Notarilia: L’informatizzazione dei fondi notarili dell’Archivio di Stato di Roma,” in Notai a Roma. Notai e Roma, ed. Orietta Verdi and Raffaele Pittella (Rome, 2018), 205–208.

[44] Groppi 2000, 63–64. The carpenters’ guild also paid their notary 5 scudi a year; ASR, Biblioteca, Statuti, 377/5, fol. 32v.

[45] Mentioned in a codicil to the will of their secretary, the Capitoline notary Lorenzo Bonincontro; ASR, TNC, uff. 18 (Grappolini), Testamenti, 1634–1639, vol. 7, fol. 19v.

[46] AASL, Statuti, 1609 [1607], refer to a secretario accademico (fol. 37r) who is clearly not a notary, but Spannocchia refers to himself as secretarius when he signs the manuscript of the 1619 statutes (January 8, 1619): AASL, Statuti, 1619, fol. 28r. See also ASR, TNC, uff. 15 (Erasto Spannocchia), 1622, pt. 2, vol. 91, fol. 593r–v; de La Blanchardière 1972, 80.

[47] ASR, TNC, uff. 15 (Erasto Spannocchia), 1623, pt. 1, vol. 95, fol. 321r–v. He also received back pay of 15 scudi, raising questions about how much, if anything, he had been paid over the previous five years.

[48] An example of this usage can be seen in the stima found in ASR, TNC, uff. 15 (Erasto Spannocchia), 1618, pt. 2, vol. 76, fol. 637r–v.

[49] See Antonino Bertolotti, Artisti belgi ed olandesi a Roma nei secoli XVI e XVII (Florence, 1880), 178. Originally in ASR, Tribunale criminale del Governatore, the petition was relocated by Bertolotti to the ASR fondo Miscellanea artisti, busta 2, fasc. 100; republished in Lukehart 2009, 365. A date in a later hand has been added to the original document.

[50] AASL, Statuti, 1609 [1607], fol. 39r. Quoted also in Grossi and Trani 2009, 40n28.

[51] ASR, TNC, uff. 11 (Alessandro Saravezzi), 1609, pt. 2, vol. 81, fol. 85r.

[52] ASR, TNC, uff. 11 (Alessandro Saravezzi), 1609, pt. 2, vol. 81, fol. 213r.

[53] ASR, TNC, uff. 15 (Giovanni Antonio Moschenio), 1609, pt. 2, vol. 45, fol. 548r. See also the Tribunale Civile del Senatore database for his litigation on behalf of the Accademia in 1613. The Accademia’s litigation now shifted judges in the Tribunale Civile del Senatore from the second to the first collaterale because office 15 supplied notarial services to the first collaterale.

[54] My thanks to Matteo Lafranconi for identifying Moschenio as Celio’s notary; see table of contents to ASR, TNC, uff. 15 (Giovanni Antonio Moschenio), 1608, pt. 2, vol. 45.

[55] ASR, TNC, uff. 15 (Giovanni Antonio Moschenio), 1610, pt. 3, vol. 49, fol. 376r; 1612, pt. 1, vol. 53, fol. 166r; 1615, pt. 3, vol. 65, fol. 31r (“camerarius et secretarius”); 1616, pt. 1, fol. 924r. Notaries performed routine banking functions for clients, such as holding deposits, but did not take formal charge of the accounts of most organizations.

[56] See Pietro Roccasecca, “Teaching in the Studio of the ‘Accademia del Disegno dei pittori, scultori e architetti di Roma’ (1594–1636),” in Lukehart 2009, 123–159.

[57] AASL, vol. 2a.

[58] De La Blanchardière 1972, 81–83.

[59] ASR, TNC, uff. 15 (Lorenzo Tigrino), 1625, pt. 2, vol. 104, fol. 681r–v.

[60] Renata Ago et al., “I Trenta Notai Capitolini: Schedatura dei protocolli del 1645,” in Popolazione e società a Roma dal medioevo all’età contemporanea, ed. Eugenio Sonnino (Rome, 1998), 382. Salvatore had succeeded Tigrino as titleholder by 1628.

Header image: Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Village Lawyer (detail), 1621, Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent