Bruce Edelstein and Elena Fumagalli
present the volume by
Vincenzo Sorrentino
A Patron Family Between Renaissance Florence, Rome, and Naples
(Routledge 2022)
Introduced by
Cristina Acidini and Alessandro Cecchi
February 27, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.
Casa Buonarroti – via Ghibellina 70 Florence
The presentation is open to the public up to the maximum capacity allowed by security regulations
This book revolves around the Del Riccio family, Florentine merchants and bankers who lived in Rome and Naples between the 1630s and the first quarter of the 17th century. Despite their humble origins, the Del Riccios made a rapid social ascent, employing tools and strategies already characteristic of more established merchant families. Not only through shrewd matrimonial policies and commercial ties, but also by offering themselves as cultural mediators and agents of princes, several members of the family also played a decisive role in the consolidation of the Florentine nationes in Rome and Naples and in the endowment and decoration of their respective churches.
Luigi Del Riccio’s relationship with Michelangelo in Rome was particularly close: Buonarroti provided him with a design for the tomb of his nephew Cecchino Bracci, which was built in the basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli. Luigi then decorated his Florentine chapel in Santo Spirito with a copy of the Vatican’s Pieta, and after spending 30 years in Naples, his cousin Guglielmo adorned a second family chapel in the same church with a copy of the Christ of Minerva. Unpublished documentation will finally show how the altarpiece in the Del Riccios’ Neapolitan chapel would also have had to conform to a Michelangelo iconography.
Vincenzo Sorrentino, PhD, currently a fellow at the 1563 Foundation and Visiting Senior Fellow at the Medici Archive Project, has been a research fellow and adjunct professor at the University of Pisa.