Carving Out Identity

the boncompagni fa mily, a lessandro a lgardi, and the ch apel in the sacristy of sa nta m a ria in va llicella

On April 23, 1636, a fire broke out in the wood storage of Giovanni Zaccarello, tenant of Duke Salviati’s vineyard, and expanded to the neighboring house of the Bolognese artist Alessandro Algardi (1598–1654), located in Rome in Via della Lungara.1 The unfortunate sculptor, who was at first accused by Zaccarello of having set the fire, was the one who suffered considerable damage.2 From the legal examinations recorded in the Tribunale Criminale del Governatore and the deposition of Algardi’s assistant Francesco Maria Ricci, who was in the house of the sculptor when the fire broke out, we learn that if not for several people who came to the artist’s aid, his house would have burned to the ground.3 Aside from providing an account of what happened to Algardi, the legal records are of pivotal importance because they shed light on the sculptor’s projects at the time. In fact, thanks to the deposition of Ricci, we learn that when the fire broke out, another assistant of Algardi’s was present in the house, working “intorno a San Filippo Neri,” a work correctly identified as the sculpture of Saint Philip Neri and the Angel, a three-meter-tall marble group destined for the chapel in the sacristy of the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella (FIg. 1).4

A rguably, the artist received the commission only sometime before and was not even at the preliminary stage of his carving process, having his assistant working “alla gagliarda,” that is, taking off the rough parts of the marble block and cutting out the principal features of the sculptural ensemble.5 The statue was commissioned by the layman and converted Jew Pietro Boncompagni (1592–1664), but the payment of two hundred scudi and another for the two columns flanking the marble group were made, respectively, by Pietro’s uncles, the convert Agostino Boncompagni (d. 1640) and his brother Ippolito (d. 1652).6 The three characters came from the Jewish family of the Corcos, a branch of famous rabbis and wealthy bankers from the Roman Ghetto, several members of which embraced Christianity under the auspices of Philip Neri, being baptized, as will be explained in more detail, with the Bolognese and noble family name Boncompagni.

The commissioning of the statue was investigated by Minna Heimbürger Ravalli in 1973 and by Jennifer Montagu in a seminal article published in 1977 and again in her monograph on Algardi in 1985.7 Aside from his Jewish origins, little was known about Pietro Boncompagni at the time. This lack of information about his artistic patronage and his relationship with artists made it difficult, as both scholars observed, to postulate why Pietro chose Algardi.8

By placing the circumstances of this commission in the broader context of the Corcos family’s transition from Judaism to Catholicism, I will examine this episode of patronage in connection with the vicissitudes that led the family to embrace Christianity and its subsequent efforts to refashion its identities. In investigating the relationship of Pietro to Agostino and Ippolito, I will delve further into the lives of the latter two and suggest, on the basis of new documentary evidence, that because of Agostino’s role within the Oratory and Ippolito’s friendship with Bolognese artists, the two played a key role in envisioning the commission. I will thus explore the embellishment of their chapel as a collective enterprise, conceived with the intention both to emphasize the Boncompagni family’s devotion and special bond to Saint Philip Neri as advocate of their conversion and to publicly consolidate their new social and religious identity.