An architect, an intendant and a cardinal - A talk by Yuri Primarosa

Join us for a talk by Dr Yuri Primarosa on Thursday 12 June at 5 p.m. on the work of architect Plautilla Bricci and her unrealised project for the Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti.

An architect, an intendant and a cardinal. Three actors in a two-way dialogue that re-emerges from the ancient seventeenth-century correspondence preserved in Rome and Paris: in 1660 Elpidio Benedetti, Cardinal Jules Mazarin's agent in Rome, and the artist Plautilla Bricci became involved in a dispute between architects over the transformation of the slope of Monte Pincio, an area that France considered its own, into a monumental staircase. For essentially political reasons, none of these projects were eventually realised: Alexander VII, in fact, could not tolerate that a great architectural intervention in the centre of Rome would fatally take on what would have looked like a celebration of Louis XIV. The dispute dragged on for a year, during which time Mazarin continued to hope that the pope would not have the courage to reject a work that would have finally connected theTridente to the Via Felice (today's Via Sistina); Benedetti did not tire of promoting the project that he himself had sanctioned to the last (Plautilla always remained in the shadows, an unknown executor of the abbot's ambitions); the pontiff then closed himself in an icy silence that blocked the French initiative without ever officially rejecting it. In the years that followed, Elpidio did not give up hope of seeing his staircase project realised. He kept a cardboard model of it in his villa on the Gianicolo, which he proudly displayed to his guests to show them ‘how one could climb the Pincio with a carriage’.

Please note that this event will be in Italian.

Admission is free but booking is required due to the limited number of spaces (write to info@keats-shelley-house.org).

Entry from 4:45 p.m. onwards. 

Yuri Primarosa is curator at the National Galleries of Ancient Art in Rome.
His numerous contributions on various aspects of 17th century Roman paintings include the catalogue raisonné of the works of Ottavio Leoni (2017), and, in recent years, the exhibitions he has curated on Mattia and Gregorio Preti (Rome, 2019; 2020), Plautilla Bricci (Rome, 2021), Orazio Gentileschi (Rome, 2023), Carlo Maratti (Rome, 2024), Canaletto, Bellotto and Van Wittel (Cuneo, 2024). A monographic exhibition on Simone Cantarini opened last month in the Ducal Palace in Urbino.