The City of the Sun. Baroque art and scientific thought in the Rome of Urban VIII

The exhibition The City of the Sun. Baroque art and scientific thought in the Rome of Urban VIII at the National Gallery of Ancient Art in Palazzo Barberini, curated by Filippo Camerota with the collaboration of Marcello Fagiolo, is dedicated to the close link between the arts and sciences promoted by patronage of the Barberini family.

On display are around a hundred works including paintings, drawings, engravings, books, documents, scientific instruments and models, which well describe the cultural atmosphere of that historical period, an atmosphere which reveals a now modern vision of the world, based on a new experimental and rational scientific method, explained by Galileo in the work Il Saggiatore. Those years in fact marked the birth of empirical science against the obscurantism of the previous era. In fact, the title of the exhibition refers both to Pope Urban VIII, who chose the sun as a heraldic element alongside the bees, and to Tommaso Campanella and his work The City of the Sun, a philosophical-utopian essay due to which he had to undergo a long imprisonment, interrupted by Urban VIII.The exhibition itinerary, in three sections, is divided between the works of the protagonists of the three Roman academic scientific centres - the Roman College of the Jesuits, the Accademia dei Lincei and the Convento dei Minimi - and the work of some of the most famous artists of the Baroque Rome. Among the canvases on display, the portraits of Galileo - by Santi di Tito - of Urban VIII - by Gian Lorenzo Bernini - and of Louis XIII - by Jean-François Nicerone are particularly noteworthy, as well as allegories such as that of Wisdom by Andrea Sacchi, or that of the satyrs admiring the anamorphosis of an elephant in a drawing by Simon Vouet. The exhibition also makes use of the loans of ancient books or terrestrial and celestial globes such as those by Matthäus Greuter from 1636.

The exhibition is organized by the Galileo Museum in collaboration with the National Galleries of Ancient Art, the National Central Library of Rome and the Center for Studies on Culture and Image of Rome, and takes advantage of the patronage of the Department of Culture of Rome Capital and the National Committee for the celebrations of the fourth centenary of the election of Pope Urban VIII. Finally, to accompany the exhibition, an illustrated Italian catalog and a bilingual guide (Italian/English) are available, both published in co-edition by Edizioni Museo Galileo and Sillabe.

Photo credits: Simon Vouet Eight satyrs admiring the anamorphosis of an elephant, 1625-1627 pencil and sanguine on paper; 24 x 33.9 cm Darmstadt, Hessisches Landesmuseum