Costanza Piccolomini Bonarelli

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Bust of Costanza Bonarelli di Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1638–39, Museo del Bargello

Costanza Bonarelli (1614 – 3 December 1662), also known as Costanza Bonucelli or Costanza Piccolomini Bonucelli, was an Italian noblewoman, merchant and art dealer, descended from a Sienese noble family. She is known for being portrayed by the artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the bust now exposed at the National Museum of Bargello in Florence, and it was carved between 1636 and 1638.

The Piccolomini family[]

Costanza was born around 1614, daughter of Lorenzo Piccolomini, member of a minor branch of the important Sienese family. The first time she appears in documents is in Rome during 1625, when she was eleven years old. The name of her mother is unknown because in this document, coming from the Stati d'Anime of the parish S. Lorenzo in Lucina, Costanza was resident in the street "behind the palace of the church" - the current via della Vite - with her father Leonardo and her step-mother, Tiberia. Costanza never mentioned her mother in her last will, signed around the 23 January 1662.[1] Even if Lorenzo was part of the "poor" branch of the Piccolomini family and he worked as a groom, his name and his association with the powerful clan are still today for the identification of Costanza, that in the documents is always named 'Signora' and, in the aforementioned testament, she stabilished that her inheritance could have been inherited by all the descendants, as long as their last name was Piccolomini.

The wedding[]

On 15 August 1628, on the occasion of Solemnity of the Assumption, Costanza received a dowry of 45 scudi (the equivalent of an annual rent for a house of modest dimension) from the Confraternity of San Rocco, funded by Giambattista Borghese, brother of the late Pope . In 1630 Costanza, named as 'la zitella da Viterbo' ("the spinster of Viterbo), received the promise of a second dowry of 26 scudi and 44 baiocchi, this time from the Gonfalone Confraternity. Costanza then married the sculptor, restorer and art dealer Matteo Bonarelli (or Bonucelli) from Lucca, on 16 February 1632 in his parish of San Lorenzo in Lucina. On the 28th February, the marriage contract is signed between Costanza, her father Leonardo and her husband Matteo.[2] The dowry is fixed at 289 scudi. Costanza was eighteen years old and Matteo twenty-eight: they settled in the current Scanderbeg alley, at the foothills of the Quirinale.

The relationship with Bernini[]

The first testimony of Matteo Bonucelli as an assistant of Bernini is the payment, by the year 1636, for three putti of marble for the S. Pietro; the following year, Matteo assisted Bernini with the mausoleum dedicated to Countess Matilde, always in San Pietro. When they first meet, Costanza was a married woman of 22 years old, Gian Lorenzo Bernini a 38-year-old bachelor. The portrait of Bargello, in which the sculptor of cardinals and popes immortalized in marble his lover, may have been started in the 1636, but it was definitely finished in October 1637 when Fulvio Testi, a friend of Bernini, in a letter to the Count Francesco Fontana declared that it was the most beautiful portrait executed by the artist. With this last annotation, we can assume that the portrait was partly knowed to the public.[3]

But in the last summer of 1638 the scandal broke. When Gianlorenzo Bernini discovered that Costanza was having an affair with his younger brother Luigi, Gianlorenzo was blinded by jealousy, and his excesses were described by his mother, Angelica Galante Bernini, in a letter destined to the Cardinal Francesco Barberini, dated around autumn 1638.[4] Costanza was punished by a groom of the Bernini family that slashed her face upon request of Bernini himself; meanwhile Luigi fled from Rome and taking refuge in Bologna for about a year. For the crime of being slashed in the face, which was described by the late Italian lawyer Prospero Farinacci as "atrox et grave delictum", were frequently victimized many courtesans. Costanza was indeed described as a courtesans and punished (perhaps for adultery) with detention in the Domus Pia de Urbe, a place knowed also ad the monastery of Casa Pia, while the groom that injured her was exiled; Gianlorenzo Bernini, instead, was at first condemned to pay a penalty of three thousand scudi, and then he was pardoned, meanwhile his brother Luigi, that was less famous and to the Pope was considered less important, was also exiled from Rome. It wasn't until the 7 April 1639, and only after writing heartbreaking plea to the Governor of the house,[5] that Costanza was "given back to her husband".

Widow and art dealer[]

During the next years Costanza lived in her old house/study in harmony with her husband, indeed she continued the business of merchant and art dealer with a fair success also after the death of Matteo Bonacelli (18 January 1654) and during the pontificate of the Sienese Alessandro VII Chigi. In his will, signed in the year 1649, Matteo designated as sole heir "Signora Costanza Piccolomini mia dilettissima moglie".[6] Payments orders intended for the Bonucelli widow referre to her as "Signora Costanza", or "Costanza Piccolomini" or also "Costanza scultora".[7]

Costanza has a large collection of artworks that was exhibited in the main floor of her house, and in two rooms on the upper floor. One of the most famous works collected by her was the Plague of Ashdod by Nicolas Poussin, commissioned by the Sicilian Nobleman Fabrizio Valguarnera in 1630. In 1665, when Bernini was in Paris, he saw the artwork in the palace of Duke of Richelieu and he claimed to know it, suggesting that the painting had to be hanged lower to watch it better. In the same year the painting was sold from Richelieu to the King Louis XIV of France, and today is located in the Louvre.[8]

The last years[]

During Easter 1657, Costanza Piccolomini became the mother of a child, Olimpia Caterina Piccolomini: the girl must have been born more than a years after the death of Matteo Bonacelli, when Costanza was in her mid-40s.[9] Costanza made her will in February 1659, and three days before her death she added a codicil, on 30 November 1662. Costanza wasn't buried with her husband in the crypt of their parish of St. Vincenzo and Anastasio, but was buried in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. The same burial was destined to, respectively 18 and 19 years after her death, to Gianlorenzo and Luigi Bernini.

References[]

  1. ^ McPhee, p.150-152
  2. ^ McPhee, p.163
  3. ^ McPhee, p.39
  4. ^ McPhee, p.149-150
  5. ^ McPhee, p.154
  6. ^ McPhee, p.154-155
  7. ^ McPhee, p.82-85
  8. ^ McPhee, p.85
  9. ^ McPhee, p.87

Further reading[]

  • Sarah McPhee, Bernini's Beloved. A portrait of Costanza Piccolomini, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2012.
  • Domenico Bernini, Franco Mormando, The Life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.
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