Some time ago the Library received a request for information on the presence or absence of a print included in a 19th century publication. XVIII. The investigation of the miscellaneous volume in question yielded a positive outcome: yes, the press was present. But what was it about?
The work is entitled “Apologia pro P. Joanne Baptista Mezetto ordinis Servorum B.M.V. eiusque discipulo Jacobo Martino Modanesio elaborated for… Paulum Mariam Cardi Regiensem… Editio secunda…” and is published in a collection entitled “Miscellanea of various operettas… Seventh volume”. In Venice, under Tommaso Bettinelli under the banner of S. Ignatio, 1743. (location in Casanatense: misc. vol. 1764)
The lady who asked for the information (Lucia Armentano, a now retired colleague from the Municipal Historical Archives of Carpi) was carrying out research with great enthusiasm on a painter from Carpi, Antonio Montanari known as Postetta. During her work she had come across the story of the child from Budrio and, as often happens during research, from link to link she goes off the beaten track to arrive at small discoveries or completely unexpected or at least unexpected results.
We will not go into the merits of the story, because the words of Lucia Armentano herself will do it much better than us, who shortly thereafter published in the magazine Voce: Weekly of current affairs, culture and sport (2/2/17 a. XXIV, n 4) in the Stories and documents section, 17 an interesting article entitled That child prodigy who wanted to be a child again. We publish some extracts from this article, courtesy of the author, referring to the Voce magazine for the full text. The article will reveal to our readers the true [e triste] story of Giacomo Martino Gibertoni, alias the child of Budrio, as well as his connections with Antonio Montanari and the Casanatense library.
“In 1782 the lawyer Eustachio Cabassi (1730-1796), a scholar from Carpi, collector and investigator of national antiquities, was elected prior of the Community for the third time and, as soon as he took office, proposed and obtained from the Council to have four portraits of most illustrious men, in letters and arms, of our city, for the decoration of the first room of the Public Residence, again under a priory of Cabassi, other paintings were commissioned with illustrious portraits of Carpi who had distinguished themselves for their virtues in the face of only two resolutions, as Elena Melegari documented in her beautiful degree thesis, several payment orders were issued between 1782 and 1783 in favor of the painter in charge of the work, Antonio Montanari from Carpi, known as Postetta.
Twenty-four portraits of this modest but imaginative provincial artist have come down to us, today preserved in the city museums, one of which is particularly striking, since it celebrates a child prodigy, Giacomo Martino Gibertoni, who lived in the first half of the seventeenth century and known as the Modenese, listed by Girolamo Tiraboschi among the writers of the Este States for the sole fact that his rare genius deserved to be remembered.
In the painting the young man wears an elegant suit, light brown tunic and trousers, white collar and gloves and carries a sword at his side; the right hand rests on an open book with titles in Latin, while on the left, under a gray curtain, a scroll reads: “For seven years defended in Rome, XI cardinals present for three days conclusions on theology, philosophy, law, medicine and other . 1647.” In the upper part of the canvas, in yellow, the boy’s personal details are shown with the clarification that he belonged to the Gibertoni family of Fossoli, in the Carpi district. […]
[…] Shortly after the birth of Giacomo Martino, the family moved to Budrio and there, in the winter of 1643, the child was noticed by his Servite father Giovanni Battista Mezzetti, who sensed his talent and asked permission from the parents to take him with them to Bologna to educate him. Over the course of four years, that is, from three to seven years old, Mezzetti taught the boy Latin, Greek and perhaps also Hebrew – or Aramaic – and instructed him in all the most sublime sciences, with a result that went far beyond expectations.
This led to the public and solemn exhibition, which took place in Rome in the church of San Marcello on 9 June 1647. For the occasion, a sheet adorned with symbols and figures was printed, including the portrait of the child prodigy , with propositions on every sort of science that he was preparing to discuss. A large crowd gathered at the show and anyone was able to question the boy and argue with him, and to remove the suspicion of fraud the topics of the dispute were drawn by lot.
The success was amazing, so much so that the Roman poet and philosopher Gian Vittorio Rossi, who attended the event, left memory of it as a very rare and wonderful thing, but he also added that the applause was the only fruit that the father Mezzetti and the boy they drew from that performance. Having left Rome, master and pupil returned to Bologna and then back to Budrio. In June 1648 Giacomo Martino was sent to the Servite Convent of Bologna with the aim of increasing his education, but shortly thereafter «he began to show himself as an enemy of study and toil, and to give signs of a dissipated spirit ». And once again the suspicion arose that everything was the work of the devil, a suspicion already expressed by someone at the time of the dispute in Rome, but recognized without foundation by the authorities of the Holy Inquisition.
Father Mezzetti, seeing his hopes dissolve, was distressed to the point of going mad: he withdrew to the top of the bell tower of his church in Budrio, determined not to come down until Giacomo Martino had resumed the straight path of his studies. The old man’s protest went on for a few days, then on the morning of July 14th he gave up and began to go down the stairs, but in doing so, either because he misplaced his foot, or for another reason, he fell from the first rung to to the ground and died instantly. According to other versions, however, the poor Servite father, in the throes of mystical exaltation, attempted to take flight from the top of the bell tower to reach the sanctuary of Loreto, without however replicating – as someone wrote – the happy outcome of other flights to the Marche.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Pallotta, who had taken the story of Giacomo Martino to heart, ordered the boy to be taken to the Marche region, to the Caldarola boarding school. But here, unfortunately, the child prodigy did not last long and, according to some, he ceased to live in 1649, before reaching the age of ten; according to others he died in 1658.
For Girolamo Tiraboschi, the early death of the little genius confirmed what others had already observed: «that commonly children, who too soon begin to show evidence of extraordinary intelligence, are either kidnapped by an immature death, or as they grow older they become almost stupid and senseless, as if that were an effort that nature cannot sustain for long” […].
[…] Retracing this story also allowed us to discover other portraits by Giacomo Martino, one of which in particular could have been used as a model by the painter Antonio Montanari, a hypothesis that our friend Elena Melegari had put forward during the compilation of his thesis. It is an etching by an anonymous Italian from the 18th century, found – for now – in two copies, at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library of Yale University and at the Casanatense Library in Rome. The searches continue.”
The engraving is the table contained in the work from which we started in telling this story: the apologia of Father Mezzetti, which tells the whole story of the good father Servite and his brilliant and unfortunate disciple Giacomo Martino, the child of Budrio.