Memories in the chest you collect

by Anna Alloro

Artur Wolynski (1844-1893)

Artur Wołyński was born in Słuzewo (Warsaw) on 9 February 1844. Engaged in political struggle from a very young age, when the Polish uprising of 1863 failed and was sentenced to death, he was forced to flee abroad, first to France and then to Italy where, his studies, he graduated in 1868 in philosophy and law at the Collegio Romano. Expelled from the Papal State for some of his political writings, he moved to Florence where he deepened his studies on Copernicus. After long procedures, in 1882 he managed to obtain some rooms in Rome where he could place his collection of Copernican relics, inside the Roman College. After the creation of the Museum, Wolynski worked hard to create a center of Polish culture that would serve as a meeting point for his compatriots exiled in Italy, identifying the Casanatense Library as the most suitable place to host books and documents on Polish history and literature which has been collected over the years. In 1888 he offered his collection to Casanatense who, having obtained authorization from the Ministry of Education, accepted it. The collection was inventoried and cataloged by Francesco Ciaglinski in 1892, and has currently found worthy accommodation in a room adjacent to the Monumental Hall where, above the boxes containing his Polish Library, the plaster bust of Artur Wolynski was placed. The Polish scholar died in his Roman home in via Panisperna, due to bronchopneumonia, on 29 April 1893 at just 49 years of age and was buried in the Verano Cemetery.

The book material in the collection includes the works of the most representative Polish poets, philosophers and historians. There are also some valuable editions such as a S.Tommaso d’Aquino published by Giunta in 1530, a Cicerone printed by Grifio in 1552, some writings by Socinus printed in Krakow in 1611-1612. The collection of prints, mostly lithographs taken from newspapers of the time, ordered by Wolynski himself, presents portraits and images of historical, social and worldly episodes of the nineteenth century in Europe and the world.

Facts and Portraits: the unification of Italy on the print of the Wolynski collection by Anna Alloro

In the general climate of the celebrations with which this year the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy is celebrated, Casanatense, drawing on the Wolynski collection, intends to offer a gallery of useful images to illustrate the figures and episodes that made it possible, through the battles of the Risorgimento, the birth and consolidation of the Kingdom of Italy. Many of the prints chosen for this section are taken from L’Illustrazione Italiana, a prestigious weekly magazine, published starting in 1873 in Milan by the publisher Emilio Treves, who was also its first director. In the last quarter of a century of the nineteenth century the magazine achieved great success in the circles of the middle and upper class, thanks to the quality of the articles and illustrations, entrusted to leading artists and made from wood engravings which allowed for high-profile images to be obtained. high definition. However, the Wolynski collection does not lack the testimony of other nineteenth-century newspapers, such as L’Illustrazione Popolare, L’Illustrazione per tutti, L’Epoca. The particular attention and the large space dedicated to the past of the Italian nation, a recent past it is true, but still the past, demonstrates how the figures and events of the Italian Risorgimento were immediately experienced by the collective and popular imagination as heroic and worthy of being celebrated and remembered. The journey opens with the human and political story of Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose figure stands out as that of the hero par excellence in the judgment of a contemporary, Edmondo De Amicis. And then gradually other characters, known to all since childhood: Vittorio Emanuele II, “gentleman king” and “father of the country”, Pope Pius IX, King Umberto I, men who, often intertwining their lives, have marked the history of our country with his ideas, choices and actions.

The significant events of the Risorgimento also appear in the section: some battles of the wars of independence, the meeting at Teano which concluded the expedition of the Thousand, the breach of Porta Pia which finally delivered Rome to Italy. The relationships of the Savoy kings with the European monarchs, especially Austrian and German, are also illustrated, depicted on the pages of Italian magazines in the dense intertwining of exchanged, glittering and sumptuous official visits aimed at strengthening friendly relations and encouraging the birth of agreements and alliances . Finally, the portraits of some of the politicians who gave life to the governments of the Kingdom of Italy in the first forty years, representatives of the “Left” and the “Historical Right”, are exhibited. And so, through the illustrations collected and preserved by the Polish scholar, the epic of a people and a nation comes to life again, albeit in an episodic and fragmentary manner, under the guise of “facts and portraits” pertaining to the theme of the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy.

Queen Margaret

A musician at court: Giovanni Sgambati and Queen Margherita by Rita Fioravanti

Composer, conductor and extraordinary pianist, Giovanni Sgambati (Rome, 1841-1914), was one of the major architects of the rebirth of symphonic and chamber music in Italy between the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Once the temporal power of the popes fell, a climate of fervent cultural, as well as political, change hit Rome, the capital of the kingdom. The agreement between the musician and the new political class, committed to also ensuring the consensus of intellectuals, was immediate. Sgambati received the most prestigious and authoritative support for his activity of disseminating and promoting instrumental music from the Savoy court and in particular from Queen Margherita. A true lover of music and an excellent amateur of musical performance, Margherita contributed decisively to changing the orientations of the aristocracy and the upper middle class who, following the example of the sovereign, opened up to European, especially German, symphonic and chamber music. until then little known in Italy. On 28 March 1881, for the first time in history, a concert was organized at the Quirinale Palace: Sgambati was called to the podium, who conducted the Coriolan Overture by Beethoven, the queen’s favorite author, and the Symphony in king for large orchestra , a composition by Sgambati himself dedicated to the sovereign. Margherita then invited the Quintet Society founded by the musician in 1881 to perform at the palace. In 1893 the musical ensemble took the name of Quintet of the Court of Her Majesty the Queen.

The demonstrations at the Quirinale continued assiduously until 9 July 1900; after the death of Umberto I they resumed on 13 June 1904 at Palazzo Margherita in Via Veneto (Palazzo Boncompagni or Piombino, today home to the Embassy of the United States of America), the new residence of the Queen Mother. Almost all the documents displayed in the section come from the Giovanni Sgambati Archive preserved in Casanatense. The prestigious fund was purchased by the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities at the Christie’s auction in Rome on 13 December 1994. download the full text

Adolfo Matarelli: satire and the Risorgimento by Elena Petroselli

Adolfo Matarelli, famous Florentine cartoonist, author of 40 of the 51 caricatures present in the Arturo Wolynski Fund, was a multifaceted and versatile artist, protagonist of the main humorous broadsheets of the time as well as colleague and friend of prominent figures such as Carlo Lorenzini, better known as Collodi, and Telemaco Signorini. It is to him that since 1860 we owe the fortune and popularity of the newspaper Il Lampione: his caricatures were proverbial, from them we can grasp the cultural imagination that animated the Italian patriots, the opinions, feelings, hopes and disappointments of an era that created the cultural basis of Italian identity. The cartoons of Mata, pseudonym of the Florentine artist, are immediate but accurate at the same time, endowed with an aesthetic refinement without sophistry.

Some satirical cartoons from the Wolynski Fund attest to the dense network of mutual references, references, influences and controversies that linked the periodical press, satirical cartoons and the political issues of the Risorgimento. The periodical press, in fact, was the driving force and place of debate of the national movements and its emotional charge was expressed above all through satire; it is no coincidence that the Risorgimento was the golden age of Italian caricature, since the desire to change things and the spirit of rebellion are the lifeblood of this often little-considered art form. Even more than other types of periodical press, it was humorous newspapers that played a fundamental role in preparing the humus from which the Risorgimento enterprises came to life, since through various allegorical ploys they could comment on political events while evading censorship, and they could reach through the images also include the large segment of the illiterate population. Furthermore, the caricature also has a dreamlike function: it reworks lived experiences by transporting them into a lighter parallel dimension, thus allowing them to be resized and analyzed from the right point of view, but, unlike dreams, it acts under the supervision of consciousness, and is therefore even more linked to the culture of the society of which the caricaturist is part, as he translates its expectations and needs.

Music for a united Italy by Anna Alberati

Together with the words to music of some famous opera librettos, various pieces of music, i.e. rather rare and often little-known manuscript and printed scores, also bear witness in the Casanatense Library to the period of the Italian Risorgimento and its myths. Thus a small journey unfolds through a series of arias from melodramas, patriotic hymns, choirs, band marches, music and words with which the patriots, the young patriot musicians and artists, and the various composers expressed the ideals in music and with music , the utopias, the ardors, the emotions that they passionately and with incredible enthusiasm experienced in that particular historical moment, when Italy did not yet exist. Paced by numerous hymns and festive marches, above all, here is the history of Rome, which from being the capital of the Papal State became the capital of Italy through a series of particular events, between enthusiasms and defeats, from a liberal pope to the same pope at sudden reactionary, from a too beautiful and too short republic to an inevitable monarchy. Other music bears witness to the life of the young nation through some compositions of a celebratory nature and some closely linked to the royal family, from Rome as the capital in 1871 to the regicide in the year 1900.

The main protagonist, among the composers present, is the Roman musician Giovanni Sgambati (1841-1914), of whom the Library preserves a notable musical and archival collection. Although his education in the provinces with his English mother, his indifference towards melodrama and his frequenting of foreign cultural environments, in addition to his relationship with Franz Liszt, his teacher, excluded him from the political and cultural life of the time, in 1870 the breach of Porta Pia managed to inspire in him some compositions dedicated to the event. Furthermore, in Rome, the capital of the kingdom of Italy, he carried out an assiduous artistic activity dedicated to chamber music, as a composer, concert performer, orchestra director, artistic director and teacher, both privately and within various institutions; in particular he was active with the royal family, for whom he oversaw the activity of concerts at the Quirinale with his Quintet Society, which later took the name of Quintet of the Court of Her Majesty the Queen. With the death of King Umberto I and the Requiem Mass composed and then conducted by Sgambati at the Pantheon in 1901, a century and, almost entirely, the Risorgimento in Italy came to an end.

A project for Florence as the capital: Antonio Corazzi by Barbara Mussetto

Within the collection of prints and drawings of the Casanatense Library, a group of drawings by the Italian architect Antonio Corazzi is preserved, received as part of the Artur Wolynski donation and identified and reorganized in 1969 with the collaboration of prof. Bronislaw Biliński. Currently preserved in 5 folders (20.B.II.148/1-5), the collection has a consistency of 300 sheets of various sizes. Antonio Corazzi (Livorno 1792 – Florence 1877) trained in Florence at the Academy of Fine Arts under the guidance of professor-architects such as Gaspero Paoletti and Giuseppe Del Rosso, starting his professional activity starting from 1817. He immediately introduced himself for him the occasion of a brilliant journey, when the Kingdom of Poland, on the initiative of the undersecretary of state Stanislaw Staszic who, following a long stay knew the Florentine environment well, asked the Grand Duchy of Tuscany to send an architect to Poland young and capable. Antonio Corazzi, chosen, arrived in Warsaw at the end of 1810 and until 1830 he created monumental projects for public buildings for the city with the function of general builder of the government, establishing himself as an architect full of talent and ability to create. The most complete expression of his abilities is found in the creation of the Great Theater in Warsaw, which places him among the greatest representatives of European neoclassicism.

The last period of activity (1847-1877) coincides with his return to Florence, where he was appointed professor of the Academy of Fine Arts and where he dedicated himself to the design of public monuments and private residence buildings. In particular, we highlight the projects for the seat of the National Parliament, in anticipation of moving the capital to Florence, the monument to Dante in Piazza Santa Croce, various theaters in Alexandria, Copenhagen, Ravenna, Castiglion Fiorentino. The drawings preserved at the Casanatense, mostly executed in pencil except for some brightly watercoloured, refer to the numerous projects developed for public and private buildings, to be carried out essentially in Warsaw and Florence, the architect’s residential city.

In the name of God and the people: the Roman Republic of 1849 by Margherita Palumbo

From the volumes that make up the very rich collection of Edicts and Announcements of the Casanatense (Per.est.18) some documents have been chosen to integrate the Wolynski Prints concerning the Roman Republic proclaimed in February 1849, after the escape of Pius IX to Gaeta: the siege of the French troops, the resistance on the Janiculum, the assault on Villa Spada and Villa Barberini, the death of Luciano Manara. Over the course of the few republican months of Rome, hundreds of decrees, proclamations and edicts were published which in the name of God and the People declare the pontiff fallen, open the gardens of the Vatican and the Quirinale to the citizens, order the requisition of the «Bells of Rome, belonging to our churches, to make cannons”, abolish the Tribunal of the Inquisition. The press was also entrusted with the instructions for the construction of barricades, with «earth, stones from the pavements removed, barrels, furniture, cars, tables, beams, firewood», and it will be the Barricades Commission that will have them posted on the 3rd July 1849, the manifesto with which the final defeat was communicated to the Romans. Pius IX returned to Rome on 12 April 1850. In the following days, holy invitations were printed one after the other, with the announcement of ceremonies and triduums of thanksgiving for the newfound “calm after such a furious storm”, and the “seeing that ‘order to perfidious anarchy’. Calm and order also returned to churches and convents, while the Commission for the recovery and restitution of property, furniture and furnishings arranged for the return of furnishings, bells, sacred images and books.

The events of 1849 are also remembered in the Historical Memoirs that the last Dominican prefect, Pio Tommaso Masetti, dedicated to the Casanatense Library in 1884. «Coming now to our library, the Roman Republic was proclaimed […] the Father Curators, terrified by what was happening, went out, or hid elsewhere», and in the month of May a prudent closure was opted for. The Casanatense was reopened in November 1849 and the librarians had the many sheets printed between February and July of that year bound into a large tome. They wrote a cross in ink on the spine of the volume, to signal – Masetti writes – the ecclesiastical condemnation of those days of «anarchy, of fears, of republican abuses» (ms. 5068, pp. 142-143).