The first virtual exhibition created by Casanatense with the SCMS developed by ICCU is online, with which we aim to make visible an iconographic heritage, if we want minor, but of historical and documentary interest and not only for the Institute that preserves it.
The Casanatense library is populated by a series of painted and sculpted portraits of some of the men who have “inhabited” it over the centuries and of others whose life and thoughts have been a source of inspiration and example for the frequenters of the great Roman library institution.
Who are these?
The Dominican Fathers (some of them were prefects, who today we would call the directors of the library), who with a generally benevolent and smiling expression, observe what is happening from the walls of the various rooms where their portraits hang; the Founder, Cardinal Casanate; two eminent state librarians among those who directed the Institute after 1873, the year of the suppression of the religious corporations and the confiscation of the Casanatense by the Italian State, Luigi De Gregori and Ignazio Giorgi; illustrious men, in various capacities, portrayed in plaster busts and plaster or marble medallions; the allegorical representations of the Sciences, painted in a cycle of frescoes decorating the walls of the first reading room.
All these characters (and these men have been made such by their public representation) appear as the impassive and vigilant guardians of the books, for which some have worked for a large part of their lives and with which others have handed down their thoughts to posterity or seen their deeds celebrated.