| Palazzo Lancellotti in via dei Coronari was built shortly after 1590 for the family who still owns it. Slowly, in the course of a century, the Lancellotti were able to acquire a vast area along Via dei Coronari, in the immediate vicinity of the church of San Salvatore in Lauro. Cardinal Scipione Lancellotti gave to Francesco da Volterra the task of creating a palace out of a medley of old constructions. After Volterra' s death the palace was finished by Carlo Maderno, responsible for the rich stucco decoration of the courtyard, stairs and loggia.;The real glory of the palace consists in its fresco decoration, carried out under Agostino Tassi's direction between 1617 and 1625, with the collaboration of numerous other artists, including Lanfranco and Guercino. Ten frescoed rooms, five on the piano nobile and five on the ground-floor, survive to this day. Six of them were known, if little studied, for access to the palace has always been difficult, and four are new discoveries. The earlier ones were painted for Cardinal Orazio Lancellotti, the later, after Orazio's death, for his brother Tiberio. The project though remained rather coherent. Its goal, most clearly spelled out in the three vaults on the ground-floor painted by Tassi, Guercino and Lanfranco, was the celebration of the nobility of the Lancellotti family, a nobility based both on the personal virtues of the family members and on the antiquity of their origins.;The Lancellotti, relative newcomers to Rome and suspected of being Jewish, needed this sort of advertising to help them establish their status in Rome. To carry out the decoration they chose Agostino Tassi, extremely popular at the time, but now little known and less esteemed. This study of Palazzo Lancellotti inevitably becomes also a study of Agostino Tassi. If further work is certainly needed on the painter, Palazzo Lancellotti substantially adds to our knowledge of the central years of his career, and it helps us understand the extravagant praise of his contemporaries for here have survived some of his best works. |
