Baroque Rome, 1600-1680

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The popes who ruled seventeenth-century Rome were political as well as spiritual leaders who faced a series of daunting challenges: climate change, an unpredictable global economy, social unrest, the Protestant Reformation, and violent conflicts, including the cataclysm of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). Their responses ranged from controversial trials like those of Giordano Bruno (1600) and Galileo Galilei (1633) to a far more successful campaign to present Rome to the world as an Eternal City, mustering the persuasive powers of public preaching, liturgy, art, literature, theatre, graphic arts, music, and architecture to transform a flagging political power into a capital of spirituality and culture. Women, including Christina, the expatriate queen of Sweden, played an increasingly important role in the cultural sphere of a city with an unusually large proportion of male residents, as patrons, performers, and powers behind the throne, and the abundance of surviving bureaucratic records provides insight into the daily life of Romans from every level of society, from the taverns frequented by the painter Caravaggio and his rambunctious friends to the walks Pope Alexander VII took in the Vatican gardens with the great artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.