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The Accademia degli Arcadi or Accademia dell'Arcadia, "Academy of Arcadia" or "Academy of the Arcadians", was an Italian literary academy founded in Rome in 1690. The full Italian official name was Pontificia Accademia degli Arcadi.
Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a European country consisting of a peninsula delimited by the Italian Alps and surrounded by several islands. Located in the middle of the Mediterranean sea and traversed along its length by the Apennines, Italy has a largely temperate seasonal and Mediterranean climate. The country covers an area of 301,340 km2 (116,350 sq mi) and shares open land borders with France, Slovenia, Austria, Switzerland and the enclaved microstates of Vatican City and San Marino. Italy has a territorial exclave in Switzerland (Campione) and a maritime exclave in the Tunisian Sea (Lampedusa). With around 60 million inhabitants, Italy is the fourth-most populous member state of the European Union.
An academy is an institution of secondary education, higher learning, research, or honorary membership. Academia is the worldwide group composed of professors and researchers at institutes of higher learning.
Rome is the capital city and a special comune of Italy. Rome also serves as the capital of the Lazio region. With 2,872,800 residents in 1,285 km2 (496.1 sq mi), it is also the country's most populated comune. It is the fourth most populous city in the European Union by population within city limits. It is the centre of the Metropolitan City of Rome, which has a population of 4,355,725 residents, thus making it the most populous metropolitan city in Italy. Rome is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, within Lazio (Latium), along the shores of the Tiber. The Vatican City is an independent country inside the city boundaries of Rome, the only existing example of a country within a city: for this reason Rome has been often defined as capital of two states.
The beginnings of the Accademia degli Arcadi date to February 1656, when a literary circle formed under the patronage of Queen Christina of Sweden, who had abdicated the Swedish crown in 1654, converted to Catholicism, and taken up her residence in Rome, where she spent much of the rest of her life. There she became a significant patron of music and opera, with composers including Alessandro Scarlatti, Alessandro Stradella and Arcangelo Corelli dedicating works to her. After her death in 1689, the academy was established in her memory and elected her as its symbolic head (basilissa, the Greek term for 'Queen'). The Academy lasted for the next two hundred years,[clarification needed] remaining a leading cultural institution into the 20th century.
Pietro Alessandro Gaspare Scarlatti was an Italian Baroque composer, known especially for his operas and chamber cantatas. He is considered the founder of the Neapolitan school of opera. He was the father of two other composers, Domenico Scarlatti and Pietro Filippo Scarlatti.
Antonio Alessandro Boncompagno Stradella was an Italian composer of the middle Baroque period. He enjoyed a dazzling career as a freelance composer, writing on commission, and collaborating with distinguished poets, producing over three hundred works in a variety of genres.
Arcangelo Corelli was an Italian violinist and composer of the Baroque era. His music was key in the development of the modern genres of sonata and concerto, in establishing the preeminence of the violin, and as the first coalescing of modern tonality and functional harmony.
The Accademia degi Arcadi was so called because its principal intention was to reform the diction of Italian poetry, which the founders believed had become corrupt through over-indulgence in the ornamentation of the baroque style, under the inspiration of pastoral literature, the conventions of which imagined the life of shepherds, originally supposed to have lived in Arcadia in the golden age, divinely inspired in poetry by the Muses, Apollo, Hermes and Pan. The Academy chose as its emblem the pipe of Pan with its seven unequal reeds.
Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in classical Greek and Roman religion and Greek and Roman mythology. The national divinity of the Greeks, Apollo has been variously recognized as a god of archery, music and dance, truth and prophecy, healing and diseases, the sun and light, poetry, and more. Apollo is the son of Zeus and Leto, and has a twin sister, the chaste huntress Artemis. Seen as the most beautiful god and the ideal of the kouros, Apollo is considered to be the most Greek of all gods. Apollo is known in Greek-influenced Etruscan mythology as Apulu.
Hermes is the god of trade, heraldry, merchants, commerce, roads, thieves, trickery, sports, travelers, and athletes in Ancient Greek religion and mythology; the son of Zeus and the Pleiad Maia, he was the second youngest of the Olympian gods.
The fourteen founders selected as the first Custode di Arcadia or president of the academy, Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni who was the author of a history of Italian poetry and of various literary works. The Arcadians resolved to return to the fields of truth, always singing of subjects of pastoral simplicity and drawing their inspiration from Greco-Roman bucolic poetry. The ideal parameters for the artistic work were simplicity and a sense of measure and beauty. Common to all the poets was the desire to oppose the poetry of the Marinists, and return to classic poetry, embracing also the recent rationalist influence of Descartes. Norms and rituals of the academy took their cue from classic and pastoral mythology, as in the custom of assuming 'pastoral' names; (Crescimbeni, for example, chose that of Alfesibeo Cario). The fourteen founder members included the librettist Silvio Stampiglia and the poet Vincenzo Leonio.
Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni was an Italian critic and poet. Crescimbeni was born in Macerata, which was then part of the Papal States.
Marinism is the name now given to an ornate, witty style of poetry and verse drama written in imitation of Giambattista Marino (1569–1625), following in particular La Lira and L'Adone.
Silvio Stampiglia was an Italian poet, librettist, and founder member of the Accademia dell'Arcadia under the pen name of Palemone Licurio.
The first solemn gathering of the Arcadians was held on the Janiculum hill, in a wood belonging to the Reformed Minorites, on 5 October 1690.
The Janiculum is a hill in western Rome, Italy. Although the second-tallest hill in the contemporary city of Rome, the Janiculum does not figure among the proverbial Seven Hills of Rome, being west of the Tiber and outside the boundaries of the ancient city.
In 1692, the meetings were transferred to the gardens of Duke Orsini on the Esquiline hill; in 1696, to the Farnese gardens on the Palatine. Finally, the generosity of John V of Portugal, one of its members under the name of Arete Melleo, enabled the society to secure (1723) on the Janiculum a site known as the Bosco Parrasio or (Parrasian Grove). Here they held their meetings in summer days, in winter moving to the Teatro degli Arcadi in the Palazzo Salviati. In 1696 the Accademia admitted seven musicians including Giovanni Bononcini.
The Orsini family is an Italian noble family that was one of the most influential princely families in medieval Italy and Renaissance Rome. Members of the Orsini family include three popes: Celestine III (1191–1198), Nicholas III (1277–1280), and Benedict XIII (1724–1730). In addition, the family membership includes 34 cardinals, numerous condottieri, and other significant political and religious figures.
The Palatine Hill, which is the centremost of the Seven Hills of Rome, is one of the most ancient parts of the city and has been called "the first nucleus of the Roman Empire." It stands 40 metres above the Roman Forum, looking down upon it on one side, and upon the Circus Maximus on the other. From the time of Augustus Imperial palaces were built here. Prior to extensions to the Palace of Tiberius and the construction of the Domus Augustana by Domitian, 81-96 AD, the hill was mostly occupied by the houses of the rich. The perimeter measures 2,182 meters and the area is 255,801 square meters or 63 acres, with a circumference of 1,740 meters while the Regionary Catalogues of the fourth century give a perimeter of 11,510 feet or 3,402 meters (equals 131 acres.
Dom John V, known as the Magnanimous and the Portuguese Sun King, was a monarch of the House of Braganza who ruled as King of Portugal during the first half of the 18th century. John V's reign saw the rise of Portugal and its monarchy to new levels of prosperity, wealth, and prestige among European courts.
While the academy was still on the Palatine, its Statuto or Constitution was drawn up. This constitution (the work of co-founder Gian Vincenzo Gravina) was modelled on the ancient Roman laws of the 'Twelve Tables', and was engraved on marble. Differing tendencies soon asserted themselves, following the ideas of the two founders: that of Gravina stood in the tradition of Homer and Dante, while that of Crescimbeni was more influenced by Petrarch. Because of these differences Gravina left to found the Accademia dei Quirini in 1711. Despite this loss, Arcadia retained its vigour in the following years, and created colonies in many cities of Italy. Many noblemen, ecclesiastics, and artists held membership of it to be an honour, and very soon it numbered 1,300. Much of what they produced, however, was either mediocre or pretentious (an example is Saverio Bettinelli's disparagement of Dante), although the Academy did receive some endorsement for its attack on the redundant Rococo style, then dominant in art and literature.
The celebrated opera librettist Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782) although he had his own differences with Arcadia, was a student of Gravina's, and a leading light of the academy's second generation. His works, of which the best remembered might be Il Re Pastore because of its setting by Mozart, may represent the closest thing to a justification of its program that Arcadia achieved.
A violent anti-Arcadian reaction soon developed, and, starting from the early 19th century, Arcadianism began to be regarded as a late and unconvincing expression of the ancien régime. After the end of the French Revolution, the Academy strove to renew itself in accord with the spirit of the times, without sacrificing its traditional system of sylvan associations and pastoral names. The Academy no longer represented a literary school, but a general interest in the classics, and figures like Dante came to be greatly honoured by its members. Furthermore, the Academy's field of endeavour was enlarged to include many branches of study, including history and archaeology. The new Arcadian revival was marked by the foundation (1819) of the Giornale Arcadico. In 1925 the Academy was renamed to become the Arcadia – Accademia Letteraria Italiana, a historical institute.
The Accademia degi Arcadi counted among its members some of the principal literary men and women of the time, including Menzini, Redi, Metastasio, Rolli, Guidi, Clotilde Tambroni and others. The famous composer George Frideric Handel is known to have often attended the meetings and symposia of the Arcadians when studying in Italy, under the patronage of Ruspoli, a leading member of the Academy. There is an interesting account of the Academy's history and program in Goethe's 'Italian Journey'.
Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi, better known by his pseudonym of Pietro Metastasio, was an Italian poet and librettist, considered the most important writer of opera seria libretti.
Arcadian may refer to:
Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina was an Italian man of letters and jurist. He was born at Roggiano Gravina, a small town near Cosenza, in Calabria.
Carlo Alessandro Guidi, Italian lyric poet, was born at Pavia.
Roman academies includes a description of Papal academies in Rome including historical and bibliographical notes concerning the more important of these. Roman Academies were associations of learned individuals and not institutes for instruction.
The Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna is a public tertiary academy of fine art in Bologna, in Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy. It has a campus in Cesena.
The Storia della letteratura italiana is an essay written by Italian literary critic Francesco de Sanctis, published by Morano in two volumes in 1870 and 1871.
Piero Boitani is an Italian literary critic.
Giambattista Felice Zappi was an Italian poet.
Faustina Maratti was an Italian Baroque poet and painter.
Maria Antonia Scalera Stellini was a 17th-century Italian poet and playwright.
Arcadia is a pastoral poem written around 1480 by Jacopo Sannazaro and published in 1504 in Naples. Sannazaro's Arcadia influenced the literature of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Accademia often refers to:
Francesco Palmieri was an Italian poet and musician.
Claudiu Isopescu was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian literary historian and translator.
The Accademia degli Umoristi was a learned society of intellectuals, mainly noblemen, that significantly influenced the cultural life of 17th century Rome. The society was founded in 1603 by Paolo Mancini and Gaspare Salviani. It began as place for writers and intellectuals to celebrate burlesque and mock-heroic poetry, but soon attracted some of the most prominent literary figures and patrons of the arts in Rome. The academy became defunct around 1670. The Academy was briefly revived in the first half of the eighteenth century by Pope Clement XI.
Eurialo De Michelis was an Italian author, poet and literary critic born in Salerno in the south.
Vincenzo Leoni was an Italian lawyer and poet, and in 1690 was one of the original founders of the Academy of Arcadia.
Bianca Laura Saibante was a 18th century Italian poetess and playwright. Born into a wealthy family, she is considered one of the founders of the Accademia Roveretana degli Agiati in Rovereto.
References
Barroero, L. and Susinno, S. 'Arcadian Rome, Universal Capital of the Arts', in Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century, ed. E. P. Bowron and J. J. Rishel, 47–77 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000)
Dixon, S. M. (1999) "Women in Arcadia", Eighteenth Century Studies, 32(3), pp.371–375.
Dixon, S. M. (2006) Between the real and the ideal: the Accademia degli Arcadi and its garden in eighteenth-century Rome (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press).
Forment, B. (2008) Moonlight on Endymion: In Search of “Arcadian Opera,” 1688-1721, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, 14(1). Online: https://sscm-jscm.org/v14/no1/forment.html
Giorgetti Vichi, A. M. (ed.) (1977) Gli Arcadi dal 1690 al 1800: Onomasticon (Rome, Arcadia – Accademia Letteraria Italiana). (List of members.)
Claudio Rendina, Enciclopedia di Roma, Rome: Newton Compton, 2000.
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