ABSTRACT
In October 1859 Count Giovanni Bentivoglio was elected to the town council of Bologna.2 The Count’s ancestors had dominated the city during most of the fi fteenth century. The city’s famous Teatro Comunale, once among Europe’s fi nest opera houses, was built on the site of the Bentivoglio family’s former palace, with its three hundred lavishly decorated rooms at the time considered to be the most expensive city palace ever built in Italy, according to Bologna’s most infl uential architect of the fi ne secolo, Alfonso Rubbiani, “more beautiful than the Medici palace in Florence.”3 The Bentivoglio palace was destroyed in 1507, after the defeat of the family by Pope Julius II, leaving behind the so-called “Guasto,” symbolising the victory of the Papal regime over Bentivoglio’s signoria and the surrender of the most rebellious city of the Papal States. During his time as Bishop of Bologna, from 1483, Julius’ infl uence on the city had remained limited, due to the outstanding position of the Bentivoglio family as the city’s rulers. When he conquered the city as pope, the event was staged as the return of the Roman imperator, later described by the Bolognesi as the beginning of their Papal enslavement. Julius was accompanied by his entire court, including twenty-six cardinals with their private households. To commemorate the expedition Julius issued a medal bearing the
inscription IULIUS CAESAR PONT.II.4 With the consolidation of the pope’s rule in the Papal States during the early sixteenth century, the court of Rome was “transformed into one of the great monarchical courts of Europe” and the new Tempelstaat increasingly invested in its self-representation through culture.5 Julius II, governing during the time of Michelangelo, Raphael, Bramante and del Sarto, belongs to the greatest patrons of the arts in history. Unlike other Italian signoria-courts at the time, and despite their political power and the grandeur of their palace, the Bentivoglio family had never exercised cultural leadership in Bologna.6 From the sixteenth century the cardinal-legate assumed this role and invested in the cultural infrastructure of Bologna. Culture was supposed to “civilise” the bellicose nobility-Affektdämpfung in the sense of Norbert Elias.7 During the Counterreformation of the sixteenth century Bologna’s theatres were unable to compete with those of the courts of the Este or Farnese. But from the seventeenth century opera became a major art form at the Papal court in Rome; and Bologna was keen to follow this example-fi rst in private theatres, in particular the Malvezzi in Borgo San Sigismondo, and, after this had been destroyed by fi re in 1743, in the new Teatro Comunale, built on the site of the Bentivoglio family’s palace, as a publicly owned opera house. The building was fi nanced by the Papal government, which subsequently sold the theatre’s private boxes to Bologna’s nobility.8 Thus, the nobility shared the ownership of the theatre; and the term “Comunale” stood for a “community” of noble owners rather than for a “public” institution in the modern sense of the word. In this respect Bologna’s
Figure 2.1 One of the First Photographs of the Interior of Bologna’s Teatro Comunale, ca. 1870. (Reproduction by Kind Permission of Pàtron Editore.)
Comunale differs from theatres such as the San Carlo in Naples, which was largely “an extension of the court” and a “critical point of contact between the court and the capital.”9 The work of Italy’s most famous theatre-architect, Antonio Galli, known as il Bibiena, the Comunale was inaugurated on 14 May 1763 with the fi rst presentation of Gluck’s Trionfo di Clelia, on a libretto by Metastasio. A preferred composer of the Roman court, Christoph Willibald Gluck had been knighted by the pope shortly before the opening of Bologna’s new theatre.10
