Built in
939 as a Benedictine monastery
Rebuilt in
1568
Modified
1764/66 by the great G.B. Piranesi (1720/78)
when the Cardinal G.B. Rezzonico, brother of Pope Clement XIII Rezzonico
(1758/69), became Grand Master of the Knights of Malta
Piranesi
applied a rich stucco decoration of arms and emblems of the Rezzonico family in
the decorations above the pediment,
eventually destroyed by the French bombardment of 1849
It was his
only architectural work of an all “theoretical” career
The PIAZZA
DEI CAVALIERI DI MALTA was designed and carried out as well in 1764 by G.B. Piranesi, the amazing urban creation of a genius
“It is
charged with a visionary accent, which pre-romantically enhances the sublime
magnificence of the architecture. Notice the crowded reliefs on the facade that
seem to act as unpublished fragments of the ancient world, freely manipulated
and bizarrely reassembled” (Carlo Bertelli, Giuliano Briganti, Antonio
Giuliano)
“St. Mary of
the Priory is the counterpart of monumentality explored in the reliefs. Docile
and slightly melancholic, chipped, with a tremulous design, almost montage of
ancient objects found, it expresses a resistance to neo-classicism, inwardly
resigned to defeat. (...) He faces the Roman ruins with the taste of Venetian
view painting, but then archeology would lead him to an empirical attitude,
tinged with enlightenment, which rejects the idealizations of Winckelman and
Mengs. Poles of Piranesi's research are 'the evocation of some primitive structuralism'
and 'the use of a distortion, a deformation of the organic laws of form'. It is
a systematic negative comment 'to the concept of place, the concept of center';
'he lives the crisis of classical harmony as a painful yet irreversible loss.
What he feels he needs to justify, then, is just his intuition of the
inevitability of disorder' M. Tafuri writes. The breaking of the laws of
perspective is clear: adopting many points of view the Euclidean space collapses.
It is no coincidence (...) that Piranesi condemns the monotonous neoclassic
rigor defending even the creative freedom of Borromini” (Bruno Zevi)
Interior
with stuccos by G.B. Piranesi
ON THE
RIGHT
“Tomb of
Baldassarre Spinelli” using in part a Roman sarcophagus
“Cenotaph of G.B. Piranesi” 1779/80 by Giuseppe Angelini (1742/1811)
“Leopoldo
Cicognara stated that the idea for Piranesi's statue derived from an ancient
sculpure of Zeno. (...) In a competition with Canova, inspired by Don Abbondio
Rezzonico, Angelini sculpted (1781), a Lost Minerva: it seems that victory was
for Canova, who modeled the Apollo Crowning Himself, now kept in Possagno.
(...) The sculptor Giuseppe Angelini belongs to that group of Italian and
foreign artists, working in Rome in the last decades of the eighteenth century,
oriented toward the neoclassical style, even before the coming of Antonio
Canova. The judgment of the most recent criticism, however, is very restrictive
in regards to Angelini” (Mario Pepe - Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani Treccani)
MAIN ALTAR
Group “Glory
of St. Basil” by Tommaso Righi (1727/1802) from
the design by G.B. Piranesi
“Tomb of
Bartolomeo Carafa” d. 1405 maybe by Magister Paulus
and other funerary monuments of the Grand Masters of the Order
GARDEN
Renovated
by G.B. Piranesi with archaeological materials
“Well curb”
1244
VILLA
On the
second floor GALLERY with portraits of the Grand Masters from 1113 to today and
HALL with “Virgin and Child with St. Basil” by Andrea
Sacchi (1599/1661) formerly on the altar of the church
COFFEE
HOUSE
Built for
Cardinal Benedetto Pamphilj
The complex
has a right of extra-territoriality. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta
(SMOM), or Order of Malta, is a religious order of chivalry canonically
dependent on the Holy See, with charitable purposes
It is
recognized by the Italian law and by much of the international community as a
subject of international law, although now it doesn't have anymore its
territory which once was Rhodes, and until the end of the eighteenth century,
Malta
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