Volume 39, Number 21 · December 17, 1992
Playing the Palace
By Joseph Connors
Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan
by Patricia Waddy
The Architectural History Foundation and MIT Press, 456 pp., $47.50
Images of Nepotism: The Painted Ceilings of Palazzo Barberini
by John Beldon Scott
Princeton University Press, 243 pp., $75.00
The great palaces of baroque Rome, today so often transformed into embassies, banks, and museums, resemble luxury liners in drydock. They once housed an aristocratic and indeed theocratic elite of unparalleled splendor, but today without an effort of the imagination it is difficult to detect where first class ended and second class began, where one slept and dined, where outsiders were welcome and where they were not. As we move through these buildings we can only guess when we are intruding on old theaters of public ceremony, or stumbling upon the patterns of secret circulation permitted only to servants, lovers, spies, or scholars trudging to the family library.
Review, 4090 words
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