Thesis title: I Barnabiti e i circoli culturali nella Roma del Seicento
This dissertation examines the presence and intellectual role of the Clerics Regular of St. Paul — the Barnabites — in Counter-Reformation Rome, highlighting their mediating function between religious institutions, academic culture, and the arts. The arrival of the Order in 1574 marked the beginning of its active integration into the city’s intellectual life through the establishment of colleges, congregations, and academies. Based on extensive archival research — especially the Acta triennalia of the Roman colleges — and a systematic analysis of contemporary academic publications, the study argues that the Barnabites developed a dialogical model of Catholic knowledge that combined doctrinal rigor with openness to the modern spirit of inquiry.
At the center of the investigation lies the Academy of the Infecondi, whose evolution — from the early gatherings at Santa Maria in Campitelli to its relocation to the church of Santi Biagio e Carlo ai Catinari in 1661 — reveals a collective laboratory where theology, rhetoric, poetry, natural philosophy, and the visual arts converged into a unified pedagogical and spiritual project. Figures such as Giovanni Ambrogio Mazenta, Bartolomeo Gavanti, and Cosimo Dossena exemplify the Barnabites’ intellectual versatility and their role as intermediaries among the curia, the nobility, and the artistic milieu. Through prosopographical and intertextual analysis, the dissertation shows how Barnabite culture materialized in concrete spaces — libraries, oratories, academic halls — conceived as devices for transforming knowledge into communal experience.
Ultimately, the study reinterprets Baroque Rome as a dynamic system of cultural interaction, in which the Barnabites and the Infecondi acted as key agents in shaping mechanisms of cultural consensus. Their educational and intellectual enterprise, grounded in the unity of word, image, and sound, emerges as one of the privileged pathways through which seventeenth-century Catholicism produced, transmitted, and ritualized knowledge.