Il collezionismo privato a Ferrara nel periodo delle Legazioni. Il caso della famiglia Calcagnini.

This research is centered on the private collections of the city of Ferrara at the time of the Legations. The attention has been focused on a unknown family of Ferrara which was an important role for the artistic movement of that city: the Calcagnini family. The history of this family and its possessions in terms of paintings and works of art was performed in the archives of Modena, Ferrara and Rome where the Calcagnini private heritage it’s recorded (family archive, notary files, letters of the family members, etc.). This thesis is organized into two sections. Aim of the first part is to illustrate the nature of the Calcagnini’s collection during the Seicento and its evolution in the following century; the second part aims to give an overview of its artistic asset, unfortunately lost to this date. This investigation has allowed us to not only follow the hereditary path of the family picture collection from mid of XVII century, but also to display the inedit Calcagnini’s relations – in terms of collecting – with others important families in Ferrara during the seicento and settecento, such as with the Pio di Savoia, Varano and Villa families. The recovered appraisal of the assets, often drawn up by qualified painters, describes different attributive proposals that make us understand the collection trends of the various members of this family. Having a leading member of this family, Carlo Leopoldo, elected bishop and resident in Rome, has enabled to identify new connections, particularly artistic, between the legatine centre and the Papal Court following a tradition started with the devolution in 1598 since Leopoldo’s collection was sent to his heir in Ferrara in 1746. This last rich roman collection, in particularly, reflects the classic-Arcadian taste successful in the contemporary prelates Courts, as we can found in Michel Rocca’s paintings, whose some work of art has been here identified. Like for the Seicento, even for the XVIII Century has been found inventories of other distinguished collectors, strictly related to the ferrarese as well as the roman scenes, like the abbot Giuseppe Carli, erudite connoisseur, or the abbot Carlo Cesare Grazzini whose piece of works ended in the legatine centre as carrier of new ideas and new artistic creations.