Francesco Fulvio Frugoni...

Francesco Fulvio Frugoni. Libri barocchi tra Genova, Torino e l’Europa
by Giacomo Montanari

Due to its characteristic of peregrinus, the minimum friar Francesco Fulvio Frugoni (Genoa 1620-Venice 1686) adequately represents the Baroque intellectual prototype: fascinated by the variety of the European cultural scene, and – at the same time – forced by the contingencies, the writer moves during his sixty-six years of life in a long journey through the most updated artistic centers of Europe at that time.

The multifaceted and numerous literary production of Frugoni, although mostly known and cited, has never received the attention it deserved in two fundamental points emerged clearly from these studies: the importance of cultural education received within the Genoa’s environment by his ‘master’ Anton Giulio Brignole Sale and by the turbulent, but certainly important, Luca Assarino; and the constant and uninterrupted theoretical relationship with the comparison between the arts (poetry and painting) and active relationship with some of the most important artists who had the opportunity to meet on his way through the courts of Monaco and Turin and the Republics of Genoa and Venice.

In Frugoni are effectively conjugated the works of art’s pedagogical vocation (whether literary or pictorial), the awareness of the importance of the antico as a model and the extreme sensitivity to the imitatio naturae as a disruptive force to commovere the public towards which the artistical communication is addressed. Through a chronological path that can not be separated from an initial, in-depth clarification of the Genoese cultural landscape in which the author was formed culturally, this study presents a reinterpretation of the literary path of Frugoni analyzed according to the relations with the visual arts, the artists and the development of typical lines of research of Baroque literary production of which he was a major interpreter.

The research methodology, which provides multidisciplinary approach aimed to cross the literary analysis, art historical and partly archival data, allows us to understand, focusing on some significant events, the choices and cultural motivations that animated the production and particularly relevant relationship with the visual arts of one of the most brilliant and multifaceted ‘feathers’ of the second half of XVIIth century.