«Ciò nasce dal modo del loro governo»: i disegni di architettura nel fondo archivistico dei teatini di Firenze

The lack of documentation, and even more limited graphic sources, on the building activity of the Theatines preserved in the Archivio Generalizio of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome has certainly represented the main obstacle to the numerous attempts to understand the choices, strategies and architectural culture of the congregation of regular clerics founded in 1524 by Gian Pietro Carafa. The recent rediscovery of a conspicuous corpus of drawings conserved within the Theatine fonds of Santi Michele e Gaetano in Florence has therefore prompted us not only to present some of the apparently most significant drawings, but above all to take stock of the issue and to solicit a different point of view, with which to understand and bridge the gap. The difficulty lies in the fact that Theatines arose as a simple community of clerics. They governed themselves as such at least until the 1590s, and the evidence in our possession suggests that they reserved the same collegial approach to architectural matters. In order to understand the Theatine nature, therefore, it seems necessary to set aside pre-constituted and “Roman-centric” approaches and retrace the network of relations and exchanges that existed between the cities and territories where clerics settled.