Baroque returns: the donations and reuses of Francesco Gualdi

The 17th-century Roman collector Francesco Gualdi (1574-1657) had a peculiar conception of his museum: he considered the collection as a dynamic organism, with pieces that could exit from it, in order to be returned to the city and serve the publica utilitas. He therefore donated medieval seals to illustrious cultural institutions and placed Christian sarcophagi in the porches of some Roman churches; ancient marbles were reused in monuments assembled on the façades of profane buildings. The places and contexts where pieces were transferred were never accidental: objects were returned to their original contexts (intended in a broad sense), as Gualdi himself affirms in a pamphlet he commissioned from Paolo Giuseppe Meroni, the Oratio de Christianae Antiquitatis Reliquiis (1635).