Academy of Arcadia

The Accademia degli Arcadi or Accademia dell'Arcadia, "Academy of Arcadia" or "Academy of the Arcadians", was an Italian literary academy founded in Rome in 1690. The full Italian official name was Pontificia Accademia degli Arcadi.

The beginnings of the Accademia degi Arcadi date to February 1656, when a literary circle formed under the patronage of Queen Christina of Sweden, who had abdicated the Swedish crown in 1654, converted to Catholicism, and taken up her residence in Rome, where she spent much of the rest of her life. There she became a significant patron of music and opera, with composers including Alessandro Scarlatti, Alessandro Stradella and Arcangelo Corelli dedicating works to her. After her death in 1689, the academy was established in her memory and elected her as its symbolic head (basilissa, the Greek term for 'Queen'). The Academy lasted for the next two hundred years, remaining a leading cultural institution into the 20th century.

The Accademia degi Arcadi was so called because its principal intention was to reform the diction of Italian poetry, which the founders believed had become corrupt through over-indulgence in the ornamentation of the baroque style, under the inspiration of pastoral literature, the conventions of which imagined the life of shepherds, originally supposed to have lived in Arcadia in the golden age, divinely inspired in poetry by the Muses, Apollo, Hermes and Pan. The Academy chose as its emblem the pipe of Pan with its seven unequal reeds.

The fourteen founders selected as the first Custode di Arcadia or president of the academy, Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni who was the author of a history of Italian poetry and of various literary works. The Arcadians resolved to return to the fields of truth, always singing of subjects of pastoral simplicity and drawing their inspiration from Greco-Roman bucolic poetry. The ideal parameters for the artistic work were simplicity and a sense of measure and beauty. Common to all the poets was the desire to oppose the poetry of the Marinists, and return to classic poetry, embracing also the recent rationalist influence of Descartes. Norms and rituals of the academy took their cue from classic and pastoral mythology, as in the custom of assuming 'pastoral' names; (Crescimbeni, for example, chose that of Alfesibeo Cario). The fourteen founder members included the librettist Silvio Stampiglia.

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