Cassiano dal Pozzo

Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588 – 22 October 1657) was an Italian scholar and patron of arts. The secretary of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, he was an antiquary in the classicizing circle of Rome, and a long-term friend and patron of Nicolas Poussin, whom he supported from his earliest arrival in Rome: Poussin in a letter declared that he was "a disciple of the house and the museum of cavaliere dal Pozzo." A doctor with interests in the proto-science of alchemy, a correspondent of major figures like Galileo, a collector of books and master drawings, dal Pozzo was a node in the network of European scientific figures.

Dal Pozzo was born in Turin, to a noble family originating from Vercelli, the grandson of the first minister of the Grand Duke of Tuscany.

He was raised in Florence and educated at the University of Pisa. In 1612 he moved to Rome, where with deft diplomacy he moved among influential and cultivated patrons. After taking up a position as secretary in Cardinal Barberini’s household in 1623, Cassiano soon became a prominent figure in Rome’s intellectual life; both he and the Cardinal were members of the Accademia dei Lincei, the scientific society founded by principe Federico Cesi. Cassiano was soon joined in Rome by his younger brother Carlo Antonio (1606–1689), who shared his artistic and scientific interests and played a significant role in augmenting the collection that Cassiano commenced about 1615 and came to call his Museo Cartaceo ("Paper Museum"). Aside from drawings of artists of the Quattrocento and the High Renaissance, he commissioned from his “giovani ben intendenti del disegno” hundreds of drawings after the Antique and examples of curiosities of every kind. Cassiano had casts made of works of sculpture, such as the reliefs of Trajan's Column, which Poussin seems to have drawn at leisure, rather than working from the original (Friedlaender 1964).

Aside from his lasting friendship with Poussin, who shared his antiquarian interests and from whom Cassiano commissioned the series of seven Sacraments and the illustrated manuscript of Leonardo's Le Regole e Precetti della Pittura, Cassiano’s patronage extended to the French painter in Rome Simon Vouet and the classicizing sculptor Alessandro Algardi, to Artemisia Gentileschi, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (from whom he commissioned a bust of his uncle, Carlo Antonio), Pietro da Cortona, Caravaggio as well as lesser-known contemporary artists whom he kept busy with lesser commissions for his Museo Cartaceo. His close connections with leading European scientists such as Galileo, with scholars and philosophers, kept him fully informed of the latest archaeological and scientific discoveries, for all of which he attempted to provide a visual record in his Museo. Cassiano also appears to have patronized the publication of manuscripts on painting by Matteo Zaccolini.

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