Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano

BOTTARI, GIOVANNI GAETANO. - Born in Florence on 15 January 1689, died in Rome on 4 June 1775. He applied himself to Greek and Latin letters and to erudition. He was director of the grand-ducal printing house and attended to the publication of the new edition of the Vocabolario della Crusca. Summoned to Rome by Clement XII in 1730, he stood at the side of Cardinal Neri Corsini and was librarian of the Corsiniana. From 1731 for some years he taught ecclesiastical history; from 1735 he was secret chaplain to the Pope; he held ecclesiastical benefices; he became an employee of the Vatican Library, of which in 1738 he was sub-custodian and in 1768 custodian. He was a friend of Cardinal Lambertini even when the latter became Pope, but he received no special favors from him. He published many works on artists and on the history of art, translations of works of the Fathers together with his friend Pietro Foggini, concerned himself with Christian archaeology and maintained a wide correspondence with Italian and foreign scholars. He acquired special celebrity in his time because he was regarded as the head of so-called Roman Jansenism. This tendency of his became sharper when in 1749 he entered the circle that gathered around Cardinal Passionei. In opposition to the Jesuits, of whom he proved himself a bitter adversary, he was anti-probabilist and rigorist in morals and a supporter of the theology of Gian Lorenzo Berti and of his followers in dogmatics, keeping in contact with the Jansenists of the Low Countries. He published nothing on these matters, but maintained a very active propaganda in ecclesiastical and religious circles in Rome and outside it.

Pio Paschini