Leonardo Cominelli

Leonardo Cominelli belongs to a wealthy and well-known family of Salò, where he was born on 7 November 1642 by Bernardino, also an important exponent in the society of the time as a jurist and official of the Venetian Republic.

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While still young he shows a marked predisposition to study both scientific and literary and artistic subjects, not separated from a strong and characterizing religiosity. All these connotations are perhaps the basis of his family's choice to send him to the Jesuit Fathers of Castiglione delle Stiviere to consolidate his intellectual formation. This choice was then confirmed in the attendance, again by the Jesuits, of the University of Parma. The period spent also at the University of Padua is not quantifiable, short but sufficient because at only twenty-one, in 1663, he published his first published work, an Ode Panegirica "To the Most Serene Prince Francesco Morosini among the Principi Colleggati first conqueror" .

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The university stays allow him to get to know and relate to various important scholars with whom numerous correspondences subsequently occur that will testify to the acquisition of fame as an appreciated and valuable scholar, subsequently always recognized.

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Studies and commitment in the most varied cultural expressions always see him as an active part and also a protagonist as in the request of 1669 to the Provveditore di Salò, Antonio Zane, to revive the Accademia degli Unanimi, inactive for many years and where one of his already sat ancestor, Giovanbattista Cominelli, who in 1596, together with the other members of this literary cenacle, published a poem in homage to card. Lorenzo Priuli, then Patriarch of Venice.

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Even in the long periods spent in the Cisano palace, health problems that turned out to be more and more delicate, did not prevent him from working closely with various scholars such as Father Daniello Bartoli, official historian of the Society of Jesus, Paolo Segneri Jesuit preacher of the Sacred Vatican Penitentiary or as the family of the Princes and Dukes of the Pico della Mirandola.

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Leonardo Cominelli also leaves an important testimony of his pictorial activities,  of which there is only trace in the book by Carlo Antonio Saccarelli dedicated in 1742 to his beloved nephew Margherita Cominelli Simbeni, resulting in no other reports  in the archives of the time.

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Sixteen paintings, including large ones, mostly of a religious nature, made by him to adorn the rooms of the family home and which today represent the collection of the Foundation, also dedicated to his perpetual memory by his descendant, Raffaele Cominelli, and who after more than three centuries they also help to remember and understand the role of the Cominelli family in the cultural and social history of Sanfelico and Garda.

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Gianluigi Marsiletti, 2021

 

 

Bibliografia:

Francesco De Leonardis, “Leonardo Cominelli – Pittore e letterato della Riviera di Salò”, Grafo – 1997

Marcello Zane, “Poeta più poeta dei nostri tempi – Vita e opere di Leonardo Cominelli da Cisano (1642-1703)”, Comune di San Felice del Benaco – 1992

Carlo Alberto Saccarelli, “Vita della fedele serva del Signore Margherita Cominelli Simbeni”, Mantova - 1742