UN CONTRIBUTO ALLO STUDIO DELL'ITALIANO DELLA COMUNICAZIONE EPISTOLARE NEL SEICENTO: LE LETTERE DI JAN BRUEGHEL IL VECCHIO A FEDERICO BORROMEO ED ERCOLE BIANCHI

The present research is focused on a corpus consisting of 77 letters written by the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Elder and conserved at the Ambrosiana Library of Milan. The letters have been sent during a period starting from 1596 to 1624 to the Cardinal Federico Borromeo and to Ercole Bianchi, a notorious collector of Borromeo’s entourage. Cardinal Borromeo and Ercole Bianchi were both not only Brueghel’s friends, but also two of his most important customers; the painter realized for them many artworks, whose stories are testified by the letters at the Ambrosiana Library. Being fully written in Italian, these letters constitute a precious documentation of the linguistic relations between Flemands and Milan in the XVIIth century. Because of his self-educated competence with the Italian language, the painter decided to ask for the help of chosen secretaries in his correspondence with Borromeo and Bianchi. Among them, the most important was Peter Paul Rubens, polyglot and cultured artist, whose role was already acknowledged at the time of the first publication of the letters (by Giovanni Crivelli, 1868). In this work the identity of two other Brueghel’s occasional secretaries will be proposed for the first time, Philip Rubens (Peter’s brother) and Ferdinand Van den Eijnden, Brueghel’s brother-in law. Besides, a third hand (secretary X) documented throughout the correspondence remains unknown. The plurality of hands in Brueghel’s correspondence has allowed the disclosure of different levels of Italian owned by flemish non-professional writers: at the lowest level we can find Brueghel’s Italian, which is called by the painter himself mal schrito (bad written) because of its many mistakes and grammatical irregularities. Among all, the letters written by Peter Paul Rubens result the best written, mostly from a syntactic point of view. The last chapter consists of an artistic glossary collecting all the art related words found in the correspondence collected at the Ambrosiana Library being authored by Brueghel and other four Brueghel’s related Flemish painters, namely Brueghel’s son, Jan the Younger, Josse and Philip de Momper and Paul Bril, Brueghel’s collaborators and friends.