ANGELO COLOCCI
The intangible yet ever-present memory of the great figures of Jesi
The Colocci family, originating from the lords of Staffolo, had been present in Jesi since the 14th century, and its members were among the most influential figures of the city’s oligarchy. Admitted to the Roman patriciate in 1505, they obtained the County of Rotorscio in 1685 and, in 1752, the title of Marquises of the Holy Roman Empire.
Angelo Colocci was born in Jesi on July 24, 1474. In 1486, his uncle Francesco, together with other aristocrats, attempted to rebel against Pope Innocent VIII, but the uprising was suppressed and part of the family, including Angelo, went into exile in Naples. There he was educated in the circle of Giovanni Pontano, the great humanist and leader of the Pontanian Academy, which later took his name. He returned to Jesi in 1491–92, bringing with him both a humanistic and political education.
Soon afterward, he moved to Rome, where he began his cursus honorum within the papal court, eventually becoming General Treasurer in 1538. As early as the beginning of the 16th century, he became president of the Roman Academy founded by Pomponio Leto, one of the most important cultural institutions in the city. He was renowned for his wit and sharp humor and had a strong interest in vernacular poetry accompanied by music. He was also the first linguist to study the structure of Romance languages, investigating the deeper characteristics of Neo-Latin languages.
Colocci was also the most important collector of books and antiquities in Rome. He became very wealthy and a skilled investor and real estate speculator. Records show that he was financially involved, together with Agostino Chigi, his colleague in the Apostolic Secretariat, in the urban redevelopment of Rome designed by Bramante in the first decade of the 16th century. He invested much of his wealth in real estate, eventually owning entire districts of the city.
Throughout his life, he studied metrology, which he called “podism” (from the Roman foot as the basic unit of measurement), as well as cosmology. His search for a correspondence between the measurements of the human body and those of the world guided him toward understanding the numerical structure of the cosmos.
Due to their shared origins in the Marche region and their intellectual affinity, Angelo Colocci was a friend of Raphael, who drew inspiration from Colocci’s cosmological studies to create one of his greatest masterpieces, the Room of the Segnatura in the Vatican.
A highly cultured and multifaceted figure, central to the humanistic culture of Rome during the time of Raphael and Pope Leo X, and later Pope Clement VII—both of the Medici family—Colocci remains a figure still partly shrouded in mystery, yet a key personality not only for Rome but for the entire Italian humanist tradition.
He died in 1549.
