Palazzo Barberini is open from Tuesday to Sunday (10am – 7pm)

The Barberini Family: Rome's Most Powerful Art Patrons

Discover the Barberini family: Florentine merchants who became Rome's most powerful art patrons, building Palazzo Barberini under Pope Urban VIII.

7/4/20268 min read

By PalazzoBarberini.info | Last updated: June 2026

Walk through almost any major church, fountain, or palace in central Rome, and sooner or later you will spot them: three small bees, carved in stone or cast in bronze, watching from a coat of arms above a doorway or worked into the base of a monument. They appear on the baldachin inside St. Peter's Basilica. They swarm across the ceiling of the Gran Salone at Palazzo Barberini. They turn up, almost playfully, on fountains, tombs, and even cannon. These bees belong to one family, and understanding who they were — how they rose, what they built, and how spectacularly they eventually fell from grace — adds an entirely new dimension to a visit to Palazzo Barberini.

This is the story of the Barberini: Florentine merchants who became the single most powerful family in 17th-century Rome, who reshaped the city through one of history's most ambitious campaigns of artistic patronage, and who left behind both a magnificent legacy and a cautionary tale about the price of unchecked ambition.

From Tuscan Wool Merchants to Roman Nobility

The Barberini story does not begin in Rome at all, but in the small Tuscan town of Barberino Val d'Elsa, from which the family originally took its name. By the early 11th century they had relocated to Florence, where they built a comfortable fortune as merchants trading in wool, grain, and textiles — solid, respectable commerce, but a long way from the corridors of papal power.

Two details from this early period are worth knowing, because they explain so much of what came later. First, the family's original coat of arms did not feature bees at all — it featured three horseflies, a reference to their old name, Tafani da Barberini ("tafani" being Italian for horseflies). It was only later, as the family's fortunes rose, that the emblem was tactfully redesigned into the more dignified and now-famous three golden bees. Second, the Barberini's relationship with Florence's ruling Medici family soured badly during the political upheavals of the 1530s. After the Medici reclaimed control of the city, the Barberini found Florence increasingly inhospitable, and members of the family began drifting south to Rome to seek their fortune within the orbit of the papal court instead.

It was a shrewd relocation. Rome in this period offered something Florence increasingly could not: a path to genuine power for ambitious families willing to climb the Church hierarchy. The Barberini took that path with single-minded determination, and within a few generations, it would deliver them the most powerful office in Christendom.

Maffeo Barberini: The Man Who Became Pope Urban VIII

The pivotal figure in the entire Barberini story is Maffeo Vincenzo Barberini, born in Florence in 1568. His father died when Maffeo was only three, and his mother brought him to Rome to be raised under the guidance of his uncle, a papal official, and educated by the Jesuits at the prestigious Collegio Romano. He proved an exceptional student, graduating from the University of Pisa with a doctorate in law in 1589.

What followed was a textbook ecclesiastical career, conducted with patience and precision. Maffeo served as a papal legate to the court of King Henry IV of France, was appointed Archbishop of Nazareth, and was eventually elevated to the cardinalate in 1606. He was, by most contemporary accounts, intelligent, cultured, and genuinely interested in poetry, science, and the arts — qualities that would later make him one of history's great patrons, even as his political instincts proved considerably more controversial.

In the summer of 1623, following the death of Pope Gregory XV, the College of Cardinals gathered in conclave during a malaria epidemic that was actively striking down several of the electors. Maffeo Barberini emerged as the compromise candidate, securing fifty of the fifty-four votes cast. On August 6, 1623, he took the papal name Urban VIII. He would reign for twenty-one years, until his death in 1644 — one of the longest and most consequential pontificates of the entire Baroque era.

A Dynasty Built on Nepotism

To understand the Barberini family's extraordinary rise, it is impossible to avoid the word that dominates every serious account of Urban VIII's pontificate: nepotism. By the standards of an era already notorious for it, Urban's elevation of his own relatives was remarkable even to his contemporaries.

Within days of his coronation, Urban made his nephew Francesco Barberini a cardinal — and Francesco would go on to become Vatican librarian and eventually vice-chancellor, building the great Barberini Library that was later absorbed into the Vatican Library itself. Another nephew, Antonio Barberini, also received a cardinal's hat and rose to become commander-in-chief of the papal army. A third nephew, Taddeo Barberini, was made Prince of Palestrina, Prefect of Rome, and Gonfalonier of the Church — essentially the pope's chief military and ceremonial officer. Urban's own brother, also named Antonio, became a cardinal as well.

The financial scale of this family enrichment was staggering. The 19th-century historian Leopold von Ranke estimated that Urban VIII's immediate family accumulated some 105 million scudi in personal wealth during his pontificate — an almost incomprehensible sum for the period, extracted in no small part from a papacy that began Urban's reign with 16 million scudi in debt and ended it with 28 million. Urban himself was apparently not entirely at ease with this; he twice convened committees of theologians to examine whether it was lawful for his nephews to retain their accumulated wealth. Unsurprisingly, both committees decided in the family's favour.

Rome's famously sharp-tongued public did not let this pass without comment. When Urban ordered the ancient bronze roofing beams stripped from the portico of the Pantheon — partly to provide material for Bernini's great bronze baldachin inside St. Peter's Basilica, and partly for papal cannon — an anonymous wit coined a phrase that has outlived the pope himself: "Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini" — "What the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did." It remains one of the most quoted lines in all of Roman history, a perfect distillation of public exasperation with a family that had, by then, made an art form out of helping itself.

The Greatest Art Patron of the Roman Baroque

And yet — this is the genuine paradox of the Barberini story — the very wealth and power that drew such scorn also funded one of the most extraordinary outpourings of artistic patronage in European history.

Urban VIII understood, perhaps better than any pope before him, that art and architecture were instruments of power every bit as effective as armies or alliances. He commissioned the young Gian Lorenzo Bernini to create the towering bronze baldachin over the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica, the Triton Fountain that still dominates Piazza Barberini today, and eventually his own elaborate papal tomb. Across Rome, wherever the Barberini funded a project — a church, a fountain, a piazza — the three golden bees of the family crest were carved or cast prominently into the stonework, an unmistakable signature stamped onto the fabric of the city itself.

The supreme architectural expression of this ambition, however, was the family's own residence: Palazzo Barberini. Urban VIII had originally inherited a more modest house from his uncle near Piazza Barberini, but as pope, he set about transforming it into something altogether grander — a building meant to declare, unmistakably, that a new dynasty had arrived. Construction proceeded under a remarkable succession of architects: Carlo Maderno began the project, Francesco Borromini took over significant elements of the design and detailing, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini ultimately saw the building toward completion. The result, as our guide to the staircase rivalry between Bernini and Borromini explores in depth, was a palace where two of history's greatest and most rivalrous architectural minds worked in close, often tense, proximity — and the building itself still bears the marks of that creative friction.

Inside, the family commissioned Pietro da Cortona to paint what would become one of the supreme achievements of Baroque ceiling painting: the Triumph of Divine Providence, a sprawling 400-square-metre fresco across the vault of the Gran Salone, in which allegorical figures crown the Barberini coat of arms amid swirling clouds of golden bees. Our detailed exploration of the Divine Providence ceiling unpacks the fresco's complex iconography, but the underlying message requires no decoding at all: this was Barberini propaganda rendered in paint, on the largest possible scale, asserting that the family's rise was nothing less than the will of Providence itself.

Beyond architecture and ceiling painting, the family also assembled an extraordinary collection of paintings — many of which remain on display today and form the heart of the must-see masterpieces at Palazzo Barberini, including works connected to artists the family patronised directly, alongside acquisitions of earlier masters like Raphael and Filippo Lippi.

The Fall: War, Disgrace, and Exile

Urban VIII's final years were considerably less glorious than his early pontificate. In 1642, pushed by his own ambitious nephews into a dispute over precedent and protocol, Urban excommunicated Duke Odoardo Farnese of Parma and seized his territories, triggering the costly and ultimately humiliating War of Castro. The conflict produced no clear victor, drained the papal treasury further, and left Urban deeply unpopular among ordinary Romans by the time peace was finally concluded in March 1644 — just months before his death.

The depth of public resentment became starkly visible the moment Urban died. A bust of the late pope, displayed near the Palace of the Conservators on the Capitoline Hill, was reportedly destroyed by an enraged crowd almost immediately after news of his death spread through the city; only the quick intervention of a priest is said to have saved a second sculpture of Urban from a similar fate.

Worse was to follow for the family. The College of Cardinals declined to elect a Barberini-aligned successor, instead choosing Cardinal Giovanni Battista Pamphili, who took the name Pope Innocent X — a pope with little loyalty to the previous regime. Innocent X swiftly launched an investigation into the conduct of the Barberini nephews during the War of Castro. Facing the very real possibility of prosecution and the confiscation of their assets, the three Barberini cardinals and princes fled Rome for Paris, seeking — and receiving — the protection of King Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin. According to several historical accounts, the family hung the French royal coat of arms above the entrance to Palazzo Barberini itself before departing, a visible signal that the building, and by extension the family, now stood under French protection.

The exile did not last forever. By 1653, most of the family had returned to Rome, the dispute eventually smoothed over through a strategic marriage between a Barberini heir and a niece of Pope Innocent X — the same kind of dynastic alliance-building that had defined the family's rise in the first place. The Barberini name endured in Roman society for generations afterward, eventually merging through marriage with the equally illustrious Colonna family in the following century.

Why This History Matters for Your Visit Today

Knowing this story transforms a walk through Palazzo Barberini from a simple tour of beautiful rooms into something closer to reading a family's autobiography, written in marble, fresco, and gilt.

When you stand beneath Pietro da Cortona's ceiling and watch Divine Providence crown the Barberini coat of arms, you are looking at the visual argument a controversial pope made to justify his family's astonishing rise. When you climb Bernini's grand staircase or descend Borromini's spiralling one, you are walking through spaces shaped by two architects whose rivalry was, in part, fuelled by competition for exactly this kind of prestigious Barberini patronage. And when you spot those three small golden bees, tucked into a cornice or carved above a doorway, you are seeing the same emblem that once adorned half of Baroque Rome — a quiet, persistent signature left behind by a family who, for one extraordinary generation, very nearly owned the city.

The palace endures. The Barberini bees still watch from every corner. And the family's complicated legacy — equal parts magnificent patronage and notorious self-enrichment — remains written into the very walls you will walk through on your visit.

Plan Your Visit

To experience this history firsthand, our visitor information page covers everything you need for planning, while our ticket booking guide walks you through securing entry without losing time at the door. If your visit coincides with the current Bernini and the Barberini exhibition, running through mid-2026, you will find this family history brought vividly to life through the sculptures, drawings, and decorative works on display — a fitting tribute to the extraordinary partnership between a Baroque genius and the family who made his career possible.

Palazzo Barberini (Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica) — Via delle Quattro Fontane 13, Rome. Open Tuesday–Sunday 10:00–19:00. Closed Mondays. Standard admission €12. Free on the first Sunday of each month.

This article is part of the PalazzoBarberini.info editorial series. This is not the official website of the Gallerie Nazionali Barberini Corsini.

Palazzo Barberini

This is not an official website. This site is offering links to authorized ticket resellers and might earn commission on tickets.