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Dr. Jacomo Cosimo Tamanti (1649–1710)

Doctor, landowner and patron of the Madonna del Soccorso

At a glance

His story

Jacomo Cosimo is the first Tamanti whose standing can be read in an original record. In March 1702 his son Ermenegildo Gaetano Gregorio Isidoro was baptized at Sant’Egidio. The priest wrote of ‘the Most Excellent Signor Dottor Jacomo, son of the late Carlo Tamanti’, a form of address kept for men of learning and rank.

He married late. In 1685, at about thirty-six, he was still single and living with his stepmother Lavinia. Carle judges that his marriage to Anna, of the ancient Menchini family, may have been decisive for the career that followed. Through Anna the Tamanti later became heirs of the Menchini themselves. Writing in the eighteenth century, the chronicler Tullio Canali noted that ‘la famiglia Tamanti, erede di quella di Menchini’ kept the papers of Pietro Menchini, a lecturer at Padua in 1500.

Canali placed this among his roll of Montalcino’s illustrious men. The Tamanti, he wrote, preserved ‘the authentic writings’ of Pietro Menchini, who was called to Hungary as tutor to the young princes, wrote a work on keeping Hungary’s nobles and citizens in the ancient faith, held the first dignity of the clergy of Olmütz (Olomouc), and was made visitor of the churches of Transylvania damaged by heresy. In Jacomo’s time, then, the Tamanti house held not only Menchini land but the Menchini family’s papers and memory.

The next generation married at the same level. In 1727 Jacomo’s son Dr Gaetano married Francesca Begni. Canali shows the Begni among the town’s leading men in these years: an Alessandro Begni went with Francesco Spagni and Crescenzio Costanti to defend Montalcino’s free Friday market and its ancient privileges, and when imperial troops passed through the town a ball for the officers was held ‘in casa del signor Begni’. Whether Alessandro was Francesca’s father is not yet known.

Jacomo also held the two offices that marked a Montalcino family of the first rank. In 1692 Angelo Canali declined to succeed his brother Carlo as Rettore of the Spedale di Santa Maria della Croce, the town’s great hospital and its richest institution. He put ‘dott. Iacomo Tamanti’ at the head of the list sent to the Grand Duke, and Jacomo was duly elected. He governed the hospital, and with it the Monte Pio, until 1704. In 1701 he became the first of his family to reach the Gonfalonierato, the town’s highest office.

The rector before him. Jacomo followed a man who had set a high standard. Tullio Canali tells the story. In 1685 the rector Domenico Santini died, leaving the hospital 3,000 scudi in debt and its orphan girls sent home to their relatives. Carlo Canali, rector after him, paid the debt in less than seven years and brought every girl back into the conservatory. He had already shown the same generosity in the hungry summer of 1677, when he lent the town 1,500 scudi, 500 of them free of interest, so that grain could be bought cheaply. After three years he asked to be released, and in July 1688 the Cardinal Prince Governor wrote begging him to stay; only his brother’s death at last let him go, and the chair passed to Dr. Jacomo.

The rector and the rectress. The office came with a wife. By a law of 1457, confirmed by the Grand Duke in 1627, no man could be proposed as rector of the hospital unless he was married or promised to marry at once, ‘opportuna cosa per quel Conservatorio’, a fitting thing for a house of orphan girls. Anna Menchini therefore became the rettrice, the rectress. She ran the household and kept the book of small expenses, while the rector was superior to the thirty or forty orphan girls and their mistresses, and the infirmary treated the sick with medicines from the hospital’s own pharmacy. Canali describes the installation of a rector and calls it the custom: after the reading of the rules and the oath, the Prior of Priors set the rector’s cap on his head and the friar’s cape on his shoulders, and the whole household filed past him and his wife the rectress to kiss their hands. Jacomo and Anna were very probably received in the same way. Under the town’s rules the rector wore the violet stole of his office over the black gown of the officials, and in processions walked just behind the Gonfaloniere and the Priors.

Gonfaloniere, 1701. Jacomo was about fifty-two when he took the town’s highest office. The Gonfaloniere di Giustizia was drawn for two months at a time and was meant to be one of the best citizens, of mature years. For those two months the arms of the Prince and of the Comunità hung at the door of his house. On feast days he went to church in a robe of red silk or camlet, with a violet or red stole, a square cap of red velvet and matching slippers, behind the standard of the town’s three Terzi, and at the church door a priest in a cope met him with holy water, incense and the kiss of peace. The honour was great; the pay, since the economies of 1684, was five lire for the two months.

From new family to old. Jacomo’s offices crowned a rise of two generations. In 1644, after quarrels over precedence, the town council ranked its citizens: families admitted within the last forty years counted as still new and had to give way to the veterans, and of 112 veteran families only thirty were declared of the noble class of the Gonfalonieri. The Tamanti were then still a ‘famiglia novizia’, a newly admitted family, and Jacomo’s grandfather Scipione was very probably kept from higher office in 1651 by this rule, for his standing as an artisan. That same year the family was declared a veteran family in the person of Scipione’s son Carlo the notary.

An eighteenth-century description of the family, written within living memory of him, confirms this picture. The “Casa Tamanti” page in the Montalcino municipal library’s book of town families (probably Memorie storico-letterarie no. 7, c. 231, written after 1731) was photographed in 2026 by Valentina Pieri. It calls Dr Jacomo a man of “belle lettere e scienza legale”, letters and law, says he was “eletto Rettore dello Spedale”, and records that he married “nobil Donna Anna Menchini”. It adds that his son Dr Gaetano died before his brother Ermenegildo, leaving his widow Francesca Begni without a son. The same page paints the family arms and describes them: “d’Azzurro ad un’Ancora a 3 punte in palo, contornata di tre Stelle”, a three-pointed anchor upright on blue, surrounded by three stars.

His most visible legacy is in stone. In 1699 ‘Giacomo Tamanti’ and his wife Anna gave the right-hand altar of the Santuario della Madonna del Soccorso, dedicated to the Virgin, Saint Gaetano and Saint Carlo Borromeo. The two saints carry the names of their sons Gaetano and Carlo Antonio. The national catalogue associates the altar’s commissioning with both the Tamanti couple and a Giuliani family of Montalcino, while its painted inscription names Jacomo and Anna together; the opposite altar, built by Biagio Bucelli in 1640, has the same forms and dimensions (no. 0900464676). These Giuliani are not known to be related to Maria Giuliani, who married into the family in 1873. The altarpiece itself, an arched canvas of Saints Gaetano and Carlo Borromeo receiving the Christ Child from the Madonna in glory, is recorded in Italy’s national heritage catalogue as the work of Giuseppe Nicola Nasini (1657–1736), the leading Sienese painter of his day, painted between 1690 and 1710. Francesco Brogi’s inventory of 1862–65 places it exactly: on the first altar on the right of the Madonna del Soccorso, an arched canvas 3.28 by 2.25 metres in which Saint Carlo kneels with arms outstretched, Saint Gaetano kisses the Christ Child, the Madonna sits in glory above, and a putto holds the cardinal’s red biretta. Jacomo and Anna therefore very probably commissioned it from Nasini for their gift of 1699 (Brogi, Inventario generale degli oggetti d’arte della provincia di Siena, 1897, p. 253) (Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali, no. 0900464677). The anchor and three stars of the Tamanti arms inside the sanctuary belong to the same world of family devotion.

The two altars. Photographs taken in October 2026 read both dedications. Over the Tamanti altar a cartouche declares it given “D.O.M. In honorem Deiparae V.M., S. Caietani et Caroli Borromei” by the Tamanti couple and Anna Mechini, “A.D. MDCIC, D.D.D.”: 1699 written the old way, with the formula “dat, donat, dedicat”. Facing it across the nave, the older altar reads “D.O.M. In honorem Sancti Iosephi Blasius Bucellius D. A.D. MDCXL”, Biagio Bucelli’s gift of 1640, with a Holy Family. On its pedestals are the Bucelli arms: an ox (bue, a pun on the name) on a mound beneath three eight-pointed stars. The Florentine heraldic collection of Ceramelli Papiani records the Bucelli of Montepulciano with a gold ox under three lilies on blue; the Montalcino branch used stars. Both families who faced each other across the Madonna’s church put three stars on their shields.

Five years later the family gave again. The national heritage catalogue records bronze altar candlesticks in the church of San Francesco, inscribed ‘A.D. 1704’ and bearing the Tamanti arms (here with six-pointed stars), two of them now kept in the adjoining Spedale di Santa Maria della Croce in Via Prato, the hospital Jacomo governed. The catalogue (no. 0900464345) places a two-leaf Sienese door of 1675–1724, 212 by 97.5 cm, on the south side of the cloister of the former convent of San Francesco, Via Prato 6, and says the identical door facing it, which leads into the church, bears the Tamanti emblem on its handles. In October 2026 the street portal and courtyard doors showed only plain iron bolts and bronze knobs, as the catalogue’s own 1995 photograph already did, so the emblem handles have been changed or are on the church side. The year is the last of Jacomo’s term as rector of that hospital; the catalogue does not name the donor, so the gift is the family’s until a payment or dedication names him (Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali, no. 0900464533).

In 1692 a ‘Tamanti Dr.’ held five of the six Tamanti farms in the fiscal survey of the Sienese countryside, among them Chiusa, Gambacci and Pelagrilli. Jacomo Cosimo is the strongest candidate. Two generations later the family still held all six: the survey of farms of the Capitanato di Montalcino made under the edict of 5 August 1771 (Archivio di Stato di Siena, Estimo del Contado 107, photographed 14 October 2026) lists ten Tamanti poderi, Cottimello, Fornello, Poggitoja, Scannaquoia, Collodini, Sorbolino, Valvosi, Chiusa, Gambocci and Pelagrilli.

The book of families. The same Montalcino manuscript has neighbouring entries, photographed in October 2026. “Casa Menchini” (c. 19), Anna’s family, shows three gold stars on blue over three hills and celebrates Pietro Menchini, who left Padua in 1547 for Hungary as tutor to a king’s son and was “designated cardinal”, and two Menchini who were rectors of the hospital. “Casa Begni” says Orazio Begni ran the hospital for many years and greeted the Grand Princess Violante of Bavaria for the town, and it names among the family’s marriages a Begni grandson with a “Lavinia Tamanti”, very probably Jacomo’s daughter born in 1700. The Menchini, Tamanti and Begni, the families who ran Montalcino’s hospital, were bound together by marriage.

The guarantor’s debt. A case file in the archbishop’s archive at Siena, scanned in October 2026, shows Jacomo as a man of credit. On 9 May 1654 Pietro Monaci of Montalcino took a censo, a loan of 100 scudi repaid as a yearly annuity, from the benefice of the chapel of the Santi Angeli Custodi, and Jacomo stood as his guarantor. Receipts from the chapel’s rector, Don Mario Melini, show Jacomo himself paying the annuity from about 1687 to 1701, and on 26 April 1702 he redeemed the whole loan and took over the chapel’s rights against the Monaci. Half a century later his heir Ermenegildo sued the Augustinian friars of Sant’Agostino, who had inherited the Monaci estate through a Monaci son who joined the order. The friars argued that a friar is dead in civil law once he takes his vows; Ermenegildo answered that whoever takes an inheritance takes its burdens. The Montalcino court found for Ermenegildo on 4 September 1749, and the archbishop’s court in Siena confirmed it on 26 May 1750, “well judged and badly appealed”.

In May 1685, when a procession carrying the Madonna was caught by rain, the image waited under the ‘portico Tamanti’. The sanctuary’s chronicle records another rain-soaked procession sheltering ‘under the portico of Signor Dottor Jacomo Tamanti’.

A copy of the Golden Verses of Pythagoras inscribed ‘Jacobi Tamantij 1675’, now at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, was once thought to be his. It came from an abbey in Cesena, where another Tamanti family lived, so the attribution is doubtful.

Contributions and honours

Still to find

His degree and university: the best place to look is the Studio section of the Archivio Arcivescovile di Siena (degree registers 1484–1804, and the colleges of lawyers and of physicians), first for 1665–1685. The Florence register of wills for 1701–1710 has no will of his under T. His own baptism and death acts; the 1692 fiscal declaration naming him; the hospital’s own register of rectors; the lists of veteran and Gonfaloniere families of 1644, which should be in the council deliberations of November–December 1644 in the Archivio comunale di Montalcino.

Sources

Lucia Carle, La patria locale (1996), pp. 277–98; Tullio Canali, Notizie istoriche della città di Montalcino in Toscana, transcription of the manuscript (Il Leccio, 2014), p. 537, and typescript in the Comune di Montalcino’s Archivio della Memoria (Carlo Canali’s rectorship; the rector, rectress and Gonfaloniere; the 1644 ranking of families); Comune di Montalcino, Santuario della Madonna del Soccorso; Lucia Bonelli Conenna, Il contado senese alla fine del XVII secolo (1990), 1692 table; Don Antonio Brandi, Studi e Trascrizioni (1699 altar inscription; 1685 procession); Gazzetta Ufficiale 1868; Sant’Egidio baptisms, 1702; Archivio possessori, record 2427; “Casa Tamanti”, manuscript entry with painted arms, Montalcino municipal library (probably Memorie storico-letterarie no. 7, c. 231; photographed by Valentina Pieri, 2026; entries “Casa Menchini” and “Casa Begni” photographed by Brian Pasch, 14 October 2026); Archivio di Stato di Siena, Estimo del Contado 107 (1771–72); Raccolta Ceramelli Papiani, fasc. 5255 (Bucelli); catalogue records 0900464345 (cloister door) and 0900464676 (altar); Archivio Arcivescovile di Siena, Cause civili, faldone 5040, no. 197 (Sant’Agostino of Montalcino v. Tamanti, 1749–50).

This page is one of ten family-leader profiles drawn from the Palazzo Tamanti storybook (version 2.17, October 2026), where every fact carries a full archival reference. It will be enlarged as new records are found. All ten family leaders.