Cardinal Bendinello Sauli and Church Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Italy (review)

Was it lèse majesté or Cardinal Bendinello Sauli’s failure to disclose Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci’s scheme to kill Pope Leo X through the introduction of poison into the pope’s painful fistula that brought about Sauli’s downfall? Despite various contemporary and near contemporary narratives and more recent attempts to solve the mysteries surrounding the 1517 cardinals’ plot to assassinate Leo X, Sauli’s role therein will probably never be completely understood. Helen Hyde gives a thorough examination of the available evidence, including surviving transcripts of the trials and confessions, diplomatic accounts, letters, and subsequent scholarship. She leaves her conclusions to the very end in the manner of a delightful, old-fashioned page-turner.

The plot occupies the third and final section of the book. Two earlier parts examine Sauli against the background of his Genoese family and in the context of his role as a cardinal-patron in High Renaissance Rome. Hyde offers a well-rounded assessment according to the expectations of magnificence that accompanied a papal prince in early-sixteenth-century Rome. Sauli, elevated to the purple at age thirty, came from a family of very ambitious merchant bankers who, from popolani origins, had clawed their way to the top in Genoa and Rome. Sauli’s uncle, cousin, and two brothers had enjoyed the prestigious position of depositor general of the Camera Apostolica—gateway to power and influence at court and access to papal revenues—prior to their dismissal in 1515 in favor of Filippo Strozzi, a Florentine and Medici in-law. Bendinello’s pathway to the purple had been not unlike the Medici themselves, who had been papal depositors and eventually obtained a cardinalate in 1489 for a young Giovanni de’ Medici, later Leo X. After one nearly successful attempt and many papal loans later, the Sauli had landed the same dignity for Bendinello in 1511 under Pope Julius II.

A cardinal, who, like Sauli, aspired to project a splendid image in papal Rome, measured his success in terms of the number of lucrative benefices received from the pope, suitable to support a large retinue of retainers, humanists among them, and maintain and furnish a grand palace, all of which brought Sauli a reputation for “splendour and pomp”(p. 71). Paolo Giovio and Agostino Giustiniani were among the handful of intellectuals whom Sauli patronized. Sebastiano del Piombo portrayed both men standing behind their cardinal patron in his stunning portrait of Sauli, seated in a pose reminiscent of Raphael’s famous likeness of Julius II. Hyde accepts the identification of Raphael’s earlier Portrait of a Cardinal (c. 1511), currently in the Prado, to be that of Sauli, perhaps commissioned upon his elevation.

Although Sauli was not a cardinal committed to church reform, some of his relatives seem to have shared those sentiments. More often Sauli appears on hunting trips or an occasional diplomatic mission among the retinue of Leo X. Since he left no significant literary remains, it is impossible to determine what he thought about the pressing issues of his day, whether theological or political. Hyde’s portrait is built from circumstantial evidence carefully pieced together from archival and printed sources. Her study complements Kate Lowe’s of Cardinal Francesco Soderini, also implicated in the papal plot. Although Sauli’s personality remains as obscure as his motives for participating in the scheme to murder a pope who had favored him, Hyde’s study gives a clear view of the unstable world of favor and finance, dynastic ambitions and intrigue that swirled around the papal court amidst shifting international alliances and war in the early decades of the sixteenth century.