Raphael, Cellini, and a Renaissance Banker: The Patronage of Bindo Altoviti (review)

This book is a curious fusion of seventeen scholarly essays on the artistic patronage and collecting of the Florentine banker Bindo Altoviti (1491–1556) and a catalogue for an exhibition on that topic that took place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence during 2003 and 2004. The exhibition was an extremely focused one (forty catalogued items of his own and related patronage, including paintings, sculpture, medals, and drawings after antique objects owned by Altoviti), in part because some of his commissions like Vasari's frescoes for his palace in Rome have been destroyed and in part because it was not feasible to borrow extant items, like his antiquities in Turin. Thus this volume sometimes seemed to overpower the exhibition that lay behind its publication. Bindo's artists included Raphael (Bindo's portrait in the National Gallery), Benedetto da Rovezzano, Giuliano Bugiardini, Jacopino da Conte, Giorgio Vasari, and Benvenuto Cellini (the large-scale bronze bust of the patron in the Gardner). Bindo was a fascinating figure, as the essays clearly indicate. A Florentine, he spent a good deal of his adult life in exile in Rome because of his anti-Medici sympathies; thus his patronage provides a comparison between the artistic production and patronage of the two cities. An extraordinary group of scholars have participated in the evolution of this book, the exhibition, and the scholarly symposium at the Gardner Museum that preceded them. Since Florentine patronage studies for this period tend to concentrate either on the Republican government or the Medici, this extensive investigation of Bindo's career not only provides substantive new information on his activities as a businessman/patron, but also, importantly, provides a model for consideration of other individual patrons of the time.

Melissa Meriam Bullard's early chapter on "Bindo Altoviti, Renaissance Banker and Papal Financier" provides the historical and intellectual scaffolding on which the rest of the book depends. She gives a thorough, archivally based history of the Altoviti family, Bindo's political and economic fortunes, and the network of Florentine political exiles with which he was associated during his years in Rome. Insofar as Bindo was a papal banker, her essay includes a succinct description of business in Rome and the Florentine economic interests in that city during the first half of the sixteenth century, as well as a brief history of the papacy for this period. Paolo Simoncelli's "Florentine Fuorusciti at the Time of Bindo Altoviti" continues the careful assessment of the vacillating fortunes of the Florentine republic after 1512 begun by Bullard, indicating how tricky navigation of the political — and thus economic — scene was for Florentines not firmly in the graces of Medici leaders in control of the city.

Unfortunately the essays on the art that Bindo collected and commissioned do not meet the standards set by the historical essays for presentation of new material in a critical and layered manner, although Jane van Nimmen's fortuna critica of Raphael's Portrait of Bindo Altoviti (thought for some of its history to have been a self-portrait of the artist) offers fascinating insights into the history of collecting. An essay on "Portraits of Florentine Exiles," for example, while useful for the range of examples that it presents, functions more as a compendium of objects rather than an historical assessment of the situation insofar as it says virtually nothing about whether there are particular characteristics shared by these paintings or whether they are different from Roman or other Florentine portraits of the same time. To be sure, portraiture is one of the more vexed areas of art historical writing, but in a volume of this heft, one expects more than a list of objects. The scattered comments about the romantic aspects of Bindo's early portrait by Raphael, for example, are not developed beyond...