The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety, and Art, 1450–1700 (review)

What were the possessions of a cardinal? This book’s prize for the best documented, if not the most, possessions must surely go to Ippolito d’Este (Cardinal 1555–66). Ippolito, whose ecclesiastical career started when he was nine, seems to have had everything he wanted – except the papacy: royal connections, status, wealth, benefices, mistresses and children, houses and villas (notably Villa d’Este at Tivoli). Mary Hollingsworth (Chapter 8) draws on the letters and account books in the Este archives to analyse Ippolito’s conspicuous consumption and provide glimpses of the material circumstances of his life: his furnishings, table wear, and, especially, clothes, all of which demonstrate a marked leaning towards secular tastes. She concludes, however, that the very superabundance of the documentation makes it difficult to assess Ippolito in relation to his peers.

Indeed, at the opposite end of the spectrum is John Casimir Wasa, half-brother of the King of Poland. After an erratic earlier career he became a Jesuit in 1642. His Cardinalate lasted less than two years (1646–48), for when his brother died, he succeeded and married his widow. His sojourn in Rome as Cardinal was too brief to result in tangible possessions of his own, but Susan Russell (Chapter 15) mounts a convincing case that the frieze decoration in the Sala degli Orientali of Palazzo Pamphilj (Piazza Navona, Rome) was hastily painted in honour of a visit, on the occasion of his installation, by the new Cardinal to Pope Innocent X’s family residence.

This contrast perhaps begins to give an idea of the scope and themes of the collection, which ranges from the better- to the lesser-known figure, the aristocrat to the humble friar, the papal nephew to the cardinal with nephews, personal to family ambition, seeking to elucidate such contrasts in the context of ‘an era of … fundamental change in the political landscape of Europe and in the Church’ (p. 12). The book is explicitly conceived as a contribution to art history. The authors are primarily interested in the cardinals’ patronage and promotion of the arts, their building and rebuilding of churches and palazzi, their establishment and endowment of chapels, their antiquarian collections, and in one case, even the foundation of an Academy (the Ambrosiana, Chapter 13). At the same time, the aim is to define the cultural and political significance of these activities for each figure discussed.

They are: Guillaume d’Estouteville (c. 1412–1483), Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini (1439–1503), Gabriele Rangone (d. 1486), Oliviero Carafa (1430–1511), Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena (1470–1520), Giulio de’ Medici (1478–1534), Ippolito d’Este (1509–1572), Giovanni de’ Medici (1543–1562), Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584), Ferdinando I de’ Medici (1549–1609), Odoardo Farnese (1573–1626), Federico Borromeo (1564–1631), Antonio Barberini (1607–1671), John Casimir Wasa (1609–1672), Camillo Massimo (1620–1677), and Giovanni Battista Patrizi (1658–1727).

As David S. Chambers shows in his useful preliminary survey, since the 1950s there has been an enormous growth of interest in cardinals and the papal curia in Renaissance and Baroque Rome and beyond. This volume, attractively bound in hallmark red and meticulously produced, is an important and useful demonstration of the vitality of such research.