Cardinals As Patrons of the Visual Arts

Chapter 31 Cardinals as Patrons of the Visual Arts

Piers Baker-Bates, Mary Hollingsworth and Arnold Witte

Five decades of research on the patronage of cardinals should suggest that the commissioning of art by members of the Sacred College during the early modern period is well understood.1 However, the traditional interpretation of patronage as a sign of personal taste and conspicuous consumption – or to phrase it in an early modern term, magnificenza – which cardinals shared with other wealthy nobles and sovereigns, has had a negative impact on an assessment of how cardinals from the Renaissance until the late Settecento commissioned art in relation to their ecclesiastical positions.2 It was this latter aspect that distin- guished cardinals from other categories of patron, and this chapter thus aims to flesh out the ways in which cardinals’ patronage in the context of the institutional Catholic Church was distinct from that of other dignitaries and sovereigns in the period 1420 to ca. 1750.

1 Terminology and Historiography

Patronage is clearly a separate concept to collecting. First, as a concept, it links the social side of patronage to the artistic results – through the fact that net- works and connections are an integral part of this phenomenon.3 Second, patronage allows for a focus on those works of art that were commissioned spe- cifically with an eye to public visibility, reflecting back on the patron’s social and institutional position.4 Patrons were not simply customers; they often de- termined the iconographical contents of the work of art. Collecting, on the

1 The authors would like to thank Patrizia Cavazzini and Lydia Hansell for their critical reading and suggestions for improvement. 2 Matthias Oberli, “Magnificentia Principis”: Das Mäzenatentum des Prinzen und Kardinals Maurizio von Savoyen (1593–1657) (Weimar: 1999), 21–39. 3 Bernd Roeck, Kunstpatronage in der frühen Neuzeit: Studien zu Kunstmarkt, Künstlern und ihre Auftraggebern in Italien und im Heiligen Römischen Reich (15.-17. Jahrhundert) (Göttingen: 1999), 13–14. 4 Alfredo Cirinei, “Conflitti artistici, rivalità cardinalizie e patronage a Roma fra Cinque e Seicento: Il caso del processo criminale contro il Cavalier d’Arpino,” in La nobiltà Romana in età moderna, ed. Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Rome: 2001), 255–305.

512 Baker-Bates, Hollingsworth and Witte other hand, signifies buying works on the open market and as a result, the iconographic meaning of the work disappears behind other, more mundane, values. For the same reason, the terminology frequently used in Italian, French, and German publications (mecenatismo, mécénat and Mäzenatentum respec- tively) is circumvented here, as this strand of interpretation highlights disinter- ested generosity out of a love for the arts.5 This essentially modern concept was unknown to early modern cardinals for whom artistic patronage was very much related to their public persona.6 The study of cardinals’ patronage started with Lina Montalto’s 1955 study on cardinal Benedetto Pamphilj (1653–1730) and was followed some years later by Francis Haskell’s 1963 fundamental study Patrons and Painters, in which cardinals played a significant role. Montalto, however, adopted a wider perspective on patronage than Haskell by also including music, literature, and opera. Both books set the tone for a long series of more specific studies on individual cardinals, both as monographs and as articles or chapters. Amongst the monographs, those by Clare Robertson on Alessandro II Farnese (1992), Pamela M. Jones on Federico I Borromeo (1993), Zygmunt Waźbiński on Francesco Maria Bourbon del Monte (1994), Matthias Oberli on Maurizio of Savoy (1999), Wil- liam Lee Barcham on Federico Corner (2001), Lisa Beaven on Camillo Massimo (2011), and Belinda Granata on Alessandro Peretti di Montalto (2012) (to name but a few) are important examples.7 It is significant that the majority of these studies focus on cardinals from around 1600, with a preference for those living between the period of the Council of Trent and the mid-17th century. This is related to the art historical issue of the Tridentine Council and the arts, which dates back to the 1920s and in particular to the discussion between Pevsner and Weisbach on Mannerism versus Baroque as the typical Counter- Reformation style, but also to the more recent discussion following Federico Zeri’s 1957 Pittura e controriforma.8 This focus on the post-Tridentine era must be one of the reasons why comparatively few studies have been dedicated to

5 Ernst H. Gombrich, “The Early Medici as Patrons of Art,” in idem, Norm and Form (London: 1966), 35–57. 6 Francesca Cappelletti, “An Eye on the Main Chance: Cardinals, Cardinal-Nephews, and Aris- tocratic Collectors,” in Display of Art in the Roman Palace 1550–1750, ed. Gail Feigenbaum (Los Angeles: 2014), 77–88 for the display of collections in cardinals’ residences in the 17th century. 7 See the bibliography at the end of this volume for details on the titles mentioned here. 8 See John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (London: 2000), 35 and Ute Engel, Stil und Nation: Barockforschung und die deutsche Kunstge- schichte, ca. 1830–1930 (Paderborn: 2018), 641–47 for the Pevsner-Weisbach debate, and Elisa- beth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, “Italian Painting of the Seventeenth Century,” The Art Bulletin 69/4 (1987), 505 for Zeri.