This chapter follows the diverse strategies that early modern popes and their families used to commemorate their attachment to the papacy in the period from 1300 to 1700. By necessity this analysis depends on considering a division between different types of commemorators (i.e., the institution of the papacy vs. popes vs. cardinal-nephews vs. lay kinsmen) and different types of commemoration (i.e., individual liturgical vs. spatial vs. corporate objects).1 While most popes and their relatives who wished to mark their ascent to the throne of St. Peter considered commemoration strategies to be a social good, which could lead to further access to the cardinalate or papacy, not all pontificates received the same commemorative energy. While this uneven experience sometimes resulted from economic disparities, generally popes who elevated kin cardinals were more widely commemorated. Consequently, this period also witnessed an increase in commemorative energy in line with the expansion of the College of Cardinals and the growth of Italian noble families linked to the papacy.2 This chapter will explore major trends and important anomalies in papal commemoration that reveal how contemporaries understood the connection between public memory and dynasticism.
Liturgical Commemoration
Through the late medieval and early modern periods the commemoration of pontiffs was variously sporadic and also regularised through the papal chapel’s annual liturgical cycle. As the pope was considered to be the vicar of Christ on Earth and the heir of the apostle Peter, chosen by the Holy Spirit during conclave, his post-election corporate identity was more important theologically than his pre-election self. Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani showed that through the late medieval and early modern period, Christians believed that the pope had two souls: one soul that he shared with Jesus Christ, and which represented the Catholic Church, and one soul that was entirely human. During his pontificate, the pope appeared as Christ and transitioned back to his mortal self at death.3 Thus, the annual liturgical cycle that re-enacted Jesus’ life reflected one of the pope’s souls and obscured the other soul. Only if the pope was determined to be of extraordinary holiness and canonised after death, did the Catholic Church commemorate him beyond his corporate identity. Between roughly 1300 and 1700, only Celestine V (1294, canonised 1313) and Pius V (1566–1572, beatified 1672, canonised 1712) achieved this level of personal commemoration. This infrequency suggests an institutional preference for commemorating the office and its Christological and Petrine origins over the elected man.
In contrast to sporadic commemoration through canonisation, Caeremoniale Romanum (1488), the guide written by Master of Ceremonies Agostino Patrizi, documents an annual corporate commemoration process. Each year the papal chapel held an anniversary Mass for the pope’s immediate predecessor. Although the entire court attended, including the reigning pontiff, only cardinals raised by the deceased pope acted as mourners and filled liturgical roles.4 As the Mass occurred on the predecessor’s death date, the event perpetuated a corporate mythology manifested through the memories of current members of the papal court. This memorial event and the collective memory that animated it constructed an institutional history that historicised the early modern papacy.5 From a structural perspective, the event also reinforced the current pope’s right to hold power, as it recalled his predecessor, the men who were raised by him to the cardinalate, and the predecessor’s death, which allowed for his own election. By celebrating the historical precedent established by the men who were his legitimate predecessors, the living pope justified his own continued rule.
This annual opportunity to commemorate a papal predecessor is characteristic of the early modern papacy’s memorialising tendency. Perhaps due to its character as a non-hereditary elected monarchy, early modern popes and the court that surrounded them had a keen interest in establishing their place in a historical line. Memories of the Papal Schism (1378–1417), during which there were two, and then three, elected popes vying for popular support, likely intensified the importance of articulating undeniable ties between individuals and the papal office. While the papacy was technically non-heritable, appointing kinsmen as cardinals made the prospects of a papal dynasty more likely. Between 1300 and 1700 eleven popes were elected who had been elevated to the cardinalate by a kinsman.6 Although it is impossible to draw a clear and continuous connection between dynastic creation and commemoration efforts, the flourishing of commemorative projects in this period suggests that commemoration of popes and by popes was a valuable investment for institutional, individual, and familial benefit.
The increasing size of the College of Cardinals meant that there were ample participants in papal anniversary Masses. The elevation of household familiars and kin to the cardinalate ensured that factions had long chronological roots. Wolfgang Reinhard and Marco Pellegrini have argued that through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries election to the throne of St. Peter brought income and opportunities for advancement that impacted the pope’s entire family.7 A single kin cardinal was considered acceptable and appropriate, even if the College of Cardinals already numbered above the maximum consensus of twenty-six members.8 This signals an acknowledgement of the importance of kin support (and the loyalty that it often signalled) in the larger administrative and social needs of the papacy. Implicitly this measure accepted an involvement with the pope’s family that could last two or more generations. Notably, kin cardinals were most likely to commission tombs and lasting commemorative spaces. This tendency bundles two animating virtues together: the need to bury a deceased pope honourably and the cardinal’s desire to go beyond liturgical commemoration and permanently assert his family’s ties to the papacy.9
Encouraging Dynasticism Via Commemoration
Early modern strategies of papal commemoration depended on signs and media that looked beyond the man to the institution of the papacy and the pope’s relatives. Because of this, the subject of papal commemoration embraces issues of identity and clientelism, and sits close to the heart of current historiographical trends. As in any discussion of papal dynasticism one must accept the fact that the divide between clerical and lay worlds was permeable and that acquiring clerical offices could play an important role in the advancement strategies of a cleric’s lay relatives. Throughout the early modern period and beyond, families considered themselves to be a community (i.e., house or casa) that shared resources and labour in a coordinated effort to raise the house’s social standing.10 To fully understand the scope of commemoration of and by popes, clerical and lay papal relatives must play an intrinsic part in the conversation.11
If the men who sat on St. Peter’s throne truly wished to be remembered only as the rocks with which the Church was built, there would be no need to carve their names or armorial shields on their statues. Indeed, the reason for carving names, distinctive faces, and coats of arms was to distinguish the history of the papacy and the families that occupied it. Throughout the early modern period there was a reciprocal relationship between the institution and the families that offered cardinals as papabili. Memorialising past popes simultaneously reasserted the institution’s continuity and allowed papal families to share reflected glory derived from secular authority, social credit, and spiritual charisma. Although reformers continued to complain about commemoration creeping into spaces that were exclusively meant for worship, it was a losing battle. Since the papacy depended on the wealth and social leverage of its cardinals and popes and gained from their relatives’ desire to publicly recognise ecclesiastical contributions, there was no practical advantage to limiting papal commemoration. Similarly, these campaigns brought tangible benefits to communities that accepted the funds facilitating memorial objects, images, and spaces. These communities then became standard-bearers for a family’s long-term goal of perpetuating its connection to the elite Church and the papacy, preferably by building a papal dynasty. In the short term a desire to attract patrons and maintain the Catholic hierarchy became a way for families to campaign for further offices, both elected and appointed, based on a history of service to the elite Church.
There are various levels folded within the papal desire to commemorate. Since the papacy was a continuous, elected monarchy there were benefits to name recognition. Objects or images that bore coats of arms or papal figures usually had a basic practical purpose: liturgical tools, texts, tableware, and façade or mural decoration. The money that papal families invested in these objects functioned in two ways: first, as much-needed gifts that would be used in churches, libraries, squares, and palaces; and secondly, as reminders of the family’s past office-holding, cultural interest, and generosity. Individuals who came in contact with these objects, images, and spaces would become part of a memorialisation campaign that could continue for centuries. At 1300 there was every expectation that the heir of St. Peter would continue to be elected by the College of Cardinals, much as it is today. Thus, a family that hoped to create a papal dynasty took the long view that any investment perpetuating memories of their family’s pope would only reap maximum rewards if they had a kin cardinal who could be elected pope. Conveniently, having a pope in the family increased the chances of having kin cardinals, both during that pontificate and afterwards. Cardinals could train relatives, pass on benefices, and keep them in the vicinity of the pope as he sought worthy candidates for future red hats.
These men found it useful to maintain their uncles’ or brothers’ memory in order to portray themselves as carrying on their family’s pedigree. There was profit in being part of a lineage that remained close to power and generally passed its offices down to junior relatives. Objects embossed with a pope or cardinal’s shield followed a similar path and freely crossed the clerical-lay divide. Silver vases with Cardinal Pietro Riario’s arms passed to his brother Girolamo and were part of the tangible domestic magnificence that impressed Caterina Sforza on arrival at her Roman marital home. Likewise, Raphael’s portrait of Pope Leo X with his cardinal-cousins (1517) initially stood in place of individuals, reminding wedding guests that the bridal couple was connected to absent power-brokers.12 The fact that the painting remained in Florence for centuries suggests that it was a useful tool in the Medici family’s strategies. In Rome, during the seventeenth century, public fountains became popular sites for civic patronage by papal families. The Borghese family’s Fontana dell’Acqua Paola (1612); the Barberini family’s Fontana della Barcaccia (1627–1629), Fontana del Tritone (1642–1643), and Fontana delle Api (1644); and the Pamphili family’s Fontana dei Quattro Fiume (1648–1651) are examples that incorporate family and pontifical imagery or the pope’s name in an effort to remind passers-by of his contribution to urban life.13
Papal Tombs
As Cathleen Fleck has shown, from the early fourteenth century the popes in Avignon understood how spaces and objects could assert papal institutional authority and reinforce individual power, even when far from the bones of St. Peter that bestowed apostolic legitimacy on the succeeding bishops of Rome.14 Julian Gardner has noted that some fourteenth-century popes built a monument in Avignon as well as a monument in their home diocese, in an effort to assert both an institutional and local identity through liturgical and visual commemoration.15 This practice underlines the importance of tombs in a period of tension and conflict to maintain the chronology of papal history at its contemporary centre, while also communicating personal contributions to distant supporters. Pope Clement VI (r. 1342–1352) constructed a tomb in Avignon, but also had his remains interred at the Abbey of La Chaise-Dieu in Le Puy (Auvergne, France), where forty-four statues of his relatives would surround his monument in the choir.16 Likewise Urban V (r. 1362–1370) built a tomb in Avignon’s cathedral, as well as one in the Abbey of Saint-Victor in Marseille, where he had been abbot.17
In Rome through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries papal tombs were collected in what is now called Old St. Peter’s basilica, a structure initiated by Emperor Constantine (begun 318–322, consecrated 360). Once the papacy returned in 1420 following the Council of Constance, fifteenth-century popes resumed the tradition, further transforming the basilica into a tour of papal history. Carol Richardson has noted that once Julius II began the staged demolition required for the building of New St. Peter’s (around April 1506), the destroyed transept left many wall and sarcophagus-style monuments open to the elements, impeding liturgical commemoration.18 The wholesale replacement of the Church required the redistribution of papal tombs to station churches across the city and prompted uncertainty for future burials.19
Yet even before the basilica’s renewal, popes faced barriers to commemoration. While papal cadavers received provisional burial in St. Peter’s immediately after funerals, the vagaries of financing a tomb fit for a pontiff could mean later removal. The short-lived Pius III (r. 1503) is a good example of this difficulty. As a cardinal he took responsibility for his uncle Pius II’s tomb, in the expectation that both this tomb and his own would remain in the chapel dedicated to Sts. Andrew and Gregory. Pius II had built this chapel in Old St. Peter’s and intended it also to be his burial chapel.20 While still a cardinal Pius III received permission to be buried at the foot of his uncle’s tomb, chiefly because he paid for it.21 After Pius III’s death the responsibility to oversee his funeral, burial, and tomb fell to his brothers, Giacomo and Antonio Piccolomini.22 Fortunately, in the early seventeenth century, as New St. Peter’s entered its final phase of construction, the presence of a distant relative, Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto, saved the two Piccolomini tombs from obscurity or destruction by transferring them to facing walls in the nave of Sant’Andrea della Valle. The new church had recently been built on the site of the old Palazzo Piccolomini (begun 1590), through the patronage of the duchess of Amalfi, Costanza Piccolomini d’Aragona, and after her death, Cardinal Peretti Montalto.23 The role of these patrons was crucial to creating sites of memory and commemoration. As Jan de Jong has noted, “[a] tomb is, first of all, a place to be buried. However, devices such as an inscription or a representation in stone or some other material, also make it a place of commemoration.”24 These devices allowed publicity of patronage, alignment of individual patrons with papal memory, and the visual linkage of two popes in a single space. Yet, the distance between the Piccolomini popes and Cardinal Peretti Montalto was evidently so great as to be insurmountable by memory or a coat of arms. To ensure that his contribution and participation in commemorating the Piuses was known, Peretti Montalto added an inscription beneath Pius III’s tomb prominently identifying his role (see Fig. 1).25
Fig. 1
Detail of funeral monument for Pope Pius II, Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome. Photograph by Peter 1936F, CC BY-SA 4.0
Thus, papal tombs posed an opportunity to create a lasting message of achievement by constructing commemorative spaces that both late medieval and early modern families valued. Indeed, some popes valued these spaces so much that they sought opportunities to memorialise themselves by creating tombs for others. Between 1481 and 1483, Pope Sixtus IV built a tomb in his hometown of Savona for his parents. Constructed within the cloister of the cathedral, the wall tomb includes a relief of Sixtus presenting his parents to the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child. Jill Blondin has argued convincingly that this relief places Sixtus in the position conventionally accorded to a patron saint and directly across from two other saints.26 As Savona sits on the Ligurian coast, quite far from Rome, this act was not intended to influence members of the papal court, but targeted a local audience by integrating the pope’s image and updating the space, which was soon called the Sistine Chapel.27 Comparison with other examples of a tomb supplied by a pope to memorialise his parents highlights the unusual character of this project. Urban V built a memorial chapel in Bédouès (Lozère, France) close to his family home and endowed it with a college of six canons. Yet he did not position himself in place of a saintly intercessor, but relied on local knowledge of a famous son and an accompanying inscription.28 What links these two tombs is the patron’s desire to use them as platforms for self-commemoration at a distance from Rome, much as Avignonese popes did with secondary burial sites.
These swiftly completed projects contrast with many drawn-out papal tombs in which spectacular designs slowly shrunk. The presence of energetic and wealthy kin and clients was essential to memorials’ honourable completion and maintenance, yet the decades-long process tested the endurance and resources of many families. In addition, the disruption caused by the rebuilding of St. Peter’s basilica coincided with the Catholic Reformation. After 1534 there was a change in the display of papal tombs that was influenced by the Council of Trent’s (1545–1563) elevation of pastoral care, which consequently de-emphasised family power carved in stone.29 Traditionally, scholars repeat Gian Matteo Giberti and Carlo Borromeo’s invocations to remove freestanding tombs from the church interior, in order to allow deceased Christians to truly return to dust, while reducing worldly arrogance and eliminating distractions to worship.30 On the whole, wealthy elite clergy ignored Giberti and Borromeo’s advice, instead adopting the more flamboyant decorative motifs of Catholic triumphalism, and highlighting the continued importance of visualising and spatialising commemoration .31
Papal Self-commemoration and Damnatio Memoriae
While not all commemorations were funerary monuments or tombs, these are the most recognisable sites and traditional acts. Between 1300 and 1700 popes pursued a variety of other commemorative strategies that reinforced institutional authority and individual identity in public spaces. Popes commissioned representations of themselves with mixed results. As Nancy Rash has shown, Boniface VIII initiated the practice of self-commemoration in life with statues in Orvieto, Bologna, and Florence. These portrait statues prompted complaints because they were placed in both ecclesiastical and civic spaces, explicitly supporting his claim of spiritual and temporal lordship.32 While earlier papal portraits existed in mosaic, paintings, and sepulchral effigies, Arnolfo di Cambio’s life-size, half-length portrait of Boniface (now in the Musei Vaticani) was the first sculpture of a living pontiff. Over the next centuries it would serve as an iconographic standard, echoing both Petrine (blessing gesture and keys) and princely models, while incorporating the triple-crown and the liturgical cope/pluvial. In 1341, Benedict XII commissioned a portrait sculpture of himself from Paolo of Siena in an almost identical pose.33
After the fourteenth century few papal statues framed a gesturing half-length pope until Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Clement X (c.1676, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini), but full-length statues of living popes used Boniface’s iconographical model throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In a similar fashion, Boniface’s successors’ statues attracted protest as proxies for unpopular popes.34 After Bologna’s capitulation, Michelangelo’s ten-foot-tall bronze statue of Julius II (1506–1507) was placed in a niche over the portal of the basilica of San Petronio.35 Considering the city’s struggle to assert its independence and the basilica’s adjacent position to the Palazzo Comunale, the statue appeared as a sign of conquest. Only three years later, the city handed the statue to the duke of Ferrara, who cast a cannon named La Giulia from the melted bronze and used it against Julius’ troops.36 This experience did not prevent another statue of a later pope appearing in the same square. Today Alessandro Menganti’s statue of Gregory XIII (1580) sits in a niche on the façade of the Palazzo Comunale, the site where the early modern Senate deliberated alongside the papal legate. In this case, the Senate initiated the act of commemoration, contributed the funds, assigned a site, and commissioned the artist.37 This time Gregory’s bronze statue was a sign of pride, offered by the city in celebration of its native son’s elevation, and in gratitude for favours done to his alma mater, the Bolognese Studium.38 Undoubtedly, the Senate was well aware of the trade-off between visually aligning their city with papal authority and manifesting its pride, gratitude, and future hopes on the façade of the town hall. By offering the pope a piece of Bologna, the statue’s viewers recollected that a man from Bologna controlled the Papal States.
These statues indicate the precarious nature of dispersed commemoration. The staying power of Gregory XIII’s statue shows the importance of local protection for sites of commemoration. As members of the Buoncompagni family remained in Bologna, their presence, and continued elite status, dissuaded malcontents from removing the statue. Although it sat far from Rome, Gregory’s lay relatives enjoyed this visible reminder of their social pedigree and became the statue’s protectors. In contrast, far from its initial patron and purpose, and without local protectors who appreciated or benefitted from a statue’s presence, the bronze Julius grew vulnerable. As John Hunt has shown in Rome, statues acted as physical proxies for absent leaders, experiencing violence that attackers would have liked to do to the pope, but surely would not have dared. The present and living pope was far more powerful, able to punish attackers, both of his body and his statue, but in absence and death this protection retreated. During the interregnal period, statues at the Capitoline Hill, close to the hub of civic governance but relatively far from the reach of papal protection, became vulnerable targets of popular discontent and victims of perceived poor governance.39
Papal fortresses provide an opportunity for surveilling the tyranny or protection of distance. In Rome Castel Sant’Angelo is a public reminder of papal strength and variously served as a treasury, prison, and refuge. After Alexander VI’s death in 1503 and the election of Julius II, the Borgia family’s popularity plunged and his exterior papal arms were chiselled away in Rome and elsewhere, as a sort of damnatio memoriae (damnation of memory, see Fig. 2).40 With the pope’s daughter in Ferrara and his sons in Spain and Naples, there were few protectors present who had the force or inclination to avert the damage to his memory. In contrast, at the fortress of Ostia, which was relatively far from the centre of papal authority, the Borgia coat of arms remained untouched. While Julius visited Ostia often to fish and tour the harbour, he erected his own arms alongside his predecessor’s arms.41 Unlike Castel Sant’Angelo, which faced the Tiber River and mediated between the Rome’s citizenry and the curial Borgo, in Ostia there were either fewer people who mattered viewing Alexander’s coat of arms or its reduced viewing public made the destruction of Borgia memory far less important (Fig. 3).
Fig. 2
Alessandro Menganti, Statue of Gregory XIII (1580), façade of the Palazzo Comunale, Bologna. Photograph by author
Fig. 3
Effaced inscription of Pope Alexander VI, c. 1500, Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome. Photograph by author
Strategies of Commemoration: Portraits, Arms, and Objects
In its use of the portrait and the armorial shield, the language of papal commemoration is similar to lay commemoration. While the portrait seems more direct, it is the less common format as it was constrained by cost, originated with the pope, and was disseminated throughout Italian courts, much like the portraits of secular rulers. The papal “state” portrait emerged in the early sixteenth century and followed the “camauro style” developed by Raphael’s portrait of Julius II (1511–1512). As Opher Mansour has shown, this model reflected the spiritual and secular powers fused in the papal prince both iconographically and functionally.42 After the Council of Trent, public expectation of papal behaviour influenced the contours of papal portraiture. While Pius V (r. 1566–1572) subtly transformed Raphael’s model to emphasise his personal piety, the reformer Gabriele Paleotti equated self-representation with pride and vanity, undermining the “state” portrait’s traditional courtly expectation.43 However, this criticism did not prevent continued interest in papal portraiture, and by the late eighteenth century Italian nobles would display the current pope’s picture in their audience hall, replacing it on his death, and privileging alignment with authority over visual chronology.44
Armorial shields abound in commemorations of both clerical and secular elites, chiefly because of their relative simplicity and widespread incorporation into European decorative language. Elite ecclesiastical commemorations generally presented an individual’s armorial shield alongside an indication of rank, which often appeared above palace, chapel, titular church, or cathedral doors.45 The renewal of Rome’s city gates in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offer examples of how popes combined shields with laudatory inscriptions to reach a large audience.46 Applying armorial shields to objects (e.g., tombs, vestments, plates, books) and structures (e.g., churches, palaces, carriages, gates) created a visualised network implying patronage and ownership that passively maintained a family’s claim on offices, authority, and thus social credit long after individuals left positions or died. As long as these armorial shields were publicly viewed, they formed an echoing legacy that remained in the public consciousness and supported contemporary reputations. Together legacy and reputation reinforced a family’s continued hope for new offices and the maintenance of a historicised authority.
The Villa Farnese at Caprarola reveals how armorial shields can argue for a noble lineage stretching back in time, as well as a broad familial network that appears to offer support in the present. Decorated in the sixteenth century, the palace’s rotunda-like courtyard pairs the armorial shields of elite Italian families, combining older and better-known noble families like the Sforza with regional families like the Oddi and Vitelleschi, and rising stars like the Borromei. The fact that Cardinal Alessandro Farnese the Younger, Paul III’s cardinal-great-nephew, decorated this space speaks to the fluid use of the armorial shield by both clergy and laymen for commemoration. Moreover, the courtyard’s decoration reveals the elite clergy’s belief in the importance of family and commemoration of both clerical and lay ancestors, undermining the practical separation of these two groups. Spaces like the Villa Farnese and its contemporaries (the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and Villa d’Este in Tivoli) assert the widespread use by both clergy and laity of the same strategies of commemoration through the late medieval and early modern periods.
The flexibility of the armorial shield encouraged its application on a wide variety of portable objects, which broadened the memorial process. Although St. Antonino Pierozzi, the archbishop of Florence (1446–1459), encouraged wealthy citizens to contribute to beautifying Christendom through the physical restoration of churches and the provision of liturgical tools, the reforming friar Girolamo Savonarola criticised armorial embroidery on liturgical vestments as worldly ambition.47 Nonetheless, Pius II’s gift of vestments to the new cathedral in Pienza is characteristic of this desire to simultaneously commemorate a pope and celebrate his patronage. The Opera della Cattedrale di Pienza displays several silk and velvet chasubles and a cope embroidered with the Piccolomini family arms on the back and near the hem.48 These robes clothed the priest who officiated at the cathedral altar, surrounded by Piccolomini-tagged furniture, and handling altarware stamped with Pius’ name and arms.49 Together these items defined the wearer as a cleric, wholly committed to divine service, and associated the patron who gifted these items with that human sacrifice, facilitating future liturgical sacrifices that benefitted the entire community.
Coins minted in the Papal States also used the pope’s arms to signify a new pontificate, but these coins embraced greater diversity of imagery. Commonly, the reverse of papal coins bore an image of Saints Peter and Paul, a fishing boat (for the “fisher of men”), or a cross.50 Over longer pontificates and through the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reverse imagery included inscriptions, the kneeling pope, a papal consistory, the Jubilee Holy Door, and new St. Peter’s basilica. Through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the obverse displayed either the pope’s head in profile or his arms.51 These customs mirrored coins issued by lay monarchs, underlining the pope’s secular role as prince of the Papal States, but obfuscating his office’s non-hereditary character. Engraving the pope’s face on the coin emphasised his personal leadership role, while displaying his papal arms, which incorporated his family’s shield, reminded the public of the continued involvement of kinship networks in ecclesiastical and political governance. Coins issued to mark the interregnal period, highlight this message as they bear only the Papal States’ essential imagery: St. Peter or his keys, and the cross.52 Nevertheless, the persistence of coins named after the popes that introduced them, for example, the giulio and the paolo, is another way that coins memorialised specific pontificates.53
What links most of these items together is their ability to move from one space to another, increasing their impact and the diffusion of message and memory. While it is unlikely that silver altarware ventured far from home, other objects bearing the papal arms were created expressly for dispersal. Hand-painted tin-glazed earthenware plates were less highly valued, but still prestigious gifts that routinely bore the owner’s shield.54 In this case, workmanship determined the objects’ value, instead of the weight and cost of its precious material. Istoriato maiolica, often displayed on a credenza or banquet table, grew in popularity and reached its height in Italian court circles in the 1520s. Cardinal Ludovico Podocataro’s commission of a ninety-one piece maiolica service bearing his new armorial shield, from the Urbino potter Francesco Garducci soon after his elevation to the cardinalate, underlines the common use of maiolica for public signalling.55 Similarly, the preservation of maiolica ware long after the original owner died reaffirms the way that over time public signalling could become memorialisation. While ceramic plates from the dinner services of popes and cardinals appear in many museum collections, few of these items emphasise maiolica’s political and commemorative power like the “Giovanni Maria dish.”56 Housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a maiolica bowl from Casteldurante bears the papal arms of Julius II and Peter’s crossed keys above the shield of the Bolognese Manzoli family (see Fig. 4). Believed to commemorate the pope’s conquest of Bologna in 1506–1507, and gifted to Melchiorre di Giorgio Manzoli, the Bolognese envoy to Rome, in gratitude for his support, this bowl is intrinsically a marker of factional identity and political alliance.57
Fig. 4
Workshop of Giovanni Maria Vasaro, “Bowl with the Arms of Pope Julius II and the Manzoli of Bologna surrounded by putti, cornucopiae, satyrs, dolphins, birds, etc. 1508,” Robert Lehman Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/459197, CC0 1.0 Universal
In a fashion similar to maiolica plates presented on a credenza, prints could be displayed to visitors either in albums or in frames. As Laurie Nussdorfer, Rose Marie San Juan, and Pascale Rihouet have shown, popes commissioned texts and engravings of their activities and distributed them among their factions and families.58 Prints documenting the papal possesso, the ceremonial parade from St. Peter’s basilica to the cathedral of St. John Lateran, by which the pope “took possession” of the city as its bishop, were a particular favourite. The metal plates created for one possesso print could be (and were) reused for a later pope’s possesso print.59 Giovanni Guerra’s Order of the Cavalcade (1589) was the first print to mark Sixtus V’s election by visualising the trans-urban parade that followed his coronation. Guerra’s portrayal quickly became a model, presenting a snaking cavalcade that passed select Roman monuments, including the Forum, its triumphal arches, and the Colosseum.60 As Rihouet argues, Sixtus’ print was likely commissioned by either his great-nephew, Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto, or the pope’s sister, Camilla Peretti (Alessandro’s grandmother). The print displays three coats of arms, belonging to the cardinal, his younger, recently married brother, and their grandmother. All three people had reason to be grateful to the pope and to publicly highlight his achievement and their relationship with him. Offices, titles, a marital alliance, and material resources had enriched their family since the election. The same year Guerra had already dedicated a book on Peretti family heraldry to Camilla, further underscoring the perceived value of commemorating kinship ties and revealing its public mechanics.61
Commemoration by Lay Papal Relatives
As Rihouet notes, Guerra’s possesso print derived from a fresco designed by Cesare Nebbia in the Vatican Palace library (the Salone Sistino). Although Sixtus V commissioned this fresco cycle illustrating his own achievements, many early modern papal families maintained their connection to the papacy in the same way. While the reigns of Leo X and Clement VII were politically rocky, they integrated the Medici family into European ruling houses. A few years after Clement’s death, Cosimo (r. 1537–1574), the young Duke of Florence (afterward the Grand Duke of Tuscany), commemorated his distant relatives in the Palazzo Vecchio’s decoration, in order to assert his inheritance of the family’s historical authority. Chiefly this strategy appears in the Salone dei Cinquecento, which earlier functioned as a meeting hall for the republican Consiglio Maggiore and later as a ducal audience hall. In the renovated space sat niched statues of Cosimo, his father, his eldest son, Popes Leo and Clement, and Duke Alessandro (his cousin and predecessor).62 Far above these statues, the ceiling and upper wall register portrayed episodes from Florentine history, privileging the expansion of Medici territory, but also recalling the city’s protection of Pope Eugenius IV and the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–1445). Since this space would host the wedding of Cosimo’s heir to the Holy Roman Emperor’s daughter in 1565, ensuring the family and city’s future stability, the room demanded a multi-generational narrative that positioned the Medici family at a level proximate to the emperor. The two Medici popes were crucial to this message, as the universal papacy was the only power above the emperor. To further commemorate his illustrious ancestors, Cosimo dedicated a separate room to each man. On one ceiling the newly elected Leo X appears enthroned at St. John Lateran, Rome’s Cathedral (1513), while on a wall he enters Florence in triumph (1515), in both cases surrounded by cardinals and noblemen.63 In the room devoted to Clement VII, the pope crowns Emperor Charles V (1530) and officiates at the marriage of the French dauphin to Catherine de’ Medici (1533).64
Cosimo’s alignment of his more illustrious ancestors with his own goals and authority was a traditional strategy for papal families, many of which had gained fiefs through their connections. Thus, commemorating papal kin justified their continued rule. Kin cardinals followed the same strategy. At Caprarola the viewer witnesses Paul III’s coronation as pope, thus legitimising the scenes in which he names his son leader of the papal troops, and his grandsons the prefect of Rome and imperial cardinal-legate. Adjacent to those images, Paul’s successor Julius III continues to honour the Farnese family by naming Ottavio as the duke of Parma. Painted in the 1550s these scenes assert the institutional and familial pedigree of Cardinal Alessandro, the villa’s owner, and commemorate his recently deceased grandfather. Paul III reappears briefly in the cardinal’s tiny chapel, surrounded by a frieze of painted chalices, crosses, and triple-crowns. The Palazzo Farnese at Piacenza shows how subsequent generations could return to this strategy repeatedly by updating and revising commemorations.65 Scenes from Pope Paul III’s life appear alongside scenes portraying deeds by his descendants, who profited from the marriages, titles, and offices he procured for his children and grandchildren. Not only did Sebastiano Ricci in 1687–1688 produce a Pauline life-cycle for the duchess of Parma, but from the 1690s Ilario Spolverini depicted the papal patriarch as part of a larger cycle of paintings chronicling the family’s ecclesiastical and lay fortunes through the early eighteenth century. For Italian dynasties that experienced a dramatic surge by securing the papal election, commemorating fasti familiari (family deeds) in large-scale pictorial cycles on public display was the key to maintaining authority amid widespread Spanish influence after 1527.66
Conclusion
Coupled with the desire to maintain the papacy as a mechanism for political strength and social mobility, popes and their kinsmen publicised their association with living and dead popes in a variety of ways. As this chapter shows, there was no statute of limitations on commemorative projects. Erecting monuments to a papal relative could take decades or appear unexpectedly as an opportunity to align oneself with long-dead ancestors. While monuments in ecclesiastical spaces—tombs, chapels, and libraries—were often the work of clerical relatives, mostly cardinals, monuments in domestic spaces usually followed the patronage of lay kinsmen. However, commemorative strategies stretched far beyond those bounds and thus speak to the early modern enthusiasm for articulating a historical record that worked equally for institutions and individuals.
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Footnotes
1
In this discussion “individual commemoration” refers to events, spaces, or items that are initiated by individuals to commemorate individuals, as opposed to institutions, families, or other groups. “Spatial commemoration” refers to spaces that are created for the purpose of remembering an individual, either through decorative schemes, interment, or liturgy that might take place there. “Corporate objects” refers to items that bear identifying images, like coats of arms, that could also refer to relatives with the same surname who achieved the same office.
2
On the elevation of papal kin to the College of Cardinals, see Jennifer Mara DeSilva, “Politics and Dynasty: Under-aged Cardinals in the Catholic Church, 1420–1605,” Royal Studies Journal 4.2 (2017): 81–102.
3
Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani, The Pope’s Body, trans. David S. Peterson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 69–74.
4
Marc Dykmans, L’ouevre de Patrizi Piccolomini ou le cérémonial papal de la première Renaissance, 2 vols. (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1980–1982), 2:443–444.
5
Paravicini-Bagliani, The Pope’s Body, 71–73.
6
This group includes the elevation of relatives by marriage or sexual intimacy, like Leo X, who was elevated by his sister’s father-in-law, and Paul III, who was elevated by his sister’s lover. On this broader functional definition of papal kin, see Loek Luiten, “Sexuality, agency, and honor in the connections between the Borgia and Farnese families in Renaissance Rome,” in The Borgia Family: Rumor and Representation, ed. Jennifer Mara DeSilva (London: Routledge, 2019), 34–54.
7
Marco Pellegrini, Il Papato nel Rinascimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010); Wolfgang Reinhard, “Struttura e significato del Sacro Collegio tra la fine del XV e la fine del XVI secolo,” in Città italiano del ‘500 tra Riforma e Controriforma: atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Lucca, 13–15 ottobre 1983, ed. Marino Berengo (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1988), 257–265.
8
J.A.F. Thomson, Popes and Princes, 1417–1517: Politics and Polity in the Late Medieval Church (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980), 64–70.
9
The Piccolomini Library in Siena asserts this truth. Above the four walls that bear scenes from his uncle, Pope Pius II’s life, Cardinal Francesco Todeschini-Piccolomini decorated the ceiling with an inscription documenting his own election to the papacy. Susan J. May, “The Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral: a new reading with particular reference to two compartments of the vault decoration,” Renaissance Studies 19.3 (2005): 281 n. 2, 292 n. 8.
10
While this understanding of the family as a reciprocal community is most obvious at the elite level where networks are clearly seen in operation, when extended family members lived in close proximity to one another, or when large families lived in small communities, the same dynamic ensued.
11
Jennifer Mara DeSilva, “Articulating Work and Family: Lay Papal Relatives in the Papal States, 1420–1549,” Renaissance Quarterly 69.1 (2016): 1–39.
12
The portrait graced the wedding banquet of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne on 8 September 1518; Nelson H. Minnich, “Raphael’s Portrait Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi: A Religious Interpretation,” Renaissance Quarterly 56.4 (2003): 1007–1008.
13
Katherine W. Rinne, “Renovatio Aquae: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Tiber River in Early Modern Rome,” in A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492–1692, eds. Pamela M. Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 324–341.
14
Cathleen A. Fleck, “Seeking Legitimacy: Art and Manuscripts for the Popes in Avignon from 1378 to 1417,” in A Companion to the Great Western Schism, eds. Joëlle Rollo-Koster and Thomas M. Izbicki (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 240, 244.
15
Julian Gardner, The Tomb and the Tiara: Curial Tomb Sculpture in Rome and Avignon in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 111, 146, 151.
16
As a youth Clement entered the Benedictine Order at this abbey, and his elaborate funeral there in 1352 emphasised his family’s continued connection with the community; Anne McGee Morganstern, “Art and Ceremony in Papal Avignon: A Prescription for the Tomb of Clement VI,” Gesta 40.1 (2001): 61–77.
17
Gardner, The Tomb and the Tiara, 151.
18
Carol M. Richardson, “‘Ruined, untended and derelict’: Fifteenth-century Papal Tombs in St Peter’s,” in Art and Identity in Early Modern Rome, eds. Jill Burke and Michael Bury (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2008), 191.
19
Unfortunately, many of the monuments from Late Antiquity were disposed of or destroyed, including the thirteenth-century tombs of Nicholas III and Honorius IV and the fifteenth-century tombs of Nicholas V and Calixtus III, while Martin V moved to St. John Lateran and Eugenius IV moved to San Salvatore in Lauro; Gardner, The Tomb and the Tiara, 62, 102–103; Wendy J. Reardon, The Deaths of the Popes (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2004), 155–158.
20
Ruth Rubinstein noted that building this chapel highlighted a new phase in papal self-commemoration, in which a pope appropriated space previously meant for saints; Ruth Olitsky Rubinstein, “Pius II’s Piazza S. Pietro and St. Andrew’s Head,” in Essays in the History of Architecture presented to Rudolf Wittkower, eds. Douglas Fraser, Howard Hibbard, and Milton J. Lewine (London: Phaidon, 1969), 32.
21
This was not an uncommon request for cardinal-nephews. Carol Richardson, “The Lost Will and Testament of Cardinal Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini (1439–1503),” Papers of the British School at Rome 66 (1998): 199 n. 37.
22
The brothers also contributed to a chapel at the church of San Francesco in Siena, encouraging liturgical commemoration and local remembrance of their family’s achievements. Richardson, “The Lost Will and Testament,” 208 n. 72.
23
Jan de Jong, “Monuments of Meditation and Propaganda. The Tombs of Popes Pius III and Pius V,” Incontri 32.2 (2017): 15–16.
24
de Jong, “Monuments of Meditation and Propaganda,” 8.
25
de Jong, “Monuments of Meditation and Propaganda,” 16.
26
Blondin has also noted that several years earlier Sixtus built a similar tomb (1474–1477) for his nephew Pietro Riario in Santi Dodici Apostoli, Rome, depicting himself in the same position; Jill E. Blondin, “Sixtus IV as Patron (Saint): The Tomb of the Pope’s Parents in Savona,” in Proceedings of Constructions of Death, Mourning, and Memory Conference, October 27–29 2006, ed. Lilian H. Zirpolo (Woodcliff Lake, NJ: WAPACC Text and Studies, 2006), 147–149.
27
In 1459 Pius II also built a mortuary monument for his deceased parents in San Francesco in Siena, effectively undoing their exile from the city; Fabrizio Nevola, Siena: Reconstructing the Renaissance City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 82–84; R.J. Mitchell, The Laurels and the Tiara: Pope Pius II 1458–1464 (London: Harvill Press, 1962), 28.
28
Abbé Couderc, Notice sur l’église de Bédoués (Toulouse: Imprimerie de Jean-Baptiste Cazaux, 1856), 6, 9.
29
Yoni Ascher, “Manifest Humbleness: Self-Commemoration in the Time of the Catholic Reform,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 35.2 (2004): 330–332, 339, 355–356.
30
Reformers preferred the far more modest floor slab monuments; Giovanni Matteo Giberti, Constitutiones editae (Verona: apud Antonium Puttelle, 1542), Book 5, Chapter 26, 37; Carlo Borromeo, Instructiones fabricae et suppellectilis ecclesiasticae (1577), trans. Evelyn C. Voelker, Book 1, Chapter XXVII, accessed 22 November 2019, http://evelynvoelker.com/.
31
On the development of the funeral as a commemorative event in the sixteenth century, see Minou Schraven, Festive Funerals in Early Modern Italy: The Art and Culture of Conspicuous Consumption (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
32
Nancy Rash, “Boniface VIII and Honorific Portraiture: Observations on the Half-Length Image in the Vatican,” Gesta 26.1 (1987): 47–49.
33
Rash, “Boniface VIII,” 49–50, 52–53.
34
Indeed, Michelangelo may have predicted this event as he joked with Julius that “the forceful gesture of the [statue’s] right hand […] is threatening this populace, Holy Father, if they are not prudent.” Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, ed. Helmut Wohl, 2nd ed. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 38.
35
Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, 37–38.
36
Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, 39; Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull, 2 vols., (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 1:349; Christine Shaw, Julius II Warrior Pope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 202–203, 205.
37
David A. Lines, “Papal Power and University Control in Early Modern Italy: Bologna and Gregory XIII,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 44.3 (2013): 664–667, 678 n. 69.
38
Monika Butzek, “La statua di Gregorio XIII—vicende storiche,” in Il restauro del Nettuno, la statua di Gregorio XIII e la sistemazione di Piazza Maggiore nel Cinquecento: contributi anche documentari alla conoscenza della prassi e dell’organizzazione delle arti a Bologna prima dei Carracci, eds. Andrea Emiliani, Giovanna Perini, and Giovanni Morigi (Bologna: Minerva Edizioni, 1999), 197–252.
39
John M. Hunt, “The Pope’s Two Souls and the Space of Ritual Protest during Rome’s Sede Vacante, 1559–1644,” in Sacralization of Space and Behavior in the Early Modern World: Studies and Sources, ed. Jennifer Mara DeSilva (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 183–189.
40
Robert G. La France, “Exorcising the Borgia from Urbino: Timoteo Viti’s Arrivabene Chapel,” Renaissance Quarterly 68.4 (2015): 1209.
41
Notably, the post-mortem backlash against Julius did not include erasing his arms or the extended inscription he erected running along the external wall of the Vatican Palace and facing the Via Sant’Anna, which reads: “IVLIVS II PONT MAX LIGVRVM VI PATRIA SAONENSIS SIXTINEPOS IIII VIAM HANC STRVXIT PONT COMMODITATI” (“JULIUS II, SUPREME PONTIFF, THE NEPHEW OF SIXTUS IV, A MAN FROM THE LIGURIAN COUNTRY OF SAVONA, CONSTRUCTED THIS BRIDGE FOR CONVENIENCE”). The continued presence of a della Rovere faction in Rome surely protected it.
42
Opher Mansour, “Prince and Pontiff: Secular and Spiritual Authority in Papal State Portraiture between Raphael’s Julius II and the Portraits of Pius V and Clement VIII,” in Art and Identity in Early Modern Rome, eds. Jill Burke and Michael Bury (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 212.
43
Mansour, “Prince and Pontiff,” 223–224.
44
Sabrina Norlander Eliasson, “A Faceless Society? Portraiture and the Politics of Display,” Art History 30.4 (2007): 505.
45
In the absence of a reliable physiognomic likeness, the armorial shield became a key identifier, alongside costume and inscription; Georgia Sommers Wright, “The Reinvention of the Portrait Likeness in the Fourteenth Century,” Gesta 39.2 (2000): 117.
46
Gregory XIII inaugurated a new façade on the Porta San Giovanni (1574), Urban VIII renovated the Porta Portese (1644), and Pius IV (1565) and Alexander VII (1655) renewed the outer and inner façades of the Porta del Popolo.
47
Peter Howard, Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012), 49–52, 88, 101–102, 112.
48
Several chasubles and a cope survive from the sixteenth century bearing a Piccolomini cardinal’s arms, but only one chasuble survives from Pius’ original gift of 1460. See Fabiana Bari, Munificia magnificenza. Il Tesoro tessile della cattedrale di Pienza da Pio II Piccolomini agli inizi dell’Ottocento (Pienza: Museo diocesiano di Pienza, 2004), 54–76.
49
The diocesan museum in Pienza displays a situla (secchiello, bucket for holy water), a crozier, and a thurible and incense boat donated by Pius II, most of which bear his pontifical arms; Museo diocesano di Pienza, ed. Laura Martini (Siena: Protagon Editori Toscani, 1998), 70–76.
50
Boniface VIII’s undated grosso from the mint at Ponte de Sorgues (no earlier than 1300) shows his face with St. Peter’s key on one side and a cross quartering the coin on the other.
51
Maria Grazia Bernardini and Marco Bussagli, eds., Il ‘400 a Roma. La rinascita delle arti da Donatello a Perugino (Milan: Skira Editore, 2008), 96, 98, 198–201.
52
This coin is very similar to the denaro and grosso paparino coins issued across the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Papal States; Francesco Muntoni, Le monete dei Papi e degli Stati Pontifici, 2nd ed. (Rome: Urania Editrice, 1996), 1:23–27, Tavola 5.
53
From 1504 Julius II’s decision to raise the amount of silver in a carlino to 4 grams led the new coins to be called after him. Similarly, from 1540, Paul III’s alteration of the amount of silver in a carlino from 3.65 grams to 3.85 grams led to his name being applied to the new coins; Edoardo Martinori, La moneta: vocabulario generale (Rome: Istituto Italiano di Numismatica, 1915), 183–184, 363.
54
Luke Syson and Dora Thornton, Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy (London: The British Museum Press, 2001), 200–206.
55
Timothy Wilson, Maiolica: Italian Renaissance Ceramics in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016), 29.
56
Cardinal Ciocchi del Monte (1527), the future Pope Julius III, Cardinal Antonio Pucci (c.1535–1540), Cardinal Innico d’Avalos d’Aragona (c.1565), Cardinal Antonio Maria Salviati (c.1580s), and Cardinal Buonnacorso Buonnacorsi (1670s), and Henry Benedict Stuart, Cardinal of York (1765) all commissioned maiolica dinner services that are now dispersed throughout museums in Europe and North America.
57
Workshop of Giovanni Maria Vasaro, “Bowl with the Arms of Pope Julius II and the Manzoli of Bologna surrounded by putti, cornucopiae, satyrs, dolphins, birds, etc. 1508,” Robert Lehman Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed 15 November 2019, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/459197.
58
Laurie Nussdorfer has explored the increasing appetite for ceremonial print, beginning in the early sixteenth century and exploding in the seventeenth century, while Rose Marie San Juan has shown a more general increase in the use of print as a tool for commemoration in Rome throughout the early modern period; Laurie Nussdorfer, “Print and Pageantry in Baroque Rome,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 29.2 (1998): 439–443; Rose Marie San Juan, Rome: A City out of Print (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
59
Guerra’s plates for the 1589 print were recycled in 1644 to illustrate Innocent X’s cavalcade; Pascale Rihouet, “Giovanni Guerra’s Order of the Cavalcade (1589) and the birth of possesso prints in Sixtus V’s Rome,” in Eternal Ephemera: The Papal Possesso and its Legacies in Early Modern Rome, eds. Jennifer Mara DeSilva and Pascale Rihouet (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2020), 167.
60
Rihouet, “Giovanni Guerra’s Order of the Cavalcade (1589),” 169–171.
61
Chiara Stefani, “Giovanni Guerra inventor e l’Iconologia,” in Roma di Sisto V. Le arti e la cultura, ed. Maria Luisa Madonna (Rome: De Luca, 1993), 17–33.
62
Baccio Bandinelli sculpted the statue of Clement VII, while Vincenzo de’ Rossi sculpted Leo X.
63
Giorgio Vasari, The Election of Giovanni de’ Medici to the Papacy, and Giovanni Vasari and Giovanni Stradano, The Arrival of Leo X in Florence (1555–1562), Sala di Leone X, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.
64
Giorgio Vasari, The Wedding of Catherine de’ Medici to Henry II of France and Giorgio Vasari, Clement VII crowns Charles V in San Petronio at Bologna (1555–1562), Sala di Clemente VII, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.
65
Confusingly, examples of Fasti Farnesiani (the Farnese Deeds) also appear in Farnese residences in Caprarola, where they were famously executed by Taddeo Zuccari in 1559, in Rome again by Zuccari in the 1560s, and in Naples by Giovanni Evangelisti Draghi in 1680s.
66
Stefano Pronti, “I Farnese nelle imagini” and “Ilario Spolverini, il pittore virtuoso,” Il Farnese a Piacenza: il Palazzo e i Fasti, ed. Stefano Pronti (Milan: Skira Editore, 1997), 67–75 and 77–83.