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'Il Gran Cardinale': Alessandro Farnese, Patron of the Arts. - book reviews
Art Bulletin, The, June, 1995 by Walter S. Melion
Scions of princely families, beneficiaries of pontifical patronage, members of the sacred college, and kinsmen, Archbishops Alessandro Farnese and Federico Borromeo engaged in mecenatismo on a grand scale, using patronage to signify their support for the project of reform codified in the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent. Though separated by a generation, both men shared Tridentine assumptions about the nature and scope of institutional reform. Grandson of Paul III, the convener of the reform council, Alessandro entered the cardinalate soon after his grandfather became pontiff in 1534, securing shortly thereafter the position of vice-chancellor of the Roman Church, as well as a succession of episcopal offices, such as the archbishoprics of Avignon and Monreale and thirteen additional bishoprics, during his ecclesiastical career. Having served to negotiate the preliminaries to the council, Alessandro seems to have undergone an experience of religious conversion soon after its close, receiving holy orders and being consecrated as a bishop in 1564; his newfound devotion to the spiritual life, a timely response to the conciliar decrees that posited a reformed episcopate as the source of universal reform within the hierarchical church, elicited comment, for he seemed "as changed as is day from night." Cousin and ward of Carlo Borromeo, the cardinal-nephew of the Medici Pope Pius IV, Federico obtained the rank of cardinal in 1587 and eventually followed Carlo as archbishop of Milan in 1595, instituting an ambitiously comprehensive program of diocesan reform that continued, indeed expanded upon his predecessor's pastoral efforts as recorded in the Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis. Having received Alessandro's help in his efforts to secure a cardinalship, Federico, famed from his youth for his spiritual zeal, first assumed a prestigious post in the Roman Curia as a member of the Congregation of Rites and Ceremonies, charged with implementing scholarly reforms, such as revision of the Vulgate and publication of the acts of the ecumenical councils. After accepting the office of archbishop, he returned to Milan, where he applied the Tridentine model of institutional reform, enforcing canonical discipline and embracing Carlo's views of the episcopate as the supreme arbiter of moral and religious life.
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Focusing on Alessandro and Federico as patrons of the arts, the important and complementary books by Pamela Jones and Clare Robertson allow us to discern how the reform protocols of Trent resonated in the ecclesiastical careers of these churchmen, motivating exemplary acts of religious patronage. Whereas Alessandro, who had started to collect and commission both sacred and secular art in the early 1540s, transformed his public patronage in response to the Tridentine canons and decrees, Federico, who began collecting in the 1590s, concentrated from the start almost exclusively on acquiring sacred art. Yet his notion of what constituted sacred art, as Jones has discovered, encompassed genres such as landscape and still life, as well as orthodox religious narratives and devotional subjects. Since Borromeo's earliest acquisitions, landscapes by the Flemish masters Paulus Bril and Jan Brueghel the Elder, served both to incite and thematize meditative prayer, and also to exemplify the scope of God's powers as artificer, they were seen to be modes of religious imagery. This surprising point, which suggests that even secular art becomes sacred when it accommodates a religious purpose, is one of many insights furnished by Jones's fruitful research in the Ambrosiana. While Robertson's work in the Farnese archives in Naples and Parma has yielded an exhaustive survey of the finds of art Alessandro collected in his efforts to stage himself respectively as papal relative, influential statesman, and pious prelate, Jones allows us to see how Borromeo sought to reform art in order to make it instrumental in the reform of religious life. Implicit in their accounts are different notions of the ways in which patronage articulates with religious truth, justifying high ecclesiastical office and averring service to the church in Alessandro's case, affirming doctrine and structuring spirituality in Federico's. In acknowledging that Jones offers the more productive reading, I want to underscore the richly rewarding results of Robertson's documentary efforts, but also to suggest how the data she proffers, far from vitiating the integrity of Alessandro's efforts at pious self-representation, support his contemporaries' perception of him as thoroughly reformed - diventato tutto spirituale - in the wake of Trent.
Since I focus mainly on the nexus between spirituality and self-representation, it is worth emphasizing that Robertson's wide-ranging book exceeds the compass of my review. Although she devotes a chapter to Alessandro's role as Counter-Reformation prelate, she aims to track his entire patronal career, mapping the kinds and degrees of patronage that earned him the sobriquet il Gran Cardinale. In six lucid chapters packed with previously unpublished information, she chronicles his early interest in precious works of decorative art - miniatures, bronzes, and engraved rock crystals - the most renowned of which were Giulio Clovio's Farnese Hours, 1538-46, and the Cassetta Farnese, ca. 1543-61, of Manno Sbarri and Giovanni Bernardi da Castel Bolognese. She also chronicles Alessandro's supervision of several of Paul III's commissions, such as the refurbishment of the Castel S. Angelo, which incorporated a fresco cycle designed by Perino del Vaga, 1545-47; his early commission of Vasari's Allegory of Justice, 1543, soon followed by his first major fresco commission, Vasari's panegyric cycle in the Sala dei Cento Giorni, 1546, painted for the Palazzo della Cancelleria, Alessandro's chief residence, to summarize the full range of papal virtues in the figure of Paul III; his primary secular project of the 1560s and 1570s, the construction and decoration of the Villa Farnese at Caprarola, which marked Alessandro's investment in the courtly protocols of villeggiatura; his civic interventions in Farnese holdings throughout the Lazio; and finally his great ecclesiastical commissions, ranging from Francesco Salviati's Cappella del Pallio, 1548-50, in the Palazzo della Cancelleria, to the renovation or construction of a series of abbeys, churches, and oratories in Rome and its environs, the most celebrated of which was the Gesu.
