This excellent collection of seventeen essays brings together papers given at a conference on Cardinals' patronage organized by the Open University in December 2004. It begins with a highly informative introduction by Hollingsworth and Richardson, who build on their own broad expertise to describe the nature of the Cardinalate and its duties, detailing ceremonial requirements, rules of dress, and all the problems brought on by the immense burden of maintaining a splendid household. The editors consistently underscore the contrast between Cardinals' two inherited offices—that of the wealthy, worldly senators of Rome and that of the poor, devout apostles of Christ—and this is the theme that echoes most clearly throughout subsequent chapters. As the Hollingsworth and Richardson point out, remarkably few Cardinals were actually ordained as priests, and some were mere boys when the popes appointed them as favors to their powerful families. Hoping to secure their legacies, the popes packed the College of Cardinals with their powerful allies, leading to a dramatic rise in the number of Cardinals and a flood of wealthy princes into Rome.
The first, key essay by David S. Chambers summarizes current and past research on the Cardinalate and outlines of some of the lesser-known chapters of Paolo Cortesi's De Cardinalatu, a treatise on the life of the Cardinal (1510) that has yet to be published in a complete modern edition. The following contributions reveal the diverse nature of the College of Cardinals, each one examining the career of a different individual. Several essays highlight Cardinals' roles as representatives of their princely houses and foreign nations, exercising broad authority in Rome and abroad. However, while the unabashedly secular and political nature of the office is evident in Diana Norman's portrait of Oliviero Carafa, an interesting contrast is given by Roberto Cobianchi's essay on Cardinal Gabriele Rangone, an Observant Franciscan of humble origins. Cobianchi traces how the requirements of the Cardinalate conflicted with Rangone's way of life and religious beliefs, leading to his notably modest approach to patronage.
A thoughtful contribution by Pamela Jones discusses the importance of humility in St. Carlo Borromeo's public persona, while Suzanne Butters studies the complexities involved in Ferdinando I de' Medici's move from Cardinal to Grand Duke, considering how these roles could both conflict and overlap. Opher Mansour offers a subtle analysis of the frescoes in Cardinal Odoardo Farnese's Camerino and their interplay with theories of virtue in the late Cinquecento. Moving into the seventeenth century, Karin Wolfe and David Marshall describe struggles for power within the Barberini and Patrizi families, who put their elder sons in charge of their households and lined up a Cardinalate for their younger “heir to spare” (or in the case of the Barbarini, for two brothers who became Cardinals and bitter rivals). These essays make use of a remarkable wealth of surviving documentation, covering everything from family intrigue to minute details of palace decoration.
The authors know their topics inside and out, having spent many years researching “their” Cardinals. Their far-reaching knowledge of history, church ceremonial, and politics—displayed in especially dazzling form by Butters—ensure that the volume will become an important reference work in art history and in Renaissance studies for years to come. Despite a high level of detail, the essays are condensed into readable chapters that are well presented and illustrated with seventy black-and-white and sixteen color plates.
While several essays cover a Cardinal's full career, others focus on a particular aspect of it, and both methods reveal that the discussion of the individual patron can yield novel, extraordinary results, especially when supported by interdisciplinary research. Yet among the greatest challenges the book presents—one that Chambers and the editors acknowledge—is obtaining a wider view that goes beyond the “case study.” Through the chronological arrangement of the essays overarching issues come into focus, and the book is in this sense an important preview of how a broader study of the office in the early modern era might take shape, taking into consideration the less wealthy and famous Cardinals overlooked in previous scholarship, fully integrating art historical approaches with other methods (the combination of musicological and art historical studies is especially intriguing) and weighing the relevance of particularly visible personalities whose Cardinalates set new standards. Several authors in the volume refer, for example, to Carlo Borromeo and Ferdinando I de' Medici, who emerge as opposing benchmarks of the sixteenth-century Cardinalate. The contrast between them is certainly striking: one became an exemplar of piety by resisting family pressure to give up his Cardinale after the death of his elder brother, while the other one broke all rules of decorum by renouncing his Cardinal's hat to assume the Grand Duchy of Florence, essentially reversing Borromeo's course of action.
As a final note, while Chambers acknowledges the “Requiem” project devoted to the study of Cardinals' tombs, the art-historical side of this research group, run from Berlin by Horst Bredekamp and Arne Karsten, also deserves recognition, considering its excellent series of publications on early modern Cardinals and its useful on-line database.
