Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and Reform in 17th-Century Milan. - book reviews

Scions of princely families, beneficiaries of pontifical patronage, members of the sacred body and kinsmen, Archbishops Alessandro Farnese and Federico Borromeo engaged in mecenatismo upon a grand scale, using patronage to signify their support for the throw out of reform codified in the canons and appoints of the Council of Trent admitting separated by a generation, the pair men shared Tridentine assumptions about the nature and intention of institutional reform. Grandson of Paul III, the convener of the reform council, Alessandro go intoed the cardinalate soon after his grandfather became pontiff in 1534 securing shortly thereafter the position of vice-chancellor of the Roman house of worship as well as a succession of episcopal offices, like as the archbishoprics of Avignon and Monreale and thirteen additional bishoprics, during his ecclesiastical career. Having serv to negotiate the preliminaries to the council, Alessandro looks to have undergone an experience of religious conversion presently after its close, receiving sacred orders and being consecrated as a bishop in 1564; his newfound devotion to the spiritual life, a timely reply to the conciliar decrees that posited a reformed episcopate as the source of universal reform within the hierarchical temple elicited comment, for he appear to beed "as changed as is day from night." Cousin and ward of Carlo Borromeo, the cardinal-nephew of the Medici [i]pontifex maximus[/i] 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 on his predecessor's pastoral efforts as recorded in the Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis. Having received Alessandro's help in his efforts to confident a cardinalship, Federico, famed from his youth for his spiritual zeal, first assumed a prestigious column in the Roman Curia as a member of the Congregation of Rites and Ceremonies, charged with implementing scholarly reforms, of the like kind as revision of the Vulgate and publication of the acts of the ecumenical councils. After accepting the office of archbishop, he turn backed to Milan, where he applied the Tridentine mould of institutional reform, enforcing canonical discipline and embracing Carlo's views of the episcopate as the first arbiter of moral and religious life.

Focusing upon Alessandro and Federico as patrons of the arts, the important and complementary volumes by Pamela Jones and Clare Robertson allow us to discern in what manner 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 gather and commission both sacred and secular art in the early 1540 transformed his public patronage in answer to the Tridentine canons and enjoins Federico, who began collecting in the 1590 concentrated from the start almost exclusively upon acquiring sacred art. Yet his notion of what constituted sacred art, as Jone has discovered, encompassed genre like as landscape and still life, as well as orthodox religious narratives and devotional make submissives Since Borromeo's earliest acquisitions, landscapes through the Flemish masters Paulus Bril and Jan Brueghel the older served both to incite and thematize meditative prayer and also to exemplify the aim of God's powers as artificer, they were seen to be fashions of religious imagery. This surprising point, which remind ofs that even secular art becomes sacred when it accommodates a religious design is one of many insights furnished through Jones's fruitful research in the Ambrosiana. While Robertson's work in the Farnese archives in Naples and Parma has yielded an exhaustive take a view of of the kinds of art Alessandro mustered in his efforts to stage himself respectively as papal relative, influential statesman, and pious prelate, Jone allows us to diocese 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 verity justifying high ecclesiastical office and averring service to the temple in Alessandro's case, affirming doctrine and structuring spirituality in Federico's. In acknowledging that Jone tenders the more productive reading, I want to underscore the richly rewarding issues of Robertson's documentary efforts, on the contrary also to suggest how the data she tenders 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 upon the nexus between spirituality and self-representation, it is worth emphasizing that Robertson's wide-ranging work exceeds the compass of my review. Although she set aparts a chapter to Alessandro's part as Counter-Reformation prelate, she aims to track his entire patronal career, mapping the kinds and stages 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, and zincs and engraved rock crystals -- the greatest in quantity 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, similar as the refurbishment of the Castel s Angelo, which incorporated a fresco circle of time designed by Perino del Vaga, 1545-47; his early commission of Vasari's Allegory of justice, 1543 before long followed by his first major fresco commission, Vasari's panegyric circle of time in the Sala dei Cento Giorni, 1546 painted for the Palazzo della Cancelleria, Alessandro's chief residence, to summarize the replete range of papal virtues in the figure of Paul 111; his primary secular throw out of the 1560s and 1570 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 completely through 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 greatest in quantity celebrated of which was the Gesu