Portrait Cultures of the Early Modern Cardinal ed. by Piers Baker-Bates and Irene Brooke (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Portrait Cultures of the Early Modern Cardinal ed. by Piers Baker-Bates and Irene Brooke Livia Stoenescu Piers Baker-Bates and Irene Brooke, eds., Portrait Cultures of the Early Modern Cardinal (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 381 pp., 59 ills. + 12 color plates. This thought-provoking volume stands out as a commemorative gesture to Piers Brooke and to the scholarship of the late Professor Clare Robertson, whose pioneering work on the cardinalate complements her seminal work on artists and ecclesiastical patrons of Rome and the Counter-Reformation. Within the burgeoning field of early modern studies from the last decades, the driving forces behind portraiture research have been the material origins and imaginative properties of portraits. Notably, cardinalate portraiture remains a topic ripe for critical attention, even though the experts have reached a consensus about the early modern portrait as a genre predicated upon verisimilitude rather than likeness. To be sure, this volume does more than fill a lacuna as it sheds new light on the historical, aesthetic, religious, and humanistic underpinnings of ecclesiastical portraiture within which emerged the cardinal portrait as a discrete category. The editors convincingly argue that “as material objects, cardinal portraits were clearly embedded with meanings specific to the class of individuals represented” (23). Comprising an introduction, four thematic sections, and a conclusion, the volume encompasses aspects of the intricacies of individual likeness and collective identity in “Individuality and Identity: Florence and Rome,” the effect of political allegiances in “Divided Loyalties: Venice and Rome,” the role of wealth, art collections, and ritualistic display in “Collecting and Display: Portraits and Worldly Goods,” and the impact the religious climate of the Council of Trent (1545–63) had on the depiction of cardinals in “Post-Tridentine Piety: The Devout Cardinal.” In “Introduction: Cardinals and Their Images,” Piers-Baker Bates and Irene Brooke lay out the visual legacy of early modern cardinals in the media of painting, engraving, medals, and sculpture. As the editors acknowledge, the tradition of painted portraits established by Raphael’s Julius II formed the fundamental basis for a typology of cardinal portraits, quickening the originality of Sebastiano del Piombo and Scipione Pulzone’s painted portraits and, likewise, of Bernini’s sculpted busts depicting living cardinals such as Scipione Borghese. Evolving parallel to the powerful presence of portraitists, alternative formats for memory and preservation in the ancient format of medallic portraits would become integral to the post-Tridentine practice of worshipping the cardinals’ portraits as miracle-performing objects. The introduction includes a second essay, Miles Pattenden’s “The Early Modern Cardinal: An Historical Appraisal,” which [End Page 208] discusses the cardinal as partaker of the papal acumen in boosting a prelate’s career or indiscriminately tipping the balance of power to lower the reputation of his subordinate. Pattenden cogently notices the implications of early modern papal policies that promoted cardinalate portraiture to the discourses of institutional fashioning and the creation of an alter identity, and, at the other end of the spectrum, that subjected the prelate to a constant pattern of contestation of his authority (53). Part 1, “Individuality and Identity: Florence and Rome,” is fully consonant with the volume’s thematic emphasis on notions of memory and the particular truth of verisimilitude. Brian Jeffrey Maxson’s “Visual and Verbal Portraits of Cardinals in Fifteenth-Century Florence” reflects upon the visual and literary cultures of the cardinalate in Florence, the preeminent center for portraiture in Renaissance art. Maxson underscores the function of the cardinal portrait in works of art inspired by the Florentine traditions of confirmation rituals and processional ceremonies that overtly shunned individual likeness to prioritize instead the social role of group identities. Compellingly resonating with the overall thematic focus, Carol M. Richardson’s “Dead Ringers: Cardinals and Their Effigies, 1400–1520” analyzes early modern theories of resemblance to call attention to the cardinal effigy as the interface between transcendent histories and anecdotal details, which, even when spiced up with personal features, still eschew, as Richardson demonstrates, accurate portrayal to draw on verisimilitude in the design of the cardinal portrait for his tomb monument. Richardson’s ideas of portrait likeness in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century cardinals’ tombs advance much-anticipated research on the peculiarities...