Intro­duc­tion

fig. 1 Piazza della Cancel­leria with the houses of the Galli in the back­ground, Rome, Museo di Roma, Archivio Foto­gra­fico, af 3153. 1888– 1900. Photo © Rome, Sovrin­ten­denza Capi­to­lina ai Beni Cultu­rali, Museo di Roma.

Illus­tra­tion page. See the complete open-access PDF for the image.

Some­time in the 1880s in Rome, a photo­grapher captured a view of the piazza in front of the Palazzo della Cancel­leria and San Lorenzo in Damaso (Fig. 1). As his horse and driver waited to carry him to the next stop, he preserved a moment suspended between Rome’s past and future, just before the arrival of a new, modern epoch. Rising on the left is the façade of the Cancel­leria, the palace-and-church complex cons­tructed by Cardinal Raffaele Riario between the late 1480s and the mid-1510s. The photographer’s inte­rest was not, however, in the Cancelleria’s famous façade, but in the view towards the empty piazza. His aim was to docu­ment this scene before the cons­truc­tion of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, the broad thorough­fare that now runs along the north side of the Cancel­leria, unleas­hing its noise and traffic on this once-tran­quil setting (Maps 1 and 3).

One of the buil­dings slated for immi­nent demo­li­tion, visible just behind the photographer’s carriage, is a house with ground-floor shops and a wide entryway. In the late fifte­enth and early sixte­enth centu­ries, this house had belonged to the Roman Jacopo Galli, Cardinal Riario’s banker, colla­bo­rator, and agent. The photo­graph records its promi­nent posi­tion, facing onto Piazza San Lorenzo and flan­king the Cancelleria’s façade. Its former owner, Galli, had been a formi­dable presence in this neigh­bour­hood: he had owned not only this house but nearly an entire block of houses and shops to the north of Riario’s church and palace (Maps 1 and 3). Along with Jacopo Galli’s palaz­zetto, a row of houses form­erly owned by Galli stret­ching west­ward along the via dei Leutari was sacri­ficed to make way for the Corso Vittorio (see Fig. 8).

Repla­cing the via dei Leutari with the broad Corso Vittorio unclut­tered the area and allowed the Cancel­leria to be admired in sple­ndid isola­tion (Fig. 2). The view of the buil­ding from this

fig. 2 Rome, Palazzo San Giorgio. Photo: Author.

Illus­tra­tion page. See the complete open-access PDF for the image.

new, wide thorough­fare would, it was hoped, high­light its monu­men­ta­lity, the harmony of its propor­tions, and the ‘gran­deur of the idea that inspired its archi­tect’,¹ who was then presumed to be Donato Bramante. In keeping with Rome’s status as the capital of a newly unified Italy, nine­te­enth-century plan­ners aimed to exalt the Cancel­leria and cele­brate Bramante as a national hero. It is some­what ironic, ther­e­fore, that the destruc­tion of Jacopo Galli’s houses severed a link between this Roman neigh­bour­hood and Italy’s grea­test ‘genius’, Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti. By the nine­te­enth century, it had been forgotten that Cardinal Riario had been Michelangelo’s first Roman patron, and that Riario and Galli had supported Michel­an­gelo for the better part of a decade. In the summer of 1496, while Riario’s palace was still rising from the ground, Cardinal Riario asked Michel­an­gelo to carve the marble Bacchus now in the Bargello Museum (Figs 3–4). Riario’s banker Jacopo Galli befri­ended the artist and, up until his death in 1505, Galli sustained Michel­an­gelo in a series of career-defi­ning commis­sions: the Vatican Pietà, an altar­piece for the church of Sant’Agostino in Rome, statues for the monu­ment of Pius III in Siena, and the Bruges Madonna (see Figs 193, 198–201). Some­time before his death in 1505, Galli came to own the Bacchus as well as another sculp­ture by Michel­an­gelo, the Young Archer now in New York (Figs 5, 187). After Jacopo Galli’s death, Michel­an­gelo kept up a close friend­ship with Galli’s sons and, for more than sixty years, the Galli family displayed the Bacchus and Young Archer in their houses near San Lorenzo in Damaso (Map 3). The Galli went into decline and, in 1572, they were obliged to sell the Bacchus to Fran­cesco I de’ Medici. They even­tually parted with the Young Archer, and their connec­tion to Michel­an­gelo faded from memory.

The memory of the artist’s colla­bo­ra­tion with Cardinal Riario was erased deli­bera­tely with a single act: the publi­ca­tion in 1553 of Ascanio Condivi’s Vita di Miche­lag­nolo Buonar­roti. Condivi was a friend and pupil of Michel­an­gelo and, with help from the master himself, used this biography to reinvent Michelangelo’s life story. In the mid-sixte­enth century, Condivi was aware that the Riario were being rele­gated to the losing side of history and that Michelangelo’s supporter Jacopo Galli was in danger of vanis­hing into obscu­rity. To distance Michel­an­gelo from Riario and to promote Galli, he attri­buted the commis­sion of the Bacchus to Galli, rather than Riario. Going further, he attempted to wipe away the memory of Riario’s rela­ti­onship with Michel­an­gelo altog­e­ther. Accor­ding to Condivi, Riario bought a now-lost sculp­ture of a Slee­ping Cupid by Michel­an­gelo, thin­king the statue was antique. When Riario disco­vered that the Cupid was modern, he returned the work and demanded his money back from the agent who had sold it to him. With this story, Condivi unders­cored Riario’s igno­rance as a patron: the Cardinal had failed to reco­g­nise the true value of Michelangelo’s Slee­ping Cupid, a work for which he should have spared no expense. Cardinal Riario, Condivi wrote, ‘unders­tood little and delighted little in statues’ and, despite having hosted Michel­an­gelo in Rome for a year, never commis­sioned anything at all from him. Fort­u­na­tely, a Roman nobleman of great ingegno, Jacopo Galli, was able to reco­g­nise the artist’s gifts. Galli, accor­ding to Condivi, commis­sioned the Bacchus and a Cupid (the Young Archer in New York, Figs 5, 187) from Michel­an­gelo, passing on both statues to his sons and heirs [Appendix ii.29].

The false belief that Jacopo Galli, not Riario, was the patron of the Bacchus persisted for more than four centu­ries. It was a misper­cep­tion that lasted until 1981, when art histo­rian Michael

figs 3–4 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Bacchus, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 10 / Scul­ture. 1496–1497. Photos © Kunst­his­to­ri­sches Institut in Florenz – Max- Planck-Institut, photo­grapher: Roberto Sigismondi.

Illus­tra­tion page. See the complete open-access PDF for the image.

Hirst published a payment from Riario to Michel­an­gelo for the ‘bacho’ (see Fig. 178), decisi­vely proving that the Cardinal had commis­sioned the statue.² However, Hirst’s reve­la­tion that Riario was the patron of Michelangelo’s Bacchus has done little to change the art-histo­rical discus­sion about the Cardinal, who has still not managed to escape Condivi’s state­ments regar­ding his poor artistic judge­ment and his neglect of Michel­an­gelo. A frag­mented and flawed image of Riario has endured, and the over­ar­ching trajec­tory of his career as a patron remains under­ex­plored. Before 1981, scho­larly atten­tion concen­trated prima­rily on Riario’s patro­nage of San Lorenzo in Damaso, and in the decades that followed, his patro­nage continued to be inter­preted prima­rily through the lens of archi­tec­tural history.³ A signi­fi­cant body of rese­arch has focused on the cons­truc­tion history of Riario’s church and palace: funda­mental articles by Enzo Bentivo­glio and Simo­netta Valtieri in the 1980s, publi­ca­tions inspired by the excava­tion of the Early Chris­tian basi­lica of San Lorenzo in Damaso carried out between 1988 and 1993 (Fig. 6), and a coll­ec­tion of essays marking a recent resto­ra­tion of the Cancel­leria.⁴ The great archi­tec­tural histo­rian Chris­toph Frommel was a key figure in this rese­arch, and his theo­ries have been espe­ci­ally influ­en­tial in the discus­sion of Riario, Galli, and Michelangelo’s Bacchus.

fig. 5 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Young Archer, New York, The Metro­po­litan Museum of Art (on loan from French Repu­blic). 1497?. Photo © Raffa­ello Bencini / Bridgeman Images.

fig. 6 Excava­tions of the cour­tyard of the Cancel­leria, 1988–1993. Photo: Gabriele Fichera, © Biblio­theca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunst­ge­schichte, Rome.

Recently, a publi­ca­tion of acts from a confe­rence focused on Riario’s patro­nage of Jacopo Ripanda empha­sised the need for a more balanced view of the Cardinal, one which moves beyond his repu­ta­tion as an igno­rant and immoral character.⁵ Jacopo Galli has also been the subject of important studies—from Cons­tance Gibbons Lee’s disser­ta­tion on Galli (1981), to Frommel’s article ‘Jacopo Gallo als Förderer der Künste’ (1992), to in-depth articles on the Galli family and their anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tions by Nico­letta Baldini, Donatella Lodico, and Anna Maria Piras (1999 and 2007).⁶ In 2018, Eugenio Lo Sardo and Maria Anto­ni­etta Quesada edited a compi­la­tion of archival docu­ments that brought to light an inven­tory of Galli’s proper­ties drawn up shortly after his death.⁷ Of parti­cular signi­fi­cance, as well, was the breakth­rough redis­co­very of Michelangelo’s Young Archer (see Figs 5, 187), which brought into view another work by Michel­an­gelo that was once owned by Galli. Ales­sandro Parronchi, in the 1960s, had first attri­buted this statue to the Floren­tine and asso­ciated it with the ‘Cupi­dine’ that Condivi claimed Galli had commis­sioned from him.⁸ In the 1990s, Kath­leen Weil-Garris Brandt revived Parronchi’s long-rejected attri­bu­tion for the figure, then on display in the Cultural Services buil­ding of the French Embassy in Manhattan. Amid a heated debate concer­ning its author­ship, the statue was the focus of the 1999 exhi­bi­tion Giovi­nezza di Michel­an­gelo.⁹ Echoing criti­ques that had long plagued the Bacchus, scep­tics continued to focus on its ‘weak’ and slender form. After the disco­very of sixte­enth-century drawings of the figure and further rese­arch, however, Michelangelo’s author­ship of the Archer is now widely accepted, espe­ci­ally after the statue was presented as his work in the Metro­po­litan Museum’s 2017 exhi­bi­tion, Michel­an­gelo: Divine Draft sman and Desi­gner.¹⁰

Th ese disco­veries have opened up new perspec­tives, but have not yet led to a compre­hen­sive reas­sess­ment of the rela­ti­onship between Riario, Galli, and Michel­an­gelo. Nume­rous misper­cep­tions remain embedded in the lite­ra­ture and many inva­luable sources, inclu­ding the survi­ving account books of the Galli-Balducci bank (Fig. 7), have yet to be fully explored.¹¹ As is discussed below, past inves­ti­ga­tions of the conver­gence of Riario, Galli, and Michel­an­gelo in Rome have been bele­aguered by the unfa­vourable recep­tion of the Bacchus and the flawed proposition—first aired in the twen­tieth century and now widely accepted—that Cardinal Riario disliked and ‘rejected’ the statue. Given these chal­lenges, it is perhaps no surprise that Michelangelo’s time with Riario and Galli is still considered a brief, and rela­tively insi­gni­fi­cant, episode in the artist’s career.

Cardinal, Banker, and Sculptor in the Rione Parione

The goal of this study is to shed new light on several diffe­rent topics: Cardinal Riario’s patro­nage of art, archi­tec­ture, theatre, letters, and oratory; Jacopo Galli’s role as an inter­me­diary for both Riario and Michel­an­gelo; and Michelangelo’s colla­bo­ra­tion with both Riario and Galli. It aims to re-examine these subjects with the help of previously unknown or under­ex­plored sources that add subt­lety and nuance to the discus­sion of these topics. It begins with the estab­lish­ment of the Riario dynasty, then moves to Riario’s partnership

fig. 7 The Galli-Balducci bank accounts, Eredità di Lemmo Balducci 5, fols 21 v –22 r. February 1501, Florence, Archivio di Stato. Photo: Author, repro­duced with permis­sion of Minis­tero della Cultura.

with Galli in the recon­s­truc­tion of San Lorenzo in Damaso and the Cardinal’s palace, which is now known as the Cancel­leria, but was in Riario’s day known as the Palazzo San Giorgio (Map 1.9). It considers Michelangelo’s arrival in Rome in 1496, the attempted sale of the artist’s Slee­ping Cupid, Riario’s patro­nage of the Bacchus, and the display of the Bacchus in the houses of the Galli until Fran­cesco I de’ Medici acquired the statue in 1572. Th is study does not aim to offer a complete history of Michelangelo’s youth, a full account of Riario’s career, or an exhaus­tive analysis of the icono­graphy of the Bacchus. Instead, its subject is the ‘long’ context of Michelangelo’s statue, starting with the rise of the Riario family, conti­nuing with the years when Riario, Galli, and Michel­an­gelo came toge­ther in Rome, and conclu­ding with the aft erlife of the Bacchus in the sixte­enth century. Instead of focu­sing on a single patron or artist, it analyses how three figures worked colla­bo­ra­tively, within common cultural, commer­cial, and artistic networks. In this sense, it takes inspi­ra­tion from recent work that has chal­lenged the model of the heroic individual—a para­digm of author­ship epito­mised by Michelangelo—to empha­sise the importance of coope­ra­tion, poli­tical alli­ance, and shared agency.¹²

One prot­ago­nist of this story is Raffaele Riario, a major figure who served as Came­ra­rius of the Roman Church under five popes.¹³ The Cardinal’s life is a compel­ling saga of rise and fall, mirro­ring his family’s poli­tical fortunes. More a secular prince than a cleric (although a cardinal he had at least two children), he seized every oppor­tu­nity to advance his family’s inte­rests. The Riario first came to promi­nence during the papacy of Sixtus IV, thanks to Sixtus’s aggres­sive promo­tion of Cardinal Pietro Riario and Count Girolamo Riario, who were Raffaele Riario’s uncles. As is discussed in Chapter 2, the brot­hers Pietro and Girolamo shored up the family’s ambi­tions by acqui­ring the city of Imola from the Duke of Milan and instal­ling Girolamo as its vicar. In 1477, when Raffaele Riario was only seven­teen years old, Sixtus promoted him to the cardi­na­late. Girolamo Riario imme­dia­tely sent the young Cardinal Riario to Florence to parti­ci­pate in the Pazzi conspi­racy, the infa­mous plot aimed at over­thro­wing the Medici. During the first months of 1478, Raffaele Riario received a brief but profound artistic and philo­so­phical educa­tion in Florence, espe­ci­ally through an encounter with Marsilio Ficino. After Riario’s impri­son­ment in Florence in the aft ermath of the failed Pazzi coup, Sixtus rewarded him in Rome with the offices of Camer­lengo (head of the treasury of the Church) and Protector General of the Augus­ti­nian order. Riario also received the coveted church and palace of San Lorenzo in Damaso in the Rione Parione (Maps 1–2). Once estab­lished in the quarter of San Lorenzo, as Chapter 3 explores, Riario allied with a local merchant-banking family, the Galli, who were already asso­ciates of the Camera Apos­to­lica and long-stan­ding patrons of San Lorenzo. In the late 1480s, Jacopo Galli and his busi­ness partner, the Floren­tine Bald­as­sare Balducci, estab­lished a bank directly on the Piazza San Lorenzo. Around the same time, Galli began to play a central role in the Cardinal’s project to rebuild San Lorenzo from the ground up. Toge­ther Raffaele Riario and Jacopo Galli not only initiated this project, but also rede­ve­loped a signi­fi­cant area of the Rione Parione between the Palazzo San Giorgio, the via dei Leutari, and the Piazza di Parione. The outcomes were remar­kable: while Riario cons­tructed a new basi­lica of San Lorenzo in Damaso and Rome’s

gran­dest palace, Jacopo Galli acquired nearly an entire city block of houses and shops sited to the north of the church (Fig. 8; see also Maps 1 and 3).

The merchant-banker Jacopo Galli is another prot­ago­nist of this study.¹⁴ As Riario’s manager, agent, and faci­li­tator, Galli provided the Cardinal with both finan­cial support and an array of services. His suita­bi­lity as an ally stemmed from his exten­sive connec­tions in huma­nist and anti­qua­rian circles, the Roman nobi­lity, the neigh­bour­hood of Parione, and the Floren­tine banking sector. Acting as a cultural mediator, Galli lever­aged this expan­sive network to procure supplies, foster artistic and lite­rary talent, and support a project as ambi­tious as the cons­truc­tion of the new San Lorenzo in Damaso. While his rela­ti­onship with Riario has some­times been framed as a close friend­ship, it is more accu­ra­tely unders­tood as a profound and endu­ring partnership.

In Rome, Riario followed the example of his uncles by assembling a large court popu­lated with rela­tives from his home­town of Savona—a city on the Ligu­rian coast between Genoa and Nice—and an entou­rage of artists, aides, huma­nists, and theo­lo­gians. Chapter 4 examines their varied intellec­tual pursuits, which were focused not only on the revival of clas­sical anti­quity, but also on a range of other topics, inclu­ding astro­lo­gical progno­sti­ca­tion and the Kabbalah. Neopla­to­nism and an inte­rest in other forms of pre-Chris­tian reve­la­tion thrived in Riario’s house­hold and in his Augus­ti­nian theo­lo­gical circle, inspired by the Platonic strain of St. Augustine’s writings and by the contem­po­rary thin­kers Riario most admired, inclu­ding Ficino, Lorenzo Bonin­contri, and Egidio da Viterbo. As this chapter considers, Riario’s huma­nist network had a parti­cular focus on the cele­bra­tion of the Spanish Recon­quista and a hoped-for Golden Age of Chris­tian domi­nance over­seas. Chapter 5 turns to the Cardinal’s patro­nage of the visual arts. Art histo­rians have often been scep­tical of Riario’s support of artists, and his taste has been unders­tood as ‘retar­da­taire’ due to his admi­ra­tion for Jacopo Ripanda, a painter deemed eccen­tric and styli­sti­cally outdated. Drawing upon over­looked sources, this chapter takes a closer look at Riario’s commis­sions in the 1490s, shed­ding light on the manu­script illu­mi­na­tors Riario favoured, his possible rela­ti­onship with Ripanda, his coll­ec­tion of anti­qui­ties, as well as his villa in Tras­te­vere which, as will be argued here, was

fig. 8 Aerial view of the former ‘Isola Galli’ between Piazza di Parione (Piazza di Pasquino) to the north and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II to the south, showing the former extent of Jacopo Galli’s proper­ties. Photo: American Academy in Rome, © J. H. Aronson, 1979, with addi­tions by author.

begun earlier than has previously been assumed. Chapter 6 takes as its subject Michelangelo’s Slee­ping Cupid, which was put up for sale in Rome as an anti­quity in 1496. This chapter will consider how the Slee­ping Cupid was conceived as a new genre of art object created in compe­ti­tion with anti­qui­ties, but was trans­formed into a ‘forged’ anti­quity, against the artist’s will, when it fell into the hands of the merchant Bald­as­sare del Mila­nese. The Cupid left the artist’s inner circle and entered the art market, promp­ting a despe­rate attempt by Michel­an­gelo and his patron Lorenzo di Pier­fran­cesco de’ Medici to regain control over it. These events occurred during a period when anti­qui­ties were incre­asingly viewed as a form of tradable, pawnable currency, and when modern crea­tions could be lucra­tively misre­pre­sented as genui­nely ancient ones.

Riario’s subse­quent commis­sion for the Bacchus, which Michel­an­gelo himself described in a remar­kable letter of July 1496 [Appendix ii.10], is the subject of Chapter 7. As Michelangelo’s letter relates, Riario received the sculptor with the urgent request to look at ‘certain figures’ (certe figure). The context leaves little doubt that these anony­mous ‘figures’ were antique statues. After comple­ting this assign­ment, the next day Michel­an­gelo met Riario at the buil­ding site of the new palace of San Lorenzo in Damaso. The Cardinal asked Michel­an­gelo what he thought of the figures he had seen and if he could summon the courage to ‘do some­thing beau­tiful’ for him. The artist replied that he would not match the beauty of the ‘certain figures’ but would accept Riario’s chall­enge. Over the course of the follo­wing year, Michel­an­gelo carved the Bacchus in response to Riario’s extra­or­di­nary request. In craf­ting the Bacchus, the artist synthe­sised his earlier expe­ri­ences in Florence, the inte­rests of his patron, the visual culture of Rome, and a wider programme of excava­tion, reuse, and all’antica inven­tion at San Lorenzo. Chapter 7 will address these topics as well as the ques­tion of the intended setting of the Bacchus, with the sugges­tion that Riario likely envi­sioned the garden of the Cardinal’s palace as the site for Michelangelo’s statue, rather than the cour­tyard of the Palazzo San Giorgio as is now widely assumed.

Riario was in exile from Rome between 1499 and 1503 and in the years of his absence, Jacopo Galli supported Michel­an­gelo. Chapter 8 turns to the close part­ner­ship that deve­loped between them, which lasted until Galli’s death in 1505. By 1505, Jacopo Galli displayed the Bacchus in his house, having acquired the statue from Riario. Galli also commis­sioned or received as a gift from Michel­an­gelo the Young Archer now in New York (see Figs 5, 187). Galli had a crucial impact on Michelangelo’s career, as a colla­bo­rator who brought Michel­an­gelo into his stimu­la­ting intellec­tual circle and as an agent who helped him win new commis­sions. Galli underw­rote Michelangelo’s contracts, supported his work as a sculptor by offe­ring prac­tical assis­tance, and orga­nised his finances. Galli’s compe­tence and guidance under­pinned Michelangelo’s achie­ve­ments over several years; without Galli’s support, argu­ably, there would be no Vatican Pietà and no Bruges Madonna. Galli also engaged Michel­an­gelo with the artistic and lite­rary life of Renais­sance Rome. Not only was Galli an anti­qui­ties coll­ector and art patron, but he was also a poet, a sponsor of clas­sical come­dies, and a close friend of lite­rati such as Pietro Bembo, Giacomo Mazzocchi, and Jacopo Sadoleto.

The focus of Chapter 9 is on the after­life of the Bacchus in the houses of Jacopo Galli’s heirs, who continued to display the statue and Michelangelo’s Young Archer in the decades follo­wing Jacopo’s death. Galli’s sons kept up a close friend­ship with Michel­an­gelo, who provided

fig. 9 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Bacchus, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 10 / Scul­ture. 1496–1497. Photo © Kunst­his­to­ri­sches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck- Institut, photo­grapher: Roberto Sigismondi.

Illus­tra­tion page. See the complete open-access PDF for the image.

them with a previously unknown commis­sion, a travel­ling altar­piece they required for a journey to Bologna with Riario. In 1527, the Sack of Rome devas­tated the Galli and threa­tened their houses and coll­ec­tions. As a recent publi­ca­tion by Diletta Gambe­rini has shown, poems written by Antonio Tebaldeo refer to a botched attempt by Charles V’s armies to loot the Bacchus from the house of the Galli and trans­port it over­seas.¹⁵ This regrettable episode is likely, as will be explored, what caused the break still visible at the statue’s wrist. The statue was displayed amongst anti­qui­ties without its hand for many years and, with the passage of time, its frag­men­ta­tion helped to shape a mytho­logy about Michel­an­gelo and his rivalry with the antique. Yet the gradual decline of the Galli family forced them to sell many of their proper­ties in Parione and, even­tually, to part with the Bacchus. After Fran­cesco I de’ Medici purchased the statue from the Galli in 1572, he incor­po­rated it into a Floren­tine cult of Michel­an­gelo, whose momentum had surged after the artist’s death in 1564.

The Recep­tion of Michelangelo’s Bacchus

Since this study takes a broad over­view of a hundred years, between 1471 and 1572, the commis­sion of Michelangelo’s Bacchus comes into focus only in Chapter 7. It is, however, worth intro­du­cing here a history of the Bacchus’s critical recep­tion, since the discus­sion of Riario, Galli, and their colla­bo­ra­tion with Michel­an­gelo has been framed by past perspec­tives on the statue. Any under­stan­ding of the rela­ti­onship between these three figures has been overs­ha­dowed by the nega­tive critical recep­tion of the Bacchus, which has endured for centu­ries. A tradi­tion of inter­pre­ta­tion that has focused on antique texts or images that could have served as ‘sources’ for the Bacchus has, moreover, kept the work distant from the turbu­lent poli­tics of the time and the vivid cultural milieu of fifte­enth-century Rome.

Michelangelo’s life­sized marble figure of Bacchus depicts the god of wine in a state of inebria­tion, gazing intently at the cup he holds in his right hand (see Figs 3, 4, 132, 148). The statue depicts Bacchus fully nude, stan­ding in an off-balance pose and leaning forward as if on the verge of stumb­ling, his belly visibly swollen with wine (Fig. 9). Michelangelo’s repre­sen­ta­tion unders­cores Bacchus’s role as the inventor of wine and as the giver of wine’s gifts: the figure’s head is topped with a crown of grapes whose fruits fall among his curls, and his eyes are fixed on his raised cup of wine. Snea­king up behind him is a playful satyr, half-human, half-goat, who takes advan­tage of Bacchus’s state of distrac­tion to steal a bunch of grapes caught in the god’s feline pelt. The child­like satyr clings to the pelt, pulls himself forward and twists his torso towards the grapes. His expres­sion reveals pure delight as he bites into the succu­lent fruits.

Michel­an­gelo carved the statue in 1496–1497, between his early trai­ning in the sculp­ture garden of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence and the success of his Pietà in Rome. As the decades passed, as Michel­an­gelo became famous through other, grander projects, the circum­s­tances surroun­ding the crea­tion of the Bacchus faded from memory. The reli­gious climate shifted drama­ti­cally and by the 1550s, Michelangelo’s spiri­tua­lity inten­si­fied. The Bacchus began to seem unfa­mi­liar and unsett­ling, as can be sensed in Ascanio Condivi’s biography, which dwells upon the statue’s ‘squin­ting, lasci­vious eyes’ [Appendix ii.29]. From a mid-sixte­enth-century perspec­tive, the Bacchus seemed to differ from the more heroic works from Michelangelo’s later career such as the David (see Fig. 214) or the figures from Julius II’s tomb (see Fig. 161). Giorgio Vasari’s discus­sion of the Bacchus high­lighted what was by the mid-Cinque­cento perceived as the statue’s lack of ‘mascu­li­nity’: in his first Vita of Michel­an­gelo (1550) and his second (1568), Vasari described a certain combi­na­tion of genders in the figure, clai­ming that the Bacchus brought toge­ther the ‘youthful svel­teness of the mascu­line with the fleshi­ness and

round­ness of the femi­nine’ [Appendix II.27 and II.34]. When the anony­mous author of the ‘Cambridge Sketch­book’ made his red chalk drawing of the Bacchus, between the late 1530s and c. 1550, he reim­agined the statue as a robust figure with bulging muscles (see Fig. 151). By this time, the sculp­ture diverged not only from contem­po­rary concepts of Michelangelo’s work, but also from prevai­ling percep­tions of the antique. Between the 1490s and the 1550s vast numbers of ancient statues came to light, and decades of study, enga­ge­ment, and coll­ec­ting brought dramatic shift s in the recep­tion of ancient art. In describing his reac­tion to the statue, the Portu­guese painter Fran­cisco de Holanda gave voice to the expec­ta­tions of sixte­enth-century viewers when he asserted that the pose of the Bacchus seemed to deviate from the ‘defi­nite rule of anti­quity’, with refe­rence to the un-antique arran­ge­ment of the limbs.¹⁶

Despite its diffe­rence from Cinque­cento ideals, the statue was nevert­heless held in high regard and given a central place in the cult of Michel­an­gelo. The Medici brought the statue to Florence, and by the 1590s exhi­bited it in the Eastern corridor of the Uffizi, where it was juxta­posed with ancient statues in reco­gni­tion of its intended para­gone with the antique.¹⁷ An eigh­te­enth-century drawing of the gallery shows that by then, the figure had been placed on view next to antique portrait busts and displayed beneath Agnolo Bronzino’s Portrait of Eleo­nora of Toledo with her Son Giovanni (Fig. 10). Although the Bacchus was disad­van­taged by its posi­tion against a wall, where it could not be seen from all sides, it was among the few modern statues to be displayed in a gallery of ancient master­pieces. Its hono­rific status as the ‘equal’ of the antique also found expres­sion in a series of etchings by Fran­çois Perrier, dated

fig. 10 Bene­detto Vincenzo de Greyss, View of the Eastern corridor of the Uffizi, Galleria impe­riale di Firenze, Vienna, Öster­rei­chi­sche Natio­nal­bi­blio­thek, Cod. Min. 32/1, s.p. 1748. Photo cour­tesy of Öster­rei­chi­sche Nationalbibliothek.

1633, which illus­trate famous ancient statues in Rome and two modern works in Florence—Michelangelo’s David and Bacchus—all of them put on a par by their arran­ge­ment in niches (Fig. 11).¹⁸ Starting in the sixte­enth century, small-scale replicas of the Bacchus were cast in bronze (Figs 146, 219). In the seven­te­enth-century full-size copies of the work were ordered for the royal coll­ec­tions of King Louis XIV of France (in marble) and Prince Johann Adam Andreas I of Liech­ten­stein (in bronze, see Fig. 147).¹⁹ Engra­vings in the volume that Anton Fran­cesco Gori devoted to antique sculp­ture in his Musaeum Floren­tinum (1731–1742) illus­trated Michelangelo’s Bacchus from three diffe­rent angles, prai­sing it for its ability to ‘deceive the eyes of the behol­ders who judge it to be ancient’.²⁰ In 1761, Michelangelo’s Bacchus was further hono­ured as the only modern work to be copied for display by the Duke of North­um­ber­land at Syon House.²¹

Such flat­tery would, however, take a dramatic turn in an era of strin­gent neoclas­si­cism. By the late eigh­te­enth century, the Bacchus was openly criti­cised by viewers who read it as an ‘incor­rect’ inter­pre­ta­tion of anti­quity, or a defec­tive work lacking in gran­deur and restraint. Its depar­ture from the clas­sical ideal became more evident in the 1790s when, for the first time in its history, the Bacchus was sepa­rated from ancient statues. It was trans­ferred to the Western corridor of the Uffizi and placed among fift eenth- and sixte­enth-century works. The move inserted the statue into a history of modern art, where it seemed anoma­lous, styli­sti­cally outdated, and flawed in its response to the antique. ‘Anti­quity’ was no longer a rival, a paragon of excel­lence which Michelangelo’s statue could strive to match. Instead, it became a distinct sphere—an ordered, coherent corpus of authentic texts and arte­facts to which the Bacchus did not belong.²² In its new posi­tion on the outside, the Bacchus seemed to be a glaringly un-antique misin­ter­pre­ta­tion of ancient art, and it elicited highly unfa­vourable reac­tions from viewers. For Percy Shelley, writing in 1819, it was a ‘most

fig. 11 Fran­çois Perrier, The Bacchus of Michel­an­gelo, Amsterdam, Rijks­mu­seum, rp-p-oB-72.215. 1633. Photo: Rijks­mu­seum, public domain.

fig. 12 The Sala Michel­an­gelo, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello. Photo: Author, repro­duced with permis­sion of the Minis­tero della Cultura – Musei del Bargello.

Illus­tra­tion page. See the complete open-access PDF for the image.

revol­ting mistake of the spirit and meaning of Bacchus’.²³ In an exch­ange about the Bacchus with Leopoldo Cico­g­nara in 1815, Antonio Canova wrote that Michel­an­gelo had infused in the work ‘a swollen, deviant character’. ‘Certainly’, Cico­g­nara replied, ‘a more correct style in terms of form and a more correct overall appearance would have placed this statue among the best produc­tions of modern art’.²⁴

The gulf between antique and modern widened even further when, in 1873, the Bacchus moved from the Uffizi to the Museo del Bargello, a new national museum of Renais­sance sculp­ture. Here, the statue was displayed in several diffe­rent rooms until, after the flood of 1966, it was moved to a ‘Sala Michel­an­gelo’, a hall of Cinque­cento master­pieces featuring works by Giam­bo­logna, Barto­lomeo Amman­nati, and Baccio Bandi­nelli (Fig. 12).²⁵ In the company of these sixte­enth-century statues, the Bacchus has seemed inade­quate. In this setting, it conti­nues to suffer from what Fran­cesco Caglioti has described—in the context of the styli­stic critique of the Manhattan Young Archer—as an ‘anachro­ni­stic syndrome’, that is, the tendency to imagine that Michelangelo’s matu­rity was already fully formed in the late Quat­tro­cento and to misjudge his early works accor­dingly.²⁶ The statue is afflicted, as well, by a tendency to judge its clas­sical response accor­ding to concep­tions of the antique that post­date the statue’s crea­tion. It is easily forgotten that Michel­an­gelo made the Bacchus before the disco­very of the Laocoön, before the forma­tion of major anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tions in the sixte­enth century, and long before the era of scien­tific archaeology.

These false criteria were carried directly into the new disci­pline of art history. When Herman Grimm (1860), Hein­rich Wölf­flin (1891), Karl Frey (1907), and Henry Thode (1908–1913) made the first attempts to situate the Bacchus in the deve­lo­p­ment of Michelangelo’s style, efforts were made to histo­ri­cise its seemingly unclas­sical and un- Michel­an­ge­lesque appearance. Yet the statue was inevi­tably portrayed as a failure, in terms that were often severe. Grimm would write that the statue put forth ‘an almost disgus­ting image of human weak­ness’. Hein­rich Wölf­flin found a comical lack of antique correct­ness in the figure, which made a poor impres­sion when compared with Jacopo Sansovino’s Bacchus (see Fig. 171). In 1909, Carl Justi lamented the appearance of the Bacchus, its unat­trac­tive face pitiful ‘in compa­rison with the pulsing life of ancient Bacchic figures’.²⁷ In an art-histo­rical discus­sion that began with these texts, the figure’s gender ambi­guity, and its perceived ‘weak­ness’ or lack of ‘mascu­li­nity’, have often been cast in a nega­tive light.²⁸

Between the late nine­te­enth century and the 1950s, a large body of lite­ra­ture addressed the ques­tion of the antique ‘sources’ for the Bacchus. The statue was compared to statues of the young Anti­nous or a Dory­phoros in contrap­posto, and its subject and narra­tive were related to antique repre­sen­ta­tions of Bacchus in free­stan­ding statuary, sarco­phagi, and gems.²⁹ These confron­ta­tions, inevi­tably, proved unsa­tis­fac­tory. No antique proto­type for the Bacchus was disco­vered and, although the work was sculpted by the grea­test master of the Renais­sance, the Bacchus failed to satisfy the expec­ta­tion that it should join clas­sical form with clas­sical content. Erwin Panofsky’s theory of reinte­gra­tion, first published in his article ‘Renais­sance and Renas­cences’ in 1944, overs­ha­dowed the alter­na­tive, credible view­point of Herbert von Einem, who in the same year described the Bacchus’s late-medieval ‘Gothic sway’.³⁰

In the search for the clas­sical sources of the Bacchus, art histo­rians have often expressed perple­xity at the statue’s open expres­sion of drun­ken­ness, which contrasts with the antique icono­graphy of the wine-god.³¹ The discus­sion shifted drama­ti­cally in 1958, when Edgar Wind’s Pagan Myste­ries in the Renais­sance offered a philo­so­phical and Neopla­tonic expl­ana­tion for the statue’s drunken state. Wind’s enti­rely novel inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bacchus unders­tood the statue in terms of Platonic furor, in keeping with a Quat­tro­cento belief in an ‘ancient theo­logy’, a divine wisdom and spiri­tual under­stan­ding thought to be hidden in pagan anti­quity.³² After Wind’s revi­sio­nist reading, the Bacchus could once again be seen in a posi­tive light, since its drun­ken­ness and far-away expres­sion could be explained in terms of Diony­sian rapture. Presuming that Jacopo Galli was the patron of the Bacchus, Wind focused on a dialogue in praise of philo­sophy by Jacopo Sado­leto, which was set in Galli’s Roman vigna. This source was the De laudibus Philo­so­phiae libri duo (composed between c. 1521 and 1538), one part of which was called Phaedrus in refe­rence to the interlo­cutor Tommaso Inghi­rami, who went by the academic name ‘Fedra’.³³ Although Wind exag­ge­rated a perceived connec­tion between Sadoleto’s Phaedrus, Plato’s Phaedrus, and the Bacchic passages in Plato’s dialogue, his essay broke ground by situa­ting the Bacchus within the intellec­tual milieu of Jacopo Galli and Raffaele Riario. Wind shed light on a context of great signi­fi­cance for the crea­tion of the Bacchus when he unders­cored the importance of Augus­ti­nian theo­lo­gians surroun­ding the Cardinal. As Wind wrote:

Riario was cardinal-protector of the Augus­ti­nian order, and on close terms with its general, Fra Mariano da Genaz­zano, who was Girolamo Savonarola’s powerful and vocal oppo­nent. ln their circle, which was also Jacopo Galli’s, an Augus­ti­nian revival of Chris­tian mysti­cism was combined with a formal cult of Cicero and Virgil.³⁴

These key insights relate to Wind’s parallel rese­arch on the reli­gious symbo­lism of the Sistine Ceiling and its Augus­ti­nian under­curr­ents; in the present study, they serve as a guide to the conver­gence of Riario, Galli, and Michel­an­gelo in spheres that were artistic, lite­rary, philo­so­phical, and theological.

Over the follo­wing decades, several formi­dable studies took up and expanded Wind’s intui­tions, starting with an article by Phyllis Bober of 1977 on the theme of the Slee­ping Nymph.³⁵ In his Michel­an­gelo and the Language of Art of 1981, David Summers embraced Wind’s Neopla­tonic reading of the Bacchus as a way of coun­tering an obses­sion with what he called a ‘crowd of ugly [ancient] sculp­tures […] adduced as proto­types for the Bacchus’.³⁶ Summers turned to passages from ancient texts that might have inspired Michel­an­gelo, empha­sising a philo­lo­gical reading that relied on Condivi’s descrip­tion of the Bacchus as a figure whose ‘form and appearance corre­spond in every way to the inten­tions of ancient authors’ [Appendix ii.29]. He called atten­tion to Pliny’s notice of lost bronze sculp­tures by Praxi­teles of Father Liber, Drun­ken­ness (Ebrietas), and a Satyr and to Callistratus’s descrip­tion of Praxi­teles’ Dionysus. Accor­ding to Callistratus, Praxiteles’s figure wore a wreath of ivy and a fawn skin, held a thyrsus, exhi­bited ‘Bacchic madness, and seemed to be divi­nely inspired’. Praxi­teles had ‘had the power to infuse Bacchic ecstasy into the statue’.³⁷ These allu­sions are compel­ling and have often been endorsed, but at the same time they exem­plify the overly abstract search for authen­ti­cally clas­sical ‘sources’ that has long charac­te­rised the art-histo­rical discus­sion of the Bacchus.³⁸

When Bober and Summers wrote about the Bacchus, they assumed that Jacopo Galli had commis­sioned the statue. This was despite the fact that Johannes Wilde had correctly intuited in an article published in the 1930s that Cardinal Riario, rather than Galli, was its patron. In his article ‘Eine Studie Michel­an­gelos nach der Antike’ (1932–1934), Wilde rightly surmised that the Bacchus was a ‘life­sized’ marble statue that Riario commis­sioned from Michel­an­gelo, as the artist detailed in his letter of July 1496. Without further expl­ana­tion, Wilde proposed that Riario had ordered the Bacchus from Michel­an­gelo, but it was then ‘rejected by the Cardinal’.³⁹ Both Charles de Tolnay, in his Youth of Michel­an­gelo of 1943, and Paola Barocchi, in her commen­tary of 1962 on Giorgio Vasari’s Life of Michel­an­gelo, raised the possi­bi­lity that Riario had commis­sioned the statue and then refused it.⁴⁰ In most of the lite­ra­ture, however, Wilde’s sugges­tion was over­looked, and Galli was presumed to have commis­sioned the work.

It was only in 1981 that Johannes Wilde’s former pupil, Michael Hirst, was able to prove beyond doubt that Cardinal Riario commis­sioned the Bacchus. Hirst disco­vered a payment for the statue in the records of the Galli-Balducci bank, an extra­or­di­na­rily rich archive that had entered the Archivio di Stato in Florence in the 1920s.⁴¹ Many decades before Hirst’s publi­ca­tion, the Galli-Balducci archives had been studied by Giovanni Poggi, Soprin­ten­dente of ‘Arte medievale e moderna’ in Tuscany, Director of the Uffizi, and head of a project to edit Michelangelo’s personal corre­spon­dence. Poggi unders­tood the signi­fi­cance of the Galli-Balducci accounts and the nume­rous payments to Michel­an­gelo recorded in them. Yet he alluded to them only indi­rectly in his published work. Follo­wing the clues which Poggi left behind in his mono­graph La Madonna di Bruges di Michel­ang­iolo of 1951, an American BA student, Harold Mancusi-Ungaro, was able to locate the Galli-Balducci papers in the Floren­tine archives. In a mono­graph from 1971, Mancusi-Ungaro published payments recorded in

the Galli-Balducci accounts for the Bruges Madonna and for statues by Michel­an­gelo for the Cathe­dral of Siena.⁴² Picking up on this trail, Michael Hirst consulted the archive and came across Riario’s payments to Michel­an­gelo for the Bacchus.⁴³ With this disco­very, published in the Burlington Maga­zine in 1981, Hirst provided proof that Wilde, his own mentor, had been correct: Riario had commis­sioned the Bacchus. In this short article, Hirst also brought back the second part of Wilde’s thesis, namely, that Jacopo Galli had come to own the Bacchus because Riario had ‘rejected’ the figure.⁴⁴ The Bacchus’s perceived defi­ci­en­cies, arti­cu­lated in a long history of nega­tive criti­cism of the statue, made it easy to believe that Riario had commis­sioned the work, but had then refused it when he saw the final result.

Hirst’s findings formed the basis for the London exhi­bi­tion Making & Meaning: The Young Michel­an­gelo (1994), which rein­forced the rejec­tion thesis.⁴⁵ Since then, it has usually been assumed that Riario rejected Michelangelo’s statue of Bacchus because he found it to be morally or aesthe­ti­cally flawed. In the context of these argu­ments, the Bacchus has been called a ‘signal failure’, a ‘discarded deity’, or a ‘humi­lia­ting’ flop. It is taken to be the best-known example of a failed commis­sion from the Renais­sance era.⁴⁶ Often, the argu­ment has been made that Riario rejected the Bacchus because it was not a suffi­ci­ently correct imita­tion of the antique.⁴⁷ Or, it has been proposed that Riario refused the statue because it was too antique, too pagan, and ther­e­fore improper: Riario, because of his posi­tion as Treasurer of the Church, ‘did not want to see the statue of a pagan divi­nity in his palace’.⁴⁸ It has been argued that Riario may have distanced himself from the Bacchus to guard against reprisal from a reform commis­sion set up by Pope Alex­ander VI around the time of its comple­tion, or rejected the statue when he realised that the nude figure of pagan subject was not appro­priate for the cour­tyard of his palace, the statue’s presumed intended setting.⁴⁹ The Bacchus, it has been written, ‘has few of the heroic and idea­li­sing quali­ties we normally asso­ciate with Michel­an­gelo or with anti­quity’, and it is ther­e­fore ‘easy to imagine a high-ranking cardinal finding it distas­teful and perhaps inap­pro­priate’.⁵⁰ These percep­tions continue today, and even the label of the statue at the Bargello informs viewers that ‘the statue’s preca­rious equi­li­brium and drunken gaze did not please its patron, Cardinal Raffaele Riario’.

There is, however, no indi­ca­tion in contem­po­rary sources of a sudden volte-face by the patron, or a step as radical as ‘rejec­tion’ of the statue. In the absence of any indi­ca­tion that Riario declined the Bacchus, one of the prin­cipal aims of this study is to rede­fine the statue as the product of a vanished context, rather than a failed work of art that Riario refused. Argu­ments concer­ning Riario’s rejec­tion of the Bacchus on moral grounds usually rely upon the presump­tion that the statue would have been visible in a semi-public space, the Cardinal’s cour­tyard. Accor­ding to a theory first proposed by Wilde and then expanded by Frommel,

Riario’s inten­tion was to install the Bacchus in the centre of the grand cortile he planned for his new palazzo (see Fig. 165). In this posi­tion, the god of theatre would have comple­mented thea­trical perfor­mances that Riario intended to stage in this space.⁵¹ The thesis has been supported by another, related argu­ment: that Riario’s palace is a direct response to Giovanni Sulpizio da Veroli’s exhorta­tion to Riario, in his editio prin­ceps of Vitruvius’s De Archi­tec­tura, to cons­truct Rome’s first perma­nent theatre.⁵² While both of these hypo­theses have met with wide accep­tance, further conside­ra­tion will demons­trate that there is good reason to ques­tion them.

The Bacchus has not featured promin­ently in biogra­phies of Michel­an­gelo, and the art-histo­rical discus­sion of the work has stayed rela­tively self-contained. One reason for its isola­tion is the Neopla­tonic expli­ca­tion of the statue initiated by Edgar Wind. Wind’s reading dates to the 1950s, a golden age of Neopla­tonic inter­pre­ta­tion, when Wind, Panofsky, and Ernst Gombrich strongly favoured it as an ‘icono­lo­gical’ mode of analysis. After the Neopla­tonic model reached its pinnacle with André Chastel’s Marsile Ficin et l’art (1954), it began to fall out of fashion. By the 1980s, a vigo­rous counter-offen­sive against Neopla­to­nism was underway, parti­cu­larly in the German and Anglo-Saxon lite­ra­ture.⁵³ Amidst these debates, Michelangelo’s Bacchus has remained one of the few Renais­sance artworks that have consis­t­ently retained a 1950s-era Neopla­tonic reading. Largely for this reason it has become some­thing of a niche topic, as a work of art closely asso­ciated with a metho­do­logy that has been widely aban­doned.⁵⁴ John Moffitt’s Inspi­ra­tion: Bacchus and the Cultural History of a Crea­tion Myth (2005) empha­sised Neopla­tonic readings, as did Linda Koch’s 2006 article ‘Michelangelo’s Bacchus and the Art of Self-Forma­tion’, with the argu­ment that Michel­an­gelo defined himself in the statue as divi­nely inspired.⁵⁵ Bacchic inspi­ra­tion was also a focus of Phil­ippe Morel’s discus­sion of the Bacchus, in the context of a swee­ping study of the imagery of wine in the Early Modern era in its full diver­sity and rich­ness.⁵⁶

Other studies of the statue have continued to explore icono­gra­phic issues—Bacchus’s nudity and drun­ken­ness, the animal skin he holds (variously called a panther, lion, wolf, or leopardus) and the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the young satyr (or panisc) next to him—with a focus on Michelangelo’s possible sources of inspi­ra­tion.⁵⁷ Most of this discus­sion has main­tained the flawed assump­tion that these sources would neces­s­a­rily have been antique. An excep­tion has been Andreas Emmerling-Skala’s work, which convin­cingly placed Michelangelo’s Bacchus in the context of mytho­gra­phic manuals, a topic that will be considered in further detail in Chapter 7.⁵⁸ Overall, however, a focus on Ficino’s Neopla­to­nism, icono­graphy, or passages in clas­sical texts that might have been brought to Michelangelo’s atten­tion by a huma­nist advisor (usually iden­ti­fied as either Jacopo Galli or Giulio Pomponio Leto) has meant that

the circum­s­tances of the commis­sion itself have not received due atten­tion.⁵⁹ It has led to a decou­pling of the statue’s meaning from the speci­fics of the mate­rial, visual, and intellec­tual envi­ron­ment in which it was conceived and created.

What this study aims to accom­plish, with the help of a breadth of unex­plored or unde­r­uti­lised sources, is to reas­sess this Roman milieu. Nume­rous underva­lued sources shed light on the years Michel­an­gelo spent in Riario’s inner circle, at first in the Cardinal’s employ and then as a friend and colla­bo­rator of Jacopo Galli. There is much further insight to be gained on the artistic, anti­qua­rian, and intellec­tual culture that Riario, Galli, and Michel­an­gelo shared. Extra­or­di­nary archival docu­ments and lite­rary texts open up this context and offer signi­fi­cant correc­tives to the tangled tales of Condivi and Vasari. These include two panegy­rics in honour of Riario and an eclogue by Bernar­dino Capella and Gaspare ‘Manio’ de Clodiis [Appendix i]; a book of poems largely dedi­cated to Riario by Antonio ‘Flami­nius’ Biax­ander [Appendix ii.19]; copies of dozens of docu­ments nota­rised in the 1480s and 1490s by Riario’s secre­tary Gisberto Senilis [Appendix ii.5–8 and 12]; and, signi­fi­cantly, the Galli-Balducci bank archives them­selves. These chro­nicle, day by day, payments made from and to the accounts of Michel­an­gelo, Galli, Riario, and others in their circle. They have been mined by Mancusi-Ungaro and Hirst, then by Bentivo­glio and Valtieri, who analysed thou­sands of payments for mate­rials and labour to recon­s­truct the buil­ding history of the Palazzo San Giorgio and San Lorenzo in Damaso.⁶⁰ More recently, the accounts have informed Rab Hatfield’s The Wealth of Michel­an­gelo and Lo Sardo and Quesada’s Michel­an­gelo e Iacopo Galli nella Roma dei Borgia.⁶¹ Yet the Galli-Balducci archives can provide richer insight when considered holi­sti­cally, in light of the social network they bring to life. In the course of rese­arch for the present study, these archives were examined once again and have yielded new findings that concern, for example, nume­rous figures connected to Riario and Galli, Galli’s own iden­tity as a patron, Riario’s villa in Tras­te­vere, and the rela­ti­onship between Michel­an­gelo and Galli’s sons.

By taking a broad over­view of a full century, this study aims to ques­tion autho­ri­ta­tive state­ments long lodged in the lite­ra­ture and shed new light on Riario, Galli, and their fasci­na­ting colla­bo­ra­tion with Michel­an­gelo. New rese­arch on Early Modern Rome makes it possible to explore topics that were previously undervalued—for example, the signi­fi­cance of Riario’s role as Came­ra­rius for his patro­nage of art and archi­tec­ture, or the parti­cular brand of anti­qua­ria­nism culti­vated by the Galli family of merchant-bankers. Shif­ting atten­tion towards the anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim rhetoric promoted by Riario, who adopted the public iden­tity of a Crusa­ding ‘San Giorgio’, sheds light on a previously underva­lued aspect of the Cardinal’s patro­nage. The chap­ters that follow, moreover, aim to chall­enge received opinion about the recep­tion of anti­quity in this era, speci­fi­cally, the notion that an ‘archaeo­lo­gical’, correct under­stan­ding of the antique guided the approach of Riario as a patron and Michelangelo

as a sculptor. As this study will unders­core, the evoca­tion of anti­quity fits into broader objec­tives, sustained across Riario’s patro­nage of huma­nism, theatre, and prea­ching. The Bacchus was shaped by the poli­tics of the times and by a vision of the future deve­loped by Riario, Galli, and the Cardinal’s network of fami­liars: that of a new Golden Age brought to fulfilment by Riario’s ascent to power.