Cardinal Riario, the Galli, and the Recon­s­truc­tion of San Lorenzo in Damaso, 1484–1499

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

3  Cardinal Riario, the Galli, and the Recon­s­truc­tion of San Lorenzo in Damaso 1484–1499

The conclu­sion of Marsilio Ficino’s 1478 Epis­tola Veri­tatis, addressed to Raffaele Riario in the voice of ‘Truth’, describes the ideal house­hold that the young Cardinal should estab­lish when he arrives in Rome:

Let your house be a temple of God. Let it be an eye of prudence, a scale of justice, and a seat of forti­tude. Let it be an example of mode­ra­tion, a stan­dard of inte­grity, a sple­ndour of love, a source of the Graces, and a chorus of the Muses. Let it be a school for orators and poets, a shrine for philo­so­phers and theo­lo­gians, and a council chamber of the wise. Let it be a nursery of genius, a reward for the learned, a table for the poor, a shelter of hope for the good, a refuge for the inno­cent, and a strong­hold for the oppressed.¹

The words Riario’s fami­liars would use to describe the Palazzo San Giorgio that Riario even­tually built at San Lorenzo in Damaso—now known as the Cancel­leria (Fig. 50)—closely echo Ficino’s hopes: it was a work of perfec­tion, a court whose mate­rial sple­ndour and harmo­nious propor­tions seemed mani­fes­ta­tions of the Cardinal’s own ideal virtues. Thus Riario’s flat­terer Niccolò Cruciger praised his ‘gene­ro­sity and libe­ra­lity of spirit, which shine in you so abun­dantly, so lavishly, and so magni­fi­cently that they extend to your palace (‘Penates’), which you have sple­ndidly erected with Parian marble from the foun­da­tions and first stone up to the heavens’.² Another of the Cardinal’s favou­rites, the poet and linguist Antonio Biax­ander, wondered at the place’s ‘bronze walls which fortify [Riario’s] stead­fast mind with various virtues; not a gentle breeze shakes it’ [Appendix ii.19]. Biax­ander deli­vered this praise in a poem about a colossal antique statue of a Muse that Riario displayed in the cour­tyard (see Fig. 103), as if to follow to the letter Ficino’s descrip­tion of a ‘chorus of the Muses’ and a refuge for learned men.³

This chapter examines Riario’s buil­ding project from the time of his arrival at San Lorenzo in Damaso in 1483 until his flight from Rome in 1499. It considers Riario’s entry into the heart of the Rione Parione, a bust­ling commer­cial centre enli­vened by artisans, merchants, a large foreign popu­la­tion, and a lite­rary culture that spilled over from the Univer­sity of Rome. It explores Riario’s alli­ance with the Galli family, Roman merchant-bankers and noble resi­dents of the district with a long­stan­ding rela­ti­onship to the basi­lica. It intro­duces Giuliano Galli, the patri­arch who laid the foun­da­tions of his family’s successful busi­ness by colla­bo­ra­ting with the Camera Apos­to­lica and by setting up a part­ner­ship with the Floren­tine banker Bald­as­sare Balducci. In the next gene­ra­tion, Giuliano’s son Jacopo expanded the opera­tions of the Galli-Balducci bank and, toge­ther with Balducci, assisted Cardinal Riario in rebuilding

San Lorenzo in Damaso. In modern-day scho­lar­ship, Riario’s palace has often been praised for its clas­si­cising, Renais­sance style. It has also often been condemned for its size, its use of mate­rials pillaged from the ruins, and its archi­tec­tural ingur­gi­ta­tion of one of Rome’s most revered early Chris­tian basi­licas, concealed behind the façade and ‘degraded to a sort of palace chapel’.⁴ However for Riario, the massive scale of the new palace and basi­lica would, it was hoped, soli­dify his family’s stan­ding in the after­math of a major setback: Girolamo Riario’s assas­si­na­tion in 1488. Riario’s plan was to estab­lish a forti­fied, monu­mental presence for the Riario dynasty, in the heart of Rome, as a show of strength at a time of poli­tical weak­ness. This chapter considers the origins of the project, the possible rele­vance of Giovanni Sulpizio da Veroli’s dedi­ca­tion to Riario of the editio prin­ceps of Vitruvius’s De archi­tec­tura in the first half of 1487, and Jacopo Galli’s crucial role. Findings from the Galli-Balducci bank accounts and from the nota­rial acts of the Cardinal’s secre­tary Gisberto Senilis reveal that Galli and Riario part­nered not only in recon­s­truc­ting San Lorenzo, but also in the rede­ve­lo­p­ment of the via dei Leutari to the north of the basi­lica. With the help of stra­tegic purchases of land by Cardinal Riario, Galli even­tually deve­loped a unified block of proper­ties, the Isola Galli, which was closely aligned with Riario’s church and palace (see Map 3).

fig. 50 Aerial view of the Cancel­leria. Photo: Alessio Fioretti.

The Galli Family in the Rione Parione and the Galli-Balducci Bank

With his move to San Lorenzo Riario became absorbed into the vibrant Rione Parione. His new resi­dence was a short distance from the chicken market at Piazza Polla­rola and from the ‘mercato dei cavalli’ (a market for equestrian supplies) between Piazza del Paradiso and Piazza del Biscione. It stood not far from the bankers’ stalls, taverns, and inns at Campo de’ Fiori (Map 1).⁵ The Rione was densely popu­lated with merchants, shop­kee­pers, and noble fami­lies whose inter­ac­tions and alli­ances shaped its economic and social fabric. Riario’s success as Cardinal of San Lorenzo in Damaso, and even­tually in the project to rebuild his church and palace, required close part­ner­ships with this network, and he found his most important colla­bo­ra­tors in the Galli family. From the time of his arrival at San Lorenzo until his death, Riario relied upon the Galli as his allies and agents. Like other promi­nent fami­lies in Rome, the Galli achieved this close rela­ti­onship with the Cardinal through their role as merchant bankers, a multi­faceted profes­sion that made them indis­pensable partners.

Accor­ding to the sixte­enth-century forger of family histo­ries Alfonso Cecca­relli, the Galli traced their origins back to the ancient Roman Aqui­lius Gallus family. Their most famous antique ‘ancestor’ was the Repu­blican praetor Gaius Aqui­lius Gallus, a plebeian who became a noted jurist.⁶ In the seven­te­enth century, the histo­rian Dirk Ameyden more plau­sibly traced the origins of the Galli to a certain Paolo da Castro, born in 1320. Ameyden asserted that Paolo’s son Giacomo married Livia Orsini di Mugnano, and he observed that a Galli coat-of-arms visible on the via dei Leutari was quar­tered with that of the Orsini.⁷ Ameyden’s history also mentions Nicola Galli, a nephew of Stefano Porcari who parti­ci­pated in a plot Porcari orga­nised in 1453 to assas­si­nate Nicholas V. After Porcari’s coup failed, Nicola Galli was said to have fled to Damascus. He even­tually re-estab­lished himself in Rome, where he pursued a career as a univer­sity lecturer.⁸ While Nicola Galli has been a figure of inte­rest in histo­ries of the Porcari conspi­racy, his connec­tion to the Galli of the Rione Parione and to Jacopo Galli merits further evalua­tion: Giuliano Galli had a brother named Nicola, possibly the Nicola who parti­ci­pated in the coup.⁹ If Nicola Galli were indeed Giuliano Galli’s brother and Stefano Porcari’s nephew, it would help to explain why the Galli and the Porcari fami­lies were so closely inter­con­nected throug­hout the fifte­enth and sixte­enth centu­ries.¹⁰

The busi­ness-savvy Giuliano Galli brought his family to new levels of prospe­rity through his success as a merchant-banker.¹¹ Accor­ding to his testa­ment drawn up in 1461, Galli was a resi­dent of the Rione Parione, the husband of the noble­woman Concordia Tebal­de­schi, and the father of one son, Jacopo.¹² In 1467, he was cited for failing to sweep the street outside his house in the district of San Lorenzo in Damaso. In 1483, Galli was granted permis­sion to rebuild a house just south of San Lorenzo at the ‘Arco di Santa Marghe­rita’ between the via Florea (now known as the via del Pelle­grino) and the via dei Cappel­lari (see Map 1.11).¹³ He main­tained a close connection

to San Lorenzo in Damaso and had a family chapel in the basi­lica, likely by 1472, when Giuliano buried his mother, Mattuzia, and his grand­mo­ther, Andreozia, in the church.¹⁴ Galli was involved in the admi­nis­tra­tion of San Lorenzo and served more than once as its fabri­ciere, an office that gave him respon­si­bi­lity for the upkeep of the basi­lica.¹⁵ As one of the over­seers of the fabbrica, Galli would join forces with Cardinal Riario in matters of church main­ten­ance. This is seen, for example, when in 1486 Giuliano Galli approved the instal­la­tion of marble door frames that Riario had donated to the church.¹⁶

By the early 1480s, Galli began to share his banking busi­ness with a Floren­tine, Bald­as­sare Balducci. Balducci was a descen­dant of Lemmo Balducci, the patri­arch of a well-estab­lished Floren­tine banking family.¹⁷ He seems to have started out as a cassiere in Giuliano Galli’s bank and then, by c. 1484, became a partner in the busi­ness. His influence in the enter­prise is already in evidence in the 1480s, when the Galli bank began to colla­bo­rate exten­si­vely with the Lorenzi bank of Florence.¹⁸ In the early 1480s, at the same time that it was expan­ding its opera­tions beyond Rome, Galli’s bank streng­thened its ties with the Camera Apos­to­lica. In January 1480, the bank became the depo­si­ta­rius of the Maestri delle strade and the Came­ra­rius at the time, Cardinal d’Estouteville, relied on the Galli bank to receive and pay out funds for buil­ding works. In 1481, Giuliano Galli purchased the right to collect the gabella studii, the tax on foreign wines sold in Roman taverns.¹⁹ In 1484, Cardinal Riario became a close colla­bo­rator of the Galli bank when he succeeded d’Estouteville as Came­ra­rius. In this year, his bank was once again contracted to serve as depo­si­ta­rius of the Maestri di strade.²⁰ In 1485, the Galli bank provided the Camera with the funds it needed to finance a repair to the fort­ress of Monti­celli d’Ongina, while the bank also took on the role of fidei­us­sore of the Castellan of Todi, insu­ring the Castellan for enormous sums against possible damages or losses. Riario’s Camera could draw upon Giuliano Galli to secure a line of credit: as Quesada pointed out, the Camera paid Galli in September 1484 to recover a set of silver vessels owned by the pope, which it had put in pawn with Galli’s bank. These dealings point to the finan­cial prowess of the Galli bank, as well as to the variety of services it could provide to the papal treasury.²¹

Giuliano Galli’s role as depo­si­ta­rius of the Maestri would have engaged him with the street works and repairs carried out in the Rione Parione in the 1480s, notably, the widening in 1480 of the via Florea (the current via del Pelle­grino) that runs along the south side of San Lorenzo (Map 3). This project, along with further impro­ve­ments to this street made in 1483, is comme­mo­rated by an inscrip­tion immured nearby (Fig. 51). The expan­sion of the via Florea cut into the left nave of the basi­lica, causing damage that would contri­bute to Cardinal Riario’s even­tual decision to rebuild the church-and-palace complex. At the same time, the widening of this street was a crucial step towards the rede­ve­lo­p­ment of the entire quarter, since it provided ample space for carts carrying goods. The enhance­ment provided a major boost for the area south of San Lorenzo in Damaso, trans­forming it into a hub between the Ponte Sisto and Ripa port to the south, and the

fig. 51 Inscrip­tion marking street works, Rome, via de’ Balestrari. 1483. Photo: Author.

Vatican (via the via Merca­toria) to the north.²² It was in 1483, amid these impro­ve­ments, that Giuliano Galli decided to rebuild his house at the Arco di Santa Marghe­rita (see Map 1.11). The banker’s ability to coor­di­nate his own inte­rests with those of the basi­lica, the Came­ra­rius, and the Maestri in the rede­ve­lo­p­ment of the area south of San Lorenzo offers a preview of future efforts by his son, Jacopo Galli, to rede­velop the via dei Leutari north of the church.

Giuliano Galli’s bank gene­rated income through its invol­vement in a wide range of finan­cial and commer­cial acti­vi­ties. Like other Roman merchant-bankers in the fift eenth century, Galli invested in Rome’s taverns, many of which were located in Parione, espe­ci­ally in the vici­nity of Campo de’ Fiori (Map 1.12). The taverns Galli managed, inclu­ding ‘Lo Gallo’ and ‘La Grotta’, reaped substan­tial profits from the growing number of visi­tors and pilgrims to Rome.²³ Expec­ting a large influx for the Jubilee year, in 1475 Galli rented a share of the popular Taverna della Vacca near Campo de’ Fiori.²⁴ Rese­arch has shown that Galli was one of the most successful inves­tors in Rome’s taverns, since it is esti­mated that in this year alone, ‘La Grotta’ sold over 30,000 litres of foreign wine.²⁵ The sale of foreign wines in taverns funded the gabella studii and, as was mentioned, in 1481 Giuliano Galli acquired the contract to collect this tax. By simul­ta­neously inves­ting in taverns and in the gabella studii studii, he set up a highly profi­table busi­ness that essen­ti­ally allowed him to pay taxes to himself.

Galli invested

the vici­nity

‘Lo

visi­tors

1475

in

When the Camera pawned the pope’s silver vessels with Giuliano Galli, it used a method of raising funds that was then wide­spread in Rome: pled­ging precious objects as colla­teral against cash loans.²⁶ Th roug­hout the Galli-Balducci account books, refe­rences are made to pearls, diamonds, and sapphires that the bank regu­larly accepted as payments or guaran­tees.²⁷ Exper­tise in precious gems extended seam­lessly into the trade in small anti­qui­ties which were, like gems, portable objects which never lost their value and could thus be used as colla­teral. The circu­la­tion of these objects fostered connec­tions among merchant-bankers, patrons, coll­ec­tors, artists, and anti­qua­rians. Within this network, Giuliano Galli’s bank culti­vated specia­lised exper­tise in procu­ring and apprai­sing precious objects, inclu­ding antique gems and cameos. A concrete example of this acti­vity is described in a letter sent by the employees of the Medici bank in Rome. In February 1487, these agents assisted Lorenzo de’ Medici in the purchase of a rare antique gem from Giovanni Ciam­po­lini, the Roman merchant and coll­ector who lived near Campo de’ Fiori, a short distance from

When

method

fig. 52 Phaeton Driving the Chariot of Helios, inscribed ‘lav.r.meD’, Naples, Museo Archeo­lo­gico Nazio­nale, inv. 26086, Arditi 592. 1st century ce. Photo by permis­sion of the Minis­tero della Cultura — Museo Archeo­lo­gico Nazio­nale di Napoli.

Giuliano Galli. The gem in ques­tion was the intaglio of Phaeton Driving the Chariot of Helios that is now one of the treasures of the Museo Archeo­lo­gico Nazio­nale in Naples (Fig. 52).²⁸ The letter, written by Lorenzo’s agent Luigi da Barbe­rino in Rome to Niccolò Miche­lozzi in Florence, reports on nego­tia­tions over the price of this exqui­site object. After much hagg­ling, de’ Medici agreed to pay 200 ducats for it. Still, since he hoped to avoid paying offthe final inst­al­ment, an expert opinion on the value of the gem was requested from ‘a Roman merchant named Giuliano Gallo’ who evaluated the object toge­ther with ‘his nephew Gentile’. Accor­ding to the letter, Gentile Galli, the son of Giuliano’s brother Nicola,²⁹ closely examined the gem with expert eyes. His conclu­sion was that Lorenzo de’ Medici should be glad to win such an excel­lent work for the agreed price. In fact, the corne­lian was worth 500 ducats, and Gentile himself, the letter reports, ‘wouldn’t let it go for a thousand’. Gentile Galli’s esti­mate gave Ciam­po­lini the backing he needed to force de’ Medici into paying the agreed price in full.³⁰ The inci­dent sheds light on the role that Roman merchant-bankers played in a burgeo­ning trade in anti­qui­ties. As will be discussed in Chapter 6, the cross­over between banking, art dealing, and the market for small-scale antique objects would prove to be signi­fi­cant in the attempted sale of Michelangelo’s Slee­ping Cupid in Rome in 1496, as well as in the future colla­bo­ra­tion between Jacopo Galli and Michelangelo.

It is probable that, like Giovanni Ciam­po­lini, Giuliano Galli had his own coll­ec­tion of antique inscrip­tions and sculp­tures, despite the lack of any tangible traces of it. This possi­bi­lity is supported by the anti­qua­rian flavour of the tomb commis­sioned for him by his son Jacopo after Giuliano’s death, discussed in Chapter 5 (see Fig. 90). Although evidence is scarce, anti­qui­ties coll­ec­ting was already widely prac­tised in Galli’s milieu by the 1480s. For example, Fran­cesco Porcari—a peer and contem­po­rary of Giuliano Galli who died in 1482—owned over one hundred antique inscrip­tions, ‘thir­teen marble heads’ kept in a study, and other figural sculp­tures.³¹ It seems that Giuliano Galli had a library, or at least traded in books: Roman customs records published by Arnold Esch include a notice of ‘used’ books he imported in 1479.³² Further­more, his friend­ship with Gaspare da Verona, a professor of rhetoric at the Studium, unders­cores Galli’s enga­ge­ment with huma­nist circles.³³

When Galli died in September 1488, he was succeeded by his son and heir, Jacopo.³⁴ Giuliano Galli prepared Jacopo to follow in his foot­s­teps by provi­ding him with a huma­nist educa­tion; as Jacopo Sado­leto would later write, Jacopo Galli spent his youth devoted to philo­sophy, but ceased his studies to take on the respon­si­bi­li­ties of his father’s bank.³⁵ Giuliano also ensured

that Jacopo was married to a bride from a suitably noble and prospe­rous Roman family. Jacopo’s bride was Saulina Tebaldi, whose status in the gene­ra­tion of Giuliano Galli is evident in the tomb of her uncle, Cardinal Giacomo Tebaldi—an impres­sive monu­ment sculpted by Andrea Bregno (Figs 53–54). Saulina’s father, Simone ‘Mezzo­ca­vallo’ Tebaldi, was a doctor of Pope Callixtus III who features as an interlo­cutor in Marcan­tonio Altieri’s trea­tise Li Nuptiali. In this work, Mezzo­ca­vallo describes the ‘exces­sive number of daugh­ters’ he married to Roman nobles: Saulina to the Galli, and her sisters to the Albe­rini, Leni, and Alber­toni.³⁶ Marrying into the Tebaldi family seems to have signi­fi­cantly bols­tered not only Jacopo Galli’s social stan­ding, but also his finances. As the Galli-Balducci account books reveal, Saulina Tebaldi would often draw upon her own funds during her marriage to Jacopo, for example for the purchase of a house or for buil­ding works carried out at the family’s vigna near the Tiber.³⁷

fig. 53 Andrea Bregno and Giovanni Dalmata, Tomb of Cardinal Giacomo Tebaldi, Rome, Santa Maria sopra Minerva. 1466 or after. Photo © Biblio­theca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunst­ge­schichte, Rome.

fig. 54 Andrea Bregno and Giovanni Dalmata, Tomb of Cardinal Giacomo Tebaldi, detail of effigy and sarco­phagus, Rome, Santa Maria sopra Minerva. 1466 or after. Photo: The Cour­t­auld, Conway Library, cc-by-nc.

At the time of his death, Giuliano Galli must have left his bank both to his son Jacopo and to Bald­as­sare Balducci, who toge­ther founded what they called the ‘Banco degli eredi di Giuliano Galli’. From early on in its exis­tence, this bank was closely allied with Cardinal Riario and with the project to recon­s­truct Riario’s church and palace on a massive scale. The earliest survi­ving records of the Galli-Balducci bank, which date to the early months of 1489, show that it was already engaged with the Cardinal’s affairs. By April 1489, Galli and Balducci rented out offices for their bank on the piazza in front of San Lorenzo in Damaso. Accor­ding to a nota­rial act that has gone unno­ticed in the lite­ra­ture, the notary Gaspare di Pietro and a certain Mattia, son of Giovanni Lodo­vico de Narnea, agreed to let out a ‘banco’ on the piazza to Galli and Balducci for forty-five ducats a year, initi­ally for a period of seven years. The act describes the bank’s precise loca­tion, between proper­ties owned by Mattia, by ‘the church of San Pietro’, and by the basi­lica of San Lorenzo.³⁸ Around the same time, Jacopo Galli also estab­lished his resi­dence on Piazza San Lorenzo. By 1491, Galli was living not at his father’s house in the Arco di Santa Marghe­rita, but on the north side of Piazza San Lorenzo.³⁹ Galli’s decision to set up his bank and resi­dence on the Piazza San Lorenzo must have been part of a stra­tegic alignment with Riario, since Galli’s move seems connected to Riario’s decision to use the Galli-Balducci bank to manage the accounts of the Cardinal’s cons­truc­tion project. While the account books of the Galli-Balducci bank between the years 1489 and 1496 do not survive, when they resume in 1496, the bank was paying all the expenses for Riario’s buil­ding site from a special conto della fabbrica.⁴⁰ The role of the Galli-Balducci bank in Riario’s buil­ding project mirrors that of the depo­si­ta­rius of the Maestri di strade, a role that Giuliano Galli’s bank had previously carried out for Cardinal Riario. This role offered distinct advan­tages to Jacopo Galli: as is discussed in further detail below, with Riario’s help Galli was able to acquire nume­rous houses and shops along the via dei Leutari north of San Lorenzo, ulti­m­ately leading to the conso­li­da­tion of a unified block of proper­ties known as the Isola Galli. Jacopo Galli would be able to reno­vate a palaz­zetto facing onto the Piazza San Lorenzo (Map 1.10) and, soon before his death in 1505, was able to purchase a large and noble palazzo on the Piazza di Parione from the Sant­acroce family (Map 1.8).⁴¹

By 1497, Jacopo Galli had taken on a role that could be described as a manager of the Cardinal’s affairs, as was succinctly stated by the Floren­tine banker Tommaso Spinelli. In a letter of April 1497 to his brother Leonardo, Spinelli writes that he was received in Rome with infi­nite carezze by Jacopo Galli, ‘che governa San Giorgio’ (who ‘manages’ Cardinal Riario).⁴² A mutually bene­fi­cial rela­ti­onship between the Came­ra­rius and Jacopo Galli, based on a deep bond of friend­ship and trust, brought oppor­tu­ni­ties for both. Jacopo Galli’s role as Riario’s

‘manager’ seems to have continued until Galli’s death in 1505; as a sign of their life-long connec­tion, Galli would appoint Riario and Riario’s maggior­domo as execu­tors of his last will and testa­ment.⁴³ By alig­ning his inte­rests so closely with those of Riario, Jacopo Galli took the oppo­site approach to the anti-curial poli­tics of Stefano Porcari (and possibly of ­Galli’s own uncle, Nicola Galli) in an earlier gene­ra­tion. Galli reaped signi­fi­cant profits during a time of Rome’s resur­gence by serving as an agent and finan­cial backer for the Camerarius.

At a time when the Camera was expan­ding its powers in Rome, the stra­tegy did not go uncri­ti­cised by contem­po­rary obser­vers. In 1492, the diarist Stefano Infes­sura described a conflict that had arisen concer­ning the elec­tion of marshals (mare­sci­alli) and guar­dians for each of the Roman Rioni. Cardinal Riario had consulted the city prefects to deter­mine whether the right to elect these offi­cials rested with local autho­ri­ties, or with the Came­ra­rius. The prefects argued convin­cingly that this privi­lege belonged to the Romans. Then four of the capo­rioni, inclu­ding Jacopo Galli, went against the prefects to ‘do a favour for the Camer­lengo’. As a result, as Infes­sura writes, Riario appointed men in his own good graces, contra­vening ‘law and ancient custom’ and ‘what is worse, going against the will of the prefects’. Now, Infes­sura writes, since Riario’s appoin­tees are ill-suited for their duties, the blame lies with those— like Jacopo Galli—who put their own inte­rests ahead of those of the ‘city and the common good’.⁴⁴ Despite the critique he may have faced, a personal and profes­sional alli­ance with the Came­ra­rius enabled Galli not only to expand the profits of Galli-Balducci bank, but also to secure a place at the centre of Riario’s entou­rage. Through his proxi­mity to Riario, Galli culti­vated friend­ships with lite­rary and artistic figures and became a major patron of art, lite­ra­ture, and theatre in his own right. These undertakings—including Galli’s sculp­ture coll­ec­tion, his friend­ships with cele­brated huma­nists, his acti­vity as a poet, and his alli­ance with Michelangelo—will be explored further in Chapter 8.

Riario’s Decision to Rebuild

The ambi­tious palace-basi­lica complex of San Lorenzo in Damaso followed upon a wider campaign of reno­va­tion and rebuil­ding underway since the 1470s in Parione, which helped estab­lish this quarter as the city’s most dynamic. In 1479–1480, the portico of San Lorenzo was raised to higher ground and the piazza in front of the church repaved.⁴⁵ Between 1488 and 1490, Campo de’ Fiori (Map 1.12) also received a new brick pave­ment.⁴⁶ In 1479, to make room for new cons­truc­tion, an ancient arch at the top of the via dei Cappel­lari was demo­lished, followed soon there­after by the destruc­tion of the adja­cent church, San Salva­tore ad Arco. A twelfth-century fresco of the Madonna in San Salva­tore, widely revered as a miracle-working

image, was given a new home in a chapel in San Lorenzo in Damaso.⁴⁷ When Sixtus IV entrusted San Lorenzo to Riario in 1483, it must have been evident that conti­nuing these upgrades with a more magni­fi­cent palace and a church worthy of housing the mira­cu­lous Madonna would yield signi­fi­cant bene­fits. It would also have been clear that Riario’s role as Came­ra­rius gave him the autho­rity to carry out such a project. During Cardinal d’Estouteville’s time as Camer­lengo, Sixtus IV expanded the autho­rity of the Came­ra­rius over buil­ding and plan­ning to encou­rage new initia­tives. He issued a bull in 1474 faci­li­ta­ting cardi­nals’ ability to pass on their palaces to their own family members, and another in 1480 that made it easier to appro­priate adja­cent proper­ties, or to free up surroun­ding streets and piazzas for new cons­truc­tion.⁴⁸ The autho­rity of the Camerlengo’s Maestri delle strade also broa­dened: they could pave and widen streets, approve cons­truc­tion permits, and even seize land or demo­lish buil­dings.⁴⁹ A reform of the office of the Maestri delle strade in 1480, further­more, gave these offi­cials expanded powers over the excava­tion and reuse of antique ruins. A more orga­nised and regu­lated system deve­loped whereby licences for excava­tions were granted, often with the obli­ga­tion to reserve one third of the finds for the Camera.⁵⁰ All of these poli­cies added momentum to a veri­table buil­ding boom among Sixtus’s cardi­nals. Between 1471 and 1483, several major projects were underway or completed: by Pietro Riario at San Sisto and SS. Apos­toli, Dome­nico della Rovere in the Borgo, Girolamo Basso della Rovere at Santa Balbina, and Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere at San Pietro in Vincoli and SS. Apos­toli. Yet Raffaele Ria­ rio’s recon­s­truc­tion of San Lorenzo in Damaso would top all of these as the most ambitious.

The earliest known refe­rence to Riario’s buil­ding works at San Lorenzo appears in an account of the Cardinal’s luck in a game of dice. Writing about the events of October 1489, the Roman diarist Stefano Infes­sura reports that Riario won an enormous sum gambling with Cardinal Balue and with Fran­ce­schetto Cibo, Pope Inno­cent VIII’s son. When Cibo claimed he had been tricked, the pope demanded that Riario return his winnings, but the Cardinal refused, stating that he had already spent the money on ‘wood, cement, and workers’ sala­ries’ to rebuild his palazzo ‘from its foun­da­tions’. ‘He espe­ci­ally’, Infes­sura writes, ‘wants to build a certain tower in the corner’.⁵¹ Infes­sura, an ally of the Colonna and a known adver­sary of Girolamo Riario, is not an enti­rely reliable autho­rity in these matters. Nevert­heless, other sources seem to corrob­orate the details of his story. Both Riario and Cibo were known for their gambling habits, and the vast debts that Fran­ce­schetto accu­mu­lated in Rome became a matter of concern for Franceschetto’s father-in-law, Lorenzo de’ Medici, in precisely the month of October 1489. The pope’s son Fran­ce­schetto was married to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s daughter Madda­lena, and Lorenzo often stepped in to pay the bills for his son-in-law’s extra­va­gances. On 21 October, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s agents in Rome wrote to request urgent assis­tance in resol­ving a finan­cial issue for Fran­ce­schetto, possibly the gambling debts to

Riario mentioned by Infes­sura.⁵² By a remar­kable twist of fate, then, it may have been Lorenzo de’ Medici—Count Girolamo’s arch-nemesis—who provided part of the initial funding for Cardinal Riario’s massive palace.⁵³

The irony appears less bitter if one considers that a recent event had brought Riario into a curious poli­tical alli­ance with Lorenzo de’ Medici, namely, Count Girolamo’s brutal assas­si­na­tion in Forlì. Follo­wing nume­rous failed attempts by discon­tented locals, a coup led by Ludo­vico and Checco Orsi of Forlì succeeded on 14 April 1488. Two weeks shy of the tenth anni­ver­sary of the Pazzi conspi­racy, the Orsi brot­hers ambushed the Count in the ‘Sala delle Ninfe’ of his palazzo at Forlì, took Girolamo’s life, and dragged his nude body through the streets.⁵⁴ In the after­math of this episode, the fate of the Riario in Imola and Forlì hung in the balance. The two cities suddenly seemed a winnable prize for several rival inte­rests inclu­ding the Sforza, who aimed to re-annex the terri­tory, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, who hoped that Inno­cent VIII would install Fran­ce­schetto Cibo and Madda­lena de’ Medici as his vicars. The pope, for his part, set his sights on brin­ging Imola and Forlì under direct papal rule and leaving the Medici, Riario, and Sforza out of the equa­tion. Behind the scenes, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere urged Inno­cent to push for direct rule in Imola by the Church. Della Rovere was eager to capi­ta­lise on the oppor­tu­nity to weaken the Riario, and some histo­rians have even suggested that he was the master­mind behind Girolamo Riario’s assas­si­na­tion.⁵⁵

In the after­math of the coup, Cate­rina Sforza acted decisi­vely, occu­pying the Rocca di Raval­dino as she awaited the arrival of Mila­nese troops. Faced with the threat that her children would be murdered if she did not abandon the Rocca, Cate­rina repor­tedly replied that she would not surrender for their sake since she had ‘the means to make more’. Famously, Niccolò Machia­velli added to Caterina’s riposte the gesture of lifting up her skirts to reveal her ‘membra geni­tali’.⁵⁶ By late April, a Mila­nese contin­gent arrived in Forlì, resto­ring the city to Riario-Sforza rule. Once back in power, Cate­rina Sforza exacted brutal revenge on the Orsi and their allies. Pope Inno­cent VIII, encou­raged by Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, dispatched Cardinal Raffaele to the region as his legate, tasked with preven­ting Milan from seizing control. When he pushed the pope to send Cardinal Riario as his repre­sen­ta­tive, Della Rovere was aware that the mission would compro­mise Riario, who would be unwil­lingly posi­tioned against the inte­rests of Ludo­vico il Moro and those of the Riario–Sforza heirs.⁵⁷

Riario set out for Forlì and arrived on 21 May. Over the follo­wing months, the Cardinal and three of the trusted Bishops in his retinue—Thomas James, Giacomo Luzio da Sutri, and Tommaso dell’Aste—worked to sway local opinion in favour of Girolamo Riario’s sons, gaining support through their lavish spen­ding. Cate­rina regained popu­la­rity with tax cuts.⁵⁸ In a surpri­sing turn, Lorenzo de’ Medici also played a pivotal role in resol­ving the situa­tion in favour of Girolamo’s heirs. De’ Medici had long coveted Imola and Forlì, hoping that Inno­cent VIII would appoint his daughter and Cibo as vicars. When it became clear that this goal was unat­tainable, de’ Medici concluded that the next best outcome would be the conti­nua­tion of the Riario-Sforza heirs: the rule of this rela­tively weak dynasty would, at least, ensure that Imola would not fall into the hands of Milan or the papacy.⁵⁹ Despite Girolamo’s role in the Pazzi conspi­racy, cold-blooded poli­tical calcu­la­tion led de’ Medici to conclude that the rule of signori parti­co­lari (i.e. the Riario-Sforza) in Imola and Forlì was preferable to that of signori poten­tati.⁶⁰ Behind the scenes, de’ Medici helped to steer the course of events towards a favourable outcome for the Riario-Sforza figlioli. In this campaign, he lever­aged his considerable influence in Rome as a member of Inno­cent VIII’s inner circle. By the summer of 1488, with de’ Medici’s assis­tance, the succes­sion of Girolamo’s son Otta­viano was secured, and was confirmed by a papal bull issued on 18 July 1488. On 30 July, Cardinal Riario wrote to Florence to rejoice in the victory of the Riario-Sforza figlioli, ‘which we also know to have been very much the hope of Magni­fico Lorenzo, to whom we remain greatly indebted’.⁶¹

Riario and de’ Medici could rely on each other for support when another crisis deve­loped in the summer of 1489: a proposed marriage between Cate­rina Sforza and Antonio Maria di Sanse­ve­rino, Vene­tian cond­ot­tiere and legate of Ludo­vico il Moro. Riario expressed to the Floren­tine ambassador in Rome his concern that the Duke of Milan would annex the terri­tory desi­gnated for Otta­viano Riario-Sforza and turn it into a fiefdom of Cate­rina Sforza and Sanse­ve­rino. In August 1489, hoping to bring the situa­tion under control, Riario set out once again for the Romagna, only to abort his mission when he fell ill in Perugia. Thanks in part to the efforts of Lorenzo de’ Medici and his Roman agents, nego­tia­tions for the marriage were halted.⁶² In this matter, Riario and de’ Medici once again formed an unli­kely alli­ance, united by the shared goal of preser­ving Cate­rina Sforza’s inde­pen­dence from Milan and the papacy.⁶³

Amid the poli­tical tensions of the late 1480s, Cardinal Riario began recon­s­truc­ting the palace of San Lorenzo in Damaso as a forti­fied strong­hold. In the after­math of his uncle’s

assas­si­na­tion in April 1488, Cardinal Raffaele assumed respon­si­bi­lity for the conti­nua­tion of the Riario dynasty in Imola and Forlì. His stra­tegy for winning power was to build Rome’s gran­dest palace, maxi­mise the powers of his office as Came­ra­rius, and posi­tion himself for victory in the next papal conclave. Accor­ding to Infes­sura, Riario initi­ally intended to cons­truct a palace with a ‘corner tower’. His plan was to build a defen­sive struc­ture in response to the fraught poli­tical atmo­sphere, as is evident in the final design and its projec­ting corner towers, which were origi­nally crenell­ated.⁶⁴ Although cardi­nals could not bequeath a titular palace atta­ched to a basi­lica to family members, Riario was keen to build a dynastic monu­ment, likely with the hope that one of the Conte’s sons would even­tually become a Cardinal and live there. The palazzo would be adorned inside and out with family heraldry, inclu­ding Riario roses (some origi­nally gilded). Repeated displays of the Cardinal’s name, mottos, and stemmi appeared in the coffered ceilings, marble door frames, and deco­ra­tive reliefs (see Figs 25–26, 62, 175).⁶⁵ One frequently recur­ring motto is the phrase ‘Hoc opus sic perpetuo’ (‘so I perpe­tuate this work’)—a promise that the palace, and the Riario them­selves, would continue in perp­etuity.⁶⁶

Like the palazzi of baro­nial fami­lies built within antique ruins, Riario’s palazzo used the language of ancient archi­tec­ture to convey a sense of strength and endu­rance. Riario’s Palazzo San Giorgio was an enormous, largely recti­li­near block that contrasted with the small houses and irre­gular streets of the surroun­ding neigh­bour­hood.⁶⁷ This stark diver­gence is evident in the Catasto Urbano, a map of Rome made between 1818 and 1824, before the radical demo­li­tions carried out to make way for the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II (see Maps 1 and 3). To the south of Riario’s palace, the via Florea—widened in 1480—provided a straight axis along one side of the complex. To the north of San Lorenzo, the via dei Leutari was recon­fi­gured and straigh­tened in the 1490s, as is discussed below. The resul­ting urban plan and archi­tec­tural concept adhered closely with the example of ancient Rome: Riario’s palace was desi­gned as a massive block with a façade of bril­liant white stone, similar in size and sple­ndour to the gran­dest of Rome’s ruins. It was cons­tructed with reused antique mate­rials and featured clear, symme­trical propor­tions (Figs 2, 50). The inten­tion to rival the ancient emperors is observed in a poem written in the sixte­enth century by Riario’s secre­tary, Federico Flavio:

To Raffaele Riario, Cardinal of San Giorgio, Cham­ber­lain of the Holy Roman Church, on his house: What once the labours of Mareotis, or the house of Gaius or Nero, whatever in short, the descen­dants of Romulus offered to the eyes of the people and the assem­bled crowds […] your house alone, Raffaele, has produced: thermal baths, walls, porticos, and thea­tres. These are not destined for our time. We now have only temples and houses that are deformed, muti­lated, crude, and cramped. You now set forth things that are equal to the times of our foref­a­thers, but are they less than your spirit? [Appendix ii.22]

Flavio mentions the palace’s ‘thea­tres’, allu­ding both to the thea­trical perfor­mances that Riario staged at the Palazzo San Giorgio and to a specific asso­cia­tion between San Lorenzo in Damaso and the Theatre of Pompey (dedi­cated in 55 BCE). Riario’s palace was actually not built on the site of Pompey’s Theatre, but stood on top of the Euripus canal and the stables of the ‘greens’, one of the chariot-racing teams that competed in the Stadium of Domi­tian.⁶⁸ In anti­quity, the Theatre of Pompey extended between what is now Largo Argen­tina and the Piazza dei Satiri, where the traces of its cavea are still visible in the Roman street pattern (Map 1.13). It was prima­rily a state­ment in the autho­ri­ta­tive Liber Ponti­fi­calis that Pope Damasus I had founded San Lorenzo ‘iuxta thea­trum’ that set up an endu­ring, yet false asso­cia­tion between San Lorenzo in Damaso and Pompey’s Theatre. The map of Rome of Ales­sandro Strozzi (1474), for example, places San Lorenzo in Damaso and the ‘Thea­trum Pompei’ in the same spot (Fig. 55).⁶⁹ Riario’s new cons­truc­tion drew upon this asso­cia­tion, evoking the scale and sple­ndour of Pompey’s Theatre, as well as the Theatre’s repu­ta­tion as one of ancient Rome’s most magni­fi­cent public buil­dings.⁷⁰

It has some­times been proposed that Riario at first intended to rebuild only the Cardinal’s palace at San Lorenzo in Damaso and then expanded his plans to include the basi­lica as well. In 1489, Infes­sura mentioned only Riario’s inten­tion to build ‘a palace in the Piazza San Lorenzo in Damaso’, without refe­rence to the recon­s­truc­tion of the church. And the fact that the old basi­lica was still being repaired and main­tained in the late 1480s suggests that plans for its recon­s­truc­tion had not yet been made.⁷¹ Follo­wing this reaso­ning, Frommel iden­ti­fied September 1488, the date of Giuliano Galli’s death, as a terminus post quem for Riario’s

fig. 55 Ales­sandro Strozzi, Map of Rome, detail, Florence, Biblio­teca Medicea Lauren­ziana, ms Redi 77, fols vii v –viii r. 1474. Photo © Minis­tero della Cultura. All rights reserved.

decision to rebuild the basi­lica of San Lorenzo. After Giuliano’s death, Jacopo Galli commis­sioned a marble tomb for his father, placing it in the Galli family chapel at San Lorenzo (see Fig. 90). Frommel has argued that Jacopo Galli would not have invested in this tomb if he had known the Galli chapel was marked for demo­li­tion.⁷² Payment records from the Galli-Balducci bank that were unknown to Frommel show Jacopo Galli was even inves­ting in this chapel more than a year after his father’s death, as late as November 1489. Accor­ding to the accounts, in October Galli paid a certain Maestro Bernar­dino ‘per resto di pintura della chapella’ and a certain Maestro Santo for ‘lavoro della chapella’.⁷³ In November, he made a payment to the painter Accur­sini da Viterbo, purchased 1500 ‘pezzi d’oro’, and paid ‘the person who made the altar panel’, suggesting that he commis­sioned an altar­piece painted on a wooden panel with a gilded back­ground or frame.⁷⁴ Galli invested in the chapel and under­took these expenses just as Infes­sura was reporting on Riario’s plans for the recon­s­truc­tion of the palazzo; at the same time, a recent resto­ra­tion of the Palazzo della Cancel­leria has confirmed that the final design for Riario’s palace presumed the basi­lica would be demo­lished and rebuilt to the north.⁷⁵ Thus the full extent of Riario’s plans to recon­s­truct the palace and basi­lica may have crystal­lized only after October/November, 1489. Or, perhaps, Galli proceeded with the deco­ra­tion of his family chapel with the aware­ness that it would not survive. Perhaps, for Galli, the obli­ga­tion to provide a proper burial place for his father outweighed any prac­tical concerns about the chapel’s impen­ding demolition.

Giovanni Sulpizio da Veroli’s Vitru­vius, the Palazzo San Giorgio, and the Revival of Clas­sical Theatre

In the art-histo­rical lite­ra­ture, Cardinal Riario’s patro­nage of the new San Lorenzo in Damaso has often been related to Giovanni Sulpizio da Veroli’s dedi­ca­tion of the first printed edition of Vitruvius’s De archi­tec­tura to the Cardinal.⁷⁶ Giovanni Sulpizio, from the town of Veroli outside of Rome, was a gramma­rian, philo­lo­gist, and educator who studied in Rome with Pomponio Leto, then taught at the Univer­sity of Perugia. At the Court of the Monte­feltro at Urbino, between 1476 and c. 1480, he witnessed the final phase of cons­truc­tion on Federico da Montefeltro’s famous palazzo. The expe­ri­ence kindled his inte­rest in archi­tec­ture and Vitru­vian theory. Some­time around 1480, he returned to Rome to become a professor in the Studium Urbis.⁷⁷ In Rome, Sulpizio embarked on an edition of Vitruvius’s De archi­tec­tura, the very first printed version of this crucial text. The publi­ca­tion of Sulpizio’s Vitru­vius can be secu­rely dated to the first half of 1487.⁷⁸ While working on the Vitru­vius he also prepared a printed edition of Frontinus’s De acquae­ductu Urbis Romae. The two publications

were related to one another and in many extant copies, Sulpizio’s Vitru­vius and Fron­tinus are bound toge­ther. His co-editor for his Fron­tinus was Pomponio Leto, who may also have been a behind-the-scenes colla­bo­rator in Sulpizio’s edition of Vitru­vius.⁷⁹

In the dedi­ca­tory epistle of his edition of Vitru­vius, Sulpizio addresses Riario directly, writing:

To whom could I have dedi­cated [Vitru­vius] more suitably? Who but to him to whom I am most devoted, by whom I know I am loved, and who has Vitru­vius as one of his plea­sures? Whom would this archi­tect have served most willingly? He who takes such delight in reading it? And who would make use of its precepts in great buil­dings, if he lives, and whom we know, with certain hope, will build prin­cely palaces, villas, temples, porticos, fort­resses, and royal courts, but above all thea­tres [Appendix ii.4].

Sulpizio then pays tribute to Riario as the ‘first’ to have supported the come­dies and trage­dies of Pomponio Leto. Riario’s next step, Sulpizio asserts, should be to build Rome’s first perma­nent theatre:

You were the first to set up a most magni­fi­cently deco­rated stage in the middle of the piazza, five feet high, for the tragedy that we were the first in this era (indeed Rome has not seen it performed in many centu­ries) to show the youth, teaching them to recite and to sing to inspire them. […] You were even the first to show to our age the sight of painted scenery when the Pompo­nians staged their comedy.⁸⁰ And for this the whole city with great desire also expects a new theatre from you [Appendix ii.4].

Sulpizio’s dedi­ca­tion seems prescient, given Riario’s magni­fi­cent patro­nage of archi­tec­ture and the thea­trical perfor­mances held at his Palazzo San Giorgio. When Sulpizio coaxed Riario to build a theatre, he invoked the memory of the ‘famous marble Theatre of Pompey, which could hold so many’, refe­ren­cing the tradi­tional asso­cia­tion between San Lorenzo in Damaso and the site of the ancient theatre. And the design of Riario’s palace—in parti­cular the archi­tec­ture of its courtyard—has often been unders­tood as Riario’s response to Sulpizio’s plea for a theatre and to Vitruvius’s trea­tise. In an article of 1948, long before the buil­ding history of the Palazzo San Giorgio had been clari­fied, Richard Kraut­heimer first explored the possible connec­tion between Vitru­vian studies, the clas­sical theatre, and Raffaele Riario’s clas­si­cising palace.⁸¹ Based on the mistaken belief that the sixte­enth-century cour­tyard was at least parti­ally completed in the 1480s, Klaus Neii­endam expanded this discus­sion in an article of 1969. Neii­endam linked the new cour­tyard of Riario’s palace (see Fig. 165) to

Sulpizio’s request for a theatre and to the Cardinal’s prac­tice of staging clas­sical plays.⁸² This inter­pre­ta­tion refers to a passage from Marcan­tonio Sabellico’s biography of Pomponio Leto, which praised Leto for having used the atria (cour­ty­ards) of the palaces of the fore­most prelates in Rome as thea­tres, where he taught young men to perform plays by Plautus, Terence, and contem­po­rary authors.⁸³ In the 1990s, Chris­toph Frommel proposed that, although the cour­tyard of the Palazzo San Giorgio did not yet exist in Sulpizio’s day (it was only cons­tructed c. 1500–1503), Riario envi­sioned the new cortile as the theatre Sulpizio urged him to build, desig­ning it speci­fi­cally as a perfor­mance space. Frommel’s hypo­thesis has been widely influ­en­tial in the inter­pre­ta­tion not only of the palace, but also of Michelangelo’s Bacchus, as will be discussed in Chapter 7.⁸⁴

Certainly, elite palace cour­ty­ards were used as stages, and Riario indeed put on plays at the palazzo of San Lorenzo. Sulpizio was directly involved in one of these perfor­mances, the ‘tragedy’ he mentioned in the dedi­ca­tion of his Vitru­vius to Riario. In 1486, he staged Seneca’s tragedy Phaedra (or as it was then called, Hippo­lytus), star­ring members of Giulio Pomponio Leto’s entou­rage. The produc­tion took place during the Palilie in April. Accor­ding to Ales­sandro Cortesi (brother of the better-known Paolo Cortesi), Seneca’s tragedy was staged by the ‘mimes of Rome’, ‘near Campo de’ Fiori and in front of ’ the palace of the Most Reverend Came­ra­rius.⁸⁵ Sulpizio’s dedi­ca­tion describes how the perfor­mance unfolded ‘in the middle of a forum’, beneath an antique-style awning.⁸⁶ Riario’s stage, Sulpizio writes, was five ‘piedi’ high, refer­ring (perhaps rheto­ri­cally) to the height recom­mended for stages in Vitruvius’s De archi­tec­tura. Decades later, in 1523, Erasmus of Rotterdam passed on an anec­dote that he repor­tedly heard directly from Cardinal Riario: the then sixteen-year-old Tommaso Inghi­rami, an outstan­ding actor, had earned the nick­name ‘Fedra’ for his role in Seneca’s tragedy, performed ‘in front of the palace’ of Cardinal Riario.⁸⁷ In addi­tion to this memo­rable event, Sulpizio’s dedi­ca­tion reminds Riario of two further produc­tions of the Hippo­lytus, one in the Castel Sant’Angelo in the presence of Pope Inno­cent VIII and another staged once again at

Riario’s palace, ‘among your penates as if in the middle of the cavea of a circus, with all seated in the shade of an awning, having received with honour the common people and also many viewers of your own rank’.⁸⁸ This latter setting might have been the cour­tyard or garden of the Cardinal’s palace at San Lorenzo.

It has been suggested that, inspired by Sulpizio, Riario envi­sioned the cour­tyard of the new Palazzo San Giorgio as a thea­trical space, with its perfec­tion and order evoking painted stage sets.⁸⁹ Upon closer inspec­tion, however, it becomes clear that Sulpizio hoped for a theatre with a single purpose—a perma­nent, inde­pen­dent struc­ture intended to replace the tempo­rary, impro­vised thea­tres in palace cour­ty­ards and piazzas where Leto’s actors performed. For Sulpizio, Riario’s theatre should take prece­dence over any ‘palaces, villas, temples, porticos, fort­resses, and arches’ that the Cardinal might intend to build. Rome has enough churches, he states, and Riario can build them later, when he was older. What was urgently needed was a purpose-built theatre—not neces­s­a­rily one rival­ling the Theatre of Pompey in scale or gran­deur. It would even suffice to restore an ancient theatre rather than build one from the ground up. What was important was that the perma­nent theatre ‘hoped for by all the people’ be acces­sible to the public and thus have a dedi­cated func­tion, as opposed to aris­to­cratic cortili retro­fitted as stages.

Although it is often assumed that Riario perso­nally commis­sioned Sulpizio’s edition of Vitru­vius, it appears that Sulpizio offered it to Riario on his own initia­tive and for his own purposes. Riario had spon­sored Sulpizio’s Hippo­lytus, yet Sulpizio’s patron and protector at the time was Falcone Sini­baldi, the tesoriere gene­rale of the Camera Apos­to­lica.⁹⁰ In his dedi­ca­tion to Riario, Sulpizio praises Sini­baldi, whom he calls the quaestor of Pope Inno­cent VIII, a man of ‘great counsel, autho­rity of faith and a man most loved in his country’. In the 1490s, Sulpizio dedi­cated to Sini­baldi a commen­tary on Quin­ti­lian and in c. 1500 a new edition of his own Latin grammar. In these publi­ca­tions Sulpizio makes it clear that he was a tutor of Falcone

Sinibaldi’s nephew, Fran­cesco, and implies that he was a member of Falcone’s house­hold.⁹¹ When Sulpizio dedi­cated his Vitru­vius to Riario, he addressed the Cardinal not only in a bid for further patro­nage from Riario, but also as the head of the Camera, with the power to initiate major urban projects. As has been noted, Riario’s office gave him over­sight of the Maestri delle strade and of nearly all papal buil­ding in Rome. Editing Fron­tinus toge­ther with Vitru­vius, Sulpizio urged Riario to turn his atten­tion to aque­ducts and thea­tres, the two remai­ning antique archi­tec­tural typo­lo­gies that the modern-day popes had not yet restored. With the help of the quaestor Sini­baldi and of the Maestri delle strade Marcello Capo­di­ferro and Niccolò Porcari, Riario should complete the restau­ratio Romae begun by Sixtus IV and continued by Inno­cent VIII. ‘What other novel­ties are left for this age?’, he asks. ‘What else is there but to bring in water and to build a theatre?’ A theatre inside the Cardinal’s own palace is not one of the possi­bi­li­ties Sulpizio recom­mends, and it is Riario’s role as Came­ra­rius, rather than his role as a patron of a palace, that Sulpizio unders­cores in his dedi­ca­tion. Vitru­vius had provided the blue­print for a free­stan­ding theatre and Riario, as Came­ra­rius, should use his trea­tise to satisfy the urgent need for a modern version of this antique buil­ding type.

While Sulpizio’s dedi­ca­tion has often been examined through the lens of archi­tec­tural history, another note­worthy aspect of his preface is its emphasis on the educa­tional signi­fi­cance of the theatre. When stres­sing the public need for a theatre, Sulpizio employs argu­ments that are funda­men­tally pedagogical:

Now it remains only to build, accor­ding to Vitruvius’s instruc­tions, a place where the youth, so devoted to you, can train them­selves in the imita­tion of the anci­ents by reci­ting poems and repre­sen­ting favole during holi­days in honour of the gods, to educate the people and enter­tain them with honest spec­ta­cles [Appendix ii.4].

These words offer valuable clues as to how Sulpizio hoped to persuade Riario, and why Riario might have been committed to the theatre in the first place: the revival of the antique theatre—particularly comedy—was seen as an ideal method for trai­ning young men in the art of oratory. Throug­hout the Quat­tro­cento, the utility of clas­sical theatre in the ‘educa­tion of the youth’ was an often-repeated theme. Huma­nists such as Giovanni Battista Canta­licio, Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, and Angelo Poli­ziano praised ancient comedy as an effec­tive means of teaching young boys oratory and rhetoric, drawing inspi­ra­tion from clas­sical ideas about comedy found in passages from Cicero and from Quintilian’s Insti­tutio oratoria.⁹²

Disco­veries of previously unknown texts in the early Quat­tro­cento sparked new inte­rest in ancient comedy and its supposed pedagogic value. Nicholas of Cusa’s sensa­tional find in

Germany in 1427 of twelve come­dies by Plautus was followed by Giovanni Aurispa’s, in 1433, of a commen­tary on Terence by the fourth-century gramma­rian Aelius Donatus.⁹³ Plautus’s and Terence’s plays are famously bawdy, but their revival was justi­fied with refe­rence to an argu­ment arti­cu­lated by Donatus and attri­buted to Cicero himself: comedy can be considered as an authentic ‘image of reality’, since it is an imita­tion of life and a mirror of ever­yday habits.⁹⁴ Comedy’s realism was thought to give it a unique educa­tional value, promp­ting school teachers to orga­nise land­mark produc­tions: during Carnival season in Florence in 1476, for example, Giorgio Antonio Vespucci’s pupils staged perfor­mances of Terence’s Andria in the Palazzo Medici and at the Palazzo della Signoria.⁹⁵ Riled by the criti­cism of reli­gious conser­va­tives, another tutor, Angelo Poli­ziano, wrote a famous defence of ancient comedy, unders­coring its value for future orators. Poliziano’s prologue to Plautus’s Menaechmi, written in 1488, coun­tered the argu­ments of hard-line prea­chers: some might criti­cise actors, but as the anci­ents them­selves knew, comedy offers an ideal means of instruc­tion for young boys.⁹⁶ Those who condemn this genre, Poli­ziano concludes, are nothing but ‘a squaw­king, frivo­lous, cap-wearing, wooden-shoed, rope-belted, super­ci­lious, rubber-necked herd’.⁹⁷

Retur­ning to Sulpizio’s dedi­ca­tion to Cardinal Riario, it is in this huma­nist context that the tutor and teacher Sulpizio praises Riario’s spon­sor­ship of the theatre and his support of the Palilie, an event that combined thea­trical perfor­mance with poetic compe­ti­tions, osten­sibly for the benefit of future gene­ra­tions of cler­gymen, statesmen, and orators. The aim of these festi­vi­ties, as Sabellico’s Life of Pomponio Leto empha­sises, was to educate the youth of Rome and to nurture new inge­nium through the produc­tion of clas­sical plays.⁹⁸ As will be discussed in Chapter 4, Riario spon­sored a huma­nist, clas­si­cising type of prea­ching by several leading orators: Fra Mariano da Genaz­zano, Tommaso Inghi­rami, and Egidio da Viterbo. Sulpizio’s trea­tise, with its emphasis on the value of the theatre to ‘educate the people’, reflects this group’s ‘thea­trical’ and learned style of prea­ching. Thus, while Sulpizio’s dedi­ca­tion anti­ci­pates Riario’s recon­s­truc­tion of the Palazzo San Giorgio, it should also be unders­tood within the frame­work of huma­nist, educa­tional, and even theo­lo­gical issues surroun­ding the revival of clas­sical theatre in the late Quat­tro­cento. Despite the ‘thea­trical’ archi­tec­ture of the cour­tyard of Palazzo San Giorgio, Sulpizio’s dedi­ca­tion and his plea for a perma­nent theatre were not as directly tied to the palace as has been assumed.

San Lorenzo in Damaso in the Era of Alex­ander VI

The dedi­ca­tory inscrip­tion that runs across the façade of the Palazzo San Giorgio places the name of Pope Alex­ander VI in a promi­nent posi­tion (see Fig. 62).⁹⁹ Although the Borgia pope

would later become Riario’s bitter enemy and send the Cardinal into exile, his elec­tion to the papacy in 1492 was possible only with the help of Riario’s poli­tical faction, led by Cardinal Ascanio Sforza. After Riario and Sforza helped Borgia in the conclave, Alex­ander VI rewarded them gene­rously. Reports circu­lated that Borgia had earned Riario’s vote with the promise of lucra­tive Spanish bene­fices, as well as the return of the Palazzo Riario near Sant’Apollinare (Map 1.2)—then inha­bited by Cardinal Sforza—to Count Girolamo’s sons and heirs. Soon after his elec­tion, the new pope began to fill Riario’s coffers. A month after Alex­ander VI’s elec­tion, Cardinal Riario purchased a suburban vigna on the banks of the Tiber for 1200 ducats. Riario’s Spanish bene­fices began to arrive in May 1493, when Riario was made Bishop of Cuenca, and in June, when he acquired a bene­fice in the Valen­cian town of Xàtiva, the birth­place of the Borgias.¹⁰⁰

fig. 56 Giuliano da Sangallo, Palazzo della Rovere, Savona. c. 1496–1503. Photo: Author.

Borgia’s elec­tion as Alex­ander VI greatly elevated the stan­ding of the Sforza-Riario faction. Its leader, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, became Vice-Chan­cellor and was given apart­ments at the Vatican as a ‘pala­tine’ Cardinal. Sforza soli­di­fied his alli­ance with the Borgia by nego­tia­ting a marriage between the pope’s daughter Lucrezia and his rela­tive Giovanni Sforza.¹⁰¹ The rapid rise of Cardi­nals Sforza and Riario in Rome led, at the same time, to the self-imposed exile of their rival Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who fled Rome in April 1494, travel­ling to Ostia, Savona, and even­tually to France. Far from the curia, Giuliano della Rovere could only compete with Raffaele Riario from a distance by cons­truc­ting a new palazzo in Savona, largely modelled on Riario’s Palazzo San Giorgio (Fig. 56).¹⁰²

As was promised in the conclave, the Riario were given back posses­sion of the palace that Count Girolamo had built near Sant’Apollinare. Since the time of Inno­cent VIII’s elec­tion, Ascanio Sforza had resided in this palace,¹⁰³ yet his appoint­ment as Vice Chan­cellor in 1492 allowed Sforza to move to the palace form­erly inha­bited by Cardinal Borgia, later known as the ‘Cancel­leria Vecchia’. With the palace at Sant’Apollinare now free, Cardinal Riario moved there himself, likely very soon after Alex­ander VI’s elec­tion. Cardinal Riario probably lived at Sant’Apollinare from late 1492 up until the time of his exile from Rome in November 1499.¹⁰⁴ The move allowed him to sustain the day-to-day needs of his court while recon­s­truc­tion at San Lorenzo in Damaso progressed at full speed.

Cons­truc­tion began with the eastern and southern blocks, and by 1495 the eastern façade facing Piazza San Lorenzo was built at least up to the height of the piano nobile, as is indi­cated by the date inscribed on the façade (see Fig. 62). By 1496, the Capi­tolo of San Lorenzo could rent out a row of shops, which had been newly built along the via Florea. After 1496, the chro­no­logy of Riario’s cons­truc­tion becomes much clearer thanks to the survival of the records of the Galli-Balducci bank.¹⁰⁵ These accounts record its progress in remar­kable detail, regis­tering payments for buil­ding mate­rials as well as sala­ries for masons, artists, and stone carvers. They show that in 1496, the focus was on the acqui­si­tion of spolia, inclu­ding the antique granite columns later installed in the cour­tyard. These were excavated with the help of ‘Bernar­dino ingegnerj’—the Floren­tine archi­tect Bernardo della Volpaia.¹⁰⁶ In 1497, della Volpaia was paid to lay the foun­da­tions for the palace stables, an impo­sing two-storey struc­ture that survived until its demo­li­tion in the late nine­te­enth century to make way for the Corso Vittorio (Map 1.6, see also Fig. 109).¹⁰⁷ Riario’s workmen completed the eastern façade and the east wing of the palace by 1495, and the new church (Fig. 57) was largely finished by 1501. Buil­ding works slowed

down tempo­r­a­rily follo­wing Riario’s flight from Rome in November 1499, but then picked up between late 1500 and 1503, when the church and the cortile were completed in Riario’s absence. Deco­ra­tion of the exte­rior continued into the 1510s (the windows of the western façade refe­rence the Cardinal’s title as Bishop of Ostia, a title he received in 1511). Deco­ra­tion of the inte­rior continued at least until 1517, when Riario became involved in the Petrucci conspiracy.

In its monu­men­ta­lity, Riario’s palace followed the prece­dent set by Pietro Barbo’s Palazzo San Marco (see Fig. 113), while the façade—dressed enti­rely in marble and travertine—imitated the lumi­nous traver­tine façades of Santa Maria del Popolo and Sant’Agostino. It also drew inspi­ra­tion from palaces far from Rome, borro­wing from the language of the ducal palaces of Mantua and Urbino to posi­tion the Riario family as equals to the Gonzaga and Monte­feltro. The cour­tyard of Riario’s palace (Fig. 58, see also Fig. 165), which has been called the first large Roman palace cortile desi­gned with porti­coes on four sides, mirrored the square, porti­coed cour­ty­ards at Palazzo Medici in Florence or Palazzo Picco­lo­mini in Pienza, but adopted the grander propor­tions of a five-by-eight bay cortile.¹⁰⁸ As Michael Waters has noted, a parti­cu­larly inno­va­tive and ambi­tious feature of the palace was the inte­gra­tion of antique granite

fig. 57 Rome, Nave of San Lorenzo in Damaso. Photo: Arnaldo Vescovo © Biblio­theca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunst­ge­schichte, Rome. fig. 58 Rome, Palazzo San Giorgio, cour­tyard. c. 1496–1503. Photo: Author.

columns into the archi­tec­ture of the cour­tyard. To achieve a unified and harmo­nious effect, Riario’s team sourced antique granite columns from the Baths of Diocle­tian,¹⁰⁹ then pains­ta­kingly adjusted them—despite the diffi­cul­ties involved in working this excep­tio­nally hard stone—so that they were correctly propor­tioned and equal in appearance. Encir­cled by granite columns, the cour­tyard created a striking visual state­ment of pres­tige and gran­deur. It was an approach that marked a signi­fi­cant depar­ture from the typical treat­ment of spolia in Rome, which often involved little more than shor­tening ancient columns to fit their new contexts.¹¹⁰ As Enzo Bentivo­glio, Suzanne Butters, and Waters have argued, carving the columns of the palazzo and the corner piers (see Fig. 58) required specia­lised tools imported from Florence that were capable of working such a hard mate­rial. The accounts between March 1497 and November 1503, record the acqui­si­tion of various sculp­tors’ tools ‘per lavorare le cholonne di granito’.¹¹¹ In April 1497 they mention payments made for nine­teen ‘schar­pellj fattj venire dafi­renze’ (‘chisels brought from Florence’). A Tuscan blacksmith, ‘Maestro Bernar­dino’, was paid for provi­ding chisels and other tools, as well as for tempe­ring them.¹¹² It is a fasci­na­ting coin­ci­dence that in the months when Riario’s workmen were acqui­ring Floren­tine chisels, Michel­an­gelo was already part of Riario’s house­hold, working on the Bacchus. It is temp­ting to specu­late that Michel­an­gelo, with his Floren­tine exper­tise, may have contri­buted to the transfer of tech­nical know­ledge that enabled Riario’s team to incor­po­rate antique granite columns and piers so seam­lessly into the cour­tyard design. Whether directly involved or not, Michel­an­gelo was present at Riario’s buil­ding site at a time when Tuscan inno­va­tion met Roman ambi­tion, heral­ding a new chapter in the treat­ment of archi­tec­tural spolia in Rome.

The façade of Riario’s palace, dressed in stone from top to bottom (see Figs  2 and 50), was another inno­va­tion intro­duced by the Cardinal’s stone­ma­sons. Its opulence stood in sharp contrast to the stuc­coed façades that were typical of Roman palazzi at the time. The façade promin­ently features opus isodomum, a masonry tech­nique described by Vitru­vius (ii.8.5–6) in which stones are arranged in regular courses of equal height (see Fig. 62). The use of this sophisti­cated method was noted by Raffaele Maffei, ‘il Volter­rano’, an ally of the Riario, in his ency­clo­paedic Urban Commen­ta­ries of 1506.¹¹³ The use of opus isodomum can be contex­tua­lised by the publi­ca­tion of Sulpizio’s editio prin­ceps of Vitru­vius and by the direct study of Roman ruins in Riario’s circle. A page of Bernardo della Volpaia’s Codex Coner draws a striking parallel between the opus isodomum of the façade of the Palazzo San Giorgio and that of the antique fire­wall of the Forum of Augustus, which the codex iden­ti­fies as the remains of the impe­rial palace of Nerva (Fig. 59).¹¹⁴

Central to the antique appearance of Riario’s palace was the exten­sive use of spolia, which the Cardinal’s alli­ances and resources made readily available. The Galli-Balducci accounts reveal that vast quan­ti­ties of antique marble and traver­tine were brought to Riario’s palace to be reused in cons­truc­tion or melted down in the lime-kiln installed at the buil­ding site.¹¹⁵ Riario’s autho­rity over the maestri di strade as well as excava­tion licences undoub­tedly expe­dited the acqui­si­tion of these archaeo­lo­gical mate­rials.¹¹⁶ The accounts name several excava­tors on

the Cardinal’s payroll who supplied stones, inclu­ding Simone Cinquini ‘Pisano’, a specia­list in the excava­tion and trans­port of anti­qui­ties.¹¹⁷ Other excava­tors employed by Riario included Maestro Manfredi and Maestro Daniele, who prac­tised their trade in the area of ‘tre colonne’, that is, in the Roman Forum near the ruins of the Temple of Castor and Pollux.¹¹⁸ The dozens of Egyp­tian granite columns that now stand in the cour­tyard were procured, as was noted, from the Baths of Diocle­tian. Taking advan­tage of his alli­ance with Cardinal Ascanio

fig. 59 Bernardo Della Volpaia, Fire­wall of the Forum of Augustus (left) and eastern façade of the Palazzo San Giorgio (right), London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Codex Coner, fol. 46 r, sm volume 115/51a. 1513–1515. Photo © Sir John Soane’s Museum.

fig. 60 Sallustio Peruzzi, Drawing of a temple on the Quirinal Hill, Florence, Uffizi A 664 recto. Post 1536–ante 1567, detail. Photo © Minis­tero per i Beni e le Atti­vità Cultu­rali Soprin­ten­denza Speciale per il Patri­monio Storico, Artis­tico ed Etno­an­tro­po­lo­gico e per il Polo Museale della città di Firenze. All rights reserved.

fig. 61 Bernardo della Volpaia, with anno­ta­tions by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, Measured plan of the Palazzo San Giorgio, Florence, Uffizi 987 A recto. c. 1515. Photo © Minis­tero per i Beni e le Atti­vità Cultu­rali Soprin­ten­denza Speciale per il Patri­monio Storico, Artis­tico ed Etno­an­tro­po­lo­gico e per il Polo Museale della città di Firenze. All rights reserved.

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

Sforza, Riario extra­cted the columns from Sforza’s hunting park, which covered much of this terri­tory.¹¹⁹ Accor­ding to an anno­ta­tion by Sallustio Peruzzi on a drawing of the monu­mental Temple of Serapis on the Quirinal hill, ‘all of the marbles that are now in the Palazzo San Giorgio’ had been excavated there (Fig. 60).¹²⁰ More reliable accounts also report on Riario’s brazen plunder of the Arch of Gordian near Castro Pretorio.¹²¹

The Galli-Balducci archives exten­si­vely docu­ment the acqui­si­tion of buil­ding mate­rials used at the palace. They record payments to large, anony­mous teams of masons and stone­car­vers or to specia­list craft­smen and engi­neers, but they do not reveal the iden­tity of the original desi­gner of the palace and church.¹²² Much of the scho­lar­ship on Riario’s palazzo has focused on the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of its archi­tect, an issue that has never been satis­fac­to­rily resolved. Among the indi­vi­duals iden­ti­fied in the accounts is the Floren­tine Bernardo della Volpaia mentioned above, a draughtsman and surveyor born into a family of clock­ma­kers, who is best known as the author of the Codex Coner. The fabbrica hired Della Volpaia to under­take specific tasks, possibly related to the cons­truc­tion of machi­nery.¹²³ By the sixte­enth century, the archi­tect Antonio da Sangallo the Younger seems to have been over­seer of the buil­ding site, as can be discerned in a measured plan drawn by Della Volpaia of the palazzo’s piano nobile (Fig. 61). The drawing bears anno­ta­tions in Sangallo’s hand, inclu­ding his critique of Della Volpaia’s measu­re­ments.¹²⁴ The presence of Antonio da Sangallo and his circle by the final phase of buil­ding is also reflected in a payment of the large sum of 200 ducats in October 1514 to Lodo­vico da Cara­vaggio ‘per la fabrica del palazzo di Roma’.¹²⁵ Da Cara­vaggio was, as later docu­men­ta­tion reveals, the primo mura­tore of the palazzo Balami-Galitzin in via della Scrofa, a palace over­seen by Antonio and Gian­fran­cesco da Sangallo.¹²⁶

As the possible archi­tect or desi­gner of the plan at its early stages, Chris­toph Frommel has suggested Baccio Pontelli, a Floren­tine wood­carver and archi­tect. Pontelli gained expe­ri­ence in Florence and in Urbino, where he possibly contri­buted to the famous intarsia work in the studiolo of Federico da Monte­feltro between 1478 and 1481. Sixtus IV later invited Pontelli to work on projects such as the Rocca of Civi­ta­vec­chia and the fort­ress and Cathe­dral of Ostia. Giorgio Vasari credited Pontelli with the design of several major buil­dings in Rome, inclu­ding Santa Maria del Popolo, the Sistine Chapel, San Pietro in Montorio, and Sant’Agostino. Archi­tec­tural histo­rians have also linked him to the Belve­dere Villa built for Pope Inno­cent VIII and Santa Maria della Pace, and it has been proposed that he was the prin­cipal author of the anti­qua­rian drawings in the Codex Escu­ri­al­ensis.¹²⁷ It is doubtful, however, that

the artistic vision arti­cu­lated in the Palazzo San Giorgio was Pontelli’s. In the critical years between 1487 and 1492, Pontelli cannot be traced to Rome, but was engaged in forti­fi­ca­tion and engi­nee­ring work in the Marches.¹²⁸ Moreover, the distinc­tive Lombard character of the Palazzo San Giorgio does not align with Pontelli’s back­ground or experiences.

Lombard carvers and masons frequently appear in the payment records of the cantiere. The accounts mention a certain ‘Giovanni da Como’ who oversaw the large team of stone­car­vers (‘scal­pel­lini’) active at the site—probably Giovanni da Larigo, an asso­ciate of Andrea Bregno.¹²⁹ Riario’s prefe­rence for Lombard craft­smen and masons can be attri­buted to his family connec­tions to Milan and to Cardinal Sforza.¹³⁰ They relate, as well, to the signi­fi­cant role that Lombard buil­ders played in Roman archi­tec­tural and anti­qua­rian projects of the late Quat­tro­cento, espe­ci­ally those asso­ciated with the Augus­ti­nian Order.¹³¹ Of parti­cular signi­fi­cance were the ties between Lombard buil­ders in Rome and the Augus­ti­nians that deve­loped after 1472, when Santa Maria del Popolo was put under the control of the Lombard Congre­ga­tion. Santa Maria del Popolo was rebuilt from 1472 to 1477 follo­wing Lombard archi­tec­tural models and, some have specu­lated, under the super­vi­sion of Andrea Bregno. An archi­tec­tural revival of Augus­ti­nian churches followed, led by Ambrogio Massari da Cori, General of the Augus­ti­nian Hermits between 1477 and 1484. With the support of Cardinal d’Estouteville, Bishop of Ostia and Velletri, Massari oversaw the recon­s­truc­tion of the Augus­ti­nian Sant’Oliva in Massari’s home­town of Cori. This church, a depen­dency of the Lombard congre­ga­tion of Santa Maria del Popolo, was rebuilt by the Lombard archi­tect Antonio da Como.¹³²

Between 1479 and 1482, the mother church of the Augus­ti­nian hermits, Sant’Agostino, was also rebuilt thanks to the efforts of Massari and Cardinal d’Estouteville (see Map 1.4). The Floren­tine archi­tects of Sant’Agostino looked to the example of Santa Maria del Popolo, and the two churches parallel each other in their lumi­nous traver­tine façades, adorned with large rose windows. The Palazzo San Giorgio, like­wise, promin­ently features a traver­tine façade. Riario’s palace used blocks quar­ried from the Colos­seum, which was probably the same source that provided the traver­tine for the façade of Sant’Agostino.¹³³ The thematic unity that connects Santa Maria del Popolo, Sant’Agostino, and the Palazzo San Giorgio is a sign of the shared inte­rests that joined toge­ther d’Estouteville, Riario, the Augus­ti­nian order, and the commu­nity of Lombard stone­ma­sons in Rome. As has been noted, the façades of Santa Maria del Popolo and Sant’Agostino seem to pay homage to Saint Augustine’s medi­ta­tions on the divine sple­ndour and purity of light. Inspired by Saint Augus­tine, Massari’s writings

described the quali­ties he considered paths to virtue: among them beauty and bril­liant whiteness, since ‘the white of eternal light is a flaw­less mirror of divine majesty’.¹³⁴ As Augus­ti­nian protector and successor to Cardinal d’Estouteville, Riario embraced these asso­cia­tions, cove­ring the entire eastern façade of his palace with bril­liant white blocks (see Fig. 50).

In 1568, Giorgio Vasari credited two Lombard archi­tects with the cons­truc­tion of Palazzo San Giorgio. In his Vita of Bramante, Vasari states that Bramante worked on ‘the reso­lu­tion of much of the Palazzo San Giorgio and the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso’ toge­ther with ‘other excel­lent archi­tects’, adding that ‘Antonio Monte­ca­vallo executed this project’.¹³⁵

fig. 62 Rome, Palazzo San Giorgio, façade. 1495. Photo: Author.

Bramante, however, only arrived in Rome in 1499, too late for him to have been the original desi­gner of the Palazzo San Giorgio. As Frommel has pointed out, during the 1480s and 1490s, Bramante worked for Riario’s ally Cardinal Ascanio Sforza at the Cathe­dral of Pavia and at Sant’Ambrogio in Milan. Possibly, Cardi­nals Riario and Sforza faci­li­tated a direct or indi­rect exch­ange of ideas between Bramante and Riario’s archi­tects.¹³⁶ Arnaldo Bruschi proposed that Bramante either contri­buted to the design of the Palazzo San Giorgio from a distance or, as Vasari’s text suggests, was involved in the ‘reso­lu­tion’ of the palace at a later phase, after his arrival in Rome in 1499. Valtieri considered his invol­vement in the design of Riario’s palace ‘more than hypo­the­tical’, based on an analysis of the propor­tions of the new San Lorenzo in Damaso. The lateral niches which once extended offthe choir of San Lorenzo, for example, parallel those Bramante desi­gned for the choir of Santa Maria del Popolo.¹³⁷ Bramante was one of the only archi­tects in Italy at the time with a know­ledge of Vitru­vius and expe­ri­ence with the many styli­stic themes that converge in the palazzo—the archi­tec­ture of Florence, Urbino, Lombardy, and Mantua, as well as the anti­qui­ties of Rome and Verona.¹³⁸

The possible contri­bu­tion of the ‘Antonio Monte­ca­vallo’ mentioned by Vasari has also been the subject of much debate. This figure is Antonio Bregno, a sculptor and a nephew of Andrea Bregno who is likely the archi­tect who signed the name ‘ANT.DA.COMO.OP’ in the cloister of the church of Sant’Oliva in Cori.¹³⁹ His career other­wise remains obscure, and art histo­rians have asked whether Vasari may have meant to refe­rence ‘Andrea’ Bregno, mista­kenly refer­ring to Andrea as ‘Antonio’. As is recorded in the Galli-Balducci account books, Andrea Bregno was respon­sible for the deli­cate grot­teschi carved on the window aedi­cules of the eastern façade (Fig. 62).¹⁴⁰ The sculp­tural deco­ra­tion of the palace’s window frames—carved not from locally sourced spolia, but from Carrara marble—are important features of the design.¹⁴¹ Yet it is unli­kely that Andrea Bregno could have acted as ‘archi­tect’ of the palace; as Thomas Pöpper has pointed out, Andrea Bregno’s own tomb­stone, his contracts, and all other contem­po­rary docu­ments described him as a ‘sculptor’ rather than an ‘archi­tectus’.¹⁴²

One of the names often mentioned in the Galli-Balducci account books, espe­ci­ally in connec­tion with brick­work and the paving of streets, is a certain ‘Maestro Alberto’.¹⁴³ Although the iden­tity of this Alberto has never been discussed in the lite­ra­ture, he can be iden­ti­fied as the Lombard archi­tect Alberto de Paneris ‘de Fontana’ of Piacenza, a figure active in nume­rous projects for the Camera Apos­to­lica.¹⁴⁴ Refe­rences to ‘Maestro Alberto’ first appear in the Galli-Balducci accounts in February 1490, in connec­tion with a payment from Falcone Sini­baldi, the Camera’s tesoriere gene­rale.¹⁴⁵ Later, between 1497 and 1500, Jacopo Galli hired Alberto to refur­bish his house on the via dei Leutari and to carry out work in the church of Santa Marghe­rita.¹⁴⁶ In 1499, Cardinal Riario entrusted Maestro Alberto with the cons­truc­tion of

fig. 63 Carlo Maderno, Foun­tain, St. Peter’s Square, reusing elements from the 15th century foun­tain. 1612–1614. Photo: Author.

parts of his villa on the via della Lungara, the buil­ding that would form the core of the current Palazzo Riario-Corsini.¹⁴⁷ Then, in 1501–1502, Alberto built a noble palazzo in the Rione Parione for Riario’s maggior­domo, Accursio de Petra.¹⁴⁸ Around the same time, the Camera Apos­to­lica paid him to restore the foun­tain in front of Old St. Peter’s later rede­si­gned by Carlo Maderno (Fig. 63),¹⁴⁹ and in 1509, he assisted Bramante at the tribune of Santa Maria del Popolo.¹⁵⁰ The range of these projects is remar­kable, and toge­ther they reveal Alberto’s close rela­ti­onship to Riario and the Cardinal’s circle. His services to Riario included the execu­tion of tempo­rary archi­tec­ture, since Alberto was paid to cons­truct the stage that Riario built for the inau­gural proces­sion (possesso) of Pope Julius II. He also took on other work for the Camera Apos­to­lica, such as buil­ding a papal paper mill in Ascoli.¹⁵¹ A reliable contractor of the Camera with expe­ri­ence in mili­tary archi­tec­ture and hydrau­lics, Alberto was a domi­nant figure in Riario’s Roman projects and may have played an important role in the design of the Palazzo San Giorgio. One wonders, however, if he was a figure of high enough stan­ding to be entrusted with such a signi­fi­cant project.¹⁵²

Nume­rous other names have been asso­ciated with the design and cons­truc­tion of San Lorenzo in Damaso, inclu­ding Melozzo da Forlì, Giuliano da Sangallo, and Fran­cesco di Giorgio.¹⁵³ Frommel has suggested that during Mantegna’s stay in Rome between 1488 and 1490, Cardinal Riario may have consulted him on the archi­tec­tural design of the Palazzo San Giorgio, and Riario’s buil­ders were possibly able to study drawings Mantegna brought from Mantua.¹⁵⁴ As has often been noted, the Domus Nova in Mantua, a noble resi­dence built c. 1480–1484 by Federico I Gonzaga (Fig. 64), bears a resem­blance to Riario’s palace in its fenestra­tion and its projec­ting corner towers. Another promi­nent figure who has been linked to the Palazzo San Giorgio is Fra Giovanni Giocondo of Verona, the leading autho­rity on Vitru­vian theory in Rome in the late 1480s. As Pier Nicola Pagliara has pointed out, Giocondo might have contri­buted to Riario’s project his know­ledge of Vitru­vius, in parti­cular Vitruvius’s discus­sion of opus isodomum. It is notable that one of the few legible quota­tions of antique archi­tec­ture in the Palazzo San Giorgio is its allu­sion to a monu­ment in Giocondo’s home­town of Verona, the Porta Borsari (Fig. 65), whose upper tier is reflected in the arti­cu­la­tion of the window frames of Riario’s palace (see Fig. 62).¹⁵⁵ Taken toge­ther, these possi­bi­li­ties suggest a scenario proposed long ago by Dome­nico Gnoli and more recently supported by Bruschi: the palace and church of San Lorenzo were the result of a colla­bo­ra­tion invol­ving multiple archi­tects and thin­kers, evol­ving over an extended period of time.¹⁵⁶ Despite the external cohe­rence of the final struc­ture, its cons­truc­tion history aligns with what Marvin Trach­ten­berg has called ‘buil­ding-intime’, a slow and coll­ec­tive process carried out over decades.¹⁵⁷

Jacopo Galli and the Expan­sion of the Isola Galli

The Galli-Balducci bank bene­fitted greatly from its posi­tion as mana­gers of the conto della fabbrica, a role that granted Jacopo Galli signi­fi­cant powers. It seems inevi­table that Galli was perso­nally involved in the day-to-day acti­vi­ties of Riario’s buil­ding site, such as sourcing and trans­porting mate­rials and contrac­ting work to buil­ders and sculp­tors. Galli likely

fig. 64 Mantua, Domus Nova. Early 1480s. Photo by James Austin, The Cour­t­auld, Conway Library photo­gra­phic coll­ec­tion, cc-by-nc.

fig. 65 Verona, Porta Borsari. Photo © iStock / Getty Images, Bepsimage.

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

acted as an entre­pre­neur and inter­me­diary, skim­ming offpro­fits as he provided supplies or contracts.¹⁵⁸ The oppor­tu­ni­ties to trade in raw mate­rials were certainly abun­dant, and Galli likely capi­ta­lised on them in his capa­city as a merchant, for example through his invol­vement in the timber busi­ness. At the end of 1498 Galli, toge­ther with the Roman Bernar­dino Fabi and the Floren­tine banker Jacopo Rucellai, leased from Riario the right to harvest wood from the Cardinal’s estates at Pali­doro and Statua. Entries in the Galli-Balducci account books over the follo­wing years refer to the felling of lumber and its ship­ment by boat or by cart; it seems inevi­table that some of these deli­veries were destined for the cons­truc­tion site.¹⁵⁹

During the nearly four years of Riario’s absence from Rome, between November 1499 and September 1503, cons­truc­tion on Palazzo San Giorgio continued. It was during this period that the palace’s monu­mental cortile was built. In these years, while Riario moved between Nort­hern Italy and France, the Cardinal’s stand-ins would have over­seen his buil­ding project and cared for his posses­sions, proper­ties, and agri­cul­tural estates. While the precise arran­ge­ments in place in these years and the chain of command are nowhere spelled out, it seems inevi­table that Galli was a crucial manager of Riario’s affairs, inclu­ding the Cardinal’s very active cons­truc­tion site. This type of rela­ti­onship grew not only out of private agree­ments struck between Galli and Riario, but also from the expe­ri­ence of the Galli bank in working with the Camera Apos­to­lica. In Rome, it was not uncommon for merchant-bankers to provide finan­cial and mate­rial backing for the projects of the Camera and the pope.¹⁶⁰ In this context, the services Galli provided to Riario at the cantiere of San Lorenzo seem similar to those offered by the Roman merchant-banker Giuliano Leni in his role as custode for the cons­truc­tion of New St. Peter’s in the era of Pope Leo X. As an act from 1513 or 1514 speci­fies, the pope gave Leni ‘la cura de la speysa de la fabricha di sancto Petro’, autho­ri­sing him, for example, to contract stone­ma­sons capable of execu­ting Bramante’s designs for the tribune.¹⁶¹

Galli’s part­ner­ship with Riario also enabled him to amass an exten­sive port­folio of proper­ties to the north of Riario’s cons­truc­tion site. Two previously unknown docu­ments shed light on Riario’s key role in estab­li­shing an ‘isola’ of houses and shops for Jacopo Galli. These acts show that in 1490 and 1491, Riario bought up land and proper­ties that not only bene­fitted the cons­truc­tion of San Lorenzo in Damaso, but were also advan­ta­geous for Galli. The first, nota­rised on 4 December 1490, shows that the Cardinal paid 210 ducats to a certain baker (     pistor sive furn­a­rius) named Magister Jachettus (Jacquet) of Arles for a stabulum (stable). This buil­ding bordered other proper­ties owned by Jacquet, as well as the proper­ties of the noble Romans

Gentile and Lorenzo Signo­retti. On another side, it bordered stables owned by Riario, that is, the stables of the palace of San Lorenzo in Damaso that flanked the basi­lica on its north side (Map 2).¹⁶² Battista Anselmi de Novara, Riario’s procu­rator, was given permis­sion to take Jachettus’s stable and all ‘the open areas of [Jachettus’s] house that square up with the walls of the stables of said Cardinal Riario’ [Appendix ii.5]. The second act, nota­rised by Senilis and dated February 1491, provides the earliest known refe­rence to Jacopo Galli’s owner­ship of property on Piazza San Lorenzo [Appendix ii.6]. It states that Cardinal Riario would pay Gentile Signo­retti 333 ducats for a stable and a garden ‘in platea Sti. Laurenti in Damaso’ between the proper­ties of Gentile Signo­retti, Jacopo Galli, and the heirs of Barto­lomeo Sant­acroce.¹⁶³

These descrip­tions of the proper­ties in this area can be compared with another, dated 28 July 1495, which defined the borders of the palace owned by the heirs of Barto­lomeo Sant­acroce: on one side was the house of Gentile Signo­retti, to another side and to the back were the houses of Jacopo Galli, and in front was the Piazza di Parione, other­wise known as the Piazza di Pasquino.¹⁶⁴ On 23 April 1505, when Prospero Sant­acroce sold to his brot­hers Pietro and Andrea his half-share of this palazzo, the palace was said to stand between the houses of the phar­macist Dome­nico delle Vetere on one side and the house of Ciriaco Signo­retti on the other, with Galli’s proper­ties to the back (Map 2).¹⁶⁵ Piecing toge­ther these descrip­tions, a picture of the topo­gra­phic situa­tion begins to emerge. The houses of the Signo­retti fronted the via Papalis, the proces­sional route that ran through the Piazza di Parione and continued along what is now the via di San Pantaleo.¹⁶⁶ Palazzo Sant­acroce neigh­boured the houses of the Signo­retti and faced the Piazza di Parione: this palace is the current Palazzo Bona­dies-Lancel­lotti on via di San Pantaleo, 66, across the street from the present-day Museo di Roma and the famous statue of Pasquino (Fig. 66; see also Maps 2 and 3).¹⁶⁷ The palace of the Sant­acroce was a large and noble domus that Jacopo Galli would manage to acquire for himself shortly before his death in 1505.¹⁶⁸ A bird’s eye view of Rome by Giovanni Battista Falda printed in 1676 (Fig. 67), although far from an accu­rate survey, gives a sense of the posi­tion of this palace and its rela­ti­onship to Galli’s house to the south. On Falda’s print, the Palazzo Sant­acroce is shown across the street from the statue of Pasquino, while the palaz­zetto of Jacopo Galli to the ‘back’ of the Palazzo Sant­acroce faces the Piazza San Lorenzo (on Falda’s map, the Piazza della Cancel­leria). Between these two proper­ties is a semi-open area with what appear to be gardens and outbuil­dings. The open spaces seen in Falda’s view must corre­spond, at least in part, to the gardens and stables purchased by Riario in 1490–1491.

The docu­ments of 1490 and 1491 suggest that the land purchased by Riario was expan­sive, stret­ching between the Piazza San Lorenzo to the south and the proper­ties of the Sant­acroce and Signo­retti to the north. Riario may have drawn upon his powers as Came­ra­rius to faci­li­tate these acqui­si­tions, bene­fit­ting from laws passed under Sixtus IV that made it easier to appro­priate proper­ties adja­cent to one’s own for purposes of new cons­truc­tion. Certainly, this land was needed to move the basi­lica of San Lorenzo northwards. Yet the purchase of proper­ties from Jachettus and the Signo­retti also bene­fitted Jacopo Galli. An exten­sion northward allowed Riario and Galli to syste­ma­tise the via dei Leutari, and in September 1496, the Galli-Balducci accounts show that Riario paid k12 for ‘the pave­ment of half of the street from the shops of Jacopo [Galli]’, seemingly, the stretch of the via dei Leutari sepa­ra­ting San Lorenzo in Damaso from Galli’s palaz­zetto.¹⁶⁹ That Riario and Galli shared the costs of paving this

fig. 66 The Pasquino and the Palazzo Bona­dies-Lancel­lotti on the Via di San Pantaleo, Rome, Piazza di Pasquino. Photo: Author.

fig. 67 Giovanni Battista Falda, View of Rome, detail showing the Palazzo della Cancel­leria and the Isola Galli, Private coll­ec­tion. 1676.

fig. 68 Over­head view, Piazza di Pasquino to Palazzo della Cancel­leria. Photo: Alessio Fioretti.

street suggests that they desi­gned it colla­bo­ra­tively as a straight, narrow passa­geway between Riario’s church and Galli’s property.

Riario’s acqui­si­tions also assisted Galli’s plans to conso­li­date the Isola Galli, a unified block of houses and shops fron­ting the via dei Leutari. An over­head photo­graph of this area (Fig. 68) shows at the bottom right the yellow façade of the Palazzo Bona­dies-Lancel­lotti, which Galli

fig. 69 Planned project for the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, Rome, Archivio Storico Capi­to­lino, Ripar­ti­zione v, Lavori Pubblici, Piano rego­la­tore, Pos. 14, Via Nazio­nale e Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, busta 143, fasc. 103a. 1886. Photo © Sovrin­ten­denza Capi­to­lina – Archivio Storico Capitolino.

fig. 70 Rome, Via dei Leutari with the stables of the Palazzo San Giorgio in the back­ground, Rome, Museo di Roma, Archivio Foto­gra­fico, af 3009. 1888–1900. Photo © Roma, Sovrin­ten­denza Capi­to­lina ai Beni Cultu­rali, Museo di Roma.

purchased from the Sant­acroce in 1505.¹⁷⁰ This palace is surrounded by densely built houses with irre­gular roof­lines, all of them oriented towards the via Papalis. Between these houses and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II were the gardens and cour­ty­ards that once formed the centre of the Isola Galli. The houses of Jacopo Galli to the south, which once fronted on the via dei Leutari across from San Lorenzo, were demo­lished in the late nine­te­enth century to make way for the Corso Vittorio (see Map 3). The fate of the area cleared by the demo­li­tion can be seen on a map made in the 1880s (Fig. 69): part of it was utilised for the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, while the remai­ning area, marked on the map as ‘in vendita’ (for sale), was used to cons­truct the row of palazzi that front the Corso Vittorio (see Fig. 68).¹⁷¹

In 1497, Riario and Galli both initiated projects to rede­velop the via dei Leutari. In the summer of 1497, Riario began a large stable to the north of his garden (Map 1.6). As is seen in a nine­te­enth-century photo­graph (Fig. 70), the two-storey stables blocked offthe via dei Leutari at its western end, trans­forming it into a dead-end corridor under the control of Riario and Galli (see Fig. 109).¹⁷² By June 1497, Galli began a large-scale buil­ding project of his own, with the assis­tance of many of the same workmen and suppliers who were active in Riario’s cantiere: the recon­s­truc­tion of his palaz­zetto on the Piazza San Lorenzo. Jacopo Galli’s house appears in photo­graphs taken before its destruc­tion (Figs 1, 71) and also in an eigh­te­enth-century print by Giuseppe Vasi (Fig. 72), which labels it as the ‘Palaz­zetto del Marchese Galli’ (Fig. 73). The photo­graphs and the engra­ving clarify that the entrance was closely aligned with the magni­fi­cent eastern façade of Riario’s palace. Starting in the summer of 1497, the Galli-Balducci accounts record Galli’s payments for buil­ding works at this house by ‘Maestro Alberto’, iden­ti­fied above as Alberto da Piacenza. In June 1497, Galli paid Alberto for ‘lavoro della chamera sopra la strada’ (an upper room facing the via dei Leutari) and for ‘la fabricha

fig. 71 Palazzo San Giorgio with the houses of the Galli in the back­ground, Rome, Isti­tuto Centrale per il Cata­logo e la Docu­men­ta­zione. Late 19th century. Photo © iccd, Minis­tero per i beni e le atti­vità cultu­rali e per il turismo.

fig. 72 Giuseppe Vasi, Palazzo della Cancel­leria Apos­to­lica (plate 74), Delle magni­ficenze di Roma antica e moderna, Libro quarto, David Rumsey Map Center, Stan­ford Univer­sity. 1754. Photo: David Rumsey Map Center, Stan­ford Libra­ries, cc by-nc-sa 3.0.

fig. 73 Giuseppe Vasi, Palazzo della Cancel­leria Apos­to­lica (plate 74), detail showing 2 (‘Vicolo de Leutari’) and 4 (‘Palaz­zetto del Marchese Galli’). Delle magni­ficenze di Roma antica e moderna, Libro quarto, David Rumsey Map Center, Stan­ford Univer­sity. 1754. Photo: David Rumsey Map Center, Stan­ford Libra­ries, cc by-nc-sa 3.0.

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

della chamera sua’.¹⁷³ In July and August 1497, he paid anony­mous pain­ters for work in the ‘sala insulla strada’ and in two camere. He installed a fire­place in one of the shops on the ground floor and hired a carpenter, Maestro Giorgio, to provide new windows and doors.¹⁷⁴ Galli’s reno­va­tions continued in June 1498, when he paid Maestro Alberto ‘per achon­ciare lachamera d’ant. o ’ (‘to fix up Antonio’s room’). The iden­tity of this ‘Antonio’ is, unfort­u­na­tely, not further clari­fied. Jacopo Galli paid for a spal­liera and expen­sive cloth, and he hired a certain ‘maestro arcan­giolo di forlj pintore’ for work in the room of Antonio.¹⁷⁵ In November 1498, Galli made final payments to a certain ‘maestro pietro schar­pel­lino’ and to Maestro Alberto.¹⁷⁶ All told, Galli’s reno­va­tion project lasted over a year and comprised new painted deco­ra­tions, furnis­hings, windows, and a stair­case. The exten­sive buil­ding works reflect not only Galli’s personal ambi­tion, but also his stra­tegic alignment with Riario.

By the time of his death, Jacopo Galli poss­essed this reno­vated house and all of the proper­ties shown in (Map 3), inclu­ding the palace facing the via Papalis form­erly owned by the Sant­acroce (referred to by the Galli as their ‘casa grande’, Map 1.8) and a row of houses shoulder-to-shoulder along the via dei Leutari.¹⁷⁷ Th ese houses stret­ched from his palaz­zetto west­wards, then followed the via dei Leutari northwards towards the Piazza di Parione. While Galli’s accounts offer few clues as to when and how he succeeded in acqui­ring so many adja­cent proper­ties,¹⁷⁸ in his testa­ment Galli clari­fies that his wife, Saulina, had purchased some of them using funds from her dowry [Appendix II.16]. The Galli-Balducci accounts of the year 1500 refe­rence a tran­sac­tion in which Saulina sold a part of a house to Nardo (Bernardo) Paluz­zelli, probably a property on the ‘banda sinistra’ (Map 1.7), or west side, of the via dei Leutari, where the Paluz­zelli resided by the 1520s.¹⁷⁹ Th ese circum­s­tances suggest that Jacopo Galli may have used funds from Saulina’s dowry to conso­li­date proper­ties on the ‘banda destra’ of the via dei Leutari, not only by purcha­sing houses for the Galli’s own use, but also by resett­ling other noble fami­lies on the ‘banda sinistra’.

The estab­lish­ment of a Galli domain was closely aligned with the recon­s­truc­tion of the basi­lica of San Lorenzo in Damaso. When Riario rebuilt the basi­lica, Galli dutifully trans­ferred his family’s tombs to a Galli chapel offthe right aisle of the new church. Jacopo Galli began this chapel dedi­cated to San Giacomo in May 1502.¹⁸⁰ At the end of the sixte­enth century, the Galli chapel

fig. 74 Anony­mous French copyist after Italian draughtsman, Plan of the Palazzo San Giorgio and San Lorenzo in Damaso, Munich, Baye­ri­sche Staats­bi­blio­thek, Cod. Icon. 195, fol. 10 v <urn:nbn:de:bvb:12bsb00017404‑7>. 1530– 1540. Photo: Baye­ri­sche Staats­bi­blio­thek, Munich, NoC-Nc/1.0.

was merged with those of the Massimi and Pichi fami­lies, yet their original layout is repre­sented in a sixte­enth-century ground plan (Fig. 74).¹⁸¹ The same map shows the loca­tion of the porta piccola, a secon­dary side entrance to the new church of San Lorenzo, which was located further to the west than the current side entrance opening onto the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II (see Map 3).¹⁸² The porta piccola provided direct access to the Galli chapel from the houses of the Galli on the via dei Leutari, a privi­lege that Jacopo Galli likely coor­di­nated with Cardinal Riario when plans for the new basi­lica were being drawn up. Docu­ments from the 1540s clarify that a small, gated road opened up across the street from this porta piccola and led into the heart of the Galli isola, further incor­po­ra­ting San Lorenzo into a Galli sphere of influence.¹⁸³

* * *

Rather than a project that a patron ordered from a master archi­tect, the new San Lorenzo in Damaso was a complex venture accom­plished through colla­bo­ra­tion, shared agency, and poli­tical compro­mise. It involved multiple stake­hol­ders of varied skills and compe­ten­cies. Cardinal Riario’s recon­s­truc­tion of San Lorenzo in Damaso drew upon momentum begun by urban impro­ve­ments in the Rione Parione and took advan­tage of the Cardinal’s powers as Came­ra­rius. It brought in nume­rous buil­ders and craft smen, many of whom were employed in side projects carried out for Riario’s fami­liars and allies, as a means of spre­a­ding respon­si­bi­li­ties and bene­fits throug­hout Riario’s network. Certainly one of the most signi­fi­cant agents in Riario’s initia­tive was Jacopo Galli. Galli not only managed the accounts of the buil­ding site, but also likely provided much of the mate­rial and orga­ni­sa­tional support required for its success. By the time of his death in 1505, Galli could himself lay claim to an impres­sive domain closely connected to the new basi­lica of San Lorenzo, estab­lished in a rela­tively short period of time with the help of Cardinal Riario. The extra­or­di­nary Galli-Balducci accounts, along with Senilis’s nota­rial acts, vividly illu­mi­nate the behind-the-scenes opera­tions that brought the project of Riario and Galli to fulfilment.