Artists, Anti­qui­ties, and a Vigna in Tras­te­vere, 1480s–1490s

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

5 Artists, Anti­qui­ties, and a Vigna in Tras­te­vere 1480s–1490s

While Cardinal Riario is remem­bered as a great patron of archi­tec­ture, his support of the figural arts has often been regarded with scep­ti­cism. In contrast to Giuliano della Rovere, Riario’s taste has seemed outdated and his prefe­rence for Jacopo Ripanda has seemed inex­pli­cable. Condivi’s damning assess­ment of his poor judge­ment of sculp­ture has left its mark.¹ The Cardinal’s legacy has suffered from Giorgio Vasari’s post-facto descrip­tion of a Roman High Renais­sance domi­nated by Michel­an­gelo and Raphael, whose maniera moderna has been regarded as the only legi­ti­mate style in Riario’s day. It has been tarnished, moreover, by the Cardinal’s fall from grace, brought about by his invol­vement in the Petrucci conspi­racy of 1517. The Riario came up short in their rivalry with the Medici and the Della Rovere and, in compa­rison with these other fami­lies, much of their artistic patro­nage has been overs­ha­dowed, erased, or forgotten.

Taking into account the comple­xi­ties of Cardinal Riario’s contested repu­ta­tion, this chapter focuses on the over­looked aspects of his patro­nage of the arts prior to his exile in 1499. It builds upon the topics intro­duced in Chapter 4 by conside­ring his favoured pain­ters and manu­script illu­mi­na­tors, his villa in Tras­te­vere, and his coll­ec­tion of anti­qui­ties in the 1480s and 1490s. As was the case with Riario’s spon­sor­ship of theatre, lite­rati, and prea­chers, Riario’s patro­nage of the arts deve­lops in surpri­sing ways and defies stereo­types. One example is Riario’s proxi­mity to the Gonzaga of Mantua, whom he often imitated in his artistic choices.² With refe­rence to previously over­looked sources, it reas­sesses the chro­no­logy of Riario’s villa in Tras­te­vere with the proposal that the Cardinal cons­tructed this suburban retreat in the 1490s, earlier than was previously assumed. A final section examines Riario’s coll­ec­tion of anti­qui­ties, setting the stage for the discus­sion of Michelangelo’s Slee­ping Cupid and Bacchus in Chap­ters 6 and 7.

Artists in Riario’s Employ and Mantegna’s Roman Circle

Starting in 1496, nume­rous payments to artists employed at Riario’s palace are recorded in the Galli-Balducci account books. These show that Riario hired large teams of stone workers and buil­ders (‘scar­pel­lini’ and ‘manuali’) as well as specia­list metal­wor­kers, carpen­ters, and pain­ters iden­ti­fied only by first name. Along­side the payments to Andrea Bregno and the sculptor ‘Giovanni da Como’ mentioned in Chapter 3 are others to the metalworkers

fig. 87 Script by Barto­lomeo Sanvito, illu­mi­na­tions attri­buted to Lauro Pado­vano, Cicero, De Lege Manilia, Pro Marcello, De Amicitia, Cato Maior de Senec­tute, New York: Pier­pont Morgan Library, MS 882 (Gift, William S. Glazier; December 1956), fol. 1 r. c. 1495. Photo © The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

‘Maestro Bernar­dino’, or to the carpen­ters Antonio and Santi. An artist referred to only as ‘Maestro Paolo’ must have been Riario’s lead painter. The account books detail Paolo’s exten­sive acti­vity at the Palazzo San Giorgio, which ranged from fres­coing the walls, to gilding the roses above the windows on the façade.³ Given the pres­tige of this work, Paolo must have been an important figure, yet the account books offer no further clues as to his iden­tity or place of origin.

A painter who was active at Riario’s palace is the subject of two poems written by Antonio Biax­ander for Cardinal Riario, which offer only limited clues as to the painter’s iden­tity. Like other poems by Biax­ander, these two compo­si­tions are focused on a hoped-for future in which Riario will one day become pope. Both are written in the voice of a painter who had learned his art in Riario’s ‘house’, but now serves Pope Julius II. He now honours the Della Rovere oak, but holds out hope that he will one day cele­brate a Riario papacy and once again be inspired by the scent of the Riario rose:

The painter to the Cardinal of San Giorgio, in whose house he learned the art of pain­ting: If my flame shines at all in the art of Apelles, this the allu­ring scent of the Cyprian rose nourished. And just as now the Julian oak gleams with my honour, so may the rose painted by me flou­rish in its own season.⁴

The gift of the painter to the Cardinal: The Cyprian rose nourished my artistic fingers; now it should receive the grateful gifts of its offspring. Now my hand brings forth the monu­ments that it created as it composed; may the serene scent of the rose foster it. When at last it will flou­rish with the honour of the Vatican, the rose may secure ever­y­thing with its divine scent.⁵

The poems offer fasci­na­ting insight into Riario’s patro­nage of an anony­mous painter, but are focused less on the artist himself than on the compe­ti­tion between Riario and Della Rovere and their contest to win the papacy, which expressed itself in a compe­ti­tion over artists.

One of the patterns that can be traced in Riario’s patro­nage of pain­ters is the Cardinal’s prefe­rence for Nort­hern Italian artists, parti­cu­larly those with connec­tions to the court of the Gonzaga in Mantua. Riario took on nume­rous fami­liars who had previously served Cardinal Gonzaga,⁶ and he consis­t­ently favoured Mantuan and Paduan artists connected to the Gonzaga and to Andrea Mantegna. In 1488, Mantegna himself visited the papal court when Fran­cesco II Gonzaga ‘loaned’ the artist to Pope Inno­cent VIII. Mantegna’s task was to fresco a chapel for the pope in the Villa Belve­dere, a work that was later destroyed during the cons­truc­tion of the Museo Pio-Clemen­tino. Since Mantegna was still in Gonzaga’s employ during his time in Rome and was charged by Gonzaga with pain­ting Inno­cent VIII’s chapel, it is unli­kely he could have taken on signi­fi­cant work for Riario or anyone else. There can, nevert­heless, be little doubt that Mantegna made an impres­sion at Riario’s court and in the circle of the Mantuan and Paduan huma­nists, artists, and illu­mi­na­tors present in Riario’s

house­hold in the 1480s. Battista Fiera, the Mantuan huma­nist mentioned in Chapter 4, wrote about Mantegna’s Roman stay in his De Iusticia Pingenda, a sati­rical dialogue about the artist’s time in the Urbs.⁷ Uncer­tain of how to paint the figure of Justice in Innocent’s Belve­dere chapel, Mantegna consulted several autho­ri­ties, inclu­ding Riario’s favou­rite prea­cher, Fra Mariano da Genazzano.

Riario was a protector of an artist asso­ciated with Mantegna, the poet, artist, and print­maker Giulio Campa­gnola of Padua. Campa­gnola seems to have trained, like Mantegna, in the work­shop of Fran­cesco Squar­cione, and he is best known for the prints he produced in the early sixte­enth century in the circle of Titian and Gior­gione, such as his Woman Recli­ning in a Land­scape (Fig. 86). Yet he started out his career with the help of Riario. In his early youth, when he was only ‘about fifteen’ (c. 1497), he was described in a letter as a ‘fami­liar of Cardinal Riario’. Despite his tender age, the Paduan was said to have already mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as music, singing, pain­ting, and sculp­ture.⁸ Unfort­u­na­tely, further details about Riario’s rela­ti­onship with Campa­gnola are lacking, and no traces remain of the possible artworks or lite­rary crea­tions the Paduan might have offered to Riario.

It is likely that Campa­gnola was brought to Riario’s atten­tion by the other Paduan artists in the Cardinal’s employ, namely, the illu­mi­nator Gaspare da Padova and the scribe Barto­lomeo Sanvito. Sanvito and Gaspare da Padova were colla­bo­ra­tors who had both served

fig. 86 Giulio Campa­gnola, Woman Recli­ning in a Land­scape, Chicago, Art Insti­tute, inv. 1932.1331, John H. Wrenn Memo­rial Coll­ec­tion. c. 1508/9. Photo: Art Insti­tute of Chicago, public domain.

Cardinal Fran­cesco Gonzaga at San Lorenzo in Damaso, and then moved to the house­hold of Gonzaga’s successor, Cardinal Riario. While Sanvito was the senes­calco of Cardinal Gonzaga in 1483, in 1492 he was referred to as Riario’s maestro di casa.⁹ Gaspare da Padova initi­ally won fame for the lavish, two-volume manu­script of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey he began for Cardinal Gonzaga.¹⁰ After spen­ding more than sixteen years in Gonzaga’s service, like Sanvito he also became a depen­dent of Cardinal Riario, seemingly for a period of many years. A docu­ment in Senilis’s note­book of December 1488 that has gone unno­ticed in the lite­ra­ture refers to Gaspare da Padova as Riario’s ‘fami­liar’.¹¹ His loyal service to Riario even cost Gaspare his life. At an unknown date, perhaps circa 1493, Gaspare died in an acci­dent at the cons­truc­tion site of Riario’s palace. Accor­ding to the Neapo­litan huma­nist Pietro Summonte, Gaspare was a man of fertile genius, who ‘not content with one palm alone, dedi­cated himself to archi­tec­ture. Working in the house of the Cardinal of San Giorgio, a few years ago he died in a fatal fall at the buil­ding site’.¹²

Two manu­scripts Sanvito prepared for Cardinal Riario have survived, both of them texts by Cicero.¹³ One now in the Morgan Library, possibly painted by another Paduan artist, the minia­tu­rist Lauro Pado­vano, is adorned with deli­cate illu­mi­na­tions that combine anti­qua­rian motifs with Riario’s personal devices. Vases planted with roses grow into shields bearing Riario’s emblem of the ship’s rudder, while masks and cornu­co­piae borrowed from antique grot­tesche merge with red rosary beads, the cardinal’s hat, and Riario’s emblems. On fol. 1 r

(Fig. 87), Riario’s rudder is combined with his motto ‘hoc opuS SIc perpetuo’ (‘so I perpe­tuate this work’). Surroun­ding the rudders are the words ‘fluc­tuaNt humaNa’ (‘human affairs fluc­tuate’), with the impli­ca­tion that Riario held a steady hand at the rudder of the Church, stee­ring a firm course across the waves. Above are Riario roses and doves paired with the words ScI amorS (‘know love’). On folio 29 v (Fig. 88), an illu­mi­na­tion of the initial ‘D’ painted in gold repres­ents a putto riding a dolphin over rough seas, holding a set of reins in one hand and steadying a rudder with the other. The tail of the dolphin merges with the rudder, empha­sising the Cardinal’s full control over Fortune’s unpre­dic­table waves. The roses which bloom even on open waters unders­core the abun­dance, beauty, and delight of Riario’s rule. Th is explo­ra­tion of Riario’s devices conti­nues in the margins of fol. 42 r (Fig. 89), which are richly deco­rated with rosary beads and the cardinal’s hat, rudder, and five-petal rose. The motifs echo the deco­ra­tions of the rose, the rudder, or the armil­lary sphere that appear ever­y­where in the sculpted deco­ra­tions of Riario’s palazzo (see Figs 25–26).

Sanvito and Gaspare da Padova produced manu­scripts for a range of clients, making frequent refe­rence to an anti­qua­rian visual culture of gems and medals, sculp­ture collections,

fig. 88 Script by Barto­lomeo Sanvito, illu­mi­na­tions attri­buted to Lauro Pado­vano, Cicero, De Lege Manilia, Pro Marcello, De Amicitia, Cato Maior de Senec­tute, New York: Pier­pont Morgan Library, mS 882 (Gift, William S. Glazier; December 1956), fol. 29 v. c. 1495. Photo © The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

fig. 89 Script by Barto­lomeo Sanvito, illu­mi­na­tions attri­buted to Lauro Pado­vano, Cicero, De Lege Manilia, Pro Marcello, De Amicitia, Cato Maior de Senec­tute, New York: Pier­pont Morgan Library, mS 882 (Gift, William S. Glazier; December 1956), fol. 42 r. c. 1495. Photo © The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

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

inscrip­tions, as well as more monu­mental Roman ruins. When they were fami­liars of Riario, they must have been closely connected to a broad network of anti­qua­rians and coll­ec­tors, inclu­ding Jacopo Galli, who was one of the patrons in Rome who parti­ci­pated in these circles. The cross­over between Galli, Riario’s court, Mantegna, Gaspare da Padova, and Sanvito becomes evident when one considers the tomb that Galli commis­sioned for his father, Giuliano. As was discussed in Chapter 3, after Giuliano Galli died in September 1488, Jacopo commis­sioned his monu­ment for the Galli chapel in the old basi­lica of San Lorenzo in Damaso (Fig. 90). As Chris­toph Frommel first observed, the winged putti holding an inscribed tablet in Giuliano Galli’s tomb are notably similar to a compo­si­tion with putti holding an inscrip­tion that Mantegna painted in the Camera degli Sposi in the Ducal Palace in Mantua (Fig. 91). The unusual design of Galli’s tomb also includes a third putto caught under­neath the funerary epitaph. This striated putto, who seems frigh­tened as he attempts to free himself, also harkens back to Mantegna, namely, to the artist’s cele­brated inven­tion of two putti who wear masks and startle their compa­n­ions. A passage in Jacopo Sannazaro’s poem Arcadia describes a painted, wooden vase desi­gned by Mantegna, which included a scene of two putti playing with thea­trical masks. They scare two other putti, one of whom falls on the ground and raises his arm in self-defence, an inven­tion that inspired a drawing in the Louvre (Fig. 92),¹⁴ as well, appar­ently, as the frigh­tened fanciullo under­neath Giuliano Galli’s epitaph. Presu­mably, Jacopo Galli commis­sioned his father’s tomb at the time Mantegna was in Rome serving the pope, as an homage to the artist, or possibly in direct colla­bo­ra­tion with him.¹⁵ The same invention

fig. 90 Tomb of Giuliano Galli, Rome, San Lorenzo in Damaso. 1488 or after. Photo © Biblio­theca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunst­ge­schichte, Rome.

by Mantegna refe­renced in Giuliano Galli’s tomb also reap­pears, around the same time, in a luxu­rious manu­script of Eusebius’s Chro­nica that Sanvito and Gaspare da Padova made for the Vene­tian huma­nist Bernardo Bembo.¹⁶ This manu­script was probably produced between November 1487 and November 1488, close to the date of Giuliano Galli’s tomb. Its illu­mi­na­tions are richly deco­rated with anti­qua­rian fanta­sies inspired by Mantegna, and by the Column of Trajan (Fig. 93).¹⁷ The reuse of Mantegna’s compo­si­tion in Galli’s tomb connects Galli with the ‘amici di Mantegna’ whom Riario favoured, and places Riario and Galli’s circle in Rome’s anti­qua­rian and artistic vanguard.

fig. 91 Andrea Mantegna, Camera degli Sposi, detail of dedi­ca­tory inscrip­tion, Mantua, Palazzo Ducale. 1465–1474. Photo © Raffa­ello Bencini / Bridgeman Images. fig. 92 After Andrea Mantegna, Masked Putti Frigh­tening Other Putti, Paris, Louvre, Dépar­te­ment des Arts graphi­ques, inv. 5072 recto. c. 1495. Photo: © Grand Palais/rmn (Musée du Louvre) / Michèle Bellot.

Jacopo Ripanda of Bologna

The painter most closely asso­ciated with Raffaele Riario is Jacopo Rimpatta of Bologna, known since the seven­te­enth century as Jacopo Ripanda. It is diffi­cult to deter­mine when Ripanda first came to Rome, and in what context he first encoun­tered Riario. The Galli-Balducci accounts shed light on Ripanda’s work for Riario but only from c. 1513, when the Cardinal employed the Bolo­gnese artist to carry out fres­coes in the Bishop’s palace at Ostia (1513–1514), at the Palazzo San Giorgio (1513–1516), and at his vigna in Tras­te­vere (1516–1517). It used to be assumed that Ripanda was active in Rome as early as 1493, and that he was part of Pinturicchio’s work­shop at the Vatican in that year. Recent rese­arch has shown, however, that the ‘Jacopo’ who worked with Pintu­ric­chio in 1493 must have been another artist. In the current state of rese­arch, Ripanda’s presence in Rome is first docu­mented only from May 1500.¹⁸ As was discussed above, it may nevert­heless be the case that Riario employed him during the cele­bra­tions of the Fall of Granada in 1492, given the over­laps between the subjects and themes of the carri devised for this event and the fres­coes Ripanda later painted at the Palazzo dei Conser­va­tori. Vincenzo Fari­nella has discussed a number of drawings that might illu­mi­nate the connec­tions between the cele­bra­tions of 1492 and Jacopo Ripanda, inclu­ding a drawing of the Triumph of Scipio in the Louvre (Fig. 94). In this compo­si­tion, two turbaned ‘Moors’ kneel in subju­ga­tion before Scipio. In the back­ground a bound, turbaned figure sitting under­neath a palm tree is carried in proces­sion. While the oak tree hung with trophies shown in the distance dates the drawing to the papacy of Julius II, the imagery recalls the proces­sions spon­sored by Riario, in which Isabella and Ferdi­nand held Muhammad XII of Granada in chains.¹⁹

As soon as Ripanda set foot in Rome, he would have been occu­pied with the study of ruins and anti­qui­ties, and he must have built up a large port­folio of anti­qua­rian drawings. Even­tually the artist gathered toge­ther the mate­rial that inspired compi­la­tions of anti­qua­rian drawings in Oxford and in Paris, which are now attri­buted to Ripanda’s colla­bo­ra­tors or assistants.²⁰ By 1506, Ripanda had completed a land­mark achie­ve­ment in the history of anti­qua­ria­nism: a survey of the entire sculpted frieze of the Column of Trajan. While Ripanda’s original drawings of the Column are lost, a number of copies or versions of them survive.²¹ The artist won fame for drawing the full programme of reliefs, which he accom­plished using a speci­ally desi­gned scaf­fol­ding. As Raffaele Maffei wrote in his Urban Commen­ta­ries, Ripanda deserved praise for having drawn ‘all the sculp­tures of Trajan’s Column in order, to the great

fig. 93 Script by Barto­lomeo Sanvito, illu­mi­na­tions by Gaspare da Padova, Euse­bius, Chro­nici canones, London, British Library, Royal MS 14 C iii, fol. 2 r. c. 1485–1488. Photo © The British Library.

admi­ra­tion of all, very peri­lously rising around it on a scaf­fol­ding [machinis]’.²² Presu­mably, the cons­truc­tion of expen­sive scaf­fol­ding and the overall effort of this project required finan­cial backing from a patron, perhaps Cardinal Riario.

Some­time before 1503, Riario may have had a hand in awar­ding Ripanda a commis­sion for the deco­ra­tion of four rooms at the Palazzo dei Conser­va­tori. The scenes illus­trate episodes from the Repu­blican history of Rome, in keeping with the role of this buil­ding as the seat of the Conser­va­tors, high-ranking magis­trates in Rome’s muni­cipal govern­ment. While it is not known precisely when Ripanda was hired for the project, a late sixte­enth-century manu­script notes that the ‘first room’ (the Sala degli Orazi e Curiazi) was painted in the time of Alex­ander VI. Th us by 1503, the year of Alex­ander VI’s death, Ripanda would have finished this room, and he had probably completed a second.²³ The deco­ra­tions in the first two rooms were subse­quently painted over, and only the fres­coes Ripanda executed in a third and fourth room survive: the Sala delle Guerre Puniche (see Figs 83–84) and the Sala della Lupa,

fig. 94 Jacopo Ripanda, Triumph of Scipio, Paris, Louvre, Dépar­te­ment des Arts graphi­ques, inv. 8257 recto. c. 1508. Photo: © Grand Palais/ rmN (Musée du Louvre) / Michel Urtado.

fres­coed between 1507 and 1510.²⁴ Accor­ding to Fari­nella, the entire commis­sion of four fres­coed rooms may have been ordered from Ripanda in connec­tion with the Jubilee year of 1500. As Fari­nella points out, in his role as Came­ra­rius, Cardinal Riario was respon­sible for over­seeing the prepa­ra­tions for the Jubilee. In the Sala della Lupa, above each fresco are the coat of arms of Pope Julius II, of the Roman comune, and also of Cardinal Riario (Fig. 95). It is plau­sible then, that Riario had had a hand in awar­ding the commis­sion to Ripanda some­time before the Cardinal went into exile at the end of 1499.²⁵

After Riario’s return to Rome, the Cardinal adopted Ripanda as his preferred artist and awarded him several major projects. Ripanda seems to have assumed a role as orga­niser or desi­gner of fres­coes from the Life of Trajan that Riario commis­sioned for the Epis­copio (Bishop’s Palace) at Ostia, executed by Bald­as­sare Peruzzi and Cesare da Sesto between c. 1511 and 1513 (Fig. 96).²⁶ Between 1513 and 1516, Ripanda executed a full programme of fres­coes for the Palazzo San Giorgio, recei­ving from Riario the substan­tial sum of over 700 ducats for this work. Unfort­u­na­tely, no traces of Ripanda’s fres­coes for the Palazzo San Giorgio survive. Between 1516 and 1517, the Bolo­gnese artist executed yet another fresco cycle for Riario, this time for his vigna in Tras­te­vere, as is discussed below.²⁷ In sum, although most of Ripanda’s work for Riario has been lost, the artist became synony­mous with Riario’s public image, and

fig. 95 Jacopo Ripanda, Sala della Lupa, detail showing stemma of Cardinal Riario, Rome, Palazzo dei Conser­va­tori. 1508–1513. Photo: Author, repro­duced with permis­sion of the Sovrin­ten­denza Capi­to­lina ai Beni Culturali.

may have begun to colla­bo­rate with the Cardinal soon after his arrival in Rome. The themes of Ripanda’s art—antique and all’antica trium­phal imagery—are closely related to Riario’s iden­tity as a patron and as a Crusa­ding ‘San Giorgio’. Like other figures with connec­tions to the Gonzaga court, the Bolo­gnese artist Ripanda satis­fied Riario’s prefe­rence for a North Italian brand of anti­qua­rian imagery. As a whole, Ripanda seems to have been the ideal artist to express mili­tary and heraldic themes in cele­bra­tion of the Riario family, with allu­sion to antique trium­phal arches, histo­riated columns, and battle scenes.

Riario’s Vigna in Trastevere

In September 1492, less than a month after Rodrigo Borgia’s elec­tion as Pope Alex­ander VI, Riario acquired a vigna in Tras­te­vere. Riario’s vigna was located where the Galleria Corsini now stands, across the street from the Villa Farne­sina begun by Agos­tino Chigi in the sixte­enth century (Fig. 97).²⁸ The plot must have been parti­cu­larly appe­aling to Riario since it stood oppo­site the land of Giovanni della Rovere, prefect of Rome and brother of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere (who is portrayed by Melozzo da Forlì in Fig. 13). It was sited on the via della Lungara just outside the Porta Setti­miana, a picturesque setting between the slopes of the Gianicolo

and the banks of the Tiber, in easy reach of both the Vatican and Riario’s palace in the Rione Parione. The huma­nist, coll­ector, and long-term ally of the Riario family, Agos­tino Maffei, sold the Cardinal the property toge­ther with its ‘houses and buil­dings’ for the price of 1200 ducats.²⁹ Maffei also added to the sale an adja­cent cannetum or arun­di­netum, that is, a reed-trellis used to culti­vate grape vines.³⁰ Agos­tino Maffei, an asso­ciate of Pomponio Leto, had previously (in 1479) sold to Count Girolamo Riario the property that would become the Palazzo Riario at Sant’Apollinare. He was also, as was mentioned in Chapter 2, the patron who commis­sioned an eclogue from Capella and De Clodiis in honour of Raffaele Riario [Appendix i].³¹

Riario’s decision to purchase a vigna in this spot follows upon a wider trans­for­ma­tion of the Tiber river in the Quat­tro­cento, which saw the area develop from a secluded enclave for reli­gious insti­tu­tions into a setting for aris­to­cratic villas. The area where Riario bought his villa flanked a rela­tively long and straight stretch of the Tiber. It was joined to the Porta Setti­miana and Tras­te­vere to the south and to the Schola Saxonum and Vatican to the north by a pilgrim’s road known as the via sacra. The area became more deve­loped with the cons­truc­tion of the hermi­tage of Sant’Onofrio on the slopes of the Giani­colo in the 1430s, and by the time of Paul II it had become a favoured spot for leisure, as known from Gaspare da Verona’s descrip­tion of conver­sa­tions he held ‘beneath the Jani­culum’ in a vigna near San Giacomo (alla Lungara).³² The cons­truc­tion of the Ponte Sisto for the papal Jubilee of 1475 made this spot even more attrac­tive. The new bridge brought greater traffic to this area and made it a hub between the via Aurelia to the west, the Ripa port to the south, and the commer­cial centre of the city across the Tiber. The river­bank changed character, as elite patrons were more willing to invest in a part of Rome that had previously been avoided due to frequent floods.

It has often been assumed that after Riario purchased the vigna from Maffei in 1492, the Cardinal took little inte­rest in buil­ding a villa there, since his atten­tion was absorbed by his palace at San Lorenzo. It has been proposed that Cardinal Riario shifted his focus to the vigna only after 1510, or that Fran­cesco ­Riario-Sforza, Girolamo Riario’s son, first took inte­rest in deve­lo­ping it after 1511.³³ Sources previously left out of this discus­sion reveal, however, that there was already a signi­fi­cant villa on the site before 1495. This Riario villa was remem­bered when it was all but ruined by an epic flood of the Tiber river in December 1495—a cata­stro­phic event recorded by nume­rous flood markers still visible in Rome, for example on the façade of Sant’Eustachio (Fig. 98).

fig. 98 Flood marker, Rome, Sant’Eustachio. 1495. Photo: Author.

The exis­tence of Riario’s villa is confirmed by a poem by Giuliano Dati, a Floren­tine cleric. Dati is best known for a trans­la­tion into Italian verse of Chris­to­pher Columbus’s Epis­tola on the ‘recently disco­vered islands’ in the Americas, which he published in 1493. In 1495, to satisfy public inte­rest in another news­worthy event, he published a poem about the flood of Rome, the Del diluvio de Roma.³⁴ Many feared the world would end in the year 1500, and Dati’s poem portrayed the flood as a sign from God and a doomsday omen brought about by human sin. He connected the event with port­ents such as the appearance of a comet, which is illus­trated in the fron­ti­spiece (Fig. 99), and the birth of a pig with a human head.

Dati’s text describes how, in 1495, the Tiber swelled its banks, entered the Porta Setti­miana, flooded the garden of Giovanni della Rovere, and then reached the other side of the via della Lungara, where it ravaged Cardinal Riario’s ‘ornate’ villa, level­ling its walls:

[Water] kept coming in from Porta Portu­ense and simi­larly at Porta Settignano where the garden of the Prefect [Giovanni della Rovere] was found, and that of the Cardinal on the other side, that is, of San Giorgio, which was richly adorned. Many walls were cast down and levelled, and the walls of Battista de Novara’s vineyard were broken and torn apart, as were the walls of Messer Filippo di Ponte­corvo. […] The church of San Giacomo was flooded, along with the Cardinal’s house and his garden. Every delightful vineyard of Settignano was submerged, every buil­ding drowned in water. Now imagine the great sorrow and anguish felt by all of Settignano’s neigh­bours, and by Savo d’Aversa, every last trace of whose viney­ards and houses were flooded with water.³⁵

Even taking into account Dati’s drama­tis­a­tion of the flood for his audi­ence, his poem reveals that a func­tio­ning villa was already in exis­tence on Riario’s land by 1495, quite soon after Riario purchased the vigna from Maffei. The vigna was not a negle­cted plot, but a villa with ‘houses and buil­dings’ that was damaged by the flood. The poem also clari­fies that Riario’s

fig. 99 Giuliano Dati, Del diluvio de Roma, fron­ti­spiece, Naples, Biblio­teca Nazio­nale Vittorio Emanuele III, S.Q. 8.B 0042(1. 1495. Photo by permis­sion of the Minis­tero della Cultura © Biblio­teca Nazio­nale di Napoli.

villa was part of a cluster of retreats owned by the members of Riario’s inner circle, inclu­ding Giovanni della Rovere, Filippo di Ponte­corvo, and Battista ‘Anselmi’ de Novara. Ponte­corvo, a notary of the Camera Apos­to­lica, was the same figure who nota­rised docu­ments related to the sale of Agos­tino Maffei’s vigna to Riario in 1492, and who handled nume­rous personal matters for the Cardinal. The apos­tolic scriptor Battista Anselmi de Novara was another trusted agent and procu­rator in the service of Cardinal Riario.³⁶

Damage caused by the flood of 1495 would have given Riario the task of refur­bis­hing or rebuil­ding his villa, and previously unno­ticed records from the Galli-Balducci account books reveal that a repair or expan­sion of the villa was indeed underway a few years after the devas­ta­ting event. In May 1499, Riario made a payment of ten ducati di carlini to Maestro Alberto (iden­ti­fied in Chapter 3 as Alberto da Piacenza) for the ‘tower of the vigna’.³⁷ Then on 18 June 1499, the Cardinal paid Alberto another three ducats for work commis­sioned by Anselmi de Novara ‘for the vigna’. On the same day, Alberto received a further twenty-nine carlini ‘to cons­truct a door and to raise an upper storey when Cesare Bishop of Pisa comes’.³⁸

fig. 100 Anthonis van den Wijn­gaerde, Panorama of Rome seen from the Giani­colo, detail, New York, The Metro­po­litan Museum of Art, Acces­sion Number: 52.124.1, Rogers Fund, 1952. c. 1540–1550. Photo: The Metro­po­litan Museum of Art, New York, public domain.

The amount of the known payments from Riario to Maestro Alberto for work at the villa is rather modest; possibly, these payments only repre­sent one part of his compen­sa­tion for exten­sive work, or perhaps his efforts were focused on resto­ra­tion, rather than new addi­tions. While it is diffi­cult to know which tower, and which other parts of the villa Alberto cons­tructed or restored, a view of Rome by Hughes Pinard from the mid-Cinque­cento (see Fig. 97) repres­ents Riario’s villa with four tower-like struc­tures surroun­ding a central loggia. Another view of the area is repre­sented in a drawing in the Metro­po­litan Museum by Anthonis van den Wijn­gaerde (Fig. 100). This drawing shows what appears to be a distinc­tive tower in the back of Riario’s villa, which may have been the struc­ture that occu­pied Maestro Alberto.³⁹

The payment made in June, 1499 ‘to raise an upper storey when Cesare Bishop of Pisa comes’, offers insight into the back­ground behind this cons­truc­tion work. The Bishop of Pisa whom Riario expected in Rome was Cesare Riario-Sforza, son of Count Girolamo Riario and Cate­rina Sforza. As recently as 3 June 1499, Cardinal Riario had renounced the Arch­bi­shopric of Pisa in Cesare’s favour, even though Cesare was only nine­teen years old at the time. As a second son destined for the Church, Cesare relied upon Riario to advance his career. In October 1498, as soon as he came of age, Cesare had travelled to Rome in the company of Cate­rina Sforza’s agent Poli­doro Tiberti with the goal of winning a high eccle­si­a­stical office, ideally a cardi­na­late. Since the pope was unwil­ling to offer Cesare a cardinal’s hat, a next-best solu­tion was proposed: Cardinal Riario would resign the Arch­bi­shopric of Pisa in his favour, and retain half of the income for himself.⁴⁰ A letter from Tiberti to Cate­rina Sforza details how Cesare turned to Cardinal Riario for assu­rances of help. It was decided with Riario, Tiberti wrote to Sforza, that Cesare ‘would not enter Rome without an epis­copal dignity, or without a good and fitting income and a castello that can house three hundred men’.⁴¹ Exactly which castello Cesare was promised is not clari­fied in the letter. Since Tiberti presu­mably could not have meant the villa in Tras­te­vere, the castello intended for Cesare was perhaps the Castello degli Anguil­lara at Capra­rola, a domain that Pope Inno­cent VIII had given to the Riario.⁴²

Soon after Cesare’s visit to Rome in 1498, his needs became more urgent. In May 1499, Cesare Borgia prepared to invade Imola, posing a grave threat to the heirs of Girolamo Riario. Cesare Riario-Sforza left for Rome and in early June 1499, Cardinal Riario trans­ferred to him the Arch­bi­shopric of Pisa, ther­e­fore satis­fying the promise of an ‘epis­copal dignity’ made in 1498. In May and June 1499, Maestro Alberto rushed to prepare the villa in Tras­te­vere, focu­sing on a tower and the expan­sion of an upper storey, in light of the threats that the Riario family faced.⁴³ Cesare’s needs were satis­fied by his Arch­bi­shopric, presu­mably by a large ‘castello’, and also by an impo­sing villa in Tras­te­vere, forti­fied by the recent addi­tions of Maestro Alberto.

The sequence of events shows that even in the 1490s, Cardinal Riario imagined that his villa would serve a dynastic func­tion and that it would be shared between himself and Girolamo Riario’s heirs. This concep­tion of the site continued in the early sixte­enth century when, at diffe­rent points in time, the Cardinal granted partial owner­ship of the villa to Girolamo’s sons Fran­cesco or Galeazzo Riario-Sforza. From at least as early as 1510, the Riario-Sforza brot­hers were inves­ting heavily in the villa, purcha­sing adja­cent plots of land to expand the site.⁴⁴ Cardinal Riario did not surrender his rights to the property fully, however, but continued to share it with his cousins.⁴⁵ Cardinal Riario was the highest-ranking member of the family, and the few traces of fres­coes in the villa that date to Riario’s life­time bear his coat of arms, rather than those of the Riario-Sforza. Enzo Borsel­lino disco­vered these fres­coes in a concealed part of the ceiling at the current Villa Corsini, where they have survived centu­ries of subse­quent remo­del­ling (Fig. 101).⁴⁶ Recently, payments were redis­co­vered in the Galli-Balducci accounts which show that Cardinal Riario ordered fres­coes from Jacopo Ripanda at the Tras­te­vere villa in 1516 and 1517. It has recently been proposed that Ripanda was the author of the ceiling deco­ra­tions with Riario’s coat of arms.⁴⁷ These modest pain­tings seem styli­sti­cally incom­pa­tible with Ripanda’s work, however, and the subject of Ripanda’s exten­sive fres­coes at the Tras­te­vere vigna remains mysterious.

Cardinal Riario’s estab­lish­ment of a promi­nent villa for the Riario family in the Lungara in the 1490s was important in shaping the character of the Tiber river­bank, as well as the future

fig. 101 Fres­coes with the stemmi of Cardinal Riario and grot­tesche. Rome, Palazzo Corsini. c. 1500?. Photo © Enzo Borsellino.

deve­lo­p­ment of the area in the sixte­enth century. Some­time shortly after 1495, Giovanni della Rovere sold his vigna across the street from Cardinal Riario’s to Cardinal Ales­sandro Farnese, the future Pope Paul III. Farnese was form­erly tesoriere gene­rale of Riario’s Camera Apos­to­lica, and his purchase of the vigna can be unders­tood in light of Farnese’s desire to follow Riario’s example.⁴⁸ In 1505, the wealthy Sienese banker Agos­tino Chigi bought land across the street from Cardinal Riario, where he began to cons­truct the villa ‘Farne­sina’. Bald­as­sare Peruzzi desi­gned Chigi’s villa in response to and in direct compe­ti­tion with the Farnese and with Riario, as Fabio Chigi (Pope Alex­ander VII) would later state in his biography of Agos­tino Chigi. The Farne­sina, Fabio Chigi asserts, was meant to surpass the villas of other, rival fami­lies who had already estab­lished them­selves on the banks of the Tiber.⁴⁹ Seen from this perspec­tive, Riario’s villa, rein­forced with a tower, must have been an impres­sive struc­ture that inspired a direct response from Agos­tino Chigi and his archi­tect Peruzzi at the Villa Farne­sina. One can only specu­late as to how Jacopo Ripanda, working at Riario’s villa in 1516 and 1517, responded in turn to the famous painted deco­ra­tions by Raphael, Peruzzi, and others at the Farnesina.

Riario’s Anti­qui­ties Collection

Riario expressed his rever­ence for the mate­rial remains of the ancient past not only as a patron of art and archi­tec­ture, but also a coll­ector of ancient sculp­ture. Although it is often stated that Riario’s coll­ec­tion of anti­qui­ties was one of Rome’s most exten­sive, surpri­singly little is known about it.⁵⁰ What did Riario’s anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion look like, which objects did he own, and where did he put them on display? These ques­tions are crucial for any discus­sion of Michelangelo’s Slee­ping Cupid and Bacchus. A small number of sources hint only indi­rectly at the contents and appearance of Riario’s coll­ec­tion, begin­ning with a letter from a Floren­tine ambassador dated 1490. This remar­kable letter, which describes the disco­very of a bronze sculp­ture in one of Riario’s vigne, is one of the earliest known descrip­tions of archaeo­lo­gical excava­tions of any sort in Rome:

Recently Monsi­gnore di San Giorgio, while excavating stones from one of his vigne, found an under­ground room, where he disco­vered four bronze horsemen on bronze horses, and as many women on horse­back (in groppa), a very beau­tiful thing, and he is putting it in the buil­ding he is cons­truc­ting as his palace.⁵¹

In an article published in 1999, Doris Carl argued that this ‘very beau­tiful thing’ may have been a bronze relief showing men and women on horse­back, possibly a group of equestrian acro­bats. Carl proposed that Riario’s workmen disco­vered the object at the cons­truc­tion site of San Lorenzo in Damaso, which was built on top of ancient stables.⁵² While the hypo­thesis is intri­guing, it seems unli­kely, since the letter refers to a disco­very at one of Riario’s vigne.

While the letter offers few details about the bronze sculp­ture that Riario put in his palace, it suggests that already in 1490 Riario was plan­ning an anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion for display at the Palazzo San Giorgio, which he had recently begun. A descrip­tion of Rome published in the 1490s offers further insight into the possi­bi­lity of an anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion at San Lorenzo, since it refe­rences the Cardinal’s gigantic statue of a Muse. The Muse is called a statue of ‘Minerva’ in the poem known as the Anti­quarie pros­pe­tiche romane by an unknown author, who went only by the pseud­onym ‘Pros­pet­tivo Mila­nese’. The ‘Pros­pet­tivo’, a Nort­hern Italian anti­qua­rian and asso­ciate of Leonardo da Vinci, wrote this poem to praise da Vinci as a sculptor and to recom­mend that Leonardo visit Rome to see the city’s ancient marvels, in parti­cular its antique statues. Recently, the poem has been convin­cingly dated to either 1495 or 1496.⁵³ The Prospettivo’s poem mentions coll­ec­tions of anti­qui­ties in about fifteen palazzi in Rome, some of them owned by noble Romans and some by cardi­nals, inclu­ding Raffaele Riario. The poem focuses on one or two notable objects in each coll­ec­tion, and is not meant as a guide­book or complete account of the contents of these collections.

The descrip­tion of Riario’s palace is focused on the Cardinal’s statue of a ‘Minerva’, which the poet compares to another statue of Minerva visible at Palazzo San Marco (now known as Palazzo Venezia):

There is in the house of San Giorgio a Minerva which makes my heart beat like a hammer the equal of that of San Marco.⁵⁴

The ‘Minerva’ at San Marco refe­renced by the Pros­pet­tivo Mila­nese is an object that still stands outside the church of San Marco. Now iden­ti­fied as an Isis or Priestess of Isis, in the Early Modern era the figure was popu­larly known as the Madonna Lucrezia (Fig. 102).⁵⁵ The Pros­pet­tivo compares this statue with an analogous ‘Minerva’ owned by Cardinal ­Riario: certainly, given its simi­la­rity in subject and scale to the Madonna Lucrezia, Riario’s giant

fig. 102 Isis or Priestess of Isis, Rome, Palazzo Venezia. 2nd century ce. Photo: Author.

Muse, which is curr­ently in the Louvre (Fig. 103).⁵⁶ Now, ­Riario’s Muse is restored as a figure of Melpo­mene, but in the Quat­tro­cento the statue had no attri­butes, so that its iden­tity as a Muse was not imme­dia­tely compre­hen­sible. In anti­quity, Riario’s Muse probably repre­sented Erato. It was one of the figures in a cycle of statues of the nine Muses and Apollo, all sculpted in colossal propor­tions, that origi­nally deco­rated the scaenae frons of the Theatre of Pompey (Map 1.13).⁵⁷

It is not certain how or when this Muse reached San Lorenzo in Damaso, or if Riario was respon­sible for moving it there. It would be remar­kable if Cardinal Riario excavated the Muse from the ground in the Quat­tro­cento, or acquired it directly from the Theatre of Pompey, without any mention of this event in the anti­qua­rian lite­ra­ture. The statue more likely arrived to San Lorenzo by an indi­rect route, and probably left its original setting at the Theatre of Pompey long before the fifte­enth century. Accor­ding to the sixte­enth-century anti­qua­rian and sculptor Flaminio Vacca, four statues from the antique cycle were excavated in the late sixte­enth century on the north side of the Campus Martius, far away from Pompey’s Theatre. They were found in what seems to have been the ruins of a late antique marble work­shop. As Vacca relates, this excava­tion, at the garden of San Salva­tore in Lauro (Map 1.1), yielded the Apollo and the two large Muses now displayed in the cour­tyard of the Palazzo Borg­hese (see Fig. 169).⁵⁸ Another statue from the same group was already visible in the Campus Martius by 1510. This figure is the gigantic Muse in Naples that is now restored as a Urania, which by 1510 stood in front of the house of the Casale family near the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Conce­zione in the current Piazza in Campo Marzio, quite some distance from the Theatre of Pompey and from San Lorenzo in Damaso (Fig. 104).⁵⁹

It is notable that the Pros­pet­tivo Mila­nese compares Riario’s Muse to the Isis that was then visible outside Palazzo San Marco. Cardinal Riario would undoub­tedly have regarded ­Palazzo San Marco, the palace built by the Vene­tian Pope Paul II (Pietro Barbo) when he was a cardinal, as a model for his own. Possibly, Riario moved the gigantic Muse to San Lorenzo to imitate the display of the Isis at San Marco, thereby tapping into the pres­tige of large-scale antique sculp­ture that had also attracted Paul II. The over-life­sized Isis at San Marco was part of a coll­ec­tion of large anti­qui­ties that Barbo had moved to the front of his palace, looking to the example of the Basi­lica of San Marco in Venice—adorned with impres­sive statues in marble, porphyry, and bronze—and to the example of the coll­ec­tion of bronze anti­qui­ties in front of San Giovanni in Late­rano. With these pres­ti­gious models in mind, Barbo brought not only the Isis, but also the porphyry sarco­phagus of Constantine’s daughter Constan­tina and a large granite basin to the front of San Marco. In 1467, rumours even circu­lated that Paul II planned to move the marble Dioscuri from Monte Cavallo and

fig. 103 Muse, restored as Melpo­mene, Paris, Louvre, Dépar­te­ment ager, ma 411. c. 50–150 ce. Photo © Musée du Louvre, Dist. rmn-Grand Palais / Anne Chauvet. fig. 104 Muse, restored as Urania, Naples, Museo Archeo­lo­gico Nazio­nale, inv. 5960. c. 50–150 ce. Photo by permis­sion of the Minis­tero della Cultura – Museo Archeo­lo­gico Nazio­nale di Napoli.

fig. 105 Anony­mous, Muse at the Palazzo San Giorgio, Foss­om­brone, Biblio­teca Civica Passionei, Codex Foss­om­brone, Disegni vol. 3, fol. 32 r. c. 1524–1538. Photo published by permis­sion of the Servizio Cultu­rale del Comune di Foss­om­brone. fig. 106 Anony­mous, Muse at the Palazzo San Giorgio, Foss­om­brone, Biblio­teca Civica Passionei, Codex Foss­om­brone, Disegni vol. 3, fol. 33 r. c. 1524–1538. Photo published by permis­sion of the Servizio Cultu­rale del Comune di Fossombrone.

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

the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aure­lius to the front of his palace.⁶⁰ Perhaps, at San Lorenzo, Raffaele Riario deli­bera­tely imitated the ambi­tion of Paul II by displaying the Muse.

The Pros­pet­tivo Mila­nese offers little insight into the setting of Riario’s Minerva/Muse in the mid-1490s, other than the poet’s refe­rence to its display at the ‘house’ of the Cardinal, which puts the statue in rela­tion to the palace of San Lorenzo in Damaso, rather than the basili-

ca. In the sixte­enth century, Riario displayed the figure in his new palace, speci­fi­cally inside the cour­tyard, which was only completed in 1503. Three extra­or­di­nary sixte­enth-century drawings repre­sent the Muse inside Riario’s recently cons­tructed cortile. Two appear in the anony­mous Codex Foss­om­brone, a compi­la­tion of anti­qua­rian drawings which may repre­sent copies of drawings produced in the work­shop of Raphael in the second decade of the sixte­enth century. These show the Muse posi­tioned in the southe­as­tern side of Riario’s cour­tyard, under­neath the arcade (Figs 105–06). Set at an angle between the first and second columns from the entrance (Fig. 107), the statue turns to face visi­tors arri­ving at Riario’s thres­hold.⁶¹ Another repre­sen­ta­tion by the Portu­guese artist Fran­cisco de Holanda from the late 1530s or the 1540s depicts the Muse in a some­what diffe­rent posi­tion, no longer angled towards the entrance, but squared up with the archi­tec­ture of the loggia (Fig. 108).⁶²

fig. 107 Rome, Palazzo San Giorgio, south side of the cortile. c. 1496–1503. Photo: Author.

fig. 108 Fran­cisco de Holanda, Os desenhos das anti­gu­alhas, Muse at the Palazzo San Giorgio, Real Biblio­teca del Monas­terio de El Escorial, inv. 28–1‑20, fol. 10 r. c. 1538–1541. Photo © Patri­monio Nacional, Real Biblio­teca del Monas­terio de El Escorial, rbme Digital.

Another fasci­na­ting glimpse into Riario’s display of the Muse is offered by a poem written some­time before c. 1513/14 by Riario’s flat­terer, Antonio Biax­ander. In this work, Biax­ander correctly iden­ti­fies Riario’s statue as a Muse and refers to its display in Riario’s new Palazzo San Giorgio [Appendix ii.19]. Judging from the context, he may have composed the poem soon after the statue had been moved to the Cardinal’s new cortile. In the poem, Biax­ander addresses Riario’s Muse as a goddess who has approa­ched Riario’s great thres­hold ‘with modest foot’. He refe­rences the ‘bronze walls’ of the Cardinal’s palace, which prevent Riario’s stead­fast virtue from ever wave­ring. ‘Muse’, Biax­ander writes, ‘salute the festi­vals now cele­brated with new hearths, salute the favourable gods, rejoi­cing in this oppor­tune time’. Playing upon the device of the Riario rudder, he asserts that the Cardinal, ‘in his great­ness, controls the wave-driven reins of Rome, and justice and piety thrive under his auspices’. The Muse’s arrival in Riario’s palace reco­g­nises the ‘honour, sple­ndour, and glory of our time’ and seems to bring back ‘the blessed reign of the old sickle-bearing man’, that is, the Age of Saturn.⁶³ In this remar­kable poem, Biax­ander cele­brates Riario’s Muse as a divine presence in the Cardinal’s house­hold, in keeping with the public image Riario hoped to culti­vate. Riario’s virtues, and the sple­ndours of his palace, have attracted the colossal Muse to Riario’s court, which she has chosen as her home. Follo­wing upon the conceit of the noble palace or garden as a ‘new Helicon’, a theme frequently evoked in panegyric poetry addressed to popes and cardi­nals, the presence of the gigantic Muse in Riario’s cour­tyard was repre­sented in Biaxander’s poem as a divine endor­se­ment of the Cardinal and his palace.

In the absence of further descrip­tions or sket­ches of objects in Riario’s coll­ec­tion, the Louvre Muse is the only antique sculp­ture that can be asso­ciated with the Cardinal during his life­time. No known artist’s drawings, archival records, or written descrip­tions can be linked to any further antique objects in Riario’s posses­sion. There is no basis for the argu­ment, some­times made in the art-histo­rical lite­ra­ture, that Riario owned a large-scale statue of Ceres or Demeter now in the Vatican Museum, or the group of Muses disco­vered in the Odeon of Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli that were later moved to the Villa Madama.⁶⁴ Nor is any signi­fi­cant insight into Riario’s coll­ec­tions offered by the Galli-Balducci accounts. These record a payment from Riario for ‘certe storie’ excavated in the vigna of Simone da Piom­bino in 1498, yet it is unclear whether these ‘storie’ (presu­mably, antique reliefs) were buil­ding mate­rials, or sculp­tures intended for display inside a coll­ec­tion. The Cardinal bought them for a rela­tively modest two ducats, an amount compa­rable to payments made to marble excava­tors for generic pieces of marble.⁶⁵

Despite a dearth of evidence, it is nevert­heless certain that Riario had an anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion of some sort, since a number of sources refer to it indi­rectly. A guide­book to Rome, the Opus­culum of the Floren­tine cleric Fran­cesco Alber­tini published in 1510, refe­rences not only

the colossal Muse but also other ‘statues and pictures’ at Riario’s house.⁶⁶ The Nota d’Anticaglie, an anony­mous descrip­tion of the anti­qui­ties of Rome composed towards the end of Alex­ander VI’s ponti­fi­cate, states that there were ‘anti­ca­glie et spoglie et cose mara­vigliose’ to be seen in the ‘house of San Giorgio’.⁶⁷ In 1506, when the Laocoön emerged from the ground, it seems that Riario was inte­rested in acqui­ring it.⁶⁸ And in 1519, towards the end of Riario’s life, a concrete refe­rence to his anti­qui­ties is made in a letter from Federico II Gonzaga to Bald­as­sare Castig­lione in Rome. When Gonzaga asked Castig­lione to look out for anti­qui­ties he could send to Mantua, he instructed Castig­lione to ‘ask the Cardinal of San Giorgio, who usually has many, since he delights in them’.⁶⁹ In addi­tion, there is the matter of Michelangelo’s Slee­ping Cupid and Bacchus. As will be discussed in Chap­ters 6 and 7, when the Floren­tine merchant Bald­as­sare del Mila­nese tried to sell Michelangelo’s Slee­ping Cupid to Riario as an ancient work in 1496, he presumed that Riario would be a willing customer for a costly ‘anti­quity’. Further, indi­rect refe­rences to Riario’s anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion are provided in Michelangelo’s letter of July 1496 to his Floren­tine patron Lorenzo di Pier­fran­cesco de’ Medici [Appendix ii.10], which was mentioned in Chapter 1 and will be explored in further detail in Chap­ters 6 and 7. In this letter, Michel­an­gelo describes his arrival in Rome, his attempt to buy back the Slee­ping Cupid from Bald­as­sare, and Riario’s commis­sion of the Bacchus. At his first meeting with Riario, the artist writes, the Cardinal sent him to observe ‘certain figures’ (certe figure). As will be discussed, there can be little doubt that the certe figure were prima­rily, if not exclu­si­vely, antique statues that belonged to Riario himself.

What, then, did Riario’s anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion look like, and where was it? These ques­tions resist straight­for­ward answers. They are compli­cated by the cons­truc­tion history of Riario’s palazzo and the long period of uphe­aval at San Lorenzo that began in the 1480s and continued into the second decade of the sixte­enth century. While there are few certain­ties, in this chapter and those that follow it will be proposed that before recon­s­truc­tion works made Riario leave San Lorenzo, his coll­ec­tion would likely have been displayed in the palace garden. When buil­ding work started in earnest and after Riario left the palace, however, it is unli­kely that the Cardinal’s anti­qui­ties would have remained in his unoc­cu­pied palazzo. Instead, Riario would have kept them else­where, most logi­cally at the house of his trusted manager Jacopo Galli across the street. While this hypo­thesis will be explored further in Chapter 7,⁷⁰ for the rema­inder of this discus­sion, the focus will be on the garden of San Lorenzo in Damaso and its suita­bi­lity as a setting for the display of Riario’s sculp­ture coll­ec­tion. As will be explored here, even before Riario’s arrival there was already a tradi­tion of use for the garden of the palace at San Lorenzo and its loggia as a place of leisure and enter­tain­ment. The garden at San Lorenzo was, moreover, a setting compa­rable to other examples of palace coll­ec­tions put on view by Riario’s peers.

fig. 109 Giulio Campo­rese, Plan of the ground floor of the Palazzo San Giorgio showing the area of the garden, Rome, Archivio di Stato, Colle­zioni disegni e mappe – Colle­zione I, 87 — 546 / 2. 1843. Photo © Minis­tero della Cultura. All rights reserved.

fig. 110 Tazza Farnese, Naples, Museo Archeo­lo­gico Nazio­nale, inv. 27611. 3rd–2nd century Bce. Photo by permis­sion of the Minis­tero della Cultura – Museo Archeo­lo­gico Nazio­nale di Napoli.

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

Between 1483, when Riario was given San Lorenzo in Damaso, and his depar­ture from the palace, probably in 1492 or 1493, he spent about ten years living there.⁷¹ The Cardinal’s palace he inhe­rited had a giar­dino segreto located to the west of the church and palace (Map 2).⁷² Th is garden occu­pied roughly the same area that it would occupy in the sixte­enth century, after Riario rebuilt the entire complex (Fig. 109). When Riario arrived at San Lorenzo, the garden was used as the private retreat of the resi­dent cardinal. Its func­tions are made evident in the accounts of the over­seers of San Lorenzo: in October 1481, the fabri­cieri paid for three fine­stre impan­nate (obscured windows) to be installed in the large sacristy at the northwest corner of the basi­lica, inclu­ding one ‘above where the organ is, so that the Cardinal [Cardinal Fran­cesco Gonzaga] is not seen walking in the garden, which would cause scandal in those quar­ters’.⁷³ To main­tain decorum, the Cardinal’s private garden was kept sepa­rate from the basi­lica and its sight-lines.

It is likely that the garden was used as a setting for the display of ancient sculp­ture by Cardi­nals Ludo­vico Trevisan (resi­dent at San Lorenzo between 1440 and 1465) and Fran­cesco Gonzaga (resi­dent between 1467 and 1483). An inven­tory of Cardinal Trevisan’s goods made in 1465 lists vast quan­ti­ties of crystal cups, silver plate, bronze sculp­tures, and over a thousand coins. His coll­ec­tion was home for some time to the Tazza Farnese (Fig. 110), as well as a famous carved carne­lian known as the Sigillo di Nerone.⁷⁴ Trevisan likely coll­ected antique marble sculp­tures, as well, since in 1446 he gave a marble sculp­ture of a Slee­ping Nymph— almost certainly an antique statue—to King Alfonso I of Naples.⁷⁵ Cardinal Trevisan was known for his love of banque­ting and enter­tain­ments, some of which were held in the garden of San Lorenzo. A letter of 1462, for example, remem­bers ‘a solemn banquet’ held ‘under a loggia adja­cent to a very beau­tiful garden that he has, in which a thousand delights were created out of gree­nery: galleys, ships, peacocks, lions’.⁷⁶

Trevisan’s successor at San Lorenzo in Damaso, Fran­cesco Gonzaga, amassed an equally dazz­ling coll­ec­tion of anti­qui­ties and precious objects. Invent­ories made in 1483 and 1496 describe large quan­ti­ties of cameos, intaglios, meda­glie, bronze figures, and cups in crystal and hard­stone, many of which he had acquired from the estate of Pope Paul II.⁷⁷ David Cham­bers has argued that Cardinal Gonzaga ‘without doubt’ also coll­ected marble sculp­tures, even if these are not mentioned in the invent­ories, which focus on objects kept inside the house.⁷⁸ During Gonzaga’s time as Cardinal of San Lorenzo, the Cardinal’s palace

featured a grand, double-height loggia facing onto the garden (see Map 2), perhaps similar in appearance to the triple-height loggia looking onto the garden of the Palazzo Picco­lo­mini in Pienza (Fig. 111). The two stories of this regal loggia offered Gonzaga the choice of dining either in the garden or above it. Its func­tions are reve­aled in a letter of 1472, which describes Gonzaga’s reco­very from an illness: he ‘dressed and went down to the loggia in the garden, ate there and returned to his room. At dinner he dressed again and did the same in the upper loggia’.⁷⁹ The loggia offered Gonzaga not only a serene setting for private enjoy­ment, but also a stage-like venue suitable for enter­tain­ments and recep­tions held at his palace. In July 1472, while Gonzaga was in Bologna, Cardinal Pietro Riario hosted a banquet at the ‘caxa di Mantoa’ for a group of French ambassa­dors. Letters reporting on the event describe a banquet in a ‘loggia in the garden’ draped in red velvet, with lavish deco­ra­tions and even edible sculp­tures illus­t­ra­ting the ‘stories of Jason’.⁸⁰

fig. 111 Pienza, Palazzo Picco­lo­mini. 1459–1462. Photo © Andreas Weyermann.

The discus­sion of Gonzaga’s garden at San Lorenzo has been compli­cated by the fact that the Cardinal had two gardens: that at San Lorenzo in Damaso, and also a larger garden at his villa at Sant’Agata de’ Goti on the Quirinal Hill, near the Baths of Constan­tine. In letters written in 1479 to his maggior­domo Fran­cesco Maffei, Cardinal Gonzaga describes one of these in detail as an exten­sive garden with a laby­rinth and mytho­lo­gical pain­tings.⁸¹ David Cham­bers and others have argued that this exten­sive haven deco­rated with mytho­lo­gical scenes was the giar­dino segreto of San Lorenzo in Damaso; if this were indeed the case, it would be highly signi­fi­cant for any inter­pre­ta­tion of Riario’s anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion, and of Michelangelo’s Bacchus. The Cardinal’s letters, however, almost certainly describe his garden at Sant’Agata. In his corre­spon­dence, Gonzaga takes Maffei to task for making changes to a large and elabo­rate garden he had desi­gned using his own ideas (‘el pensiere nostro’) and chas­tises him for uproo­ting pome­gra­nate trees that the Cardinal had planted himself. He mentions a camera del bagno, a grove of cypresses and pines, and topiary bushes as ‘high as one can raise one’s hand’. The Cardinal asks Maffei to commis­sion pain­tings of the Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs for a walled horti­cello segreto, and to order a depic­tion of the story of Mele­ager for an exit near a well. He describes a laby­rinth, which the Cardinal wanted to deco­rate with pain­tings showing the story of Th eseus.⁸² The implied size of this garden, and the comple­xity of its icono­gra­phic programme, cannot be recon­ciled with the rela­tively small, urban garden at San Lorenzo at Damaso. The letters must refer to Sant’Agata, as is made clear

fig. 112 Maarten van Heems­kerck, Palazzo Medici- Madama, Berlin, SmB, Kupfer­stich­ka­bi­nett, inv. 79.D.2, Album I, fol. 5 r. 1532–1537. Photo © bpk / Kupfer­stich­ka­bi­nett, SmB / Jörg P. Anders.

fig. 113 Giuseppe Vasi, Palazzo S. Marco della Sere­niss. Rep. di Venezia (plate 65), with ‘Parte del Palazzo S. Marco con Giar­dino pensile’ labelled by the number 4, 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. 114 The Hanging Garden of Palazzo San Marco in Rome, Venice, Archivio di Stato, Miscel­lanea materie miste nota­bili, b. 120. 1621. Photo © Archivio di Stato, Venezia.

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by Cardinal Gonzaga’s discus­sion of the ‘sopracelo de la nostra camera di cani’, the roof for a shelter for his hunting dogs. Such a feature would only be suitable for the Cardinal’s house at Sant’Agata de’ Goti, where he often hunted.⁸³

The garden at San Lorenzo in Damaso, by contrast, was a giar­dino segreto of the type that, in Rome in the late fifte­enth and early sixte­enth century, became a preferred setting for cardi­nals’ anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tions. The loggia atta­ched to the garden would have made it espe­ci­ally appro­priate for the display of anti­qui­ties, since loggie facing onto gardens in city palazzi were favoured sites for the exhi­bi­tion of antique sculp­ture. The anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tions of cardi­nals were closely linked to the diplo­matic recep­tions held in garden loggie in honour of distin­gu­ished guests. Coll­ec­tions of anti­qui­ties were thus often displayed under­neath open-air loggie that were used for dining during the summer months, some­times in the company of ambassa­dors or other car-

dinals. Such a setting inspired Maarten van Heemskerck’s drawings of the anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion in a garden-facing loggia at the Palazzo Medici-Madama, which was inha­bited first by Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici and then by his sister-in-law Alfon­sina ­Orsini (Fig. 112).⁸⁴

In the Quat­tro­cento, an important example and a key prece­dent for Riario would have been the large, walled garden that Pietro Barbo built at Palazzo San Marco after Barbo became Pope Paul II. The garden was dismantled and moved in the nine­te­enth century to make way for the Vittorio Emanuele II monu­ment, yet drawings, prints, and photo­graphs preserve impres­sions of its original appearance. Giuseppe Vasi’s engra­ving of the Palazzo San Marco repres­ents the substan­tial ‘giar­dino pensile’ as a substan­tial, crenell­ated struc­ture with stables on the ground floor and a double-height garden above (Fig. 113). In a ground plan from the seven­te­enth century, it is shown divided into planted beds arranged around a circular foun­tain (Fig. 114). This delightful garden was the setting for Paul II’s important coll­ec­tion of anti­qui­ties, crea­ting a regal and divine atmo­sphere that made the garden an ideal setting for the recep­tion of important guests. The contents of Paul II’s coll­ec­tions can be parti­ally inferred from drawings and descrip­tions, which refer to the display of archi­tec­tural frag­ments, or a much-admired sarco­phagus illus­t­ra­ting a drunken Dionysus held up by satyrs (Fig. 115).⁸⁵ In the loggie, Barbo displayed antique statues such as a life­sized marble figure of

fig. 115 Bacchic sarco­phagus form­erly in Palazzo San Marco, Naples, Museo Archeo­lo­gico Nazio­nale, inv. 27710. Mid-2nd century ce. Photo by permis­sion of the Minis­tero della Cultura — Museo Archeo­lo­gico Nazio­nale di Napoli.

Poly­phemus and a Greek, which was still visible there when Ulisse Aldro­vandi visited the garden in 1550.⁸⁶ When Cardinal Lorenzo Cibo was the resi­dent cardinal at Palazzo San Marco (1491–1503), the Bolo­gnese artist Amico Asper­tini visited and drew a relief of a suove­tau­rilia with the caption ‘in logar­dino de santo marco’ (Fig. 116–17).⁸⁷ In addi­tion to these scat­tered refe­rences, an overall sense of what the arran­ge­ment of sculp­ture might have looked like in the Quat­tro­cento is offered by historic photo­graphs from the nine­te­enth century. Th ese reveal that sculp­tures were displayed in the loggia of the garden when it served as the seat of the Acca­demia di Belle Arti del Regno Italico (Fig. 118).

The func­tion of the sculp­ture garden at Palazzo San Marco as a setting for diplo­matic recep­tions is reflected in the poetry of Giovanni Michele Nagonio, speci­fi­cally in a panegyric poem he dedi­cated to the Holy Roman Emperor Maxi­mi­lian I in 1494. In this poem, Nagonio advises Maxi­mi­lian to travel to Rome so that Pope Alex­ander VI could crown him as emperor. Nagonio’s poem paints a vivid picture of the glorious entry Maxi­mi­lian would receive and the cele­bra­tory banquet that would be held in the garden of Palazzo San Marco. He describes the palace as a ‘huge buil­ding’ which ‘surpasses Olympus’. ‘Ancient images and statues of the gods and frag­ments of sacred ruin’ deco­rate the garden, while a figure of turreted Cybele is posi­tioned in a foun­tain at centre. Arranged all around are images of the gods; ‘innu­me­rable men live on in old statues and famous women of the empire are seen in a capti­vating image’.⁸⁸ The gods enliven this setting and pay homage to the pope’s hono­ured guest, Maxi­mi­lian. Stately banquets in the garden are also described several decades later, in 1523, when

fig. 116 Suove­tau­rilia relief, Paris, Louvre, Dépar­te­ment ager, ma 1096. c. 15 ce. Photo © rmN- Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski.

fig. 117 Amico Asper­tini, Anti­qui­ties in San Pietro and in the Garden of San Marco, Wolfegg, Schloss Wolfegg, Codex Wolfegg, fols 30 v –31 r. 1500–1503. Photo cour­tesy of Schloss Wolfegg.

fig. 118 Photo­graph of the Palazzo Venezia / Palazzo San Marco as the seat of the Acca­demia di Belle Arti del Regno Italico, with the hanging garden (the ‘Palaz­zetto Venezia’) before its destruc­tion, Rome, Palazzo Venezia, Archivio Foto­gra­fico. 19th century. Published by permis­sion of the Minis­tero della Cultura — Vitto­riano e Palazzo Venezia.

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

a Vene­tian ambassador reported on a recep­tion held in the garden, noting that tables were set up along the corridor of the upper loggia, over­loo­king a garden ‘with a beau­tiful foun­tain in the middle surrounded by orange, laurel and cypress trees.’⁸⁹

Another Quat­tro­cento prece­dent of great signi­fi­cance for Cardinal Riario was the garden and anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere at SS. Apos­toli. Della Rovere inhe­rited this palace from Pietro Riario in 1474, and in the 1480s and 1490s displayed there one of Rome’s most renowned private coll­ec­tions of anti­qui­ties, the direct prede­cessor of the Belve­dere statue court that Della Rovere founded after his elec­tion as Julius II. The centre­piece of Della Rovere’s coll­ec­tions at SS. Apos­toli was the Apollo Belve­dere, disco­vered in 1489 in a vigna at San Lorenzo in Panis­perna. Della Rovere’s Hercules and Antaeus (Fig. 119) and Venus Felix, both later brought to the Belve­dere, were also almost certainly displayed at SS. Apos­toli while Della Rovere was still a cardinal.⁹⁰ At SS. Apos­toli, anti­qui­ties were arranged in a loggia facing onto a garden (Fig. 120). A foun­tain made from an immense, porphyry basin—the impres­sive object now at the centre of the Sala Rotonda in the Vatican Museums—marked the centre of an ordered array of orange trees planted in the garden.⁹¹ As was the case at the Palazzo San Marco, recep­tions were held under­neath the loggia and in the presence of antique statues. A descrip­tion of one such event, held on 1 May 1504, offers insight into the func­tion of the Cardinal’s anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion at these recep­tions. Della Rovere was by this time living at the Vatican as Pope Julius II, and the banquet was hosted by the resi­dent cardinal at the time, Giovanni Colonna, to cele­brate the feast of the Apostles. Enter­tain­ments for the guests included the perfor­mance of a poem by Evan­ge­lista Madda­leni de’ Capo­di­ferro, the ‘Acta in convivio Io. Columnae’.⁹² For this perfor­mance, the statue of the Apollo Belve­dere became an interlo­cutor in Capodiferro’s poem by ‘spea­king’ the lines written for Apollo. ‘Now do not look at me here in marble’, the Apollo states, ‘but see me in my true form’. The poem has Apollo Belve­dere declare himself an ally and servant of Pope Julius II, asser­ting that he is happier at the Palazzo SS. Apos­toli than he is in Delphi. ‘This is my certain home, and I bring reve­la­tions from your oaks, Julius, to these ances­tral seats.’⁹³ As was the case at San Marco, the sculp­ture coll­ec­tion present in the garden served a panegyric role deemed appro­priate for diplo­matic receptions.

* * *

fig. 119 Hercules and Antaeus, Florence, Palazzo Pitti. 2nd century ce. Photo © Minis­tero della Cultura. No repro­duc­tions allowed without permission.

As was seen, the artists Riario preferred embo­died a distinctly Nort­hern Italian approach to visual culture, a sense of courtly sple­ndour, and an anti­qua­ria­nism that stressed mili­tary imagery and heraldry. He took advan­tage of favours won in the conclave that elected Alex­ander VI to found a Riario villa in Tras­te­vere, which he envi­sioned as a forti­fied, dynastic seat for the Riario-Sforza in Rome. At the same time, the Cardinal aspired to possess an important coll­ec­tion of antique sculp­tures, as can be intuited from scat­tered, largely indi­rect refe­rences. The garden of the Cardinal’s palace at San Lorenzo was argu­ably the most appro­priate setting for Riario’s coll­ec­tion, based on the use of the garden by Cardi­nals Trevisan and Gonzaga, as well as the parallel examples of sculp­ture coll­ec­tions deve­loped by Paul II and Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. Given Riario’s relent­less pursuit of domi­nance, his ambi­tions as a coll­ector were likely aimed at rival­ling these coll­ec­tions, which were Rome’s most pres­ti­gious. At Palazzo San Marco and Palazzo SS. Apos­toli, anti­qui­ties created the illu­sion that the ‘gods’ were present at earthly banquets, having chosen to dwell in the houses of divine rulers. These themes were echoed not only in Riario’s Muse, but also in the statue of Bacchus that Riario ordered from Michel­an­gelo, argu­ably, to expand his anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion, to compete with the most successful of his peers, and to create the appro­priate atmo­sphere of divine presence in his palace. The extra­or­di­nary circum­s­tances that first brought the Floren­tine sculptor to Riario’s door­step, in the summer of 1496, are the subject of the next chapter.

fig. 120 Rome, Palazzo Colonna at SS. Apos­toli, loggia. Post 1471–ante 1503. Photo: Roberto Sigis­mondi, © Biblio­theca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunst­ge­schichte, Rome.