The Bacchus in the Houses of the Galli, 1505–1572

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

9 The Bacchus in the Houses of the Galli 1505–1572

In the spring of 1505, after Michel­an­gelo had won fame in Florence with the colossal David and the Battle of Cascina, Pope Julius II called the artist back to Rome, entrus­ting him with the pres­ti­gious task of sculp­ting his tomb.¹ Jacopo Galli died in June, shortly after Michelangelo’s return. As this chapter will explore, Galli’s death did not sever the close ties between Michel­an­gelo and the Galli in Rome. Michelangelo’s Bacchus and Young Archer remained in the Galli family’s coll­ec­tions for decades, until 1572—eight years after the artist’s own death. Michel­an­gelo remained close to Jacopo Galli’s sons, who were able to request small favours from him, inclu­ding an altar­piece on cloth that the artist provided for their use in Bologna. He kept up the connec­tions he had made in the network of the Galli, as is seen in his agree­ment to provide a Risen Christ in 1519–1521 for the Porcari family. At the same time, the presence of his Bacchus and Young Archer at the houses of the Galli preserved Michelangelo’s rela­ti­onship to the Rione Parione. Before the Sack of 1527, the nume­rous lite­rary socie­ties that enli­vened this quarter were no doubt engaged with Michelangelo’s statues, which would have been highly prized by the district’s poets, anti­qua­rians, and anti­qui­ties collectors.

While Maarten van Heemskerck’s drawings of the Galli coll­ec­tions (Figs. 215–16) offer remar­kable insight into how the Bacchus was displayed in these years, it is unli­kely that the statue remained in the same loca­tion from the early Cinque­cento until 1572. After Jacopo’s death in 1505, his eldest son and heir, Paolo Galli, would have inhe­rited the Bacchus along with the rest of his father’s coll­ec­tion. In 1550, Ulisse Aldro­vandi saw the Bacchus, the Young Archer, and several antique sculp­tures in the house of Paolo Galli ‘presso al palagio di S. Giorgio’, that is, in the palaz­zetto across from the Palazzo San Giorgio (Map 1.10, Map 3). Paolo Galli, however, did not always reside in the palaz­zetto. During the Sack of Rome, letters addressed to Paolo reveal that he was living in the Galli’s casa grande across the street from the Pasquino (Map 1.8, Map 3), where he presu­mably kept the Bacchus. The casa grande suffered exten­sive damage during the Sack and was appar­ently looted. Extra­or­di­nary poems by Antonio Tebaldeo, as is discussed below, reveal that the Bacchus itself was stolen, only to be rescued and returned to the Galli.

In the after­math of the Sack, finan­cial pres­sures even­tually forced Paolo to rent out the casa grande. By the 1530s, Paolo had moved to the palaz­zetto on Piazza San Lorenzo, where Maarten van Heems­kerck saw the Bacchus on display, missing its right hand and inters­persed with frag­mented anti­qui­ties in the Galli coll­ec­tions. Juxta­posed with ancient marbles, the frag­mented Bacchus greatly enhanced Michelangelo’s artistic stature. It fostered a cult-like rever­ence for the artist’s ability to rival the antique, and its capti­vating display made a signi­fi­cant impres­sion on artists and anti­qua­rians who visited the Galli coll­ec­tions. At the same time, the display of the Bacchus missing its hand became a poignant symbol of the devastation

endured by the Galli family and all of Parione during the Sack of Rome. The cala­mi­ties of the Sack proved insur­moun­table for the Galli, and the family went into decline in the sixte­enth century. Even­tually, they were forced to sell offpro­per­ties and treasured artworks, inclu­ding the Bacchus. The vivid presence of the Bacchus in the houses of the Galli ended in 1572, when Medici Grand Duke Fran­cesco I, seeking to appro­priate Michelangelo’s legacy after the artist’s death, acquired the statue from Jacopo Galli’s heirs and moved it to Florence.

Jacopo Galli’s Sons, Cardinal Riario, and Michelangelo

Condivi, in his 1553 biography of Michel­an­gelo, stressed the conti­nuity of Michelangelo’s rela­ti­onship to the Galli family over gene­ra­tions when he wrote, ‘Messer Jacopo wished [Michel­an­gelo] to make a Cupid, and both of these works [the Bacchus and the Young Archer] are seen today in the house of Giuliano and Paolo Galli, cour­teous and upstan­ding gentlemen, with whom Michel­an­gelo has always main­tained an inti­mate friend­ship’ [Appendix ii.29]. While Condivi did not credit Jacopo Galli’s sons with the same ingegno he attri­buted to their father, he acknow­ledged their stead­fast loyalty to Michel­an­gelo and the pride they took in displaying two of his statues. Jacopo’s sons prized these works as symbols of successes they were never able to match. Excluded from any profits of the Galli-Balducci bank, Galli’s sons—Paolo, Giuliano, Gerolamo, and Giovanni Battista—depended for their liveli­hood on their close rela­ti­onship with Cardinal Riario and on income from proper­ties in the Isola Galli they inhe­rited from their father. The first-born son and primary heir was Paolo Galli, about whom little is known other than the titles of the pres­ti­gious offices he acquired (inclu­ding capo­rione of Parione, Roman Conser­vator, and Came­ra­rius of the Confra­ter­nity of SS. Salva­tore ad Sancta Sanc­torum). Two of Galli’s younger sons, Giuliano and Giovanni Battista, were lifelong depend­ents of Cardinal Riario, both of whom held a chap­laincy at San Lorenzo in Damaso.² Giuliano Galli, doctor iuris, became a canon of San Lorenzo in Damaso, and Giuliano and Giovanni Battista Galli were given rooms in Riario’s palace.³ As is discussed below, when Cardinal Riario trans­ferred the Bishopric of Viterbo to his cousin Otta­viano Riario-Sforza in 1506, Giuliano and Giovanni Battista became over­seers of the Bishopric, commis­sio­ning a noble house at the Bishop’s seat of Bagnaia.

After Jacopo Galli’s death, even as the pope and the Signoria of Florence vied for Michelangelo’s time, Galli’s sons could still call upon the artist for small favours. In November 1506, Paolo and Giuliano Galli paid Michel­an­gelo for a pain­ting on fabric—probably a travel­ling altarpiece—which they required to accom­pany Cardinal Riario on a trip to Bologna with Pope Julius II. As Mancusi-Ungaro first observed in 1971, the Balducci bank ledgers record a modest payment of k11 on 27 November 1506 from the ‘heirs of Jacopo Galli’ to Michelangelo.

The stated reason for Michelangelo’s deposit of the sum was ‘per dipin­gere uno telaio d’altare’, that is, to paint what might be inter­preted as an altar cloth, litur­gical cloth, or fabric altar­piece.⁴ Hirst suggested that this work may have been commis­sioned for the Galli chapel in San Lorenzo in Damaso, which was incom­plete at the time of Jacopo’s death in 1505. Galli’s testa­ment requested burial in this ‘new chapel’, which his sons were respon­sible for furnis­hing, ‘with deco­ra­tions suited to their desire’ [Appendix ii.16].⁵ Since the sum that Galli’s sons paid the artist was modest, Hirst has argued that the commis­sion was perhaps for an altar cloth or ‘an image on the altar’ destined for their chapel in San Lorenzo.⁶

In the spring of 1506, Michel­an­gelo was not in Rome, but in Florence, working on marble statues of the apostles for the Cathe­dral of Florence and on the Battle of Cascina. Julius II had shifted his focus and resources away from the tomb project and Michel­an­gelo, feeling slighted by the pope’s treat­ment, had left Rome without Julius’s permis­sion. A letter from Giovanni Balducci to Michel­an­gelo in Florence, written on 6 March 1506, expresses deep disap­point­ment at the artist’s depar­ture, assu­ring him that the pope remained committed to the tomb and expres­sing hope that Michel­an­gelo would return to Rome promptly.⁷ Julius II would indeed not allow Michel­an­gelo avoid his service for long, and when the pope travelled to Bologna, he issued a summons insis­ting that the artist join him there. Julius II entered Bologna on 11 November 1506, accom­pa­nied by Cardinal Riario, whose parti­ci­pa­tion in this journey is remem­bered in Raphael’s Mass at Bolsena (Fig. 76).⁸ In letters of 19 and 21 November 1506, Cardi­nals Fran­cesco Sode­rini and Fran­cesco Alidosi wrote to the Signoria of Florence with a request to send Michel­an­gelo, ‘because Our Holi­ness greatly desires Michel­an­gelo, the Floren­tine sculptor, to come here to carry out work in Bologna’. Soderini’s brother, the gonfa­lo­niere of Florence Piero Sode­rini, accom­mo­dated their request, and on 27 November he wrote a letter of intro­duc­tion for Michel­an­gelo to deliver in person to the pope.⁹ On the same day, 27 November, the Galli heirs paid Michel­an­gelo for their telaio d’altare, presu­mably, a travel­ling altar­piece on fabric intended not for the Galli chapel in Rome, but for use in litur­gical services held in Bologna. The payment to Michel­an­gelo is inters­persed among others in the Galli-Balducci accounts related to Paolo and Giuliano’s trip to Bologna in the entou­rage of Julius II and Cardinal Riario. On 9 November, seven­teen ducats left the account of Paolo Galli for a silver litur­gical vessel (a ‘tazza liscia scol­pita’) needed for travel with the pope (‘per andare chol­papa’).¹⁰ On 13 December, payment was made for another tazza that Paolo and Giuliano had taken with them ‘when they went to Bologna with the pope’, and on the same day, a ducat left the account of Paolo Galli ‘for the expenses of a horse for Bologna’.¹¹ Like the silver vessels, Michelangelo’s telaio d’altare can be unders­tood as a litur­gical object required for their use far from home. As a token of his intrin­seca amicizia with Galli’s sons, Michel­an­gelo had made this unas­suming work for a negli­gible sum. Since Giuliano Galli served as a chap­lain for Cardinal Riario, the commis­sion was rooted, as well, in Michelangelo’s linge­ring sense of obli­ga­tion to

the Cardinal, his first Roman patron. Although Michel­an­gelo had left behind the Sant’Agostino altar­piece, he had not severed all ties with Riario.

In the decades follo­wing Jacopo’s death, Galli’s sons were enti­rely depen­dent on Cardinal Riario and remained firmly within Riario’s sphere of influence. They continued to rent proper­ties on the via dei Leutari to Riario’s asso­ciates: for a time, they let out the casa grande to Cardinal Riario’s ally Basilio Mascardi, Bishop of Todi, with Cardinal Riario paying a share of the rent.¹² They also played an active role, as was noted, in the manage­ment of the Bishopric of Viterbo on behalf of the Riario family. Cardinal Riario had held this bishopric from 1498 until September 1506, when he trans­ferred it to Girolamo Riario’s son, Otta­viano Riario-Sforza, as partial compen­sa­tion for the loss of Imola and Forlì. Despite ceding his bishopric to Otta­viano, Riario main­tained a presence at the Bishop’s seat, Bagnaia. Cardinal Riario had long favoured Bagnaia (site of the future Villa Lante) as a place of leisure, and as Bishop of Viterbo he had deve­loped it into a hunting park and retreat.¹³ In 1506, with the help of Giuliano Galli, the Cardinal continued to invest in the ‘parco’ at Bagnaia as well as in an unspe­ci­fied ‘fabricha’.¹⁴ Giuliano and Giovanni Galli took great pride in their role at Bagnaia and, it seems c. 1520, built their own palazzo in the heart of the city (Fig. 206). Inside and out, the Galli palace in Bagnaia displays the Galli stemma of the rooster inter­mingled with the Riario rose (Fig. 207). Fres­coes in the inte­rior illus­trate putti holding roses, unicorns, and mytho­lo­gical crea­tures, while a painted wooden ceiling combines the Galli double rooster with the initials ‘SPQR’ in honour of the family’s Roman origins.¹⁵

The sons of Jacopo Galli bene­fitted greatly from the continued support of Cardinal Riario. Riario remained one of the richest cardi­nals in Rome, and in 1509 his house­hold was considered the largest in the city.¹⁶ He enjoyed a high status in the court of Julius II, as is seen in Raphael’s Mass at Bolsena (Fig. 76), in which Cardi­nals Leonardo Grosso della Rovere and Riario are accorded a posi­tion of honour, knee­ling behind Julius.¹⁷ At the same time, the loss of Imola and Forlì signi­fi­cantly weak­ened Cardinal Riario’s poli­tical stan­ding. The elec­tion of Giovanni de’ Medici as Leo X in 1513 denied Riario yet another chance at the papacy and further eroded his autho­rity. After this conclave, Riario’s eternal hope of winning the papal tiara for himself was met with ridi­cule in Rome, as is seen in Pietro Aretino’s sati­rical Testa­mento dell’elefante of 1516. In this imagined testa­ment, the elephant Hanno bequea­thed his ivory tusks to Riario, mocking his insa­tiable greed and his ‘perpetua espe­taz­zion del ponti­fi­cado’.¹⁸ Another vivid allu­sion to the wide­spread mockery of the Cardinal was provided by a Vene­tian ambassador writing in March 1517:

The Most Reverend Cardinal of San Giorgio, a Genoese, is a rich man of fifty-nine years, the nephew of Sixtus IV, and not very skilled in poli­tics. He hopes to be pope and rides about with 400 horses and twenty-three atten­dants, and based on his repu­ta­tion he thinks he will be elected to the papacy, but he will die a Cardinal.¹⁹

In May 1517, only a few weeks after this descrip­tion was written, a dramatic reversal of fortune led to Riario’s final down­fall. Nearly forty years after the Pazzi conspi­racy, the Cardinal was impli­cated in another infa­mous plot, the Petrucci conspi­racy to assas­si­nate Pope Leo X. Confes­sions extra­cted from Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci’s servant led to the arrest of Petrucci, Cardinal Bandi­nello Sauli, and Cardinal Riario, who were impri­soned in Castel Sant’Angelo. By July, Petrucci was put to death; Riario was stripped of his cardi­na­late and fined the enormous sum of 150,000 Cameral ducats. It was claimed that Riario had wished

fig. 206 Bagnaia, Palazzo Galli. c. 1520s. Photo: Author. fig. 207 Bagnaia, Palazzo Galli. c. 1520s. Photo: Author.

for the pope’s death in the hopes of winning the papacy for himself. Yet the circum­s­tances of the plot have been much debated, and as Kate Lowe has shown, a ‘conspi­racy’ may have been orchestrated by the Medici pope to remove his enemies, raise money, and seize Riario’s palace and bene­fices.²⁰ Even the Master of Cere­mo­nies, Paride de’ Grassi, ques­tioned whether the pope—the son of Lorenzo de’ Medici—had impli­cated Riario to take revenge for the Pazzi conspi­racy.²¹ Although Riario escaped death and would ulti­m­ately regain his cardi­na­late in 1518, he was ruined by the 150,000-ducat fine levied on him. Leo X demanded his full submis­sion: allies of the Cardinal, inclu­ding Paolo Galli, were asked to pledge that they would coll­ec­tively pay an addi­tional 150,000 ducat fee if Riario failed to remain loyal.²²

Riario’s fall from grace in the after­math of the conspi­racy was as rapid as his rise, as would become a point of mockery for the sati­rists of the Roman lite­rary scene. During Christ­ma­stime, 1517, Riario was ridi­culed during a game of ‘Sortes Virgi­lianae’ played at the house of Johannes Goritz. In ‘Virgi­lian lots’, lines from Virgil’s Aeneid were drawn at random; in keeping with the belief that Virgil was not only a poet but a prophet, they were thought to predict the future. The lines drawn for Cardinal Riario referred to Aeneas’s futile attempt to grasp the shade of his wife Creusa in the under­world: ‘Three times I tried to throw my arms around her neck; three times the form I grasped in vain escaped my hands’ (Aeneid ii.792–93), which was taken to allude to Riario’s dashed hopes for victory in the conclaves that elected Pius III, Julius II, and Leo X.²³ Riario’s stemma of the rose, which he had hoped would be ‘perpe­tual’, became a symbol of the tran­si­ence of his power, which bloomed but quickly faded. It was reported that light­ning struck Riario’s palace just as he was released from Castel Sant’Angelo, inspi­ring one poet to write, ‘Heavenly thun­der­bolts have struck down the rose. Once struck, what remains of the rose but its thorn?’ [Appendix ii.21].²⁴ Stripped of his vast wealth and his aura of invin­ci­bi­lity, the Cardinal’s health declined, leading him to leave Rome and seek reco­very in Naples with his loyal servants, the ‘chie­rici romani’ Giuliano and Giovanni Battista Galli. In July 1521, Giuliano and Giovanni Battista witnessed Riario’s testa­ment and were present at his deathbed.²⁵

Michelangelo’s Risen Christ for the Porcari

With the decline of Riario’s fortunes, Michelangelo’s ties to the Galli family proved more endu­ring. The artist continued to nurture rela­ti­onships he had formed in the circle of the Galli, as is seen in his invol­vement in an important commis­sion from their rela­tives, the Porcari. Michel­an­gelo favoured this family of Roman merchant bankers by agre­eing to carve for them a statue of Christ the Rede­emer (Fig. 208).²⁶ His personal connec­tions to the family must have played a key role in his decision to take on the commis­sion, which he accepted when he was flush with the enormous success of the Sistine Chapel. The statue that Michel­an­gelo carved was made to fulfil the testa­men­tary requests of Marta Porcari, who died in 1512. In her

fig. 208 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Risen Christ, Rome, Santa Maria sopra Minerva. 1519–1521. Photo © iStock / Getty Images, Anna Pakutina.

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

will, Marta Porcari had set aside funds for her own tomb at Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the family’s church near their home on the via delle Ceste.

There the Porcari owned a cluster of houses, gardens, and anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tions. Their coll­ec­tions were focused on objects refe­ren­cing the family’s adopted ancestor, Marcus ‘Porcius’ Cato, inclu­ding images of pigs (‘porci’) and boars, or antique inscrip­tions refe­ren­cing the name ‘Portius’. A visible trace of this approach is a doorway with an exqui­site antique entablature—probably moved there from the nearby ruins of the Baths of Agrippa—and a modern inscrip­tion, reading ‘I am he, Cato Porcius, author of our progeny who, with arms and diplo­macy, brought his noble name to the lips [of all]’ (Fig. 209). A niche above this portal likely once housed an ancient bust of Cato, the Porcari ‘ancestor’.²⁷

A group of over­seers that included Marta Porcari’s two young nephews and heirs, the execu­tors of her testa­ment, Bishop Camillo Porcari, and others was charged with the cons­truc­tion and deco­ra­tion of Porcari’s chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva. In 1514, this group concluded a contract with Michel­an­gelo for the Christ, which required the figure to be ‘life­sized, nude, upright, with a cross in his arms, in a pose to be deter­mined by the afore­men­tioned Michel­an­gelo’.²⁸ While Marta Porcari’s heir, Metello Vari Porcari, is some­times considered the primary patron of the statue,²⁹ he was only around twenty-five years old at the time of the commis­sion. Camillo Porcari, by contrast, was the most expe­ri­enced and well-connected member of the committee. As Gerda Panofsky-Sörgel has argued, when the contract of June 1514 was signed, Porcari was likely the only person involved who was

fig. 209 Ancient cornice inscribed ille ego sum nostrae sobolis cato porcius auctor / nobile quoi [sic] nomen os dedit arma toga, Rome, House of the Porcari. Late 15th or early 16th century. Photo © Paul Davies.

capable of winning a statue from Michel­an­gelo. Panofsky-Sörgel further suggested that Porcari’s theo­lo­gical back­ground could have been signi­fi­cant in decis­ions about the statue’s theme and appearance.³⁰ Porcari had a connec­tion to Michel­an­gelo, moreover, through a common friend­ship with Jacopo Galli—he was a neigh­bour of Galli’s in the Rione Parione who deli­vered Galli’s funerary oration and whose friend­ship with Galli was immor­ta­lised in Sadoleto’s Phaedrus.

With the commis­sion for the Risen Christ, Michel­an­gelo returned to the Roman circle that had supported him in his early career. He echoed the Bacchus with a work defined in the contract as a life­sized nude, and thus framed as a compe­ti­tion with the antique.³¹ The paral­lels between the Bacchus and the Christ became even more appa­rent in the 1520s, when Vari displayed the first version of the Christ inside a coll­ec­tion of anti­qui­ties. In 1516, when the Christ was nearly complete, Michel­an­gelo aban­doned this first version of the statue after an unseemly vein emerged in the statue’s face, resembling a scar in Christ’s cheek (Figs 210–11).³²

fig. 210 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Risen Christ, Bassano Romano, Monas­tero San Vincenzo Martire. c. 1515. Photo: Roberto Sigis­mondi © Biblio­theca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunst­ge­schichte, Rome.

fig. 211 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, Risen Christ, detail, Bassano Romano, Monas­tero San Vincenzo Martire. c. 1515. Photo: Roberto Sigis­mondi © Biblio­theca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunst­ge­schichte, Rome.

After Vari pressed Michel­an­gelo for deli­very, the artist began a second statue from a new block of marble. The first version of the Christ remained in Michelangelo’s Roman studio until 1521, when Vari won the artist’s permis­sion to display it in his house. ‘It would be an honour for me to have it’, he wrote in a letter to Michel­an­gelo, ‘and to keep it as if it were gold, so I am able to demons­trate your gene­ro­sity and the good­will you showed to me, and to silence those naysayers who spoke badly of me and of you about this work’.³³ While the statue was in Vari’s posses­sion, he displayed it in a cortile toge­ther with his prized anti­qui­ties, an arran­ge­ment that looks back to the exhi­bi­tion of the Bacchus in the houses of the Galli. Both the Galli and the Porcari proudly displayed Michelangelo’s statues as tokens of their friend­ship with the famous master and as signs (in the words of Vari) of the sculptor’s ‘good­will’. In return, Michel­an­gelo received public acknow­led­ge­ment of his own artistic supre­macy: the juxta­po­si­tion of his statues with anti­qui­ties in the Galli and Porcari coll­ec­tions marked them as modern sculp­tures worthy of this special honour.

The Bacchus in the Rione Parione before the Sack of 1527

In the houses of the Galli, the Bacchus would have been prized not only by its owners, but also by the network of Riario and Galli in Parione that favoured Michel­an­gelo. Sixte­enth-century lists of property owners reveal how the neigh­bour­hood surroun­ding the Isola Galli was connected by infi­nite bonds of family, friend­ship, and patro­nage. Records of taxes imposed on resi­dents of the via dei Leutari [Appendix ii.23 and ii.25] show that the western flank of this street, the ‘banda sinistra’ (Map 1.7), was popu­lated with fami­lies allied with Riario, Galli, and Michel­an­gelo.³⁴ The row began with the house of the Bocca­bella to the south, followed two doors further to the north by a house owned in 1523 by Giovanni Botonti of Viterbo. Botonti, chierico of the Camera Apos­to­lica under Riario, was a devotee of Egidio da Viterbo who commis­sioned two works by Sebas­tiano del Piombo: the Viterbo Pietà and a copy of del Piombo’s Borg­he­rini Flagel­la­tion, both based on cartoons by Michel­an­gelo.³⁵ Next door to Botonti was the house of another asso­ciate of Riario’s, Barto­lomeo de’ Dossis, who toge­ther with Jacopo Galli and on Riario’s behalf awarded Michel­an­gelo the commis­sion for an altar­piece for Sant’Agostino. Two doors further on this side of the via dei Leutari was the house of Pietro de Costa, one of Riario’s most loyal came­rarii.³⁶ The next house up the street belonged to Pietro Mattuzzi, guar­diano of the confra­ter­nity of the SS. Conce­zione at San Lorenzo in Damaso and the founder of the ‘Soda­litas Parionis’, a lite­rary society discussed below. The Mattuzzi family coat of arms is still visible at the doorway at the current via dei Leutari, 23 (Fig. 212).³⁷ The last house on the block was that of the Paluz­zelli, another family with close ties to both Riario and the Galli whose members included Lorenzo Paluz­zelli, a notary favoured by the Galli.

The Bacchus, at the centre of this network, was likely unders­tood as an emblem of Parione and its lively anti­qua­rian culture. Parione was dense with book­sel­lers and anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tions, and it was the cross­roads of Rome’s lite­rary soda­li­ties. Near the Galli were neigh­bours such as Mario Maffei, a coll­ector and the dedi­catee of Sadoleto’s De Laudibus Philo­so­phiae. The Epigram­mata Anti­quae Urbis, published by Giacomo Mazzocchi in 1521, was also dedi­cated to Mario Maffei, with a preface hailing Maffei’s house in Parione as a ‘new Academy’ and a refuge for learned men. The resul­ting book, a printed sylloge of antique inscrip­tions visible in Rome’s coll­ec­tions, lists a number of inscrip­tions on view in Maffei’s house, several of which, as was mentioned in Chapter 8, were previously owned by Jacopo Galli (see Fig. 185).³⁸ Parione was also the setting of the Festa di Pasquino held every year in the Piazza di Parione, on the door­step of the Galli (see Maps 1 and 3). The Piazza di Parione was a parti­cu­larly lively gathe­ring place for anti­qua­rian commu­ni­ties, as is made clear in letters between Paolo Galli and his neigh­bour Pamphilio Pamphili composed shortly after the Sack. Writing to Galli in March 1528, Pamphili looked back with nost­algia to a time before the cala­mi­ties brought about by the 1527 Sack. Mour­ning the deaths of so many resi­dents and the emptiness of the Piazza di Parione, he asked how, ‘in such a short time, so much gall­antry was extin­gu­ished from a place where there had been so many fine conver­sa­tions, so many games, smiles, and jokes, so much cour­tesy, so many riches, so much gran­deur’. The piazza once brought toge­ther a group of learned and witty friends that, Pamphili recalled, some used to call the ‘academia de Parioni’.³⁹

fig. 212 Rome, Via dei Leutari, 23, ex-Palazzo Mattuzzi. Photo: Author.

Lite­rary soda­li­ties were a way of life in the Rione Parione. While most were informal and refe­renced only tangen­ti­ally in the sources (like the ‘daily’ gathe­rings of friends in Jacopo Galli’s house remem­bered by Sado­leto), one initiated in 1517 had its own statutes and list of members: the Soda­litas Parionis founded by the Roman nobleman Pietro Mattuzzi, who lived on the via dei Leutari near the Piazza di Parione (see Fig. 212).⁴⁰ A marriage in 1483 to Isabella Borgia, daughter of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia (after 1492, Pope Alex­ander VI), had helped to win Mattuzzi appoint­ments to pres­ti­gious muni­cipal and curial offices, inclu­ding that of Maestro delle strade.⁴¹ Mattuzzi was also a guar­diano of the Confra­ter­nity of the SS. Conce­zione at San Lorenzo in Damaso, where his family had a chapel.⁴² In his testa­ment of April 1517, Mattuzzi set out the requi­re­ment that his nephew and heir Aloisio Mattuzzi honour his memory with a lite­rary soda­lity modelled on the Confra­ter­nity of San Lorenzo.⁴³ Accor­ding to the statutes of the resul­ting Soda­litas, Mattuzzi’s sodales must be ‘outstan­ding in virtue and in letters’ and pay an annual fee. They must gather each year on his death day to cele­brate the feast of the Pario­nalia, invol­ving a mass at Mattuzzi’s family chapel in San Lorenzo in Damaso, followed by a lite­rary contest (‘aliqui ludi seu litter­arie actiones’). The convi­vial events were likely held in a garden (with an anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion?) and house outside the walls of the city, which Mattuzzi bequea­thed to the Society in his testa­ment.⁴⁴ A list of the appro­xi­m­ately eighty-five members of Mattuzzi’s Soda­litas Parionis includes the names of Paolo Galli and Paolo’s son, Jacopo Galli the Younger (canon of San Lorenzo in Damaso), and a number of figures who are mentioned in Sadoleto’s Phaedrus. Bishops Mario Maffei of Volterra and Camillo Porcari are listed first as the senior eccle­si­a­stics in the group, followed by neigh­bours and asso­ciates of the Galli, inclu­ding Mario Bocca­bella, Lorenzo Signo­retti, Leonardo Paluz­zelli, Blosio Palladio, and Pamphilio Pamphili.

Members of the soda­lity seem to have made requests in their testa­ments for their own anti­qua­rian rituals. Signo­retti, a Roman nobleman who lived next door to the Galli in the Rione Parione, made such a provi­sion in his testa­ment of 1523/4. He not only asked to be buried at San Lorenzo ‘in or near by’ the chapel of the Society of the SS. Conce­zione, but also required the Soda­litas Parionis to hold an annual comme­mo­ra­tion of his death, with services ‘in front of his altar’ followed by a cena or pran­dium, that is, presu­mably, a lite­rary banquet.⁴⁵ Other promi­nent members of the Soda­litas Parionis—Angelo Colocci, Johannes Goritz, and Blosio Palladio—went on to estab­lish famous lite­rary socie­ties and anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tions in their own right, whose prac­tices echoed those of the Soda­litas. Goritz, a resi­dent of the Rione Parione, founded the feast of the Coryciana held on St. Anne’s day every year, an event that involved a mass at Goritz’s own altar in Sant’Agostino in front of Andrea Sansovino’s statue of St. Anne, the Virgin, and Child. Lite­rary rituals imme­dia­tely followed reli­gious ones, as the group moved

from Sant’Agostino to a banquet and poetic competition—focused on poems about Sansovino’s statue—at Goritz’s anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion near the Forum of Trajan. Angelo Colocci, another resi­dent of Parione, hosted well-known lite­rary events at his villa on the Quirinal.⁴⁶ Barto­lomeo de’ Dossis, resi­dent of the via dei Leutari, like­wise had a resi­dence in Parione and a viridario near the Aqua Virgo, and he displayed coll­ec­tions of anti­qui­ties in both settings.⁴⁷

From the Feast of the Pasquino, to Jacopo Galli’s entou­rage, to the ‘Soda­litas Pario­nialis’ and its offshoots, the neigh­bour­hood of Parione in the early Cinque­cento reveals itself to be ‘ground zero’ for the better known, better studied lite­rary soda­li­ties of Rome that flou­rished during the reign of Leo X. One of the most extra­or­di­nary aspects of the lite­rary soda­li­ties origi­na­ting in Parione is the centra­lity of antique and modern statuary for these groups: Goritz’s St Anne, the Virgin and Child, the coll­ec­tion of anti­qui­ties in Goritz’s vigna, and the sculp­ture coll­ec­tions of Colocci, Maffei, and others. Galli’s Bacchus, in the midst of so many anti­qua­rian socie­ties and coll­ec­tions, would also presu­mably have been treasured by the soda­li­ties of Parione, which may have attracted the parti­ci­pa­tion of Michel­an­gelo himself.

It is temp­ting to imagine, as well, that Michelangelo’s Bacchus might have played a role in Parione’s lively tradi­tions of carnival, comedy, and satire.⁴⁸ It is notable that the humour and shared plea­sures that were so important in the soda­li­ties of Parione are cele­brated in a poem by Pierio Vale­riano entitled Soda­lium convictus die Bacca­na­lium (‘The Sodality’s Banquet on the day of the Bacchanalia’), dedi­cated to the ‘delightful sodales of the high Piazza di Parione’. It should not matter, Valeriano’s poem asserts, if wars rage across Italy, or if Rome goes without a pope because of spar­ring cardi­nals. The soda­lity is ‘averse to sorrow, dedi­cated to the Muses, loyal to Apollo, and bidden to love peace, rejoi­cing, jests, and music’. ‘Go, boy’, Vale­riano writes, ‘and summon my conge­nial sodales from on high at Piazza di Parione: Colocci, Grana, Pietro­santa, Lelio, Maffei, madcap Corsi, and strict Vigili […] I have decided to draw out one day in the year in plea­sure from dawn to dusk. We must act like madmen all day long […] But now let us have garlands and plea­sant licence. Let lazy wine make us laugh […] Let us drink’.⁴⁹ Valeriano’s list of friends, which included Angelo Colocci, Lorenzo Grana, Antonio Lelio, Mario Maffei of Volterra, Pietro Corsi, and Fabio Vigili (Cardinal Riario’s secre­tary), were all resi­dents of Parione and members of the Soda­litas Parionis.⁵⁰ Perhaps this group’s cele­bra­tion of the ‘Bacchanalia’ somehow engaged with Michelangelo’s Bacchus, which was presu­mably displayed at Paolo Galli’s house offof Piazza di Parione for a time. The poem brings out the theme of ‘carpe diem’ and the spirit of drin­king songs that were popular during Carnival, a time to over­in­dulge, break ever­yday rules, and sing hymns to Bacchus. In Rome, Carnival was also a time for performing antique and modern come­dies of the sort that Riario

and Jacopo Galli were keen to sponsor. The joyous spirit of the Piazza di Parione before the Sack—as described by Valeriano—resonates with Michelangelo’s Bacchus and with the Carnival’s arche­ty­pi­cally Bacchic theme of carpe diem. As Charles de Tolnay once observed, the drunken Bacchus is more typical of Italian festival poetry and Carnival songs than clas­sical art and lite­ra­ture.⁵¹ However, since the ‘Bacchanalia’ were only passing occur­rences that have left behind few lasting traces, know­ledge of their rituals and acti­vi­ties remains incomplete.

The Sack of Rome and the Fate of the Bacchus

The carnival songs of the Piazza di Parione cele­brated in Valeriano’s poem became a distant memory after the Sack of Rome in 1527, an utterly devas­ta­ting event for the resi­dents of Parione, inclu­ding the Galli. The neigh­bour­hood suffered tragic losses of life and property, and the Rione’s famed libra­ries, archives, and art coll­ec­tions were damaged or dispersed. Paolo Galli and his wife, Lucrezia Cecchini, remained in Rome at the casa grande during the Sack, and the letters Galli wrote to Pamphilio Pamphili paint a vivid picture of their despe­rate ordeal. Pamphili, a neigh­bour whom the Galli regarded as a rela­tive, took refuge in the town of Turri and relied upon his corre­spond­ents in Rome for news. Pamphili’s brother wrote to him about the death of many family members, as well as the pitiable state of their house, which was ‘overrun with Spaniards’, who ‘were filling it with plague’.⁵² Letters to Pamphili from Paolo Galli like­wise describe a wave of death brought by the plague. As Galli wrote, ‘only Mario Bocca­bella and I can still enjoy the Piazza di Parione, which has been stripped of so much nobi­lity. In our Rione there is hardly anyone left of those who once lived here’.⁵³ Paolo could report that his brother Giuliano Galli was safe in Bagnaia and his in-laws, the Cecchini, were well. Paolo Biondo, the husband of his sister Gloria Galli, had recently returned to Rome, only to find ever­y­thing ‘utterly ruined’ and many family members gravely ill.⁵⁴ Galli was deeply saddened by the sack of Pamphili’s house and the loss of his archives, books, and pain­tings. As a conso­la­tion, he reminded Pamphili that nearly all of the noble fami­lies of Parione had suffered similar losses. By miracle, Galli had managed to save the casa grande, yet other houses were left in ruin and were now in even worse condi­tion than Pamphili’s own.⁵⁵

A fasci­na­ting testa­ment of the destruc­tion of the Sack, and of the threats that the inva­sion brought to Galli’s coll­ec­tions, is found in three extra­or­di­nary poems by Antonio Tebaldeo of Ferrara, first published in 2023 by Diletta Gambe­rini. One titled ‘For the Bacchus’ and two titled ‘For Gallus’ are preserved in a manu­script of epigrams seemingly compiled in the 1530s in the circle of Angelo Colocci, BAV, MS Vat. lat. 2835 [Appendix ii.21].⁵⁶ Three poems by Tebaldeo, written in the after­math of the Sack, lament that ‘barba­rian’ inva­ders, led by a

cruel Caesar (Emperor Charles V), had stolen the Bacchus from the Galli with the inten­tion of trans­porting it over­seas. In response, the angry goddess Diana had sent a ‘bear’ to bring Bacchus back to the house of the Galli. The Bacchus’s owner, the ‘cock’ Galli, was trans­formed into a rooster and let the statue go.⁵⁷ For his negli­gence, Gallus should be punished by being made to suffer thirst in a river of wine:

On the Bacchus The barba­rian hand sent by a cruel Caesar is not content with gems, silver, or gold. It wickedly even robs the Urbs of her gods, and above all he whose unshorn head is crowned with grapes. When they prepared to take him away across the wave-ridden sea, the powerful goddess of the high groves [Artemis] could not with­stand it. She sent a huge bear against her cruel enemies, who fled, terri­fied after seeing the wild beast. And he who is used to being carried by a spotted lynx is dragged to his home by a bear. To the Bacchus Gallus put you back in your usual home, having been taken away by the enemy, but you, good Bacchus, heed his good deeds. Young man, produce [wine] for a long time, be the equal of Lesbos in your vines, and sing endless songs worthy of Virgil. For Gallus While you were badly guar­ding the thres­holds the goddess Paphia [Venus] entrusted to you, you were trans­formed into a cock. But what will happen to you, Gallus, for having badly protected Bacchus? You deserve to suffer thirst in a river of wine [Appendix ii.21].

The circum­s­tances described in the poem are so vivid that it is diffi­cult to escape the conclu­sion that Tebaldeo based his poems on real events. The ‘cock’ they address must be Paolo Galli, the owner of the Bacchus, who stayed in Rome during the Sack to safe­guard his family’s proper­ties and coll­ec­tions. Gambe­rini has convin­cingly iden­ti­fied the ‘bear’ who brought the Bacchus back to its home as Napo­leone Orsini, cond­ot­tiere and Abbot of Farfa. Even if Tebaldeo’s poem portrays Orsini as a hero, histo­rians remember him as a profi­teer during the Sack who raided impe­rial troops for their booty, both in the coun­try­side and in the ports, even plun­de­ring ships with supplies earmarked for Romans.⁵⁸

The Bacchus, presu­mably, was targeted by looters, reco­vered by Orsini, and returned to Paolo Galli, likely after he paid a ransom to Orsini. This scenario opens up new perspec­tives on the

Bacchus, its display in the houses of the Galli, and also the break in the figure’s right wrist. In light of Tebaldeo’s poems, it is all but certain that the hand was broken offdu­ring the Sack. As was noted in Chapter 7, the hand and cup now visible on the statue are original. They were also, appar­ently, still present shortly before the Sack of Rome, since a drawing by Rosso Fioren­tino of Bacchus, made c. 1526 (Fig. 213), was inspired by Michelangelo’s statue and by the cup that was then still atta­ched to it. When van Heems­kerck drew the Bacchus in the 1530s, how­ever, the cup was already broken off. The break in the wrist of the Bacchus, ther­e­fore, must have occurred in a limited time­frame between c. 1526 and van Heemskerck’s depar­ture from Rome in 1536 or 1537.⁵⁹ In light of Tebaldeo’s poems, the most plau­sible expl­ana­tion for the break in the hand is that the statue was acci­den­tally damaged during the violent events of the Sack. The Bacchus can very likely be counted among the many marble statues harmed in the tumult. Indeed,

fig. 213 Rosso Fioren­tino, Bacchus, Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. D.1444. 1526. Photo © Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts.

Michelangelo’s David was broken around the same time and in similar circum­s­tances: accor­ding to Vasari, during the poli­tical unrest in Florence in 1527, a chair hurled from the Palazzo Vecchio shat­tered the David’s left arm (Fig. 214). Like the Bacchus, the David was frac­tured at a vulnerable point where the statue’s arm holds up a heavy object (see Fig. 143).⁶⁰

Tebaldeo’s poems shed light not only on the possible circum­s­tances of the break, but also on the ques­tion of why the original hand was broken off, yet preserved so that it could later be reat­ta­ched. If the Bacchus were acci­den­tally damaged during the Sack, rather than deli­bera­tely smashed (for example, by Protes­tant icono­clasts), this would account for why the statue is broken only at one, struc­tu­rally weak point. It would also help to explain why the original hand was preserved. Since looters would have unders­tood Michelangelo’s statue as a valuable work of art, they would have known that Bacchus would bring a greater reward if all of its parts, inclu­ding the broken-offhand and cup, were kept for future repair.

Despite Paolo Galli’s efforts to save the casa grande, the house sustained exten­sive damage during the Sack. A nota­rial act of 1532 reveals that in April 1530 Paolo Galli accepted 500 ducats from his wife, Lucrezia Cecchini, to pay for neces­sary repairs. Cecchini provided her husband with money raised from the value of her dowry and her jewel­lery, which Galli combined with ‘other funds’ to pay for the property’s refur­bish­ment.⁶¹ It was perhaps around the time of these reno­va­tions that Galli and Cecchini decided to leave the casa grande (Map 1.8) and relo­cate to the Galli palaz­zetto on Piazza San Lorenzo in Damaso (Map 1.10). Certainly, they were living at the palaz­zetto by 1541, when Paolo Galli’s resi­dence there was recorded in a tax assess­ment [Appendix ii.25].⁶² The drawings of Maarten van Heems­kerck reveal that Paolo Galli was living in the palaz­zetto even earlier, in the 1530s. The details of van Heems­kerck’s drawings (Figs 215–16) leave little doubt that he saw the Bacchus on display in the palaz­zetto on Piazza San Lorenzo in Damaso, since they respond to the same setting that Aldro­vandi described as ‘casa di M. Paulo Gallo, presso al palagio di S. Giorgio’.⁶³

Van Heems­kerck encoun­tered the Bacchus, ther­e­fore, at a highly signi­fi­cant moment in the statue’s history. Although his drawing of the Bacchus (Fig. 215) and another related depic­tion of the Galli anti­qui­ties (Fig. 216) have been published count­less times as views of Jacopo Galli’s coll­ec­tion, they docu­ment an exhi­bi­tion choreo­gra­phed by Paolo Galli at the Galli palaz­zetto in the after­math of the Sack. The drawings capture Paolo’s presen­ta­tion of the broken Bacchus, stan­ding without its hand amid frag­mented anti­qui­ties, at a poignant moment when the break recalled the statue’s recent theft during the Sack of Rome.⁶⁴ It is not known how long the Galli exhi­bited Michelangelo’s Bacchus without its hand. Girolamo da Carpi, in a drawing dated between 1549 and 1553, repre­sented the Bacchus with an ambi­guously sketchy hand, which suggests it might have been missing at the time (Fig. 217).⁶⁵ Yet the reat­tach­ment must have taken place before 1553, when Condivi’s Vita described the Bacchus with

fig. 214 Michel­an­gelo Buonar­roti, David, Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia, inv. Scult. n. 1076. 1501–1504. Photo: Oscar Savio © Biblio­theca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunst­ge­schichte, Rome.

fig. 215 Maarten van Heems­kerck, House of Paolo Galli, Berlin, SmB, Kupfer­stich­ka­bi­nett, inv. 79.D.2, Album I, fol. 72 r. c. 1532–1537. Photo © bpk / Kupfer­stich­ka­bi­nett, SmB / Jörg P. Anders.

fig. 216 Maarten van Heems­kerck, House of the Galli, Statue of Mars Ultor, Berlin, SmB, Kupfer­stich­ka­bi­nett, inv. 79.D.2, Album I, fol. 27 r. c. 1532–1537. Photo © bpk / Kupfer­stich­ka­bi­nett, SmB / Volker‑H. Schneider.

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

a ‘tazza’ in the ‘guise of someone eager to drink’ [Appendix ii.29].⁶⁶ A drawing of uncer­tain date in the Alber­tina of Michelangelo’s Bacchus seems to repre­sent the statue holding the cup (Fig. 218),⁶⁷ and the cup defi­ni­tively reap­pears as an inte­gral part of the statue in sixte­enth-century bronzes modelled after the Bacchus (Figs 146, 219).⁶⁸ However long Galli left the hand unres­tored between the 1530s and the 1550s, this unpre­ce­dented approach added new layers of meaning to the statue’s display. From the perspec­tive of the family’s own history, its frag­men­ta­tion could be read as a memory of Paolo’s rescue of the Bacchus during the Sack. From an artistic and aesthetic perspec­tive, frag­men­ta­tion gave the statue a mutable tempo­ra­lity, allo­wing the Bacchus to masquerade as an antique, only to return to the present when its author­ship was guessed or revealed.

fig. 217 Girolamo da Carpi, Acro­terion and Michelangelo’s Bacchus, Phil­adel­phia, Rosen­bach Museum and Library, Rosen­bach Album, inv. 1954.0807.85v. 1549– 1553. Photo: Rosen­bach Museum and Library, public domain.

fig. 218 Anony­mous, Study of Michelangelo’s Bacchus and Lions. Vienna: Alber­tina, inv. 133 (detail). 16th century. Photo © The Alber­tina Museum, Vienna.

fig. 220 Anony­mous Flemish or Nether­landish Artist, Bacchus, Cambridge, Trinity College, Cambridge Sketch­book, mS R.17.3, fol. 16 r. Post 1536–1555. Photo: Trinity College, Cambridge, cc By-Nc 4.0.

fig. 219 Pietro Simone da Barga after Michel­an­gelo, Bacchus, Florence, Museo Nazio­nale del Bargello, inv. 422 / Bronzi e plac­chette. 1570s-1580s. Photo © Minis­tero della Cultura – Musei del Bargello. All rights reserved.

fig. 221 Sarco­phagus illus­t­ra­ting the Rape of Perse­phone, Paris, Louvre, Dépar­te­ment ager, ma 409. First half of 2nd century ce. Photo © Musée du Louvre, Dist. rmn-Grand Palais / Stéphane Maréchall.

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

Without its hand, the frag­mented Bacchus became intert­wined with the growing cult of the divine Michel­an­gelo, which was flou­ris­hing by the 1530s. Van Heemskerck’s drawing of the Bacchus is a case in point: it relishes the break in the hand, embra­cing the ambi­gui­ties it evokes. Aldrovandi’s 1550 descrip­tion remem­bers the display of the Bacchus in the garden of Paolo Galli’s house [Appendix ii.31] and van Heems­kerck, too, presu­mably observed it in this setting. Yet van Heemskerck’s drawing invites ambi­guity about the Bacchus’s posi­tion, which stands between a cour­tyard and a garden. The drawing prio­ri­tises the statue’s rivalry with the antique by placing it in the centre of the sheet; to either side of the Bacchus, it seems to compress and illu­sio­ni­sti­cally recom­pose diffe­rent parts of the Galli anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tions to either side.⁶⁹ A parti­cu­larly enig­matic feature of the drawing is the wall van Heems­kerck repres­ents to the right of the statue. He faithfully draws the antique sarco­phagus immured in this wall—a frag­mented repre­sen­ta­tion of the Rape of Perse­phone now in the Louvre (Fig. 221)— with concern for accu­racy. Yet the wall it is atta­ched to defies belief, since it resem­bles an antique ruin rather than the type of boun­dary wall one would expect to find in an urban setting.⁷⁰ Sixte­enth-century maps from a bird’s eye perspec­tive by Falda and Tempesta (see Figs 67, 179) echo the small gardens, stables, and other outbuil­dings of the Isola Galli that are mentioned in the Galli-Balducci accounts and other docu­ments.⁷¹ Could Heemskerck’s wall have been part of a buil­ding that had fallen into ruin, or been damaged in the Sack? A more plau­sible expl­ana­tion, it seems, is that van Heems­kerck inven­tively exag­ge­rated the degra­da­tion of the wall, adding vege­ta­tion and cracked masonry to mimic the appearance of an antique ruin. Drawing on his instincts as a land­scape painter, he seems to have aged the wall to match the age of the sarco­phagus and to enhance the ambi­guity of the frag­mented Bacchus. He takes pains to cast doubt on the Bacchus’s moder­nity, rende­ring a vivid impres­sion of his visual expe­ri­ence of the Galli coll­ec­tions.⁷²

For visi­tors to Paolo Galli’s house, the frag­men­ta­tion of the Bacchus brought to mind stories of forgery, burial, and deli­be­rate breakage, freely combined with anec­dotes about the Slee­ping Cupid. The anony­mous Cambridge Sketch­book, a coll­ec­tion of anti­qua­rian drawings dated between c. 1536–1555 (Fig. 220, see also Fig. 151) includes two drawings of the Bacchus, one of which is labelled ‘scoltur de michel­an­geli the which was buried in the grownd & fond for antick’.⁷³ Presu­mably, the caption refe­rences stories then in circu­la­tion about the Cupid. In both drawings, the Bacchus is shown with a protru­ding dowel in place of its hand. The presence of the dowel unders­cores the possi­bi­lity that the hand could be removed or added at will, evoking the statue’s mutable display and its poten­tial to delight and beguile. The Galli them­selves may have engaged in playful decep­tions aimed at mislea­ding or amusing viewers, as is suggested by the Portu­guese artist Fran­cisco de Holanda’s account of a visit to the house of the Galli, when he was expli­citly shown Michelangelo’s Bacchus ‘as an antique’. To his own credit,

he writes, when ‘some Romans’ asked his opinion on the statue, he reco­g­nised its moder­nity: the arms were raised halfway, not fully high or fully low as was typical of antique statues. Astounded by Holanda’s know­ledge and powers of obser­va­tion, his would-be decei­vers confirmed that the statue was indeed a modern work by Michel­an­gelo. Holanda trium­phed over the Romans on their own terrain, and he trium­phed again, he adds, when the master himself, Michel­an­gelo, ‘learned that he had not deceived’ him.⁷⁴

The Anti­qui­ties Coll­ec­tions of the Galli

Van Heemskerck’s drawings, combined with later descrip­tions dating to the mid-sixte­enth century, shed light on the Galli coll­ec­tions of anti­qui­ties when Paolo was the family’s prin­cipal heir.⁷⁵ They enrich an under­stan­ding of the Galli’s display of the Bacchus, offe­ring insight into not only the antique objects the family displayed toge­ther with Michelangelo’s statue, but also the setting of their sculp­ture coll­ec­tions as a whole. These sources are, however, incom­plete and only offer a partial picture of the Galli coll­ec­tions and their deve­lo­p­ment over gene­ra­tions. As was noted, Jacopo’s father Giuliano Galli probably owned an anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion, even if no traces of it remain today. There can be no doubt that Jacopo Galli coll­ected antique sculp­tures, or that he displayed the Bacchus among them, given the context of the statue’s commis­sion by Riario. Yet, as was mentioned in Chapter 8, the only known refe­rences to Jacopo’s coll­ec­tion in his life­time appear in the epigra­phic sylloges, which asso­ciate around two dozen antique inscrip­tions with Galli. Accor­ding to the Epigram­mata Anti­quae Urbis of 1521, several of the same inscrip­tions were then located in Parione and ‘in domo D. Io. Galli scrip­toris peniten­tia­riae’ long after Jacopo Galli’s death.⁷⁶ Of the inscrip­tions named in 1521 in the house of ‘Io. Galli’ (presu­mably, the palaz­zetto on Piazza San Lorenzo), one in parti­cular merits atten­tion since it was modern, rather than antique. This was a para­phrase of a quota­tion from Seneca’s De bene­fi­ciis: ‘virtue excludes no one. It is open to all, it does not mind one’s house, or one’s wealth, but is content with the naked man’.⁷⁷ A version of the same, myste­rious quota­tion was later visible in the vigna of the Carafa.⁷⁸ With its evoca­tion of ‘virtue’, the inscrip­tion perhaps placed the anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion in the frame­work of ‘inner virtue’ that the Galli hoped to demons­trate through their display of anti­qui­ties. The text echoes similar inscrip­tions placed in Roman anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tions that claim these coll­ec­tions were displays not merely of wealth, but also of their owners’ inner virtue.⁷⁹

The only substan­tial written descrip­tions of the Galli coll­ec­tions are found in a guide to Rome by the Bolo­gnese anti­qua­rian Ulisse Aldro­vandi, composed in 1550 [Appendix ii.31],⁸⁰

and another by Jean-Jacques Bois­sard, which borrows heavily from Aldro­vandi [Appendix

ii.36].⁸¹ These two texts shed light on objects left out of van Heemskerck’s drawings, inclu­ding a large bust of ‘Romulus’ the Galli set over the entry portal of the Galli palaz­zetto on Piazza San Lorenzo.⁸² Paolo Giovio, who lived for a time in the Palazzo San Giorgio, also mentions this object. Giovio arti­cu­lates what was espe­ci­ally valued about the Romulus: it was unders­tood to be an authentic, ancient portrait of Rome’s founder, a likeness that could be veri­fied by compa­rison with coins inscribed with his name.⁸³ The Galli’s vera imago of Romulus above the portal marked the family’s own ‘authentic’ origins in ancient Rome. The display of this bust was consis­tent with the profound rever­ence of Roman nobles at the time for the illus­trious heroes of Rome’s early history, which was imagined as a parti­cu­larly pris­tine and virtuous era.⁸⁴

Inside this portal, Aldro­vandi encoun­tered a loggetta terrena with a garland sarco­phagus and head­less statues [Appendix ii.31], a setting that is echoed by van Heems­kerck (Fig. 215). Van Heemskerck’s drawing juxta­poses this cour­tyard with the semi-ruined wall, head­less torsos, and a relief of a Sphinx. The sarco­phagus with the story of Perse­phone atta­ched to the wall (Fig. 221) illus­trates Pluto driving a four-horse chariot towards the under­world, gras­ping Perse­phone as two Horae look on. Minerva, Venus, and a compa­nion of Perse­phone react to the commo­tion, while a perso­ni­fi­ca­tion of Eleusis, a centre of Persephone’s cult, appears on the left. It is the only antique object displayed by the Galli with a known proven­ance: around 1500–1503, the Bolo­gnese artist Amico Asper­tini drew the sarco­phagus when it was on display at the church of SS. Cosma e Damiano in the Roman forum (Fig. 222). When Asper­tini drew it, the sarco­phagus was not yet broken, and Asper­tini could observe the left half of the object, which repre­sented Persephone’s mother, Demeter, sear­ching for her missing daughter on a

fig. 222 Amico Asper­tini, Sarco­phagus with the Rape of Perse­phone, Wolfegg, Schloss Wolfegg, Codex Wolfegg, fols 36 v –37 r, detail. 1500–1503. Photo © Schloss Wolfegg.

fig. 223 Anony­mous, Perse­phone Sarco­phagus, Rennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. 794.1.2865. Early 16th century. Photo © Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes.

fig. 224 Anony­mous, Perse­phone Sarco­phagus, Coburg, Veste Coburg, Codex Cobur­gensis, inv. Hz.002, Nr.037. c. 1550–1555. Photo © Kunst­samm­lungen der Veste Coburg.

fig. 225 Anony­mous, Perse­phone Sarco­phagus, Codex Pighianus, Berlin, SBB-pk, Staats­bi­blio­thek, mS lat. fol. 61, fol. 344 v. c. 1550– 1555. Photo: Staats­bi­blio­thek zu Berlin — Preu­ßi­scher Kultur­be­sitz, public domain.

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

snake-driven chariot.⁸⁵ In his drawing, Asper­tini shows the narra­tive out of sequence, placing Pluto’s horse-driven chariot on the left-hand side of the page and Demeter’s snake-driven chariot on the right.⁸⁶ The sarco­phagus must have been broken into two pieces soon after Asper­tini observed it, since a drawing in Rennes (Fig. 223), dateable to the early sixte­enth century, depicts only the right-hand side.⁸⁷ This was the same frag­ment that entered the Galli coll­ec­tion, where it was studied by van Heems­kerck in the 1530s (Fig. 215) and by the author of the Codex Cobur­gensis in the 1550s (Fig. 224). The repre­sen­ta­tion in the Codex Cobur­gensis was copied into the Codex Pighianus and given the caption, ‘near Campo de’ Fiori, in the house where Michelangelo’s Bacchus is’ (‘aprezzo Campo fiore, in casa dov’è l Baccho del

fig. 226 Girolamo da Carpi, Perse­phone Sarco­phagus, Phil­adel­phia, Rosen­bach Museum and Library, Rosen­bach Album, 1954.0807.127r. 1549–1553. Photo: Rosen­bach Museum and Library, public domain.

fig. 227 Girolamo da Carpi, Perse­phone Sarco­phagus and Knee­ling Female Figure, Phil­adel­phia, Rosen­bach Museum and Library, Rosen­bach Album, 1954.0807.127v. 1549–1553. Photo: Rosen­bach Museum and Library, public domain.

Michael Angelo’, Fig. 225).⁸⁸ Girolamo da Carpi, like­wise, drew the sarco­phagus frag­ment in the house of the Galli on two pages from a sketch­book he made around the middle of the sixte­enth century (Figs 226–27).⁸⁹

The Perse­phone sarco­phagus thus has a remar­kable history. It was first known in SS. Cosma e Damiano, where it was presu­mably used as a foun­tain, since there is a hole that would have once served as a water spout still present in the object (see Fig. 221). It was then broken in half, for unknown reasons, in the early Cinque­cento. By the 1530s, the right half came into the posses­sion of the Galli, who exhi­bited it inside an anti­qui­ties coll­ec­tion where its frag­men­ta­tion was given aesthetic value. Here, it was no longer a func­tional object reused as a foun­tain, but a work of art, hung at eye level as if it were a pain­ting in a gallery. Whether or not this sarco­phagus was directly juxta­posed with the frag­mented Bacchus in the Galli garden, van Heems­kerck took delight in the illu­sion created when its ruina­tion was posi­tioned next to that of the Bacchus (Fig. 215).

On the left-hand side of van Heemskerck’s drawing, steps lead up to a terrace or cour­tyard where other anti­qui­ties are visible. The artist explores this part of the Galli coll­ec­tion further in a second, closely related sheet (see Fig. 216).⁹⁰ Van Heemskerck’s second view of the Galli coll­ec­tion captures anti­qui­ties gathered on a second cortile or terrace, acces­sible via a low stair (the Mars Ultor depicted on the far left-hand side of the sheet is a statue van Heems­kerck observed else­where and was not owned by the Galli).⁹¹ In this drawing, van Heems­kerck depicts a curious tableau that must have been visible some­where in the houses of the Galli: a group of statues centred on a semi-draped, slee­ping woman, artfully raised on what seems to be a frag­ment of an antique column. Other anti­qui­ties rest against a low wall, inclu­ding torsos, another Sphinx, an archi­tec­tural frag­ment with a figure of a lion, a relief showing a woman and child and, just to the right of the column, what appears to be a pair of legs.⁹² The Slee­ping Nymph lying on a plinth can be iden­ti­fied with an object now in the Dipar­ti­mento di Scienze Umani­stiche in Urbino, where it arrived via the Albani coll­ec­tion (Figs 228–29).⁹³ Other­wise, the sculp­tures on the right side of this sheet cannot be traced in modern-day coll­ec­tions, nor in other Renais­sance drawings and descrip­tions. Curiously, neither Aldro­vandi nor Bois­sard mentions the figures on the terrace, even if van Heemskerck’s drawings suggest they were inter­linked, as if one could walk from one cour­tyard to the next.

While the layout of the garden, and its rela­ti­onship to the terrace observed by van Heems­ kerck (Fig. 216) is diffi­cult to deter­mine, an act drawn up in 1577 [Appendix ii.35] offers an oblique impres­sion of how the outdoor areas of the Isola Galli might have been connected. In that year, Jacopo Galli’s great-grandson Ulisse Lancia­rini Galli occu­pied the palaz­zetto on Piazza San Lorenzo, but allowed his uncle, Sulpizio Galli, and Sulpizio’s mother, Lucrezia Cecchini, to inhabit their own, sepa­rate quar­ters in the house. A docu­ment was drawn up to

define the spaces Sulpizio and his mother could occupy: an apart­ment with lower rooms, a little cour­tyard with a well, and a stair­case. All parties would share a common ‘large door’ and ‘lower loggia’ (‘porta grande’ and ‘loggie da basso’). The loggia da basso seems to have been a common cour­tyard between two dwel­lings: the main house and the smaller apart­ment with its own cour­tyard and stair. Hypo­the­ti­cally, it could have been in this common loggia that van Heems­kerck and Aldro­vandi observed the Galli’s garland sarco­phagus (the ‘loggi­etta terrena, che si truova tosto entrando in questa casa’), while the connected apartment

fig. 228 Slee­ping Nymph, Urbino, Univer­sità degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo, Dipar­ti­mento di Scienze Umani­stiche. 2nd century ce. Photo: Gian­carlo Gobbi, by permis­sion of the Univer­sità degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo e del Comune di Urbino.

fig. 229 Slee­ping Nymph, seen from the back, Urbino, Univer­sità degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo, Dipar­ti­mento di Scienze Umani­stiche. 2nd century ce. Photo: Gian­carlo Gobbi, by permis­sion of the Univer­sità degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo e del Comune di Urbino.

with a cour­tyard, stair­case, and well occu­pied by Sulpizio Galli and his mother could have been the upper terrace where van Heems­kerck observed the Slee­ping Nymph. The act of 1577 also speci­fies that Sulpizio Galli had rights to a part of the small stables ‘towards the garden’ and would enjoy shared use of a carriage shed and a large stable behind the house, echoing Aldrovandi’s descrip­tion of the small garden ‘further inside’ where he observed the Bacchus.

When Aldro­vandi and Bois­sard toured the Galli coll­ec­tions, they were both able to access the inte­rior spaces of the palaz­zetto and visit a room on an upper floor. This room seems to have been a library or studiolo. Aldro­vandi described it as ‘a room further up near the sala’ (‘una camera piu su presso la sala’), suggesting it was a smaller room near the main recep­tion hall of the house. Here, they found Michelangelo’s Young Archer (Figs 5, 187) and other anti­qui­ties. Both were focused on Michelangelo’s statue, which they iden­tify as an Apollo. Aldro­vandi also observed a ‘rather beau­tiful’ bust of Marcus Aure­lius, an impres­sive head, and other uniden­ti­fiable frag­ments (‘Vi è ancho unaltra bella testa antica con altri frag­menti, che non si sa, che cosa si siano’).⁹⁴ As was noted in Chapter 8, in the summer of 1497, at around the same time that Michel­an­gelo was comple­ting a marble sculp­ture he had decided to carve for his ‘own plea­sure’, Jacopo Galli paid to deco­rate a sala (a recep­tion room) and two camere in his house. Michelangelo’s sculp­ture was argu­ably the Young Archer, which the artist may have carved to fit into one of Galli’s camere. The rooms in the upper floor of Galli’s house reno­vated in 1497 may have remained a coll­ec­ting space where the family showed offt­heir prized Young Archer, small anti­qui­ties, and possibly other types of objects typical of Renais­sance studioli.

Much later, in the 1680s, anti­qua­rians made refe­rence to a studiolo kept by Fran­cesco Galli in the Galli palaz­zetto. Fran­cesco Galli bols­tered his family’s dwind­ling fortunes with his marriage to the wealthy Olimpia Fonseca, salva­ging the legacy of a family whose name had long been synony­mous with their coll­ec­tions. Galli displayed a coll­ec­tion of books, anti­qui­ties, and rari­ties in this house: visi­tors described its array of medals of ‘the popes and illus­trious perso­nages’, plants, seeds, fruits, coloured stones, and a parti­cu­larly impres­sive number of sea shells.⁹⁵ At the time of his death in 1695, Fran­cesco left to his heirs the books and precious objects he kept in a libreria and in a room he referred to as his ‘studio’. His testa­ment, written in 1682, prevented his heirs from selling his ‘anti­ques, which I have in my cabinet, called the studio, which I expressly subject to my provi­sion and prohi­bi­tion, as I desire that at no time may they be sold, lent, taken out of the house, or in any way lent or shared’. As Galli asserts, he had:

over a long time, with effort and expense, gathered jewels and stones of every kind, seas­hells, medals, and coins from nearly all over the world, as well as other ancient and curious objects, and with these created a study, in the rooms halfway up the stairs, that perhaps has no equal in Rome.⁹⁶

The display of Fran­cesco Galli’s coll­ec­tions ‘up the stairs’ echoes the exhi­bi­tion spaces described by Aldro­vandi and Bois­sard, shed­ding light on a possibly studiolo coll­ec­tion set up by Jacopo Galli. It is unclear which objects Fran­cesco Galli might have inhe­rited from his forebears, and when Galli describes his anti­qui­ties and curio­si­ties, he proudly claimed to have acquired them himself. The Young Archer had already been sold, but it is temp­ting to imagine that other remnants of Jacopo Galli’s studiolo and library, handed down through the gene­ra­tions, formed the basis for Fran­cesco Galli’s collections.

The Decline of the Galli and Sale of the Bacchus

While Jacopo Galli passed on his proper­ties in Parione to his sons, he left his entire share in the bank to his partner, Bald­as­sare Balducci, expli­citly exclu­ding his sons from the busi­ness.⁹⁷ After the Sack of Rome, the Galli were kept afloat by the dowries of their wives and by the complex arran­ge­ments they devised to produce income from their proper­ties. As was seen, in 1530 Lucrezia Cecchini used the value of her dowry and jewel­lery to provide the funds needed to repair the casa grande.⁹⁸ The pres­ti­gious casa grande was at the time the most valuable of the remai­ning assets of Jacopo Galli’s heirs, and after Paolo Galli moved to the palaz­zetto of Piazza San Lorenzo, it served as a means of gene­ra­ting profit. It was common prac­tice at the time not only to rent out proper­ties for income, but also to put them under a censo—an agree­ment in which one party loaned money to a property’s owner in exch­ange for the rights to a property’s income for a certain period of time. In 1544, Paolo and Giuliano Galli sold a censo for five years on the casa grande to Bishop Fabio Migna­nelli for 600 scudi.⁹⁹ In 1547, even before these five years had expired, Paolo sold the casa grande to his brot­herin-law, Giovanni Battista Cecchini, for 3000 scudi. Galli and his wife Lucrezia Cecchini used the money from the sale to fund the dowry of their daughter Livia, whom they married to Leone Lancia­rini da Fano.¹⁰⁰ The casa grande then became the resi­dence of Livia Galli, her husband Lancia­rini da Fano, and their son, Ulisse Lancia­rini Galli.¹⁰¹ Another marriage with the Cecchini was arranged for Ulisse Lancia­rini Galli and in the 1570s, Ulisse bought a censo on the palaz­zetto on Piazza San Lorenzo for 1000 scudi with funds from his wife’s

dowry.¹⁰² This comple­xity of property tran­sac­tions, mortgages, loans, and dowry liqui­da­tions tells a story of the Galli’s decline, the gradual shift of their assets to the Cecchini, and the ascen­dancy of the Lancia­rini Galli to the status of primary heirs.

As the Galli fell into decline, their remai­ning anti­qui­ties and sculp­tures by Michel­an­gelo remained an endu­ring source of pride. Jacopo Galli’s heirs even sought to expand the coll­ec­tions, not with costly acqui­si­tions, but via excava­tion on their own land. They may have been inspired to do so by the disco­very on the via dei Leutari in the 1550s, seemingly by acci­dent, of a large, antique portrait statue. The find from the ‘time of Pope Julius III’ is remem­bered by the

fig. 230 Portrait statue (of Domi­tian?) found on the via dei Leutari, Rome, Galleria Spada, inv. 375. Late 1st–early 2nd century ce. Photo © Deut­sches Archäo­lo­gi­sches Institut, Rome, published with kind permis­sion of the Dire­zione Musei Statali della città di Roma – Galleria Spada.

fig. 231 Basin, Rome, Villa Borg­hese. Late 1st–early 2nd century ce?. Photo: Author. fig. 232 Giovanni Battista Pira­nesi, Vedute di Roma, Piazza Navona, detail showing antique basin (between the two foun­tains), New York, Metro­po­litan Museum of Art, Acces­sion Number 37.45.3(53), Harris Bris­bane Dick Fund, 1937. 1760–1778. Photo: The Metro­po­litan Museum, New York, public domain.

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

anti­qua­rian Flaminio Vacca, who iden­ti­fied the figure as a portrait of Pompey. Vacca relates how the statue, now iden­ti­fied as Domi­tian (Fig. 230), was found ‘under­neath a cellar’ on the via dei Leutari, and how its disco­very between two houses led to a dispute to deter­mine who had the rights to the figure. It is unclear whether the Galli were involved in this contest.¹⁰³ In 1562, Giulio Galli acquired a licence from the Camera Apos­to­lica to carry out excava­tions on the via dei Leutari, at both the palaz­zetto on Piazza San Lorenzo and his own house across from the porta piccola of San Lorenzo in Damaso.¹⁰⁴ These digs, or others subse­quently carried out, yielded important finds, inclu­ding a large marble basin that had once belonged to the Stabula Factionis Prasinae. This object was even­tually taken to Piazza Navona (Map 1.5), where it was used as a wate­ring trough for horses, and then even­tually moved to the Villa Borg­hese, where it now serves as a foun­tain (Figs 231–32). Excava­tions by the Galli also brought to light column capi­tals deco­rated with trophies (Fig. 233).¹⁰⁵ For a time Giulio Galli would have displayed his share of the family’s anti­qui­ties at his resi­dence across the street from the ‘porta piccola’ of San Lorenzo in Damaso.¹⁰⁶ In 1567, Giulio’s mother, Lucrezia Cecchini, took posses­sion of this house ‘near the small door of San Lorenzo’, with shops in front and ‘a certain large stable, and a path, or lane with a gate opening onto the via dei Leutari and in sight of the house of the Bocca­bella’. In exch­ange, she paid her son Giulio over 1300 scudi, which she took from the value of her dowry. A clause was included in their agree­ment that Giulio could ‘take, accept and remove accor­ding to his own free will’ from this house all ‘statues and other stones that are in marble or of any other type, figural or non-figural, yet are mini­mally atta­ched to the house’ and to arrange them as he wished [Appendix ii.33].¹⁰⁷

To ease their finan­cial woes, the Galli sold offpro­per­ties and selected objects from their prized coll­ec­tions: the Sphinx relief shown next to the Bacchus in van Heemskerck’s drawing entered the coll­ec­tion of the Della Valle family by the 1570s, when it was observed by a visi­ting artist (Fig. 234).¹⁰⁸ In 1571 Lucrezia Cecchini’s first-born son, Sulpizio, raised 1375 scudi by selling one of the proper­ties on the via dei Leutari inhe­rited from Jacopo Galli, a house with a forno then occu­pied by a baker.¹⁰⁹ And the follo­wing year, the Galli sold Michelangelo’s

fig. 233 Capital with trophies and victo­ries, Rome, Museo Nazio­nale Romano. 1st century ce?. Photo: © Eugen von Mercklin, https://arachne.dainst. org/entity/176221.

fig. 234 Pierre Jacques, Sphinx Relief in the Coll­ec­tion of the Della Valle and a Cupid, Paris, Biblio­t­hèque Natio­nale de France, Estampes et photo­gra­phie, Rés. Fb-18a‑4. 1572–1577. Photo: gallica.bnf. fr / Biblio­t­hèque natio­nale de France.

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

Bacchus to Fran­cesco I de’ Medici for the far less signi­fi­cant sum of 280 scudi.¹¹⁰ The removal of the Bacchus from the houses of the Galli marked a new phase in its history, while simul­ta­neously ending its deeply rooted rela­ti­onship with Riario, the Galli, and the Rione Parione. For the statue’s owners, it must have been a bitter loss.

The Legacy of Raffaele Riario and the Galli

More than twenty years before the Bacchus left Rome, in 1550, Giorgio Vasari published the first edition of his Life of Michel­an­gelo. At this time, the Galli garden had for decades been a cele­brated venue and favoured desti­na­tion for anti­qua­rians and artists, inclu­ding van Heems­kerck. The memory of Cardinal Riario’s vast power had faded; the palace and church he had built from the ground up were now in the hands of new owners, the Farnese. In 1547, the Farnese had employed Vasari to help erase Riario’s memory by fres­coing the walls of the Palazzo San Giorgio—then the Palazzo della Cancel­leria Apostolica—for Cardinal Ales­sandro Farnese. Vasari’s task in the Sala dei Cento Giorni in Riario’s former palace had been to glorify the life of Pope Paul III, a key supporter of Michel­an­gelo, as part of the Farnese’s programme of artistic patro­nage and coll­ec­ting (see Fig 204). Vasari was no doubt a frequent visitor to the Galli garden across the street during this time, and it comes as no surprise that he would neglect to mention Riario when he wrote, in 1550, that Michel­an­gelo made a Bacchus with a satyr ‘in the house of the Galli, across from the Palazzo San Giorgio’.

Although history could have taken a diffe­rent course, by the mid-Cinque­cento the Della ­Rovere, the Medici, and the Farnese had soundly defeated the Riario, who failed to estab­lish a dynasty of subs­tance. Cardinal Riario never became pope, and his family never conso­li­dated their own terri­to­rial state. The victors of the ‘Renais­sance’ in Rome were their successful and powerful rivals—the papal fami­lies of the Della Rovere and the Medici. Raffaele Riario’s life became the stuffof parody, and when Condivi published his biography of Michel­an­gelo in 1553, he had little moti­va­tion to correct the errors of Vasari’s biography of 1550 and to give credit to Riario for Michelangelo’s success. The Medici were then Grand Dukes of Florence, Michelangelo’s patrons, and the masters of the artist’s legacy whom Condivi aimed to please.¹¹¹ To put distance between Michel­an­gelo and an unpo­pular, seemingly unworthy figure, Condivi immor­ta­lised Cardinal Riario’s ‘igno­rance’ as a patron; his narra­tive even suggests that Michel­an­gelo, decades after the fact, had never forgotten that the Cardinal had refused to buy Michelangelo’s Slee­ping Cupid for the price of an anti­quity. Condivi replaced Riario’s early support of Michel­an­gelo with Jacopo Galli’s, paying tribute to the Galli at a time when their decline was visible to all. The gesture rewarded the artist’s cham­pions, who had done so much to support Michelangelo’s rise to fame.

Condivi’s words hono­ured Jacopo Galli just before the patrimony he had left to his heirs was broken up even further. As Galli was approa­ching death, his devo­tion to the Confra­ter­nity of the SS. Conce­zione in San Lorenzo had inspired him to add a special codicil to his testa­ment: his estate would pass down through his male descen­dants, yet if the direct, male line were ever extin­gu­ished, it would go to other bene­fi­ci­a­ries. His vigna ‘inside the city walls in Rione Tras­te­vere, near Porta Portese and the Ripa of the Tiber river’ would pass to his busi­ness partner, Bald­as­sare Balducci, or to Balducci’s heirs. His vigna near Castel Sant’Angelo would go to his brother-in-law, Marco Tebaldi, or Tebaldi’s descen­dants. Yet all of the income from his many houses and shops in the Rione Parione would be given to the Confra­ter­nity of the SS. Conce­zione to fund the dowries of needy young women. As the codicil written on 8 June 1505 states, ‘if there are no male heirs of the Galli house’, this income would be used ‘to marry young girls, poor, and chaste’ [Appendix ii.17].¹¹² As fate would have it, after the death of Galli’s grandson Sulpizio Galli in 1581, Jacopo Galli’s grand­d­aughter Livia Galli became his last direct descen­dant. The Confra­ter­nity soon staked its claim on what was left of the Isola Galli. In 1601, Ulisse Lancia­rini Galli’s son Leone struck a deal with the Confra­ter­nity, with the result that Leone would pay them a lump sum of 5000 scudi and rent of 300 scudi a year. The Confra­ter­nity would use this money to fund dowries, in accordance with Jacopo Galli’s wishes; their archives list the names of over one hundred ‘poor virgins’ who, between the years 1607 and 1613, received dowries thanks to Jacopo Galli’s bequest.¹¹³

The Galli would there­after have been sorely tempted to sell any artworks still left in their posses­sion. It seems likely that the vora­cious coll­ector Cardinal Scipione Borg­hese won their Perse­phone sarco­phagus, as well as Michelangelo’s Young Archer, when he was avidly purcha­sing art during the papacy of his uncle Paul V Borg­hese (1605–1621). The Archer was visible in the Villa Borg­hese by 1650, and the Perse­phone sarco­phagus by the early eigh­te­enth century.¹¹⁴ Just as the Galli name and the family’s repu­ta­tion as coll­ec­tors were on the verge of extinc­tion, they staged a resur­gence during the life­time of Leone’s son, Fran­cesco Galli. Francesco’s marriage into the affluent Fonseca family allowed him to build up, by the 1680s, a famed coll­ec­tion of curio­si­ties visible at the Piazza della Cancel­leria.¹¹⁵ Thanks to their unions with the Fonseca and the Delfini in the seven­te­enth century, the Galli family adopted the new title, the ‘Marchesi Galli’ (see Figs. 73 and 183). Their palace facing onto the Piazza della Cancel­leria remained with the family until the early nine­te­enth century, when it was even­tually sold.¹¹⁶ The fate of the Galli family and their proper­ties was finally sealed when, at the end of the nine­te­enth century, all of the houses form­erly owned by Jacopo Galli—except the casa grande—were demo­lished to make way for the new Corso Vittorio Emanuele II.¹¹⁷