In the 17th century, the Pope appointed some powerful church officials in Rome, known as cardinal nephews. Karen J. Lloyd’s book, Art, Patronage, and Nepotism in Early Modern Rome (Routledge, 2022), explores how these cardinal nephews used art to enhance their influence and justify their positions. We have the opportunity to hear all about this from the author and understand how nepotism was justified as a form of ‘Catholic rule’ in early modern Rome.
Watch a short video of the book here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/175_l7X2QpDshy5gXr8h-Ktf1qQcEAf3a/view?usp=sharing
What inspired you to write a book about art, patronage, and nepotism in early modern Rome?
The book stems from my dissertation, which focused on adopted cardinal nephews as art patrons. My initial research question was not strictly an art historical one. I kept reading references to ‘adopted cardinal nephews’, but could find no substantive discussion of what it meant to be an adopted nephew. Was adoption common? What were the legal or social ramifications of it? How did it impact an individual’s ability to fill the role of papal nephew? There was some literature—on adoption in France, and some on orphaned children in Italy—but it didn’t really square with what I was finding, namely the frequent references to adoption of adult men. My questions weren’t really answered by the existing literature, not for the Roman context in any case.
It was the last question that took me back to art, as throughout the 17th century, art patronage was a big part of the responsibilities of the cardinal nephew. Some of the nephews I studied are very well known as art patrons, such as Scipione Caffarelli Borghese, while others, like Cinzio Passeri Aldobrandini, a nephew of Pope Clement VIII, are much less so. Some of them, like Scipione (a relative of Paul V’s by blood, but by a sister, so didn’t have the Borghese name initially) and Paluzzo Albertoni Altieri, nephew of Clement X, became then the core of the book. Understanding some of the major works they commissioned seemed to me to require shifting how we think about their understanding of their positions as cardinal nephew and about nepotism more broadly.
Adoption, in a very real sense, gave the lie to the most fundamental justification of nepotism in early modern Rome, namely that it was the dutiful and necessary care for one’s family. As such, it was an essential good. But in a context in which blood lines and blood relations were critically important, adopting someone to serve as a nephew undermines the whole premise. Doing so suggests that the position of cardinal nephew had become something more administrative or bureaucratic (and it has been understood that way, as a steppingstone on the pathway to an essential modern papal bureaucracy).
What I was curious about, however, was how adoption exposed cracks in the thinking about nepotism, in the idea that it was accepted, no questions asked, as a familial and therefore also as a political inevitability in Seicento Rome. The position of cardinal nephew was not an inevitability. It was a socially and politically constructed position, the parameters of which were not precisely defined, and which were therefore reconstituted by each new nephew. The most influential line of research on cardinal nephews, stemming from the work of Wolfgang Reinhard, argues that cardinal nephews did not really have a political function—a function of power—instead their position was largely social. But that line is hard to draw clearly – the social and the political blurred in early modern Rome—and the cardinal nephew did have a political role to play, even if it was largely behind the scenes. The nephews came to be known as the Cardinal padrone, ‘master’ or ‘boss’ cardinal; they served as legates, headed congregations, and oversaw papal correspondence. So, the book is grounded in a different set of questions: How was nepotism defined through the arts as a political good? How did cardinal nephews, and their papal uncles, use the arts to defend their role and the very idea of nepotism as a political institution? My project was to understand how they were invested in their own position and how they used the arts to support that position.
Your book ‘uncovers how cardinal nephews crafted a seductively potent dialogue on the nature of power, fueling the development of innovative visual forms that championed themselves as the indispensable heart of papal politics’. Could you tell us more about who these nephews were and their fascination with the arts?
By the 17th century, during and in the decades-long unfolding of the Catholic Reformation, the cardinal nephews were exactly what the name implies: they were nephews of the reigning pope, invested with the office of cardinal on their uncle’s assumption of the throne. The exception in the book is Paluzzo Albertoni Altieri, who was related by marriage, rather than by blood, to Clement X Altieri, and adopted to serve as cardinal nephew. Generally, a pope would name just one cardinal nephew, and there was competition within families for that role.
Some of the nephews were voracious collectors with strong individual tastes, like Scipione Borghese, while others, like Paluzzo Altieri, were somewhat more constrained, whether by circumstance or by personal inclination (or both). Commissioning architectural projects and collecting art were critically important representationally and practically. They were a means of announcing a family’s arrival into Rome’s highest social circles. And often these were families that had only recently arrived to those levels. The Altieri, for example, were an old Roman family but quite impoverished. Others, like the Ludovisi or the Barberini, had origins elsewhere in Italy (Bologna and Tuscany) and were looking to firmly embed themselves in the Eternal City. They all used the arts to establish themselves financially, by investing in property, and socially, proclaiming and securing their new standing—hopefully—in perpetuity.
In your book, you speak about how Pope Clement X’s nephews utilized their familial connections to acquire valuable antiquities, expand their family palace, commission significant artworks, and assert their dominance and prestige in Roman society. Indeed, they were ‘the most powerful patrons of the day’. In what sense should readers understand the notion of ‘nepotism’ in early modern Rome?
The word ‘nepotism’ in English comes from the early modern Roman practice of favouring the nephew: the Italian ‘nipote’ (Latin: ‘nepos’) gives us the word. The pope of course couldn’t officially have children (and, unlike previous centuries, in the 17th century none of the cardinal nephews were illegitimate offspring of the reigning pope). But he needed someone, the equivalent of a prince, who could be trusted to serve as a kind of second-in-command. Ideally, the nephew knew the pope’s wishes and could represent those wishes in the pontiff’s absence, and could liaise with members of other European courts, as a prince of the reigning papal dynasty. In early modern Italian thinking, the pope needed a blood relative, as only that tie could ensure loyalty. It was assumed that the nephew’s interests would be fully aligned with those of the pope, and so they could work in concert. And the nephew was of the next, younger generation, so would be invested in the future of the family and would work on their behalf.
The practice of nepotism in the church shifted significantly over time. It goes back to the 12th century, and then went through phases that have been called the era of ‘major’ nepotism, when relatives of the pope could aspire to rule over their own sovereign territories, to the period of so-called ‘minor’ nepotism following reforms of the practice beginning in the mid-16th century, which aimed to rein it in. When the word ‘nepotism’ first came into circulation in the 17th century, it was not meant to be complimentary. The best-known text to popularize the word was Gregorio Leti’s two volume history Il nipotismo di Roma (Roman Nepotism), published in the 1660s, during the reign of Alexander VII. Leti was a frequent critic of the church, and it is no surprise that his book frames nepotism as the most profound scandal of the—to his mind—already corrupt court of Rome. There were then a series of movements against nepotism as an official practice that were proposed in the later decades of the 17th century, until finally the position of cardinal was eliminated in 1692 in a papal bull promulgated by Pope Innocent XII Pignatelli. So, nepotism was a political practice, closely associated with the peculiarities of the papal court and its system of rule. That said, the belief that looking after one’s family was a fundamental responsibility was entrenched in early modern Italy, and so there was also a broader practice of ‘nepotism’ in which uncles would vacate church positions to give them to relatives or otherwise favour a relation financially or professionally. This is what fascinated me about nepotism, really, its ambiguous standing as both an established norm with broad moral arguments in its support, and as a controversial and clearly potentially corrupt practice that had to be brought under control. The cardinal nephew sat squarely, and prominently, at the intersection of those two ways of thinking; he was nepotism personified.
What specific works of art did the cardinal nephews favor, and what were the reasons behind such preferences?
As patrons, they have some things in common, and some distinctly individual tastes and inclinations. There were some standard expectations of the cardinal nephew as a patron. Those expectations were rooted in the nephew’s legal ability to hold private property, which could become familial patrimony (so, in the standard thinking on this, the pope would concern himself with the Church, and the nephew with family affairs). Generally, the cardinal nephew would ensure the family had an impressive palace in the city—as in Francesco Barberini’s support for the construction of the family palace at the Quattro Fontane—as well as, ideally, a villa outside the city walls. Some of the villas are just at the edge of the city and remain well-known jewels, like the Villa Borghese or the Villa Ludovisi, while others are further afield and less well known outside of art historical circles, like the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati. Those palaces and villas would then have to be appropriately (read: sumptuously) furnished with a collection of art, including antiquities and modern paintings and sculpture. Again, some of those remain famed collections, like that of the Borghese in what is now the eponymous gallery, while others, like those of the Montalto or Ludovisi families, have been largely dispersed.
In their individual collections, their preferences varied. Scipione Borghese is habitually described as a voracious collector, both for his interests in art and for his unscrupulous methods of acquiring works he wanted. He strove to get works by famed masters of the Renaissance, like Raphael, but also had a strong interest in modern work by artists like Caravaggio and Bernini. His passion for art has, in the long run, fulfilled the purpose of maintaining the fame of the Borghese name, as visitors to Rome still flock to what was his villa to see the collection. Other nephews had different, perhaps less flashy, tastes. Francesco Barberini was interested in antiquarianism and erudite book publishing, while Flavio Chigi described his own tastes as ‘bizarre’. Regardless of individual tastes, however, their patronage was intended to advance their familial and personal interests.
What sources were vital to your study of the discourse of nepotism?
I love archival work, and have drawn on primary sources like avvisi, the news-notices of early modern Europe, as well as letters of individuals like Cardinal Flavio Chigi and the published writing of Francesco Barberini. Some sources were specific to the projects I was focused on, like patristic texts to understand Guido Reni’s frescoes for the Borghese in Vatican Palace, or early modern writings on theories of mind by Sforza Pallavicino for my writing on Paluzzo Altieri’s display of a portrait bust of his uncle by Bernini. But I would say that above all, my most important sources are the works of art themselves: looking closely, asking about how works of art were displayed and how they were perceived, that was the kind of work that led me forward.
In exploring ‘a visual ideology of nepotism’, how does your research move scholarship forward?
I will paraphrase a colleague and say that I hope that it does what all good humanities scholarship does, which is to make the familiar unfamiliar so that we can see a subject in a new way. The crux of the intersection of nepotism and the arts had largely become synonymous with notions of magnificence and social climbing. I don’t dismiss that by any means—those goals were absolutely at the core of the cardinal nephews’ activities as patrons. But I hope that I have added another, heretofore missing, side of their patronage, one that was about the political position of the cardinal nephew and about defending the practice of nepotism more broadly. Some of those projects were visually magnificent, like Carlo Maratti’s fresco for the Altieri family, while others were more subtle, woven into the displays of paintings, sculptures, and art objects that cardinal nephews orchestrated. So, I hope, too, to have contributed to showing the range of approaches we, as art historians, can take to understand how art could be made to speak politically in early modern Rome.
Lastly, are there any projects that you’re working on that we can anticipate?
I’m focusing on sculpture, especially Bernini, and the early modern body right now. I have an essay forthcoming in Art History titled ‘Bernini’s Braids and the Intimacies of Stone’, which focuses on the sculptor’s Proserpina and Daphne and the significance of their braids in relation to the materiality of marble, ideas of sculptural knowledge, and gender. I’ve been working on sculpted representations of old age, especially old age skin, and am thinking about ideas of physiology in relation to the sculpting of things like fat, skin, and hair for a new book project.
Karen Lloyd is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art, Stony Brook University. Her research focus is the art and culture of early modern Italy, especially Rome. She is the author of Art, Patronage, and Nepotism in Early Modern Rome (Routledge, 2023) and co-editor of A Transitory Star. The Late Bernini and his Reception (De Gruyter, 2015). She currently serves as Series Editor for ‘Visual Culture in Early Modernity’, Routledge.