Cardinals as Patrons of the Visual Arts

Five decades of research on the patronage of cardinals should suggest that the commissioning of art by members of the Sacred College during the early modern period is well understood. However, the traditional interpretation of patronage as a sign of personal taste and conspicuous consumption – or to phrase it in an early modern term, magnificenza – which cardinals shared with other wealthy nobles and sovereigns, has had a negative impact on an assessment of how cardinals from the Renaissance until the late Settecento commissioned art in relation to their ecclesiastical positions. It was this latter aspect that distinguished cardinals from other categories of patron, and this chapter thus aims to flesh out the ways in which cardinals’ patronage in the context of the institutional Catholic Church was distinct from that of other dignitaries and sovereigns in the period 1420 to ca. 1750.