Put Portraits of Illustrious Men on The Office Walls
In 1552, that's what Cosimo di Medici told Cristofano dell'Altissimo to do for him, here's a little flavour of what resulted.
"…send a painter to my house... so that he can get the most famous ones, and the ones he will like the most, to decorate a room in the Castle"
We’ve been in Italy for the past fortnight, enjoying the pleasures of what was once the Serenissima Repubblica Lucense, the Republic of Lucca, but is now dissolved into the modern province of Tuscany. Lucca, with its magnificent renaissance walls and a multitude of mostly romanesque churches, is a lovely city that, while steeped in history like much of central Italy, wears it more lightly than other renaissance cities such as Florence, Siena or San Gimignano and isn’t scarred by industry in the way of Pisa and Pistoia. It is a good use of a few days spending time in its shady streets, eating pork or veal cooked in tomato and capers (the city has a festa for these rovelline lucchesi), or just walking round the park atop its amazing walls.
During our visit we took a short time in the bigger, grander, tourist-crammed but magnificent city of Florence, travelling there on Italy’s famously on time trains. These trains are cheap but one was cancelled and a second broke down so no prizes for Italian railways there. Still, better than trying to find somewhere to park in Florence let alone braving high volumes of adventurous Italian driving. Unsurprisingly Florence on an Italian public holiday (Republic Day) was full to bursting. We were pleased our tickets to the Uffizi were for the Tuesday when everything was open and the Italian kids were back at work, school and college.
Florence is wonderful, so much to see and do that you are almost forced to ration carefully, but the busy crowds don’t make for a great experience and the modern practice of ‘influencers’ blocking the view of anything and everything while they preen and pose for photographs in infuriating. There was a time when you’d hesitate while somebody took a snap, no longer as these instagrammers and tik-tokkers don’t deserve my patience or indulgence.
Still you’re not really interested in me prattling on about my holiday so instead I’m going to talk about a photograph I took in the Uffizi. As you know, the Uffizi, once the offices for the Medici rulers of Florence, contains a great collection of art stretching from Greek and Roman times through the middles ages and renaissance to the 18th century (when it largely stops because the Medici got kicked out by Napoleon who gave the town to his sister or something like that). And every set of offices needs some art on the walls. We took about four hours, including a stop for a snack, to wander round the galleries and this is how I came to take the photograph I’m going to talk about. Along the main corridors, filled with assorted statuary, there are, in neat rows just below the ceiling (so about 20 feet off the ground), a collection of portraits. None of the guides talks much about these portraits but they provided, for those in that 16th century office, a guide to the most illustrious men of that age.
We stopped for a brief rest on a bench and I photographed a group of four portraits, they’re at the head of the article. I’d no idea who the individuals pictured were but thought I’d find out later when I’d a little time for investigation. I talk a lot about Kipling’s idea of the “mere uncounted folk of whose life and death is none report or lamentation” as a way of appreciating that the world around us didn’t happen by accident but was consciously created by men and women whose names we don’t know. Now the four portraits in question weren’t nobodies back in the 16th century when Cristofano dell'Altissimo painted them (in truth copied them from a collection held by Paolo Giovio), indeed they were remembered as notable in the brutal history of Italy’s renaissance: Nicolo Orsini, Bartolomeo d’Alviano, Consalvo Fernandez di Cordova (“Il Gran Capitano”), and Pietro di Navarra. Odds are, however, that like me you’ve not heard of these men. Let’s find out.
Nicolò Orsini was a condottiero, someone who today we’d call a mercenary but whose skills were essential to the conduct of the wars that dominated late medieval life in Italy (every wondered why all the villages are on hilltops and the towns wrapped in great walls, there’s your answer). Orsini, Nicolò di Pitigliano:
“A captain who values victory over not losing, nor the advantage derived from a victory so significant as to outweigh the risk of a defeat. Endowed with a great creative faculty in his operations, balanced, he is one of the finest representatives of Italian military art of his time.”
And the work was lucrative at least judging by Nicolò’s estates:
“Count of Pitigliano, Count of Nola. Lord of Fiano Romano, Morlupo, Filacciano, Montevitozzo, Ghedi, Leno, Malpaga, Montirone, Boiano, Ottaviano, Avella, Monteforte Irpino. In the Mantuan area, he owns the Casalmoro Castle and an estate in Asola”
Fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will know about another earlier condottiero, Giovanni Acuto, ‘John the Sharp’, the main character, Sir John Hawkwood, in Sir Arthur’s ‘White Company’ novels. And here in these portraits we have another, Bartolomeo d’Alviano:
“...born around 1455, stands as one of the most esteemed condottieri of his time, dedicating his prowess and leadership to the defense of the Venetian Republic. Hailing from the prestigious d’Alviano family, which shared lineage with notable Lombard families like the Trinci and Atti, Bartolomeo’s martial inclination was evident from an early age, inspired by his father and uncle’s military exploits. Despite his slight build, he engaged in numerous military campaigns, initially for the Papal States and the Orsini family. He played a pivotal role against the French at the Battle of Garigliano in 1503 and notably served the Venetian Republic, achieving significant victories, though he also faced defeats and imprisonment. His valor during the Battle of Marignano in 1515 cemented his legacy.”
In the middle of the 16th century when dell’Altimisso was carefully copying over 400 paintings for his boss Cosimo di Medici, these men would have been remembered, people were around who’d met these great men and knew of their deeds in battle. But now, when we think of the renaissance, we don’t think of these military leaders but of the artists, architects, writers and thinkers whose world and success was made possible by their mercenary exploits.
The third of our portraits is another military leader, one for who the tem ‘genius’ might legitimately apply, Gonzalo Andrés Domingo Fernández de Córdoba y Cardona-Anglesola:
“Held as one of the greatest generals in history, he became the first European to decisively employ firearms on the battlefield, and among the first to reorganize the infantry with pikes and firearms in effective defensive and offensive formations. He developed them as part of a combined arms doctrine including fields as disparate as cavalry, artillery, fortifications, guerrilla, siegecraft and diplomacy. The changes implemented by Fernández de Córdoba, which led to the formation of the tercios, were instrumental in making the Spanish army the dominant land force in Europe for over a century and a half. He has been credited with marking the transition between medieval and modern warfare.”
Back in John the Sharp’s day, in the 14th century, the innovation he brought to those seemingly endless Italian wars was the longbow. Fernández de Córdoba oversaw the combination of musket and pike that helped Spain become Europe’s, arguably with the opening of the Americas, the world’s most powerful nation. A nation created literally over the dead body of our fourth portrait, Pietro di Navarra, Pedro the last Marshal of an independent Navarre (and not to be confused in any way with a more recent Peter Navarro).
From one almost random photograph, we’ve peeled back the gilding of the late middle ages and found that, for all that age’s innovation and artistic genius, it was an age of war. It’s not a surprise that Leonardo’s pitch for business was based more on his ideas for machines of war than his artistic or scientific genius. The Giovio Collection presents us with images of men (and a few women) who made Europe’s renaissance and, with this little glimpse, we discover that this new awakening was made as much by forgotten condottieri and junior Spanish noblemen given command of armies as much as by the likes of Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Brunelleschi.
Send me a painter, Pietro Giovio said to Cosimo de Medici:
“The idea of creating a collection of portraits of illustrious men, the so-called "gioviana", dates back to Cosimo I who, for this purpose, in 1552 sent the painter Cristofano dell'Altissimo to Como to copy the collection of portraits put together by the bishop Paolo Giovio. In fact, Giovio, since 1521, during a stay in Florence as a guest of Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, had begun the creation of the most important collection of its kind both in quality and variety of subjects (it came to include four hundred portraits). Giovio himself in 1549, in a letter published by Frey, suggested to Cosimo to "send a painter to my house... so that he can get the most famous ones, and the ones he will like the most, to decorate a room in the Castle". Cristofano dell'Altissimo reached Como in 1552 and from that date the copies were sent to Florence constantly.”
If your Italian is better than mine, you can read about the full collection, all those illustrious men who line the walls of Cosimo’s old offices and who in their different ways made what we now call The Renaissance. Most of who we’ve forgotten.