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An Ardent Patron. Cardinal Camillo Massimo and his Antiquarian and Artistic Circle

2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jhc/fhr044

1477-8564

Piers Baker‐Bates,

Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

In terms of seventeenth-century collecting, this book shines light on one of the most significant, if most neglected, figures of mid seventeenth-century Rome, Cardinal Camillo Massimo (1620-77). Massimo remains most familiar to a British audience through his striking portrait by Velazquez, now at Kingston Lacy, which illustrates the jacket of this book. Massimo’s contemporary importance, though highlighted by Francis Haskell in his Patrons and Painters of 1963, has not been sufficiently followed up until now, almost fifty years later. Massimo was active as a collector not only at Rome but also in Spain; furthermore his collections, dispersed after his death to pay his vast debts, subsequently formed the basis for those of other collectors such as the Marqués del Carpio, who acquired a number of Massimo’s antiquities. Camillo was, however, not merely a collector of objects both ancient and modern but also, as the title says, ‘an ardent patron’ – despite his relative poverty – of artists, including three of the most significant of his century, that is Claude, Poussin and Velazquez. As if that was not enough, Massimo also enjoyed a lifelong friendship with Gian Pietro Bellori, perhaps the most significant theoretician of seventeenth-century art. Following a strictly chronological approach to Massimo’s life and to his collecting activities, Lisa Beaven successfully restores Massimo to the position he deserves to occupy in the pantheon of seventeenth-century collectors. She also demonstrates that, like Bellori, Massimo displayed throughout his career a consistent and sophisticated taste, for example in his collecting of landscape paintings.