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Caprarola's Sala della Cosmografia*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Mary Quinlan-McGrath
Mary Quinlan-McGrath*
Affiliation:
Northern Illinois University
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Extract

Il pontificato non vuol esser cercato, e chi lo cerca non lo trova

Paul III Farnese to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese

The Massive Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola looms over its plain, a mute witness to the former power of the family (fig. 1). The rocca was initiated by the first Cardinal Alessandro (Pope Paul III) and fully and magnificently developed by the second Cardinal Alessandro, his grandson. Inside, its decoration boasts of family deeds and silently eliminates family failures. Much of the decoration was minutely described by contemporaries, and documents and decoration have been carefully studied by modern scholars. However one of the major halls, that which evoked the greatest contemporary admiration, the Sala della Cosmografia, can profitably be looked at again (figs. 2-4, 8, 9).

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , Winter 1997 , pp. 1045 - 1100
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1997

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Footnotes

*

This article is dedicated to Ernst Gombrich, who first interested me in astronomical and astrological cycles. I would like to thank Jozef IJsewijn, Charles Cohen, John O'Malley, John North, and Bruce Stephenson for their many valuable suggestions. My thanks to Greg Reynolds for his diagram of the room. The present study was accepted in June of 1995; in September of that year Partridge, 1995, published a detailed analysis of this cycle, complete with many excellent photographs. His interpretation is very different from my own. Nevertheless, Professor Partridge and I draw a similar general conclusion, that this decoration was an expression of Cardinal Alessandro's desire for papal power.

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