Alessandro Farnese (cardinal)

Pope Clement VII, his pontificate marked by indecision and miscalculation, has instituted no vigorous measures to meet the demands of the Protestant Reformation.

A patron of artists, including Cellini, Raphael, and Michelangelo, Clement VII is remembered for having ordered, just a few days before his death, Michelangelo's painting of The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.

Johann Widmanstetter (alternately spelled John Widmanstad), a secretary of Clement VII, had in 1533 explained the Copernican system to the Pope and two cardinals.

The Pope was so pleased that he gave Widmanstetter a valuable gift.

Towards the end of his life, Clement VII once more gives indications of a leaning towards a French alliance, which is averted by his death on September 24, 1534 in Rome.

It has been said that he died from eating poisonous mushrooms, but the symptoms and length of illness do not fit this theory.

In the words of his biographer Emmanuel Rodocanachi, "In accordance with the custom of those times, people attributed his death to poison."

His body is interred in Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

His successor, Alessandro Farnese, born in 1468 at Canino, Latium, Papal States, was the oldest son of Pier Luigi I Farnese, Signore di Montalto and his wife Giovanna Caetani, a member of the Caetani family which had also produced Pope Boniface VIII.

The Farnese family had prospered over the centuries but it is to be Alessandro’s ascendency to the papacy and his dedication to family interests that brings about the most significant increase in the family’s wealth and power.

Alessandro’s humanist education had been at the University of Pisa and the court of Lorenzo de' Medici.

Initially trained as an apostolic notary, he had joined the Roman Curia in 1491 and in 1493 Pope Alexander VI appointed him Cardinal-Deacon of Santi Cosma e Damiano.

Farnese’s sister Giulia was reputedly a mistress of Alexander VI and may have been instrumental in securing this appointment for her brother.

For this reason, he was sometimes mockingly referred to as the "Borgia brother-in-law," just as Giulia was mocked as "the Bride of Christ."

As bishop of Parma, he had come under the influence of his vicar general, Bartolomeo Guidiccioni.

This leads to the world-weary future pope breaking off the relationship with his mistress and committing himself to reform in his Parma diocese.

Under Pope Clement VII, he has became Cardinal Bishop of Ostia and dean of the College of Cardinals, and on the death of Clement VII in 1534, is elected as Pope Paul III.

Alessandro had been a notably dissolute young cleric, taking for himself a mistress and having three sons and two daughters with her.

By Silvia Ruffini, he had fathered Pier Luigi Farnese, whom he will soon create Duke of Parma; others include Ranuccio Farnese and Costanza Farnese.

The elevation to the cardinalate of his grandsons, Alessandro Farnese, aged fourteen, and Guido Ascanio Sforza, aged sixteen, displeases the reform party and draws a protest from the emperor, but this is forgiven, when shortly after, he introduces into the Sacred College men of the caliber of Reginald Pole, Gasparo Contarini, Jacopo Sadoleto, and Giovanni Pietro Caraffa, who will become Pope Paul IV.

Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the future Pope Paul III, had acquired an estate at Caprarola in 1504 and had commissioned the architects Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Baldassare Peruzz to design a fortified castle or rocca.

Surviving plan drawings by Peruzzi show a pentagonal arrangement with each face of the pentagon canted inwards towards its center, to permit raking fire upon a would-be scaling force, both from the center and from the projecting bastions that advance from each corner angle of the fortress.

Peruzzi's plan also shows a central pentagonal courtyard and it is likely that the later development of the circular central court was also determined by the necessities of the pentagonal plan.

The pentagonal fortress foundations, constructed probably between 1515 and 1530, becomes the base upon which the present villa sits; so the overall form of the villa had been predetermined by the rocca foundations.

Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, a grandson of Pope Paul III, and a man who is known for promoting his family's interests, plans to turn this partly constructed fortified edifice into a villa or country house.

He had commissioned Vignola as his architect for this difficult and inhospitable site in 1556; building work commences in 1559.

Vignola had recently proved his mettle in designing Villa Giulia on the outskirts of Rome for the preceding pope, Julius III.

Vignola in his youth had been heavily influenced by Michelangelo.

For the villa at Caprarola, his plans as built are for a pentagon constructed around a circular colonnaded courtyard.

In the galleried court, paired Ionic columns flank niches containing busts of the Roman Emperors, above a rusticated arcade, a reworking of Bramante's scheme for the "House of Raphael", in Via Giulia, Rome.

A further Bramantesque detail is the entablature that breaks forward over the columns, linking them above, while they stand on separate bases.

The interior loggia formed by the arcade is frescoed with Raphaelesque grotesques, in the manner of the Vatican Logge.

The gallery and upper floors are reached by five spiral staircases around the courtyard: the most important of these is the Scala Regia ("Royal Stairs") rising through the principal floors.

Fountains have by the mid-sixteenth century become a crucial element in Italian landscape architecture, whose practitioners often exploit natural undulations in the land to create water pressure, as in Vignola's Villa Farnese.

One of the finest examples of Renaissance architecture, the Villa Farnese reflects Vignola’s ability to formulate inventive and graceful designs using classical elements.

Giulio Clovio's masterpiece, the illustrated Book of Hours produced in 1546 for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and highly praised in Giorgio Vasari's Lives, appears in the portrait of Clovio painted by El Greco around 1573.