Who Is Pope Innocent VIII?

In the years following 1485 Pope Innocent VIII had had built and handsomely decorated a villa on the high ground at the back of the old Vatican palace. An enclosed space, bounded by villa and palace to north and south and by the two walls to east and west, was to be divided into a series of courts on different levels, designed originally for the display of sculpture. The great sculptures placed in elaborately painted and decorated niches at the four corners of the court and in the center of each enclosing wall; around and set into these walls, level with the upper part of the niches were thirteen antique masks.

In 1566 there was a tension between the pope's position as head of the Roman Catholic Church and the objects they collected, when the Cardinal Michele Ghislieri was elected pope and took the name of Pius V. This emaciated Dominican friar, sprung from peasant stock, had always lived a life of the greatest austerity-and he made it clear from the moment of his election that he did not intend to change his habits almost the earliest target of his reforming zeal was the sculpture collection of the Belvedere. Within a few weeks of his election it was announced that this was to be dispersed 'because it was not suitable for the successor of St. Peter to keep such idols at home Such feelings were by no
means new nor was Pius V in any way illogical.
In 1527 Andrea Fulvio found it necessary to deny the old story that Pope Gregory the Great had 'ordered that all the most beautiful statues ... should be thrown into the Tiber so
that men, captivated by their beauty, should not be led astray from a religion that was still fresh and recent. It was the impropriety of such sculpture being exhibited by the Vicar of Christ that caused the real concern. As early as 1512 a visitor to the statue court had conceived a special hatred of the Venus Felix for this reason and had dreamed of expelling such images from the Vatican. A decade later Pope Adrian VI could comment that the sculptures were 'the idols of the ancients' It has indeed been suggested that the statue court may have been conceived of from the first as an oblique tribute to paganism,"?

Pius V in the end put these statues in place on condition that access to them was forbidden [the Capitol]. And thus, rumors that the Pope was stripping the Vatican of its antique statuary aroused great hopes among other European collectors. The Holy Roman Emperor, the King of Spain and the insatiable and indefatigable Medici all profited from his activities." But in fact when the Pope finally died in 1572 it became apparent that fears and hopes alike had been exaggerated: not a single statue considered to be of the highest excellence had left the city, and, shuttered off though its contents were, the courtyard with its Venuses and its Antonius survived intact despite a campaign of unprecedented violence against courtesans and sodomites.

In making over the sculptures from the remaining parts of the Belvedere to the Capitol, Pius V was to some extent following well-established precedents. We have seen that a hundred years earlier Sixtus IV had inaugurated the Capitoline collections with a donation of bronzes from the Lateran Palace. Many subsequent popes had followed his example, and the Conservators themselves had been active in the search for suitable antique relics. Already by 1523 visitors could look upon the statues on the Capitol as 'the most beautiful and famous in the world', even though the main impulse behind the collection seems to have been historical nostalgia rather than intrinsic beauty. In 1564 Cardinal Rodolfo Pio da Carpi bequeathed another prodigious memorial of the greatness of ancient Rome.