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longer than the surrender of arms, because like all the nobles of Old Spain—as Juana Cortés dubbed the country that she was already beginning to find stifling—they were walled in by debt and clearly in decline.

Giant Heads

    F rom the perspective of the Counter-Reformation Curia, preoccupied as it was with moral hygiene, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte had every imaginable fault. He was Venetian, he represented the sinister interests of the Medici and the French crown in the Vatican, and he was furnished with bottomless coffers that he basically used to corrupt everything—beginning with his own flesh. His list of friends included the major bankers of the city and a distinguished host of cardinals who could, if they chose, make life difficult for the pope. He was also proprietor of a noteworthy assortment of musicians, painters, poets, and castrati capable of circulating the most devastating gossip all over Rome. This confluence of power didn’t make del Monte infallible—no one but the pope was infallible in those days of hard-line bishops and inquisitors with free rein—but he was tolerated to a nearly unique degree. His whims and pleasures far overstepped the incidentally rather foggy line of the acceptable, and even the legal.
    Nevertheless, Cardinal del Monte died at a ripe old age, in possession of a moderate fortune—he lived well, but he wasn’t a thief—and good humor. If he never became pope, it was onlybecause the recently anointed Philip IV of Spain forced the vote from afar in the conclave of 1621 in order to close the gates of St. Peter’s to the French crown. He lost the last Sistine round to Alessandro Ludovisi, who ruled as Gregory XV.
    Despite all the power that del Monte accumulated, no visitor in the Rome of his day could say that he hadn’t been received with courtesy and generosity at the Palazzo Madama, from which the cardinal manipulated Vatican politics with a silk-gloved hand for three decades; no one ever claimed that his operations—intrigue-filled and complex, given that he was the representative of the Medici grand duke of Tuscany in the city—had inflicted pain on a body or losses upon any coffers; and no one, absolutely no one, would have ventured to doubt his prodigious nose for objects of art that would increase exponentially in value.
    If del Monte bought a work from a living painter and hung it in his celebrated music salon, the painter was assured inclusion on a short list of candidates for the decoration of an altar in the next chapel or a wall of the next cloister.
    The art historian Helen Langdon has studied the collection of paintings amassed by Cardinal del Monte at the Palazzo Madama. The cardinal’s Leonardos, Raphaels, and Michelangelos may have been copies, but he had five authentic Titians, a Giorgione, and several Licinios and Bassanos. And he was an enthusiastic collector of portraits, in imitation of the grand duke.
    The inventory of his collections numbers more than 600 paintings—as well as ceramic pieces and sculptures—of which 277 were “unframed paintings measuring four palms each, of various popes, emperors, cardinals, dukes and other illustriousmen and even some women.” When he moved into the Palazzo Madama, del Monte contracted the services of the painter Antiveduto Grammatica—his real name—to supply him with copies of portraits. According to Giovanni Baglione in his
Vite de’ pittori
,
scultori ed architetti moderni
, Antiveduto Grammatica was, in his day, “the great painter of heads.”
    It’s likely that del Monte met Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio at Grammatica’s workshop, where the artist labored during his years of poverty and obscurity, painting giant heads at piecework rates.
    The majority of the portraits that adorned the walls of the Palazzo Madama are lost, and for good reason: they were junk, copies of copies made in the workshop of a