This paper presents findings from the recent book Raffaele Riario, Jacopo Galli, and Michelangelo’s Bacchus, 1471–1572. It revisits Michelangelo’s Bacchus (1496–97) through the intertwined careers of Cardinal Raffaele Riario and the merchant-banker Jacopo Galli, two central figures in the cultural and economic networks of Renaissance Rome. Riario, Camerlengo of the Roman Church, was among the most ambitious patrons of his generation; Galli emerges as a collector, poet, mediator, and cultural broker who helped embed the young Michelangelo within Rome’s antiquarian milieu. Reconsidering the reception of Michelangelo’s Sleeping Cupid and the commission of the Bacchus, the book challenges several long-standing assumptions about the artist’s early Roman career, including the belief that Michelangelo attempted to deceive Riario with the Cupid. It also challenges the idea—first proposed by Johannes Wilde—that Riario rejected the Bacchus: instead of a failed commission, the Bacchus emerges as a central product of Riario’s cultural ambitions and as Michelangelo’s attempt to rival the antique. Reconstructing the networks that connected patronage, collecting, and merchant banking in Rome, the book situates Michelangelo and Galli within the wider political and intellectual milieu of Riario’s patronage, including his interests in humanism and astrology and his support for the Spanish Reconquista. It also traces the later history of the Bacchus in the houses of the Galli family, where it remained for more than sixty years. The famous break in the statue’s hand likely occurred during the Sack of Rome in 1527, when invading soldiers attempted to loot it; the broken sculpture was subsequently displayed as a fragment, becoming a poignant memorial to the devastation suffered by the Galli family during the Sack.
Kathleen Christian is Professor of Early Modern Art at the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, having previously taught in the US and the UK. She is also Director of the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance. Her research has focused on the reception of antiquity in Renaissance Rome, with particular attention to antiquities collecting, the history of sculpture, and humanism. Together with Cammy Brothers, she edits the Harvey Miller book series All’antica.
