The contribution aims at analysing the “Sala della Cosmografia” in the broader iconographic apparatus that was proposed by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in the Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola in XVI Century. The commissioner had intended to give prominence to his figure in the perspective of his hoped-for pontificate and to restore centrality to the universal mission of the Church, by leveraging the cartographic apparatus, implicitly considering maps as symbols of a power to be attested globally._x000D_
The decorations of the Sala’ also conferred a symbolic character of enormous scope, which would given the ‘simple’ cartographic data a much deeper meaning, relating to the historical moment and as a response to the threats to the Church from the Protestant world. The whole palace is in fact intended to give messages of the centrality of the Church in the European and world context, emphasising the role of the Farnese family in the history and history and in ecclesiastical destinies, bringing out – especially in the Room that the contribution intends to analysed – a contrapositive character that was typical of the European reality of the mid-16th century._x000D_
It was in fact not a cartographic representation stricto sensu, but a representation of the world and continents that encompassed a multiplicity of meanings and propagandistic messages that were part of the more general inter-confessional conflict between Reformed and Counter-Reformed, being fully inserted into the religious, political and cultural debate of the time._x000D_
The commissioner was both a leading exponent of the Church and, at the same time, the nephew of the promoter of the Council of Trent: his figure and patronage cannot be fully understood unless in the light of these personal circumstances and the influence his grandfather had in his personal life and as a ecclesiastic.

Alessandro Ricci
University of Bergamo

 
ID Abstract: 147