This volume is actually built more broadly than the title suggests: it deals in various ways with the whole lifetime of Giulio de’ Medici, rather than being narrowly confined to his incumbency as Pope Clement VII. One might superficially expect the volume to be of less immediate pertinence to the art historian than, say, Ashgate’s splendid volumes devoted to the cultural world/politics of Cosimo I de’ Medici and his duchess, Eleonora di Toledo. In fact, the scope of the essays is very wide in terms of historical, cultural, and critical concerns, and almost half of them—those collected in “Part 2: Patronage, Cultural Production and Reform”—are on artistic/art-historical matters. Fortuitously, perhaps, the most compellingly written papers are in this second part of the book.

This is by no means to suggest that the other essays lack usefulness for the discipline of art history. On the contrary, the value of the collection for students in the field is the contextual breadth it provides for understanding the conditions under which art, inclusively defined, was made and consumed, debated and ignored, moved and mutated. It also highlights, for those of us accustomed to wander intellectually between the courts, palaces, and council chambers of Italy, some of the conditions under which what we call art was either unknown or unimportant. There is, in other words, a refreshing amount of “bottom-up” history here.

It is greatly to the credit of the editors that much of the volume avoids positioning the Medici pope as a hero or even, more neutrally, as a principal protagonist: Clement’s career as prelate and politician forms the linchpin, not the subject, of the book. Sheryl Reiss is particularly to be commended for not really writing about Clement at all in her paper, but about the patronage of his predecessor, Adrian VI, whose supposedly art-famished pontificate urgently needed what one might call inverse demystification; her work thereby casts a salutary sidelight on patronage in the flanking pontificates of Clement and his cousin Leo X. Despite the porous nature of the “collection-of-essays” format, there is an unprecedented amount of room for the reader to move among and within the constituent texts here.

One aspect of the “openness” of the Clement volume is that the tributary essays are uneven both in the degree of their resolution and the extent of their originality. This is not necessarily to the detriment of the book’s overall effect. True, a few—most notably (and regrettably) Cecil Clough’s overlong and underwhelming paper on Clement’s relations with Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino—are conceptually weak, and feel like information dumps rather than satisfyingly conceived arguments. Others seem a little like retreads or addenda to existing works by the scholar in question: Charles Stinger’s “The Place of Clement VII and Clementine Rome in Renaissance History” falls into this category. However, Stinger’s piece represents sound judgment on the part of both editors and author. Orderly, cogent, and precisely articulated, it draws on Stinger’s excellent book The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), presents his further reflections on pertinent themes, and—perhaps most importantly—allows for the reader’s recalibration at the halfway point in the volume. The presence of a characteristically broad but nuanced Stinger overview stresses the potential of this volume to serve as a vade mecum on Roman cultural history in the 1520s and 1530s, containing as it does a wide array of thoroughly collated data, as well as provocative new investigations.

The essays that are most obviously provisional or adumbrative, which is to say snapshots of work in progress or slivers of tangential studies, are in the section on the Sack of Rome. Perhaps predictably, given Gouwens’s own publications on the subject, this part of the book is rich in analyses of archival material and related sources of primary evidence. There are powerful resonances between some of the papers here and those in the opening section devoted to Clement’s character, family, and politics. Ivana Ait’s account of the views of a cisalpine immigrant, Cornelius de Fine, on Clement (and especially his fiscal policies), presents a fascinating parallel to some of the rapidly historicized negative assessments of the pope by leading humanists, as discussed by T. C. Price Zimmerman. This is all the more striking because Cornelius did not directly have an axe to grind against Medici in the way that Giovio and Gucciardini did. The shift between narrow and broad focus in this section is particularly satisfying: for example, Anna Esposito and Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro’s enormously rewarding study of the testimony offered by notarial registers concerning the effects of the Sack “upon the citizenry, conceived above all as a community of people who lived and worked in the assailed and conquered city” (125), gives no attention to Clement at all. Conversely, the essay that is placed cheek by jowl with Esposito and Piñeiro’s piece concentrates on the experience of the pope and his entourage in the makeshift court at Orvieto—and some of the long-term consequences for the city’s fabric of their sojourn there.

In part 2, there are again intriguing patterns and resonances among the contributions. Inevitably, several of the papers here focus primarily on Clement’s activities as a patron—of the visual arts, of letters, and of musicians. For the historian of architecture, Clement has already emerged in studies of the last twenty years as a patron of uncommon discernment and particularized tastes; essays in the present volume by William Wallace and Caroline Elam consolidate this image. It is interesting, therefore, to find Richard Sherr conclude, in his study of the papal choir under Clement, that the Pope’s interests did not extend to the distinctive patronage of sacred music; and, in Julia Haig Gaisser’s essay on literati in Clement’s courtly ambit, evidence that his “treatment of humanists appears in sharp contrast with his generous and enthusiastic patronage of artists” (308). Linda Wolk Simon also stresses that painters’ happy expectations of patronage under the second Medici pope were largely unrewarded even before the Sack of Rome, except in the case of a favored handful.

The shadow of André Chastel, author of the seminal study of the arts around the time of the Sack, inevitably looms over the papers in this book dealing with cultural production. The varied ways in which the contributors respond to his notion of a “Clementine style” in the arts is interesting. Victor Anand Coelho makes it clear that he is seeking evidence of Clement’s taste for the fantastical in the lute music of Francesco Canova da Milano; but I have to confess that, after reading his essay twice, I am still a little unsure about his conclusions. Conversely, as already noted, Wallace and Elam carefully articulate Clement’s extraordinarily focused attitudes to architecture, the latter again concentrating on evidence of his love of the fantastical. Elam’s piece is in my view the most remarkable in the volume: the author manages to make a close study of the morphology of relatively arcane architectural motifs into an engrossing account of the subtle interplay between a discerning patron and a cluster of phenomenally able and imaginative architects.

Given the healthy oscillation between, so to speak, “close-ups” of Clement and “panoramas” of Roman society and culture in the 1520s and 1530s, it seems to me very fitting that the book ends with a paper that has little directly to do with the pope. Alexander Nagel keeps Clement for the most part in the background in his engaging study of the ways in which the visual arts—primarily devotional paintings and church furniture—reflected unstable reforming tendencies in the period. Indeed, Nagel is very clear at the outset that his aim is not to “suggest a general Clementine pattern” in these tendencies; rather he “insists on the contingency of the episodes under discussion” (386). Nagel’s position left me reflecting on whether or not a more tight-knit “life and works” of Clement would have had as much value as this collection, with its medley of rich and various themes. On balance, I am not sure that I count myself among those “scholars of Renaissance Italian history” who, according to Price Zimmerman, “eagerly await the fresh interpretations of Clement’s life and pontificate being prepared by Kenneth Gouwens” (27)—especially if Gouwens’s tendency to play the Clement apologist, so unappealingly evident in his introduction, goes unchecked. In spite of its title, The Pontificate of Clement VII consistently throws into question, implicitly and explicitly, the value of periodization by papacy. I remain unconvinced that the isomorphic pairing of author and biographical subject can yield more than a throwback to the late Romantic modes of historical storytelling from which this volume is blessedly free.