What is the greatest Papal portrait in history?

Pope Julius II, the so-called ‘Warrior Pope’, was not simply the Bishop of Rome and spiritual head of the Catholic Church, but a central figure in the cultural and political life of the High Renaissance. Until the unification of Italy in the 1870s, the pontiff was also the temporal ruler of the Papal States, acting as its political and military chief. Julius II was a hardened war-time leader and, remarkably, personally led his armies into battle twice. His belligerence was not reserved for the battlefield – Julius II was a famously difficult man with a short temper. 

The Pope was also a crucial figure of the Italian High Renaissance. Many of the greatest artistic achievements of the period (or of all time, for that matter) were executed under his patronage - Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling and Raphael’s frescoes in Julius II’s Vatican papal apartments are but two examples. 

Here Raphael paints what is often thought to be one of the most radically innovative portraits of a pope. Before this, depictions of the pontiff tended to be rather formulaic and generally showed the pope kneeling in prayer or in profile. Raphael’s portrait, however, says something of the man himself and shows Julius lost in thought and sporting the beard he famously grew to mourn the Papal States’ loss of Bologna. Apparently, the likeness was so exact that members of the Roman public were as terrified of the picture as they were of the man himself.

Michelangelo and Raphael quite rightly take the plaudits for being the greatest artists at work in Rome during the first decades of the 16th Century, yet there was a third man who, despite working in Raphael and Michelangelo’s shadows, was an innovative artist in his own right. Sebastiano was a Venetian painter who came to Rome in 1511. He undertook commissions frescoing the Villa Farnesina and worked closely with Michelangelo, painting pictures to his designs. Sebastiano was pitted against Raphael in artistic competition when, in 1516, he was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de Medici (later Pope Clement VII) to complete a monumental painting of the Raising of Lazarus (now in the National Gallery, London) whilst Raphael was given the Transfiguration as a subject. Both were intended for Narbonne Cathedral and whilst Sebastiano’s panel was sent to France, Raphael’s was deemed too magnificent to leave Rome and remains in the Vatican today. 

When Giulio de Medici became Pope Clement VII, Sebastiano aligned himself closely to his patron and, through their friendship (as well as with some bribery) the artist entered the Pope’s court in 1531 as Keeper of the Seal to the Papacy. His work, which was always sporadic and variable in quality, suffered as a result of his elevation, Sebastiano often taking years to finish a commission.

This portrait of Clement VII was painted in the year he took office as the Keeper of the Seal and is executed on slate, an innovation Sebastiano helped pioneer. This painting was untraced for many years, until it was recorded in the 19th century as belonging to the Earls of Pembroke. Rather remarkably, after being sold by the Pembrokes, it disappeared again until it resurfaced at Sotheby’s in Chester in the 1980s, its attribution lost. It was bought as ‘Italian School, 19th century’ and once the picture’s true nature was discovered, it was eventually sold to the Getty in 1992.
 

Titian, Pope Paul III, 1543, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
 

Pope Paul III succeeded Clement VII in 1534 and inherited the papacy at a deeply turbulent time for Rome and the Catholic Church as a whole. Rome had been sacked only seven years earlier and the Catholic Church was grappling with the Protestant Reformation that had been sweeping Europe for the previous decade. In 1545 Paul III convened the Council of Trent which, in its eighteen-year sitting, would clarify the Catholic Church’s doctrine in the face of spreading Protestantism. This Catholic Counter-Reformation would not only deal with matters theological but also provide guidelines for the iconography of religious art, something Lutherans found deeply suspicious.

Titian was perhaps the greatest portraitist working on the Italian peninsula during the early-mid 16th century. His skills were put to effective use in this portrait – the Pope is shown as weary and embattled, and although many have compared this picture to Raphael’s portrait of Julius II, Paul III here looks defiantly at the viewer, a deviation from Raphael’s more meditative depiction.
 

Attributed to Caravaggio, Pope Paul V, c. 1605-06, Borghese Collection, Rome
 

Caravaggio needs no introduction here – his dramatic, emotional, and often shocking paintings are the bridge between the 16th-century Counter-Reformation and the theatre of the 17th-century Italian Baroque. What he is not known for, however, is rather staid portraiture, of which this painting is an example. Caravaggio’s biographer, Giovanni Bellori, wrote in his Life of the artist, that Pope Paul V sat to the painter, who executed a seated portrait. If Caravaggio were to have painted such a picture it would have had to have been in either 1605 or 1606, as Paul V was elected in 1605 and Caravaggio had fled Rome by the summer of 1606 having killed Ranuccio Tomassoni in a brawl. 

But was this portrait painted by Caravaggio? The jury is still out. Many have suggested that the composition of the picture is too bland and static for an artist of Caravaggio’s virtuosity. However, others have pointed out that the pose and composition would have been dictated to the artist and therefore Caravaggio cannot be held responsible for its uninspiring nature. The picture was first recorded in the Borghese Collection in 1650 where it remains today. This is a point in favour of the attribution given the Cardinal Scipione Borghese was a major patron of Caravaggio’s, indeed, many of his most celebrated canvases are still to be found in his Roman Villa Borghese.

Diego Velázquez, Pope Innocent X, 1649-50, Galleria Doria Pamphilij
 

Often considered Velázquez’s greatest portrait, his depiction of Pope Innocent X only gained the fame and recognition it deserves relatively recently. The portrait was painted during a trip made by Velázquez to Italy, from his native Spain. Pope Innocent X was initially reticent about the idea of being painted by the Spaniard and doubted his abilities as a portraitist. It was only after Velázquez produced his portrait of his enslaved studio assistant, Juan de Pareja (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), that he convinced the Pope that he was up to the task. The portrait is the most roughly painted on this list, Velázquez uses thick brushstrokes to build up the whites and reds of the Pope’s vestments and to bring his ruddy face to life. The sitter looks at the viewer with an enquiring, even menacing, gaze. 

The portrait was kept from public view for at least two centuries before coming to wide notice as a masterpiece by the artist. It is perhaps equally famous as the model for Francis Bacon’s series of around fifty paintings he made after Velazquez’s original, all of which distort the figure of the Pope, and often show him demonically screaming.