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brother-emperors · 2 years

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ASCANIO MARIA SFORZA

oof, this is going to be an adventure to go through, but let’s get started!

there’s something incredibly fascinating to me about how Ascanio shows up at so many interesting and pivotal points of history, it’s almost impossible to find a text that covers either Rome or Milan in the later half of the quattrocento that doesn’t cite the Marco Pellegrini biography on him.

this part about his name specifically really makes the gears in my brain turn like goddamn, I really can’t escape mention of the gens Julia, but the Aeneas/gens Julia talk juxtaposed with the Virgin Mary sure is a lot

Ascanio Maria Sforza. La parabola politica di un cardinale – principe del Rinascimento, Marco Pellegrini

especially with the push for Ascanio to be made cardinal for the usual political reasons

Politics and Dynasty: Underaged Cardinals, 1420-1605, Jennifer Mara DeSilva

but along with the ancestral scheming, conspiracy, and a preference towards war over the political machinations of the cardinalate, and excelling at both is something that has my attention in a vice grip, especially when compared to other cardinals with military tendencies, like Cesare Borgia or Federico di Sanseverino

Popes, Cardinals and War: The Military Church in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, David Chambers

and FINALLY: the background image he’s laying on is an illustration I did after Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna of the Harpies, the dagger he has in hand is in reference to the hidden dagger he kept in his baton of command

Popes, Cardinals and War: The Military Church in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, David Chambers

and my personal choice for illustration isn’t based off of any portrait of him that exists, but instead I’ve scrambled together an image based off of several of his siblings because oh do the Visconti-Sforzas of Milan have me thinking thoughts all the time, constantly, and I haven’t even gotten to Ascanio as a patron of the arts.

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#ascanio sforza #italian renaissance tag #drawing tag #long post #OH BOY THIS SURE WAS SOMETHING #ive had this composition rattling in my skull for awhile and it has refused to leave me alone until it was finally done #anyway. would you look at that! i finally did semi-historically accurate cardinal's robes for the time period! wahoo #catholicism cw #renaissance papacy tag

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