Beschreibung:

Letter of Niccolo da Ponte, doge of Venice, to Cardinal Giulio Feltrio della Rovere, bishop of Palestrina and archbishop of Ravenna, offering thanks for a previous message of congratulations on his election, in Italian, large manuscript document on parchment [Venice, dated 13 April 1578] Single sheet, with 9 long lines in an ornamental italic hand which leans to the right, plus two lines of subscriptions, address on verso, folds, splits and small holes (with very small affects to text), bottom of leaf discoloured and split with some darkening, 275 by 475 mm. Much about the career of Cardinal Giulio Feltrio della Rovere (1533-1578) reflects the apparently paradoxical threads of religious austerity and noble excess in the Italian Renaissance Church. He was the younger brother of Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, and was elevated to the Cardinalate at the scandalously young age of thirteen. He proved to be a solid reformer of the Church, with some successes in mending the ways of wayward monastic communities, but his own sexual habits fell short of the mark and he fathered two illegitimate sons while in office, later using his influence with Pope Pius V to have them legimitised. He was one of the wealthiest cardinals of his day and an opulent art patron, extending and filling the Pallazzo della Rovere in the Via Lata in Rome, as well as a suburban villa in Rome and a palace in Fossombrone. See I. Verstegen’s contribution on him in Patronage and Dynasty: the rise of the Della Rovere, 2007.