CARDINAL NEPHEWS AND OTTOMANS IN TWO THESIS PRINTS BY GIOVANNI LUIGI VALESIO

Bolognese painter and printmaker Giovanni Luigi Valesio’s varied output included engravings featuring heraldic imagery coupled with allegorical figures and, in some cases, perplexing narratives. Their erudite, panegyric character is typical of thesis prints, elaborate ephemera made for the festive academic defences that flourished in early modern colleges. This essay establishes the heretofore unknown subject of one thesis print and offers a note on the dedicatee and art historical significance of another likely ‘conclusione’. Both prints were dedicated to cardinal nephews, Scipione Borghese and Pietro Aldobrandini respectively, and they situate the position of the cardinal nephew as a militant force against the Ottoman world through learned allusion and consciously affective depictions of captivity. Drawing on the monumental imagery of their respective papacies and offering innovative conflations of historical and allegorical representation, they testify to a visual apologetics of nepotism as good government that permeated art and life in the Papal States.