BORROMEO, FEDERIGO. — Cardinal, born in Milan on 18 August 1564 to Giulio Cesare, brother of Gilberto and father of St Charles, and to Margherita Trivulzio; died there on 22 September 1631.
Orphaned
Borromeo, Federico — Portrait by an unknown artist (17th century). Milan, Ambrosian Library.
very early, he found a second father in his great cousin, who encouraged him to pursue humanistic and philosophical studies and enrolled him at the age of fourteen at the University of Bologna; but a few months later, he conferred the ecclesiastical habit upon him in Rovato (1580) and transferred him to study in Pavia, assigning him as his residence the newly founded Borromeo College. Here the young man, who had already enrolled in Bologna in the “Congregation of Perseverance” promoted in 1573 by the Jesuit Fathers, founded an “Academia Accuratorum,” that is, of the diligent, and a “Secret Congregation” for the most devoted. On 5 May 1585 he obtained his degree in theology. The following year he went to Rome, where he chose St Philip Neri as his director, whom he would recall many times in his writings, just as he would preserve the spirit of the Oratory in some of the associations he established in Milan, such as “The Youth of the Madonna,” the “Oratory of the Married,” and the “Oratory of the Merchants.” On 22 December 1587 he was created cardinal by Sixtus V.
At the death of St Charles’s successor (1595), he was preconized archbishop of Milan, and, after many reluctances, was consecrated bishop on 11 June by Clement VIII. On 27 August he made his entry into the Duomo with such a crowd of people that he nearly suffocated; yet he did not take up permanent residence there until 1601.
At the death of Gregory XV (1623), he was among the papabili, but it seems that the veto of the King of Spain was proposed against him, on account of the twenty-year jurisdictional controversy between the archbishop and the governor of Milan.
In governing the diocese, he continued the reforming work of his cousin, in accordance with the directives of the Council of Trent, both by firmly purging the clergy and reforming monasteries and convents, and by caring for the religious formation of the people through catechetical schools; but above all, he repeated the heroic acts of charity during the renewed calamities of famine (1625–29) and the plague, spending all his wealth and contracting debts in order to distribute food to the needy and to provide religious comforts.
He himself wrote of “living two lives, the daytime one for business and the evening and nighttime one for study, and that this was possible for him because of his love for solitude.” Lively in body and in the movements of his soul, indeed choleric, as his second biographer and physician, Mongilardi, wrote, of “a very delicate and easily offended disposition,” as is read in a secret report, inclined to melancholy, which he sought to turn to Christian serenity, and in his apprehensions he found spiritual repose, beyond his studies, in contemplation and in a continual life of union with God.
His innate propensity for the interior life made him attentive to mystical phenomena and explains his correspondence with Sister Caterina Vannini of Siena, as well as with Sister Caterina Paluzzi, a Dominican nun from Morlupo, and with Ippolita Confalonieri, a nun in Santa Marta in Milan; and this excludes the romantic thesis advanced by Misiattelli.
He also showed attention to the scientific novelties that were beginning to appear in his time and was even in correspondence with Galileo, though without daring to follow him in the Copernican system.
Especially the foundation and growth of the magnificent and original Ambrosian Library (q.v.), conceived as “a living organ and a continually active center of high science and culture,” offered him frequent opportunities for intellectual contacts.
His literary production began when he was forty-five years old, but it was so abundant that in his final publication, Meditamenta litteraria, he gave information about the genesis and purpose of no fewer than ninety-five works, diverse in form and content, ranging from topics of moral and mystical theology to political considerations, such as De gratia principum, from commentaries on Holy Scripture to accounts of conclaves, from reports of pastoral visits and speeches to notes on mathematics and cosmography. Let us mention separately the Philagio, in which he collected brief biographies of devout persons, some of them noteworthy for psychological insight; Battaglia has highlighted a draft for a life of Sister Virginia de Leyva (the Nun of Monza), which B. intended to include.
F. B. also excelled as a patron of the arts. Of his “exquisite aesthetic intuition,” to use Galbiati’s words, a wise elegance is the Musaeum, and especially vivid testimony is the picture gallery he wished to complement the library, in whose construction he played a large part as advisor and critic. He attached to it an Academy of painting, sculpture, and architecture, where young people were admitted to copy classical models, just as alongside the college of doctors he established the college of pupils and the trilingual college for the formation and improvement of future doctors, and as he desired an Hermathenaean Academy of sciences and eloquence at the major seminary. Already in Rome he had taken under his protection the Academy of Design founded in 1593.
In the diocese he oversaw the restoration and embellishment of minor churches, as well as of the Duomo, and finally commissioned Crespi to make the model of the colossal statue of St Charles in Arona, erected as a palladium in the region dear to the youth of the venerated cousin and threatened by the danger of heretical infiltrations.
On the occasion of the third centenary of his death, there also appeared the interesting study by A. Batera, L’opera scientifico-letteraria di F. B. (reprint of articles published in Vita e Pensiero in 1918–19), Milan 1931; the lively biography, rich in anecdotes, by P. Bellezza, F. B. nella vita, nell’opera, negli scritti, ibid. 1931, which mentions some old prints not recalled in previous lists; and the important volume — noted for its polemical tone — by A. Saba, F. B. e i mistici del suo tempo, with the life and unpublished correspondence of Caterina Vannini of Siena, Florence 1933, in response to P. Misiattelli, Caterina Vannini, Milan 1932; M. Petrocchi, Omaggio a F. B. L’uomo e la storia, Bologna 1940, p. 23 §§, Fausta Casolini.