CAPILUPI, IPPOLITO. - Born in Mantua in 1511 to Benedetto, whom Ariosto praises in the Furioso and whom Bandello honored with the dedication of a novella, he grew up at the court of the Gonzagas, as a page of the celebrated Isabella d'Este and companion of her son Ercole Gonzaga. Educated and capable, he became Ercole's secretary as soon as the latter was invested with the purple, and afterward his agent in Rome, his correspondent and informant, and four times his conclavist. During the pontificate of Julius III he was also agent of Ferrante Gonzaga, and, whether because of his ties to Spain or for some other reason, he made no progress in his ecclesiastical career except under Pius IV, who made him bishop of Fano and nuncio in Venice, whereas Paul IV, anti-Spanish, had kept him confined in Castel Sant'Angelo for 13 months. In 1564 he retired to Fano and there carried the Cathedral to completion; but, not born to be a bishop, he renounced the diocese and returned to Rome, where, in the palace in the Campo Marzio that he had restored on the advice of Michelangelo, he ended his days in 1580. He was buried in Aracoeli and Muret composed the epitaph for his tomb. A poet, though less accomplished than his brother Lelio, author of the Centoni virgiliani, he was the editor of his own poems and those of his brothers; a friend of men of letters and of artists, among whom he counted B. Tasso, Michelangelo and Titian as intimates; a shrewd collector of paintings, antiquities, incunabula and manuscripts, he remained always the man of the humanistic Renaissance, a stranger to the religious renewal that was maturing in his years.
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Luigi Berra