CAPILUPI, IPPOLITO

CAPILUPI, IPPOLITO. — Born in Mantua in 1511 to Benedetto, whom Ariosto praised in the Furioso and Bandello honored by dedicating a novella to him, he grew up at the Gonzaga court as a page of the celebrated Isabella d’Este and companion to her son Ercole Gonzaga. Educated and capable, he became Ercole’s secretary as soon as the latter was invested with the cardinal’s purple, and subsequently his agent in Rome, his correspondent and informant, and four times his conclavist. During the pontificate of Julius III he was also the agent of Ferrante Gonzaga; and, whether because he was attached to Spain or for some other reason, he made no progress in his ecclesiastical career until the pontificate of Pius IV, who made him bishop of Fano and nuncio in Venice, whereas Paul IV, who was anti-Spanish, had kept him confined in Castel Sant’Angelo for thirteen months. In 1564 he retired to Fano and brought the Cathedral there to completion; but, not being born to be a bishop, he resigned the diocese and returned to Rome, where, in the Campo Marzio palace that he had restored on Michelangelo’s advice, he ended his days in 1580. He was buried in Aracoeli, and Muret composed the epitaph for his tomb. A poet, though less talented than his brother Lelio, author of the Centoni virgiliani, he edited his own poetry and that of his brothers; a friend of men of letters and artists, among whom B. Tasso, Michelangelo, and Titian were his intimates; an astute collector of paintings, antiquities, incunabula, and manuscripts, he always remained a man of the humanistic Renaissance, a stranger to the religious renewal that was maturing during his lifetime.