Cardenales y "nobleza eclesiástica" en Italia, entre ficción y biografía (siglos XVI-XVII)

The literature on cardinals examined in this article (writings on conclaves, biographies, funeral orations and relations, as well as descriptions of funeral apparati) demonstrate an ostentatious prevalence of the “purple” on the “blood”, of the ecclesiastical nobility on the honour of the lineage, of the genealogy of the Church on that of the family trees. Such prevalence was of course rhetoric within a system that made the kinship relationships as its strength and had a noble social block behind itself. The exception of some cardinals or popes of humble birth, indeed, confirmed the rule of the patrician or aristocratic descent of the majority of them. In this regard, as Peter Burke (2001) suggests, art and literature rather than “reflecting the life of their time […] compensate for what is lacking in their time” and in some way influence it.