Giovio Collection

The Giovio Series, also known as the Giovio Collection or Giovio Portraits, is a series of 484 portraits assembled by the 16th-century Italian Renaissance historian and biographer Paolo Giovio. It includes portraits of literary figures, rulers, statesmen and other dignitaries, many of which were done from life. Intended by Giovio as a public archive of famous men, the collection was originally housed in a specially-built museum on the shore of Lake Como. Although the original collection has not survived intact, a set of copies made for Cosimo I de' Medici now has a permanent home in Florence's Uffizi Gallery.

Giovio first began collecting portraits around 1512, soon after leaving his hometown of Como to pursue his career in Rome. Initially focused on men of letters, the collection grew to include military figures, kings, popes, artists and even a few renowned women. The series included illustrious men of ages past alongside those of his own day. Giovio intended his gallery to serve as a permanent public record, and so was scrupulous about its accuracy. Idealised portraits would not suffice: he preferred portraits drawn from life whenever possible. In the absence of such, likenesses produced from coins, busts, or earlier life portraits were acceptable. Giovio worked zealously to acquire works for his collection, writing to dozens of public figures across Europe and the Near East to solicit portraits. His correspondence reveals that he bargained, cajoled and even bribed subjects for pictures, many of which he paid for himself.

What made Giovio's collection unique was his intent to open it to the public: his 20th century biographer T. C. Price Zimmermann writes that "the idea of founding a portrait museum on the lake was his most original contribution to European civilization." The inspirational value of collections of portraits was a familiar Renaissance trope, consciously revived from Antique precedents: as the humanist Poggio Bracciolini had written in his essay De nobilitate liber, the Romans should be emulated, "for they believed that the images of men who had excelled in the pursuit of glory and wisdom, if placed before the eyes, would help ennoble and stir up the soul." Examples of similar collections can be traced to the early 14th century, and to less universal sets of the "Nine Worthies" and literary reports of the busts of philosophers in Roman libraries, such as Pliny's, to "...images made of bronze... set up in libraries in honour of those whose immortal spirits talk to us in the same places." but none of these was conceived with the express goal of edifying the public. Giovio frequently referred to his project as a templum virtutis, or "temple of virtue", as a reflection of its didactic purpose.

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