Castiglione Sabba da

Sabba da Castiglione was an instance of the self-fashioned courtier-knight of the later Renaissance who combines an unusual set of roles: Hospitaller commander, canon regular, art collector, courtier, poet, and preceptor of knightly rules. He was born in Milan around 1480, where he also became his first. education. He pursued post-secondary studies at the University of Padua, studying jurisprudence from about 1500 to late spring 1505, but did not finish his legal education. After a brief stay in Mantua, in 1505, at the age of 25, he decided to join the Order of the Knights of Jerusalem (later called Knights of Malta), of which he soon became Deputy Attorney General. He lived in Rhodes until 1508, then moved to Rome, where he sojourned seven years as legal aide-de-camp to the admiral of the Order of the Knights Hospitaller (and later Grand Master), Fabrizio del Carretto, cultivating his interest in the arts and literature. In Rome he also met his cousin, Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano. Fra Sabba was a passionate forerunner of archaeology and, during his stay on the Aegean Sea, he was able to procure several ancient marble pieces to Isabella d'Este in Mantua. In 1515, at the age of thirty-five, Fra Sabba became a Hospitaller commander, accepting a post previously held by his friend Giulio de’ Medici, the future Pope Clement VII. He took up residence at the Order’s Commenda, or commandery, a district headquarters similar to a feudal estate, in Faenza, Romagna, part of the Papal States. He accepted this post to better dedicate himself to the studies he loved so much, away from mundane affairs, the intrigues of courts and military life. His residence in Faenza was the Church of Commenda (Saint Mary Magdalene), also called ‘Magione’, dating back to the XII century. It was not in good conditions when Fra Sabba came. This was due to the fact that previous commanders had not chosen the complex of the Commenda as their own living place, employing their revenues for other purposes. In 1533, Fra Sabba entrusted Girolamo da Treviso with the task to embellish the church with a fresco portraying the ‘Enthroned Madonna between Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint Catherine of Alexandria’. Another work of art of great importance, accomplished in the year of his death, is the one painted by Francesco Menzocchi from Forlì: a monochrome fresco depicting him as an old man presented by Saint Joseph to the Virgin. Underneath this image lies Fra Sabba’s sepulchre, with a Latin epigraph composed by himself. His interests as a man of study and collector gave birth to a library, unfortunately lost, and to a collection of pieces of art, whose surviving items are to be seen in the Pinacoteca Comunale of Faenza.