Alongside Carlo Borromeo, Gabriele Paleotti represented the pinnacle of the Catholic reform desired by the Council of Trent but never really implemented in its organisational complexity. A humanist, even before being a man of the cloth, Paleotti was always linked to the University of Bologna. He often tried to soften the strict directives of the Church, being aware of the value of a free culture, albeit controlled by the needs of the time.
Gabriele Paleotti was born in Bologna in 1522 to a “bourgeois” family, well established in the upper echelons of society by virtue of prominent family members in the political, university and legal spheres.
The Paleotti residence, now occupied by offices and lecture halls of the Alma Mater Studiorum, stood directly opposite the magnificent palazzo of the Bentivoglio family, with whom the Paleotti were loyally allied.
Gabriele's grandfather Vincenzo, a professor of Civil Law, was a courtier of Giovanni II and succeeded in promoting the family's social ascent also through fruitful marriages with other humanists of the period (his daughter married Filippo Beroaldo the Elder). When, however, with the arrival of Pope Julius II in the city, the Bentivoglios were driven out, the two sons of Vincenzo, who had died some years before, were locked up in Castel Sant'Angelo.
Camillo, a man of letters, and Alessandro, a professor of Canon Law, were later released with the intercession of the new pontiff Leo X.
Gabriele was born to Alessandro. He continued his family's uninterrupted profession as a university lecturer.
Having been left fatherless at an early age, he was educated at the renowned Collegio Ancarano in Bologna before continuing his studies at the University. He then graduated in utroque iure in 1546, obtaining a professorship in Civil Law two years later (1548).
The legal precepts that he had learned from Andrea Alciato and that he himself taught in his lessons came together in 1550 in the De nothis spuriisque filiis, a work immediately reprinted throughout Europe that legitimised the rights of children born out of wedlock.
His legal knowledge soon brought him into the limelight also within the Roman Curia, which called him in 1556 (thus Paleotti left his city and teaching) and appointed him auditor of the Apostolic Court of Audience: the supreme civil court of the Papal State.
When the last phase of the Council of Trent reopened in 1562, Cardinal Giovanni Morone, president of the sessions, made him his legal advisor and got him to handle delicate matters such as attempting to find a compromise between Catholic conservatives and progressives and acting as a binding figure between the Church State and the kingdoms of Spain and France.
The Diarium, an important historical document printed only in 1842, dates back to this period. It consists of annotations by Paleotti that reveal the fragile moments of that final schism between Romans and Protestants.
By this time, Gabriele Paleotti’s ecclesiastical career was assured. In 1565 Pius V made him cardinal and the following year he returned to Bologna.
Alongside Carlo Borromeo, his Milanese counterpart, Paleotti may be considered the greatest exponent of the attempted post-Tridentine episcopal restructuring. It is likely, however, that both high prelates were sent from Rome, not so much to manage the Catholic reform in the two cities as to give the pontiff freedom and autonomy. Indeed, instead of contributing to a widespread redevelopment, the pope inaugurated a period of strong administrative centralisation. Paleotti's ideals, on the other hand, are evident in his writings: the Episcopale Bononiensis civitatis et diocesis (1580); and the Archiepiscopale Bononiense sive de Bonniensis Ecclesiae administratione (1594). Beyond his more purely spiritual objectives, the cardinal aimed to restructure the ancient system of parishes. These were to be transformed into modern vicariates appointed by the bishop, engaged in monthly collegial meetings, and added to the annual diocesan synods, which were to issue edicts and laws and elect synodal judges responsible for disciplining the local clergy, who in turn were to be retrained within seminaries.
Compared to Borromeo, Paleotti had a more open and less rigid culture, also by virtue of his studies and the city where he was born and which he administered. His religious interests liaised constantly with the intellectual, university and scientific world, so much so that often, when there was the risk of certain volumes being included in the Index of Prohibited Books, he was among the most strenuous defenders of their legitimacy. Among the many deeds that favoured the local University, the concession to the College of Doctors to modernise and expand its premises, located at the back of St Peter's Cathedral since the 13th century, certainly played a significant role.
However, he could wield very little actual power, since in Rome the popes had by then inaugurated their absolutist policy and in Bologna the noble Senate constantly claimed its administrative rights, even after the city was elevated to a metropolitan seat and Bishop Paleotti to archbishop in 1582, thanks to the Bolognese Gregory XIII (born Ugo Boncompagni).
This sense of abandonment and frustration, as well as a reasoned critique of papal bureaucratic centralism, can be found in the De sacri Consistorii consultationibus, published in 1592. Paleotti had by then returned to Rome, not without having first entrusted Bologna to the management of his cousin Alfonso Paleotti (also a graduate and, in his time, a professor of Canon Law at the University of Bologna).
Although he was among the most renowned cardinals around and had participated in no less than six conclaves, his hopes for the papacy were by then dashed, given the changed internal political situation that regarded him as radical and unreliable.
However, the difficulties and sufferings of his most intense years waned as the years progressed, with Paleotti developing a greater reliance on an intimate and personal religious sense, which saw in Filippo Neri a new absolute model. This “stoic” serenity achieved at the end of his life is the subject of Paleotti's last work, De bono senectutis, published in Rome in 1595, two years before his death.
Although Paleotti was the undisputed champion, together with Borromeo, of the Catholic spiritual Reformation, today he is mainly remembered for his Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images (1582), with which he advocated a greater and more widespread religious renewal through the use of images that were necessarily easy and adherent to biblical realism and historicism. It was precisely in Bologna, in the year of publication of his treatise, that the Accademia dei Carracci was born. This was to become a triumphant vehicle throughout Europe of the theoretical precepts of its fellow archbishop.