Pope Innocent VIII

In 1432 Giovanni Battista Cibo (or Cybo) was born into a Ligurian family, though he spent some of his formative years in the kingdom of Naples. This dual inheritance was reflected in his episcopal career, which saw him made bishop of Savona in 1466 and translated to Molfetta in 1472. Pope Sixtus IV raised him to the cardinalate on 17 May 1473, but his subsequent record was relatively undistinguished (see the Oxford Bibliographies article “Pope Sixtus IV”). During the next conclave, Sixtus’s nephew Giuliano della Rovere (see the Oxford Bibliographies article “Julius II”) persuaded his fellow cardinals to elect Cibo to the papacy, which was accomplished on 29 August 1484. He took the papal name Innocent VIII and his pontificate lasted a little under eight years, until his death on 25 July 1492. He appears in passing in numerous publications relating to Rome and the papacy during the Renaissance period, but he lacked the forcefulness, magnetism, or literary skills that distinguished some of the other 15th-century popes and so remains relatively enigmatic, —the man who happened to be pope while others took the lead in statecraft, literature, and the visual arts. Like all popes, his career can be traced in numerous Reference Works, but there are few publications that can pass as Overviews of his life or pontificate. In historiographical terms, the real strength lies in Primary Sources, the quantity and quality of which are such that, for present purposes, they are subdivided into Letters and Diaries and Histories. There are Collections of Papers that touch on the pontificate, but none devoted to Innocent himself. On the other hand, his papal election ensured that the Cibo Family remained socially distinguished for some generations, though they were never as prominent as some of the other dynasties who traced their exalted status back to one or more of the Renaissance popes. Although contemporaries found Innocent lacking in confidence, he was a papal monarch, the counterpart of the emperor and superior to all other Prelates and Princes, whether in Italy or Wider Christendom and Beyond. However, that was about the papacy as an institution, not the Cibo pope as an individual. Only when one turns to the cultural trio of Architecture, Sculpture, and Literature does Innocent even begin to emerge as an individual, commissioning his own architectural additions to the Vatican complex and being celebrated in the last papal tomb created for Old St. Peter’s.