Le vite de'pontefici

Le vite de'pontefici is an Italian ecclesiastical history about the various reigns of popes from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The book contains many illustrations of these popes, the majority in profile portraits.  This piece of marginalia, however, is full-figure Romanesque sketch in a similar style to Michelangelo or da Vinci: a vastly different artistic legacy than the woodcuts of popes throughout the body of the text. This textual dissonance implies the artist’s lack of attention to the text’s content: though not obvious from the image, this sketch is upside down relative to the text. At the back of a text highlighting the reigns of popes, the difference in artistic style and of the fact the figure that is clearly not a pope points to a reader uninterested or resistant to the text’s religious themes.