Vincenzo II Gonzaga
Vincenzo II Gonzaga was a cardinal who became duke of Mantua, sold the greatest picture collection in Italy to the king of England to pay his debts, and died fourteen months into his reign without an heir, which started a European war over his city. He was the third son of Duke Vincenzo I and was meant for the Church. He was a cardinal at twenty-one, in 1615, and would have stayed one had his brothers not died in turn, Francesco of smallpox in 1612 and Ferdinando, himself an ex-cardinal, in October 1626. Vincenzo had already resigned the red hat to marry a widow ten years older, Isabella Gonzaga di Novellara, in 1616, a marriage his brother had annulled and he then tried to have restored. He came to the throne at thirty-two, sick, childless and in debt. The Gonzaga collection had been assembled over a century - Mantegna, Titian, Correggio, Raphael, Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin, the Triumphs of Caesar - and the agent of Charles I of England, who had heard it was for sale, bought the pictures in two lots in 1627 and 1628 for something over twenty thousand pounds, and shipped them to London, where they became the core of the royal collection until Parliament sold that too. Mantua noticed; the duke did not care. He died on Christmas Day 1627, the last Gonzaga of the direct line, having on his deathbed married his niece Maria to the French claimant, Charles of Nevers, to keep the duchy from the Habsburg candidate. Spain and the emperor refused to accept it, the War of the Mantuan Succession followed, and in July 1630 an imperial army sacked Mantua for three days and the plague did the rest. The city never recovered the position; the pictures are in London, Paris and Madrid.
- Lived: 1594 CE – 1627 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: duke, monarch, head_of_state, cardinal
