Alessandro Albani (15 October 1692 – 11 December 1779) was a Roman Catholic cardinal, but should be best remembered as a leading collector of antiquities, dealer and art patron in Rome. He supported the art historian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and commissioned paintings from Anton Raphael Mengs. As a cardinal (from 1721) he furthered the interests of the governments of Austria, Savoy and Britain against those of France and Spain; he was a noted jurist and papal administrator in his earlier career. Upon his death he was the last cardinal created by Pope Innocent XIII. Biography Alessandro Albani was born on 15 October 1692 in Urbino, then part of the Papal States. He was the son of Orazio Albani. His studied jurisprudence at the La Sapienza University in Rome. Early in life he also prepared for a military career. At the age of 9 years, on 26 August 1701, he was made an honorary member of the military brotherhood of justice of the Knights of St John of Rome, and in 1707, a colonel of a regiment of dragoons in the pontifical military. Alessandro was a member of the Albani family (branch of Urbino), which originated from into the Albani (family) that had established itself there from northern Albania in the 15th century. Alessandro's father, Orazio, was the brother of Pope Clement XI Albani, who convinced Alessandro to set aside his budding military career. In part, his weak eyesight, that led to blindness in his advanced age, was not propitious for a soldier, and hence Alessandro entered the clergy. After Pope Clement XI's death in March 1721, Pope Innocent XIII appointed Alessandro as a cardinal, on 16 July 1721 as Cardinal-Deacon of Sant’Adriano al Foro - for which Alessandro required numerous special dispensations, not least because his brother, Annibale Albani, had been made a cardinal in 1711 and still sat in the Sacred College. Albani developed into one of the most astute antiquarians of his day, an arbiter of taste in the appreciation of Roman sculpture, and "a powerful and enterprising collector of Roman antiquities and patron of the arts... He used both ancient and modern art as a form of cultural capital," Seymour Howard observed, "giving away acquisitions as favours and selling them for perpetually needed funds or when they lost efficacy for him." His first apprenticeship in this area was served under the papal antiquary and curator Marcantonio Sabatini.