by Eamon Duffy
The culmination of this papal patronage of the arts came under Francesco della Rovere, the Franciscan theologian who became Sixtus IV (1471–84), and his nephew Giuliano della Rovere, who became Julius II (1503–13). From the outset, Pope Sixtus belied his poor Franciscan origins by the lavishness of his patronage. His coronation tiara alone cost 100,000 ducats, more than a third of the papacy’s annual income. Sixtus launched a lavish campaign of rebuilding which realised many of the aspirations of Nicholas V. They included the first new bridge across the Tiber since antiquity, the Ponte Sisto, built to relieve the pressure of pilgrims on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo and ensure that the tragedy of 1450 never recurred. He rebuilt the foundling hospital of Santo Spirito in the Borgo, and the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, the della Rovere family mausoleum which dominated the entrance to the city used by pilgrims from the north.
His most famous commission, however, was the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican itself. This building was designed to provide a setting for papal elections, and more especially for the meetings and common worship of the 200 clerics who, with the Pope, formed the cappella papale or papal chapel. Sixtus was a passionate lover of music, and in addition to creating the chapel he established the Sistine choir to provide appropriately splendid music for the papal liturgy. The chapel itself was decorated with twenty-eight painted niches between the windows containing the portraits of the popes of the first three centuries, and with two matched fresco cycles of the lives of Moses and of Christ by the greatest painters of the day.
These frescoes were not simply pious decoration, but were carefully worked out ideological statements, laden with papal symbolism. In Botticelli’s Punishment of Korah, for example, the theme is the dreadful punishments which befall those who rebel against Moses, God’s priest, king and prophet. Moses here is a ‘type’ or prophetic symbol for the Pope, and the inscription reads: ‘Challenge to Moses bearer of the written law’. Contemporaries would have picked up at once the allusion to the Conciliar movement and to the Italian princes currently at war with the Pope.
The matching scene across the chapel, Perugino’s Christ Consigns the Keys to Peter, is similarly inscribed: ‘Challenge to Christ bearer of the law’. In the background are portrayed the Gospel story of the tribute money, in which Christ’s relationship to the temporal power of the Roman empire was questioned, and the story of the stoning of Christ after his sermon in the synagogue at Capernaum, in which his authority as a religious teacher was rejected. In the foreground, Christ hands the golden key of spiritual authority to Peter, from which hangs suspended the base-metal key of temporal power, a deliberate evocation of the papal version of the ‘two-powers’ theory inherited from Gregory VII and Innocent III, in which the Pope possesses both spiritual and temporal power, exercising spiritual power directly, and temporal power indirectly through obedient Christian rulers. The Pope, like Christ, is supreme in both spheres.
Alongside these artistic commissions, Sixtus developed other aspects of Nicholas V’s programme, completing the establishment of the Vatican Library and appointing the Humanist Bartolomeo Platina as its librarian. Sixtus did all he could to claim the total credit for the library, but the foundation bull of the library echoes Nicholas in describing the library as being ‘for the enhancing of the Church militant, for the increase of the Catholic faith, and for the convenience and honour of the learned and studious’.5
Sixtus IV’s nephew, Julius II, continued his uncle’s patronage of the arts in the service of the papacy, but on an even more awesome scale. In the Vatican Palace itself, he refused to live in the rooms which his hated Borgia predecessor, Alexander VI, had lavishly decorated. He moved upstairs, and brought in Raphael to decorate his new apartments with paintings which similarly celebrated both reason and faith, the glories of pre-Christian philosophy but also and especially the teachings of the Church. The results are among the greatest glories of European art – the School of Athens, with its triumphant celebration of intellect, the Disputation on the Sacrament and the Miracle of Bolsena, the latter an unexpected glimpse of Julius’ perfectly genuine religious devotion – and a series of scenes which echoed the warrior Pope’s own determination to free the Church from her worldly enemies: the Expulsion of Heliodorus, the Liberation of St Peter (Julius had been the Cardinal Priest of the church of St Peter in Chains), the Repulse of Attila.
Nicholas had planned the rebuilding of St Peter’s: on 18 April 1506 Julius laid the foundation stone of the new church. It was to take 150 years to complete, for, where Nicholas had envisaged an extension of the existing building, Julius characteristically determined to make a clean sweep of the Constantinian church and the hundred or so altars, tombs and chapels it had acquired in the thousand years since it had been built. His architect, Bramante, planned a grandiose domed building centred on the shrine of the Apostle, but the new choir was also to contain an immense and vulgar tomb for the Pope. Had it been completed it would have been more appropriate for a pharaoh than a Christian bishop, and Julius’ presence in the mother church of Christendom would have been hardly less visible than that of St Peter. Above all, it was Julius who coaxed, bribed and browbeat the greatest artist of the Renaissance, Michelangelo Buonarroti, to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with frescoes which breathe the spirit of Humanist Christianity, the whole design a celebration of human beauty and of divine grace in creation and redemption.
By the turn of the sixteenth century, then, Rome had become the centre of the Italian Renaissance, and for two generations the Curia had been one of the major career routes for literati on the make. Famous Humanists competed for posts as papal secretaries, and eventually colonised the entire papal bureaucracy: at its height the Curia was employing up to a hundred Humanists at any one time. The popes harnessed the new educational skills of the Humanists, as they harnessed the skills of painters and architects, to create for the papacy an image of greatness.
In the process, the theology of the papal court underwent something of a revolution. The revival of interest in Greek literature and philosophy, and in antiquity in general, had led to a reassessment of the ‘literature of the damned’. A Christianised Platonism became fashionable, which saw Christianity not in opposition to the religion of the pre-Christian world, but as the fulfilment of all that was best in it. In ancient Egypt, Babylon and Greece would be found poetic or allegorical traces of the truths fully revealed in Christ, and the wisdom of the ancient philosophers was God-given. Traces of this sort of thinking can be seen in Michelangelo’s scheme for the Sistine Chapel ceiling, where the pagan Sybils sit alongside Old Testament prophets as foretellers of the Christian mystery. They are even more obvious in the decorations Pope Alexander VI had painted by Pinturicchio for the Borgia apartments in the Vatican in the early 1490s, where the mysteries of Osiris are used as types of the saving work of Christ.
This process could go too far. Alongside this ‘poetical theology’ went less benign forms of assimilation of the pagan past. The members of the Humanist Roman Academy visited the catacombs to see ancient inscriptions and frescoes, collected sculpture, and cultivated an elaborate Ciceronian Latin style. Some of them also flirted with a deliberate and provocative ‘paganism’ which included active republicanism and open homosexuality. Paul II, himself an ardent Humanist, was nevertheless alarmed by what he took to be an exaggerated respect for pagan authors and pagan values. He antagonised this group in the 1460s by a reorganisation of the Curia (partly designed to limit the influence of Cardinal Alessandro Borgia), which in fact reduced the number of curial posts open to Humanists. In 1468 a plot to assassinate the Pope was discovered, in which sixty members of the Academy were believed to be implicated.
Even where matters were not taken to these lengths, the self-consciously classical culture of the Renaissance Curia represented a radical break with many established Christian assumptions and attitudes. As a result it was both incomprehensible and highly offensive to many. The greatest of all the Humanists of northern Europe, Erasmus
of Rotterdam, satirised the absurd Ciceronian mannerism of curial writing, which referred to God the Father as ‘Jupiter Optimus Maximus’, to the Virgin Mary as ‘Diana’, to the Apostles as ‘legates’ and to the bishops as ‘proconsuls’.
For Erasmus such mannerisms were more than foibles. They were marks of a growing secularism within the papal court, and he was not the only one to comment on it. It was not Humanism which lay at the root of it, however, but the struggle of the popes to maintain the independence of the Papal States. Despite the 1454 Peace of Lodi, fifteenth-century Italy was a highly unstable place of shifting allegiances and ferociously contending states led by ruthlessly selfaggrandising families – the Medici of Florence, the Sforza of Milan, the Malatesta of Rimini. Behind these local forces loomed larger powers, for Spain had claims to Sicily, and France to Milan. After the French invasions of Charles VIII in 1494 and Louis XII in 1499, Italy would become the cockpit for a larger European struggle between contending powers.
Since the time of the Lombard invasions, the defence of the lands of St Peter had been one of the major concerns of papal policy: it had given birth to the Frankish empire. In this age of warring princes, however, it took on a new intensity, as the popes themselves increasingly became princes warring against other princes. Like so much else that was unattractive in the Renaissance papacy, this development can be traced back to the pontificate of Sixtus IV. Initially an ardent ally of Milan (the Duke of Milan had helped secure his election) and much under the influence of his bloodthirsty nephews Pietro and Girolamo Riario, Pope Sixtus was rapidly involved in a series of sordid wars – against Florence, Ferrara, Venice. In these, the Pope shifted alliances with all the untroubled cynicism of a secular prince in the age of Machiavelli. In 1478 he connived at the Pazzi conspiracy to murder Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici at High Mass in the Duomo in Florence.
The pattern established by Sixtus was adopted by his successors: Innocent VIII (1484–92) fomented rebellion in Naples, and allied himself to the ruling family of Florence, the Medici, by the simple expedient of marrying his illegitimate son Franceschetto to a daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent. This dynastic note became a concerto under Innocent’s Spanish successor, Roderigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, who was the father of at least nine illegitimate children. Alexander is arguably the most notorious of all the Renaissance popes. Magnetically attractive to women, he had a succession of mistresses with whom he lived quite openly, the last and youngest of them, Giulia Farnese, even after he became pope, in his sixties.
Throughout his career, disreputable legends blossomed round him. In a famous letter, which became the foundation for much of Alexander’s later notoriety with historians, Pope Pius II rebuked the then Cardinal Borgia for hosting a debauched garden-party in Siena, to which the fashionable women of the town were invited, but from which their husbands, fathers, brothers and all other men were excluded. Sadly, as the Pope conceded, the rumours turned out to be greatly exaggerated, the garden-party socially not sexually exclusive, and most of the legends about Alexander are similarly unreliable. Stories of his debauched and extravagant lifestyle contrast starkly with the spartan and coarse diet (a good many sardines) which he himself preferred, and which he imposed on his household, with his precise and slightly stuffy piety and concern for orthodoxy, and with the meagre artistic and architectural patronage he dispensed. The sober truth about his sexual appetite and his single-minded devotion to his family, however, was scandalous enough. As pope he systematically used his children’s dynastic marriages to form alliances with a succession of princes. He also alienated large tracts of the papal lands to create independent duchies for his sons Juan and Cesare. Cesare was the admired model for Niccolò Machiavelli’s treatise on Renaissance statecraft, The Prince. His conquests in the Papal States were ostensibly designed to reduce to obedience rebellious local rulers, nominally papal vicars for territories which they had in fact appropriated. Cesare’s activities as captain general of the papal armies, however, were little better, being impossible to distinguish from the settling of ancient feuds between the Borgias and rival Roman families like the Orsini. Cesare was not the champion of the papal cause, but lord of a personal fiefdom. In the same way, the Medici Pope Leo X (1513–21) pursued a war policy designed to further the interests of Florence and his family, rather than the interests of the papacy as such.
Papal diplomacy and papal warfare, however, were not inevitably linked to the aggrandisement of the Pope’s family. The most ferocious Pope of the period – imperious, hot-tempered, manically active – was the della Rovere Julius II. Known to his contemporaries as il terribile, an untranslatable word that suggests a violent force of nature rather than a personality, Julius stormed up and down the Italian peninsula in his suit of silver armour at the head of his own troops: on one occasion he belaboured with his staff the quaking cardinals who were reluctant to follow him through snowdrifts breast-high on their horses. His wars, however, unlike those of Sixtus IV or Alexander VI, were designed to secure the position of the papacy itself, not the reigning Pope’s family. He set himself to liberate papal territory which had been appropriated by the family of Alexander VI, to push back Venetian incursions into the papal territory of Romagna (the old exarchate of Ravenna). By the end of his pontificate he had driven the French out of Italy and had extended the Papal States to include Parma, Piacenza and Reggio Emilia.
Julius faithfully and spectacularly served the interests of the papacy as he understood it, including its financial interests. Though he was the most lavish of art patrons, and poured money into his wars, he left the papal treasury full. Yet there is no escaping the utterly secular character of such a pope. It was said of him that there was nothing of the priest about him but the cassock, and he did not always wear that. The last portrait by Raphael shows the fierce old man in a ragged beard, the first Renaissance Pope to wear one. Julius had grown the beard not for piety or fashion, however, but in imitation of his pagan namesake Julius Caesar, who had stopped shaving as a pledge of vengeance on the Gauls, for their massacre of his legions. Pope Julius’ beard was a pledge of vengeance against his many enemies – the French, the Turks, the Bolognese, and even the Romans.
One of the most striking features of the Renaissance papacy was the extent to which successive popes promoted their own relatives. This was not necessarily in itself a moral failing. The papacy was an elected monarchy, and newly elected popes inherited from their predecessors a labyrinthine bureaucracy and a college of cardinals who were often hostile and obstructive. The existence of such complex loyalties within the Sacred College was formally recognised and signalled at papal conclaves. During the election period, the rooms of cardinals created by the dead Pope were draped in violet, the rooms of others in green.
In such circumstances, the promotion of a kinsman to the cardinalate might be the only way to ensure colleagues and collaborators who could be relied on. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cardinal nephews routinely took on the role of secretary of state. But the Renaissance popes pushed these things to extremes. The Spanish Pope Callistus III not only promoted two nephews to the cardinalate (one of them the future Alexander VI) but made a third nephew commander in chief of the papal armies, and he flooded the papal household and the Curia itself with Catalan officials. It may be that a foreign pope needed more in the way of family backing if he was to master the Curia than a native Italian did. At any rate, Pius II was more restrained, making just two nephews cardinals, one of whom later reigned for twenty-seven days as Pius III (1503).
Once again, however, Sixtus IV raised the stakes. He made six of his nephews cardinals, and married other nephews and nieces into some of the great Italian dynasties – Naples, Milan, Urbino. Not content with this, he heaped benefices on them, giving his cardinal nephews the incomes of princes. Giuliano della Rovere, the future Julius II, was Archbishop of Avignon, Archbishop of Bologna, Bishop of Lausanne, Bishop of Coutances, Bishop of Viviers, Bishop of Mende and Bishop of Ostia and Velle
tri, and Abbot of Nonantola and of Grottaferrata, and he had scores of lesser benefices.
The inevitable outcome of all this was the creation of a wealthy cardinalatial class, with strong dynastic connections. At Eugenius IV’s election in 1431, half the twelve cardinals came from outside Italy. At Alexander VI’s election in 1492, only one out of twenty-three cardinals (Alexander himself) was non-Italian. As the papal families intermarried with the princely houses of Italy, the Sacred College and the papacy itself came to resemble a rollcall of the great – Farnese, Medici, Gonzaga, Este. Innocent VIII, having married his son into the Medici family, obligingly made Lorenzo the Magnificent’s son Giovanni a cardinal – at the age of thirteen. In due course, as we have seen, this Cardinal Medici would be elected Pope Leo X. Aristocratic infiltration of the cardinalate was in part a function of the increasing politicisation of the papacy. The rulers of Italy, France and Spain needed tame (though mostly Italian) cardinals to exert pressure on papal policy, or at any rate papal elections.
