There was no single road to the papacy, no character requirements or moral litmus test, and for the most part, the popes who followed Nicholas were worldly, pragmatic men concerned with consolidating temporal power. Behavior that had called for punishment and purification in the medieval Church was accepted with occasional concern but no censure.
The Renaissance popes were not distant spiritual figures. They were fighters in the center of the fray, sometimes captured, imprisoned, exiled, or poisoned. Within their ranks were pure souls and rascals, brilliant minds and bureaucrats, and this one indomitable warrior-patron.
Julius II was the most momentous of pontiffs. In personality, a colossus. “All knew him to be a true Roman pontiff—full of fury and extravagant conceptions,” a contemporary remarked. He dominated his age as he dominates the fresco by da Forlì. His goal was greatness—for the papacy, for the Church, and for the city. He expected it of himself, and he tolerated nothing less from others.
Modesty has never been a Roman virtue. If everything in moderation was the Socratic ideal, everything in excess was the Roman counterpoint. Pagan Rome was immoderate in its ambitions (its emperors were imperialists par excellence), immoderate in its treacheries (think of the bloodbaths of Nero and Caligula), and immoderate in its architecture (the Basilica of Maxentius covered half a city block.)
The papacy of Julius II aspired to the same imperial dimensions. From the ashes of empire would arise the glory of Christendom. Under Julius, Christian Rome would become more magnificent and mighty than the city of the Caesars. Although he shared Nicholas V’s aspirations for the city and the Church, Julius was no philosopher-king. It was said that he sat as easily in a saddle as he did in the Sedia di San Pietro. A battering ram of a man, he possessed a short temper, a powerful mind, and boundless ambition; he was irascible, irreverent, intractable.
Although it was Cosimo de’ Medici who said, “We cannot govern a state with paternosters,” the sentiment is pure Julius. He had no time for contemplation or the finer points of spirituality. He had waited twenty years for the papacy and he seized it absolutely, driving himself into battles and fighting them all—military, political, personal, and artistic—with ferocity.
The state of the Church was ambiguous at best. Upstart princes had usurped its temporal powers and dissolute clergy had made a mockery of its moral authority. Julius wanted no ambivalence in Christendom. His goals were sure and bold: to assert the authority of the Church by regaining control of the Papal States, lost during the sojourn in Avignon, and to display its power and prestige through art and architecture. To that end, he led an army of brawny Swiss mountaineers against recalcitrant princes and summoned an army of artists to create works that surpassed all other constructions.
His arsenal included unconventional weapons: papal bulls,* encyclicals, writs of excommunication, and indulgences. He rattled them as threats, and if his opponents resisted, he hurled them like javelins. When, for example, Bologna did not capitulate immediately to his will, Julius excommunicated the entire city, all who lived in it and their children, their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren. He threatened the same against Venice, placing La Serenissima under interdict and excommunicating the full Venetian Senate.
The contemporary historian Francesco Guicciardini described him as “a grand, indeed vast spirit, impatient, precipitous, open, liberal.” And Guicciardini was a relentless critic. The Christian Caesar became the most formidable force in Europe—the preeminent power player and art patron.
There is no need to follow the twists and turns by which the papacy gradually reestablished its dominion. The treaties, battles, and plots are transitory beside the art and architecture that Julius commissioned. Like the Medici in the previous century, he was a one-man MoMA, underwriting the best contemporary artists. With charm, threats, bribes, and flattery, he wheedled work from them that they had never shown themselves capable of before. The art that he commissioned became the masterpieces of Western civilization. Although his papacy spanned only a decade, they were ten tumultuous years.
CHAPTER FOUR
A TROJAN HORSE
In the optimism of a new century, Julius II assumed the papacy and, early in his pontificate, called the sculptor of the Pietà to Rome, sending him one hundred ducats to cover traveling expenses.
Michelangelo di Ludovico Buonarroti-Simoni was born in Caprese, in the upper Arno valley just north of Florence, on March 6, 1475, one of four sons in a family with little money but pretensions to nobility. Those pretensions bred a defensive pride that could turn to insolence. Lorenzo il Magnifico brought the young artist into his palace for training. Michelangelo grew up with the Medici princes, the fatuous Giovanni and his more cerebral cousin Giulio, the future Medici popes.
His talent was precocious. By the age of twenty-nine, he had carved the Pietà, sculpted the giant David, and created the first art forgery on record. Although Julius was living in France when the fraud was perpetrated, he undoubtedly received a full account of the escapade from his cousin, who happened to be on the receiving end of the hoax.
The fake was a marble Cupid, and according to Michelangelo’s pupil and biographer, Ascanio Condivi, a Medici patron instigated the deception. “If you were to prepare the cupid so that it should appear to have been buried, I shall send it to Rome and it should pass for an antique, and you would sell it much more profitably,” he told Michelangelo. Cardinal Riario, an astute collector, bought the pseudoantiquity for two hundred ducats. The dealer told Michelangelo that the payment was thirty ducats.
When Riario discovered the trickery, he dispatched an envoy to Florence to confront the forger. Instead of being apologetic or embarrassed, Michelangelo was indignant that the dealer had gypped him. Claiming he was the one who had been defrauded, he went to Rome to meet the cardinal and be recompensed. Michelangelo ended up living and working in Palazzo Riario for almost a year. Now, nine years later, he was recognized as the most talented sculptor in Christendom.
Michelangelo was an ardent young man when he met Pope Julius for the first time, single-minded in his faith and in his art. All of his disappointments were ahead of him. Their first meetings were probably models of decorum. Julius was an imposing figure, much bigger than the artist, and even without the papal panoply, he would have been intimidating. But seeing genius in the young man, Julius welcomed him kindly, like a father.
Michelangelo knelt and kissed the pope’s foot, encased in a red silk slipper. In spite of his acclaim, he was still naïve and socially awkward. He would never be adroit at palace politics. He was too hot-tempered, too quick to take offense, feeling slights when none were intended, his ego as fragile as it was large. Michelangelo was slight but sinewy with a compact build, his arms and torso muscled from the physical labor of hauling and hewing stone. His forehead was broad, “his eyes the color of bone,” Condivi wrote, his nose squashed, smashed by another artist in a fit of jealous pique.
Like Julius, Michelangelo belonged to the Renaissance in time but not in temperament. Patron and artist were not cool, serene souls. They were explosive personalities with epic ambitions and egos to match. Art was more than their passion. It was a life force, like air, water, or the Church of Rome. In agreement, they would be unassailable. At odds, volcanic.
Michelangelo could not help but be flattered by the pope’s praise and excited by his words: “Magari, my son, if you could sculpt anything, what would it be?” Pope and artist met over several weeks and considered many ideas. Julius wanted a lasting memorial that would be a testament to his pontificate. He may have imagined a sculpture as serene and poignant as the Pietà or a monument-tomb as enduring as the pyramids of the pharaohs or the mausoleum of the emperor Hadrian.
After numerous sketches, Michelangelo drew a funerary monument worthy of a second Caesar. His excitement was so keen that, if he’d had the stone, he would have begun sculpting that very day. The sarcophagus he imagined would be a memorial for the ages—a colossal, freestanding monument, carv
ed from the purest marble, with forty statues, each one several times larger than life. The central figure would be a mighty, seated Moses with the papal countenance. It was an apt allegory.
Although the exact design of the tomb is not known, Condivi and Vasari give similar dimensions in braccia, the equivalent of about two feet: “Because it would show the greatest magnificence, he directed that it should stand alone so that it could be seen from all four faces, which had two sides measuring 12 braccia and the other two 18 braccia, so that the proportion was a square and a half.”
Michelangelo believed the tomb would be his masterwork. “If God assist me,” he vowed to Julius, “I shall produce the finest thing that Italy has ever seen.” The grandiose sculpture was more triumph than tomb—a victory monument like the arch that Constantine had built to commemorate his glory at Ponte Milvio. It was a rash, brash exercise in hubris, and no design since the Trojan Horse has had such momentous consequences.
In March 1505, an exultant Michelangelo departed Rome in search of the perfect marble. He disappeared for months in the quarries of Carrara “with two assistants and a mule,” leaving the most basic question unresolved: Where would the tomb go? The obvious location was Constantine’s basilica, but the enormous size of the sculpture posed a problem. The old St. Peter’s was crowded with shrines, altars, oratories, and sarcophagi that had been added over the centuries. There was no room for such a huge memorial.
While Michelangelo hunted in the mountains for the perfect stone, Julius rummaged through the Vatican archives and dusted off Nicholas V’s Basilica plan. Coincidentally, both pontiffs had been born in Liguria, Julius the son of a fisherman, Nicholas the son of a physician, and both had definite ideas about creating a papal palatine. In 1451, Nicholas had brought the architect Bernardo Rossellino from Florence and collaborated with him on a major renovation of Constantine’s basilica. In his biography of Pope Nicholas, Manetti described the plan:
All that the progress of art and science had achieved in the way of beauty and magnificence was to be displayed in the new St. Peter’s. The plan of the church was that of a basilica with nave and double aisles, divided by pillars, and having a row of pillars along each of the outermost aisles. Its length was to be 640 feet, the breadth of the nave 320; this was to be richly decorated, and the upper part of the wall pierced with large circular windows, freely admitting the light. The high altar was to be placed at the intersection of the nave and transepts, and the Papal Throne and the stalls of the Cardinals and the Court within the apse. The roof was to be of lead, the pavement of colored marbles….
Because the Rossellino-Nicholas design closely followed Constantine’s, it is not clear whether it was a study for a new church similar to the original or a renovation project to enlarge the old basilica and fortify it with new exterior walls. In any event, in 1452, Rossellino, who had worked with Filippo Brunelleschi on the design of the lantern for the cathedral dome in Florence, began erecting a huge new tribune, or western apse (a half-circle at the end of a main arm). One hundred forty-three feet long and twenty-two feet thick, the new tribune was located beyond the exterior wall of the original apse and would have extended the basilica.
Shortly after construction started, Leone Battista Alberti, the foremost architectural theorist of the Renaissance, came from Florence to present Nicholas with his treatise on architecture De re aedificatoria. It was the perfect gift for a pope who wanted “to spend all that he possessed on books and buildings.” While he was in Rome, Alberti inspected Constantine’s basilica for Nicholas and found that the walls were seriously out of plumb.
Alberti’s report was dire. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that very soon some slight shock or movement will cause the south wall to fall. The rafters of the roof have dragged the north wall inwards to a corresponding degree.” Nicholas had already sunk 31,559 ducats, a significant expenditure, into the basilica.* But Alberti, a strict humanist, may have recoiled at the grandiosity of Nicholas’s “glorious temple,” because work on the tribune halted abruptly when the new wall was only seven and a half feet high.
In 1505, Rossellino’s unfinished tribune was still standing behind the old basilica. If completed, it would be large enough to house the tomb. Julius studied the Rosellino-Nicholas plan and conferred with his architect Giuliano da Sangallo. Sangallo, the patriarch of a talented Tuscan family and a longtime friend of both Julius and Michelangelo, expressed reservations. He thought Michelangelo’s tomb deserved something singular. Instead of enlarging the old church, Sangallo proposed building a separate chapel to “bring out all the perfection of the work.”
Still undecided, Julius invited the opinion of a second architect, Donato Bramante. A newcomer to Rome full of enthusiasms and ideas, Bramante was beginning his first project for the pope—designing a courtyard and gardens in the Vatican.
Central to any discussion of enlarging or restoring the old St. Peter’s were two basic issues: condition and cost. Some fifty years had elapsed since Alberti’s warning, and Constantine’s basilica was in dangerous disrepair. It was 1,200 years old, and although there had been some renovation work through the ages, there had been longer periods of neglect. The cost of renovating the venerable shrine would be prohibitive.
As Julius and his architects discussed the issues, Bramante may have thrown out a novel notion: Instead of tampering with an ancient edifice, for the same amount of time and money, he could tear down the old St. Peter’s and build a new one. Although it may have been an offhand remark, the very thought was blasphemy.
Constantine’s shrine to St. Peter was based on the design of the secular basilicas of imperial Rome—enormous rectangular indoor forums used as meeting places, tribunals, and money markets. The original St. Peter’s was a simple structure in the shape of the cross that had brought martyrdom to Christ and Peter and victory to Constantine at Ponte Milvio. The cross became the symbol of the empire’s new, official faith.
Consecrated in A.D. 326, the original St. Peter’s was four hundred feet long by two hundred feet wide, with a large atrium, five columned aisles, and a timber roof, which was later covered with gilded bronze plates filched from the Basilica of Maxentius. The penchant for stealing from a predecessor’s monument was a bad habit of the emperors, and the popes continued the architectural plundering to rebuild Rome.
Constantine placed the main altar over the bones of Peter. A protective wall surrounded the grave, and over it, he raised a solid gold cross, fulfilling the scripture: “Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam”—“Thou art Peter and upon this rock I shall build my church.” Weighing more than 150 pounds, the cross was inscribed with the legend: “Constantine Augustus and Helen Augusta built this royal chamber, surrounded by the Basilica shining with a similar splendor.”
Although the oldest church in Rome and the official seat of its bishop was St. John Lateran, the shrine to St. Peter was the theater where the drama of the Roman Church had been staged throughout its first millennium.
Thirty generations of pilgrims had come from every corner of Christendom to worship in the old St. Peter’s. Many of the pilgrimages were as quixotic as the journey of the three kings to Bethlehem. Caedwalla, a barbarian king, traveled all the way from West Saxony by sea and land to Rome. On Easter Saturday, a.d. 689, dressed in a white baptismal gown, he was christened Peter by the pope. Caedwalla-Peter seems to have started a trend, because ten years later, two more British warlords made the hazardous trip from Britain to Rome. Since recognition by the pope conferred legitimacy to civil authorities, it was a journey of political expediency as much as faith. Not to be outdone by Caedwalla, they not only submitted to baptism, they became monks, shearing off their warlocks and dedicating their lives to St. Peter.
One hundred eleven years later, on Christmas Day a.d. 800, Charlemagne knelt on a slab of red porphyry before Pope Leo III and was anointed the first Holy Roman Emperor. The papal librarian Anastasius described the scene:
The gracious and venera
ble Pontiff did with his own hands crown Charles with a very precious crown. Then all the faithful people of Rome, seeing the defense he gave and the love that he bore to the Holy Roman Church and her Vicar, did by the will of God and the Blessed Peter, the Keeper of the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, cry with one accord: “To Charles, the Most Pious Augustus, crowned of God, the Great and peacekeeping Emperor, be life and victory.”
Every successive Holy Roman Emperor knelt on the same stone to be crowned. Ethelwulf of Britain went to Rome for his coronation, too, and brought his six-year-old son, who would become the great English king Alfred. For what he called “the welfare of his soul,” Ethelwulf ever after sent an annual donation of 300 marks to Rome from his personal horde: 100 marks for oil to light the lamps of St. Peter’s on Easter weekend; 100 to do the same at St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, and 100 for the pope’s personal use. Ethelwulf’s donation was the beginning of Peter’s Pence, the annual drive of the Roman Catholic Church to this day.
Over the centuries, the encrustations of history had grown around the original church like barnacles on the rock of Peter. The old church had been looted, embellished, desecrated, and ornamented with mosaics, frescoes, statues, precious gems, gold, and silver. Chapels and memorials had been tacked on haphazardly. Constantine’s basilica came to symbolize the resilience and continuity of the Church.
One hundred eighty-four popes had been consecrated in the first St. Peter’s, and dozens of martyrs and saints were buried within its walls. The history of the faith could be read in its timbers, in its aisles and altars, and its proposed destruction caused a furor. Christians were outraged. The scholar-monk Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam condemned the new Basilica as a sacrilege and a grandiose waste of money. The new Julius, with pretensions to be the Christian Caesar, was displacing layers of history, disturbing the bones of pagan Romans and Christian martyrs and despoiling a hallowed shrine to satisfy his own megalomania.
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