by Ross King
Work had begun on the Sistine Chapel in 1477. The architect was a young Florentine named Baccio Pontelli, who designed the building’s proportions to match exactly those given in the Bible for the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, since the chapel is twice as long as it is high, and three times as long as it is wide (130 feet long X 43 feet wide X 65 feet high).7 But besides being a new Temple of Solomon, the chapel was also a formidable fortress. The walls at the base were ten feet thick, and all the way round the top ran a walkway from which sentinels could keep watch over the city. There were arrow-slits for archers and special holes through which, if the need arose, boiling oil could be poured on attackers below. A series of rooms above the vault served as living quarters for soldiers and, later, as a prison.
9. A reconstruction of what the exterior of the Sistine Chapel would have looked like.
It comes as no surprise, given this robust design, that Pontelli worked mainly as a military architect, having apprenticed under Francesco di Giovanni, known as Francione (‘Big Frank’), an architect who invented a type of bastion to protect castles against the new threat of cannonballs. And as soon as he finished the Sistine Chapel, Pontelli was commissioned to design what became the most advanced fortress of its day, outside Rome at Ostia Antica, on the Tiber near the coast.8 That particular fortress – whose sturdy battlements bear more than a passing resemblance to those of the Sistine Chapel – was meant to repel invasions from the Turks. The new chapel was intended to repel, among others, the unruly Roman mob. Sixtus knew their violence first-hand, having been stoned after his election in 1471.
Sixtus started a war with the republic of Florence, a rival city state, at almost the same time that work began on the new chapel. By the time the war was finished, in 1480, so too was the chapel, and as a gesture of good will Lorenzo de’ Medici sent a number of painters to Rome to fresco its walls. The leader of the group was the 31-year-old Pietro Perugino, while the rest of the team consisted of Sandro Botticelli, Cosimo Rosselli, his pupil Piero di Cosimo, and Michelangelo’s future master, Domenico Ghirlandaio, then aged about thirty-three. Later they were joined by Luca Signorelli, also a talented and experienced frescoist.
The walls of the chapel were divided by the artists into six panels, which corresponded to the bays beneath the windows. In each of these panels one of the painters and his workshop painted a fresco some twenty feet long by a dozen feet high. Scenes from the life of Moses were portrayed on one wall of the nave, ones from the life of Christ on the other. Higher up, a frieze of thirty-two brightly garbed popes ran round at the level of the windows, while the vault was decorated with a motif of gold stars on a bright blue field. This kind of starry heaven was common on cupolas and vaults, especially in churches. Indeed, for the previous millennium it had been one of the most ubiquitous decorations in Christian art.9 The vision of heaven in the Sistine Chapel was painted, not by one of Perugino’s team, but by a less well-known artist named Piermatteo d’Amelia, a former apprentice to Fra Filippo Lippi. What Piermatteo’s starry sky lacked in originality it made up for in colour, since he used in abundance the two brightest and most costly pigments in the fresco painter’s palette, gold and ultramarine.
10. A reconstruction of the interior of the Sistine Chapel as it looked in the 1480s.
The new chapel officially opened in the summer of 1483, several months after the frescoes were completed. Twenty-one years later, in the spring of 1504, a few months after Julius was elected Pope, a series of ominous cracks appeared in the vault. This structural failure was not the fault of Baccio Pontelli, whose tremendously thick walls and rigid vault ensured a sturdy building. However, the chapel was plagued by the same problem as St Peter’s: the subsidence of the underlying soil. The south wall had begun to bow outwards and, in so doing, threatened to pull the ceiling apart.
The Sistine Chapel was immediately closed while Giuliano da Sangallo inserted a dozen iron bars into the masonry of the vault in the hope of holding the walls together. More iron rods were placed under the floor to arrest the shifting foundations, after which, in the autumn of 1504, the chapel reopened. In the course of the restoration, however, the rooms that once served as quarters for soldiers had to be destroyed. These rooms were not the only part of the chapel to suffer. The cracks in the vault were blocked up with bricks and then plastered over, leaving a jagged white scar that traced its way across the north-west corner of the ceiling fresco, interrupting the expanse of blue sky painted by Piermatteo d’Amelia.
The damaged vault of the Sistine Chapel was a prominent topic of conversation between the Pope and Bramante during their dinner in the Vatican. A third party present on that occasion, a Florentine master mason named Piero Rosselli – a kinsman of the painter Cosimo Rosselli – reported their exchange in a letter to Michelangelo.10 Rosselli informed Michelangelo that the Pope had told Bramante that he planned to send Giuliano da Sangallo to Florence to fetch him, at which point he would commission Michelangelo to fresco the chapel’s vault.11 Bramante responded that Michelangelo would refuse this commission. ‘Holy Father, nothing will come of it,’ the architect explained, ‘because I have talked of it much to Michelangelo, and he has said to me many times that he does not wish to attend to the chapel.’ According to Bramante, Michelangelo had insisted that ‘he did not wish to attend to anything but the tomb and not to painting’.12 Rosselli then reported how Bramante went on carefully to outline how the sculptor was simply not the man for the job. ‘Holy Father,’ he told the Pope, ‘I believe he does not have enough courage and spirit for it, because he has not done too many figures and, above all, the figures are high and in foreshortening, and this is another thing from painting at ground level.’13
Bramante knew what he was talking about since, unlike Michelangelo, he had executed numerous murals in his long career. After training as a painter in Urbino under Piero della Francesca, one of the greatest masters during the middle decades of the fifteenth century, he had painted frescoes in both Bergamo and Milan, including one in the Sforza Castle. He had also frescoed the Porta Santa, a gate on the east side of Rome near the Lateran Palace.
Michelangelo, on the other hand, had little experience with a paintbrush despite the fact that he, like Bramante, had originally trained as a painter. At the age of thirteen, he had been apprenticed to the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, whose surname ‘garland-seller’ refers to his father, a goldsmith who specialised in making fashionable garlands for ladies’ hair. Young Michelangelo could not have hoped for a better master. Not only was Ghirlandaio enterprising and well connected, he was also a brilliant draughtsman and a skilful and prolific painter. So great was his love of painting that he dreamed of frescoing every inch of the walls encircling Florence – fortifications that were over five miles in circumference and, in places, forty-seven feet high.
A member of the Sistine Chapel team of artists, Ghirlandaio painted numerous frescoes during his twenty-year career. However, his magnum opus was the Lives of the Virgin and of St John the Baptist, executed in the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, between 1486 and 1490. This commission was almost unprecedented in size, encompassing a total painted surface of 5,900 square feet. Its execution required a small army of assistants and apprentices. Luckily, Ghirlandaio ran a large workshop that included his brothers Davide and Benedetto as well as his son Ridolfo. It is known that Michelangelo was among his apprentices as he painted the Tornabuoni Chapel because in April 1488, two years into the project, Michelangelo’s father Lodovico Buonarroti signed a contract with him.14 This apprenticeship was supposed to last for three years; in the end, it probably lasted no more than one, for soon afterwards Lorenzo de’ Medici asked Ghirlandaio to recommend pupils for the Garden of San Marco, the school in which he planned to train students in both sculpture and the liberal arts. Ghirlandaio promptly offered his new apprentice.
Relations between Ghirlandaio and Michelangelo were, it seems, far from amicable. An envious man, Ghirlandaio once shipped his talented
younger brother Benedetto to France on the pretext of developing his skills, when in fact – so the story goes – he simply wished to banish him from Florence so that he, Domenico, could reign supreme. Similar motives might have persuaded him to send young Michelangelo to the Garden of San Marco, where pupils studied sculpture instead of painting. According to Condivi, the pair fell out when Ghirlandaio, jealous of Michelangelo’s brilliance, refused to lend him one of the model books from which the apprentices made copies in charcoal and silverpoint as part of their training.15 Late in life, Michelangelo took revenge on his former master by disingenuously claiming that he learned nothing at all from Ghirlandaio.
Between the end of Ghirlandaio’s tutelage and the Sistine Chapel commission, Michelangelo hardly touched a paintbrush. The only work he is known for certain to have painted before 1506 is the Holy Family done for his friend Agnolo Doni, a circular painting that measured less than four feet in diameter.16 However, he had taken one significant – but aborted – stab at fresco painting. In 1504, soon after the marble David was completed, he had been hired by the government of Florence to fresco one wall of a council room inside the Palazzo della Signoria. The opposite wall was to be decorated by another Florentine artist with an equally illustrious reputation, Leonardo da Vinci. Then aged fifty-two, Leonardo held the field in painting, having recently returned to Florence after almost two decades in Milan, where he had painted his celebrated Last Supper on the wall of the refectory in Santa Maria delle Grazie. These two men – by far the most renowned artists of the age – were thereby thrown into direct competition.
This artistic duel was made even more compelling by the two artists’ well-known dislike of each other. The surly Michelangelo had once taunted Leonardo in public for having failed in his attempt to cast a giant bronze equestrian statue in Milan. Leonardo, meanwhile, had made it clear that he had little regard for sculptors. ‘This is a most mechanical exercise,’ he once wrote, ‘accompanied many times with a great deal of sweat.’17 He further claimed that sculptors, covered in marble dust, looked like bakers, and that their homes were both noisy and filthy, in contrast to the more elegant abodes of painters. All of Florence awaited the outcome.
The frescoes, at twenty-two feet high and fifty-four feet long, were to be almost double the size of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Michelangelo was commissioned to paint The Battle of Cascina, depicting a skirmish fought against the Pisans in 1364, while Leonardo would illustrate a Florentine victory over Milan in 1440, The Battle of Anghiari. Michelangelo set to work making sketches in a room given to him in the Dyers’ Hospital in Sant’Onofrio, while his distinguished competitor worked a safe distance away in Santa Maria Novella. After toiling in great secrecy for several months, both emerged in early 1505 with the fruits of their labours, full-size chalk drawings that revealed, in bold strokes, the overall design of their compositions. Such large-scale drawings, which were to serve as templates for the two frescoes, were known as ‘cartoons’ after the large sheets of paper, called cartone, on which they were sketched. Exhibited to the public, these two 1,100-square-foot drawings caused an outbreak of almost religious fervour in Florence. Artists, bankers, merchants, weavers and, of course, painters – all flocked to Santa Maria Novella, where the two cartoons were displayed together like holy relics.
Michelangelo’s cartoon featured what would become his trademark: muscular nudes in frantic but graceful gyrations. He had chosen to illustrate a scene leading up to the battle, when a false alarm was sounded to test the readiness of Florentine soldiers as they bathed in the Arno, resulting in a mad scramble of naked men on to the river bank and into their armour. Leonardo, on the other hand, concentrated on equestrian rather than human anatomy, showing mounted soldiers battling for a fluttering standard.
Transferred in colour to the walls of the Hall of the Great Council – a vast chamber supposedly constructed with the help of angels – these two scenes would have created, without doubt, one of the greatest artistic wonders of the world. Alas, after such a promising beginning, neither fresco was ever completed, and the duel between these two famous sons of Florence, each at the summit of his powers, failed to come off. Michelangelo’s fresco, in fact, was never even started. No sooner had he finished his magnificent cartoon than, in February 1505, he was ordered to Rome by the Pope to sculpt the tomb. As a result, not one lick of paint was ever applied to his wall. Leonardo made a tentative start on The Battle of Anghiari, but his experimental method of painting failed drastically when the colours began dripping from the wall. Chastened by this humiliating failure, he lost his appetite for the work and soon afterwards returned to Milan.
11. A copy of the central section of Michelangelo’s cartoon for The Battle of Cascina.
12. A sketch for Leonardo da Vinci’s The Battle of Anghiari.
The enthusiastic reception given to the cartoon for The Battle of Cascina may have been one reason why Julius, who, a year later, was looking for someone to fresco the vault of the Sistine Chapel, decided to give the job to Michelangelo. But since the fresco for the Palazzo della Signoria was never actually started, let alone finished, Michelangelo had no meaningful recent experience in a medium so difficult that it could tax even the ingenuity of Leonardo da Vinci. Bramante knew that Michelangelo not only lacked valuable experience in the tricky art of fresco but also understood little of the technique by which frescoists created illusionistic effects on high, curved surfaces. Painters of vaults, such as Andrea Mantegna, would portray bodies in a receding perspective – lower limbs in the foreground, heads in the background – so that they appeared to be suspended in the air above the spectator. Mastery of this virtuoso method of foreshortening, often known as di sotto in sù (‘from below upwards’), was notoriously difficult. According to one of Michelangelo’s contemporaries, di sotto in sù was ‘a more formidable task than any other in painting’.18
13. The ceiling of Mantegna’s Camera degli Sposi in the ducal palace at Mantua, completed in 1474.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Bramante should have protested at the granting of the Sistine commission to a relative novice. Contrary to Michelangelo’s alleged suspicions, he seems to have been determined to avert a disaster from unfolding on the vault of one of the most important chapels in Christendom.
Piero Rosselli did not agree with Bramante’s assessment of Michelangelo’s talents and intentions. He claimed in his letter that at this point he could listen to Bramante’s aspersions no longer. ‘I broke in and said something very rude to him,’ he boasted to Michelangelo. He then rose, he said, to a loyal and spirited defence of his absent friend. ‘Holy Father, he has never spoken to Michelangelo,’ he insisted, referring to Bramante, ‘and if anything he has just told you is true, I would like you to cut off my head.’
Reading the letter at home in Florence, Michelangelo may have felt Bramante had slurred him, especially in light of the comment that he lacked the ‘courage and spirit’ to attack the job. But he could hardly have disputed the architect’s other points. It was for these very reasons, in fact, and because he desperately wished to work on the tomb, that painting the chapel’s vault presented such an undesirable prospect. Added to that, the fresco seemed a much less important commission than the papal tomb, since ceilings of chapels were usually allotted to assistants or lesser-known artists. Wall paintings attracted all of the prestige and attention, not those on vaults.
No firm decision regarding the commission seems to have been made during the Pope’s dinner with Bramante. Still, Julius was anxious for Michelangelo to return to Rome. ‘If he does not come,’ he mused to his architect, ‘he does one wrong, therefore I think he will come back in any case.’
Rosselli agreed. ‘I believe he will return when Your Holiness wishes,’ he assured the Pope as the conversation concluded. He could not have been more wrong.
fn1 Art historians have cast serious doubts on this legend, for Castagno appears to have died (of the plague) several years before his supposed victim. But the tale of th
e murder – which was said to have taken place in the 1450s – was reproduced in a number of treatises published both before and during Michelangelo’s lifetime.
3
The Warrior Pope
POPE JULIUS 11 had been born Giuliano della Rovere in Albissola, near Genoa, in 1443. The son of a fisherman, he studied Roman law in Perugia, where he was ordained as a priest and then entered the city’s Franciscan friary. His career took a dramatic turn in 1471, when his father’s brother, a noted scholar, was elected Pope Sixtus IV. Anyone lucky enough to be the nephew of a pope could usually count on rapid promotion. The word ‘nepotism’ comes, in fact, from nipote, Italian for ‘nephew’. But even in an age of shameless nepotism, when popes vigorously promoted their nephews (who were often, in fact, their sons), Giuliano enjoyed a meteoric rise through the Church hierarchy. He was made a cardinal at the age of twenty-eight, then collected a succession of prestigious posts: abbot of Grottaferrata, bishop of Bologna, bishop of Vercelli, archbishop of Avignon, bishop of Ostia. It was only a matter of time, it seemed, before he would get himself elected Pope.
The only setback to Giuliano’s seemingly unstoppable rise had been the election to the papacy of his bitter rival, Rodrigo Borgia, who, in 1492, became Pope Alexander VI. After Alexander stripped Giuliano of his numerous offices and tried to poison him, the ambitious cardinal thought it wise to decamp to France. It was destined to be a long exile, for Alexander did not die until the summer of 1503, after which Pius III was elected. But Pius ruled for only a few weeks before dying in October, and in the conclave that ended on 1 November 1503, the seemingly inevitable happened, and Giuliano della Rovere was elected Pope – though not before offering bribes to his colleagues (most of whom both hated and feared him) to ensure a positive result.
