Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  32. Desiderius Erasmus.

  Erasmus enjoyed the warmest of receptions in Rome. He was accommodated in Cardinal Riario’s luxurious palace near the Campo dei Fiori and honoured during a Mass in the Sistine Chapel with a place inside the sanctum sanctorum. He met both Egidio da Viterbo and the equally bookish and brilliant Fedro Inghirami. Like Egidio, he made a pilgrimage to the grotto of the Cumaean Sibyl on Lake Avernus. He was also treated to a tour of Rome’s ancient monuments and shown the treasures of its libraries – experiences that would linger fondly in his memory. He may even have been allowed a view of the fresco taking shape behind its screen of canvas in the Sistine Chapel. In the summer of 1509, the vault of the chapel was already numbered among the marvels of Rome, for a canon named Francesco Albertini, a one-time pupil of Domenico Ghirlandaio, had just finished his Opusculum de mirabilis novae et veteris urbis Romae, a guidebook listing the city’s most notable monuments and frescoes. ‘Michaelis Archangeli’, wrote Albertini, was hard at work on his fresco in the Sistine Chapel.17

  Michelangelo jealously defended his scaffold against intruders, and the frescoes were certainly not open to public viewing. Still, it is not inconceivable that Erasmus was invited on to the scaffold to view the work. Although Erasmus was far more enthusiastic about books than paintings, his path could easily have crossed Michelangelo’s, especially if Egidio da Viterbo was indeed involved in the ceiling’s design. They could even have known each other from Bologna, since Erasmus’s visit there in 1507 overlapped almost exactly with Michelangelo’s. However, no documentary or anecdotal evidence supports any meeting between them, and it is equally possible that these two great men passed like ships in the night.

  Erasmus eventually succeeded in his mission, for Julius decreed that the great scholar was the son of a ‘bachelor and a widow’, which was technically the truth but not, of course, the whole story. This dispensation removed from Erasmus the blemish of illegitimacy and made him eligible for ecclesiastical office in England. The offer of a benefice was not long in arriving. His invitation to return to London came from none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury, who sent five pounds towards the expenses of his journey. He also received from his friend Lord Mountjoy an excited account of England’s new king. Henry VII had died in April of 1509 and been succeeded by his eighteen-year-old son, a handsome young man renowned for both piety and learning. ‘The heavens laugh and the earth rejoices,’ Mountjoy wrote of the new reign of King Henry VIII, ‘all is milk and honey.’18

  Still, Erasmus departed for England only with the greatest reluctance. ‘Had I not torn myself from Rome,’ he later recalled, ‘I could never have resolved to leave. There one enjoys sweet liberty, rich libraries, the charming friendship of writers and scholars, and the sight of antique monuments. I was honoured by the society of eminent prelates, so that I cannot conceive of a greater pleasure than to return to the city.’19

  However, not quite everything about Rome had pleased Erasmus. When he arrived in London, sometime in the autumn of 1509, a short period of convalescence was called for since the stress of the long journey and a rough crossing of the Channel had given him kidney pains. He retired to the Chelsea home of his good friend Thomas More, whose coronation poem for Henry VIII had rejoiced – in words echoing Egidio’s praise of Julius – that a new golden age was about to dawn. Forced to stay indoors, in the company of More’s numerous children, Erasmus spent seven days composing The Praise of Folly, the treatise that would win him notoriety. This work suggests that Erasmus had taken a shrewder view of Rome than he later suggested in his letter extolling the ‘sweet liberty’ of the city. A devastating satire on corrupt courtiers, filthy and ignorant monks, greedy cardinals, arrogant theologians, long-winded preachers and even crack-brained prophets who claimed to have visions of the future, The Praise of Folly was aimed, at least in part, at the culture of Rome under Julius II and his cardinals.

  Unlike Egidio, Erasmus did not believe that Julius was about to inaugurate a new golden age. One of the Cumaean Sibyl’s other prophecies must have seemed more appropriate to him as he stood beside the sulphurous waters of Lake Avernus in the summer 1509. ‘I see war and all the horrors of war,’ she told Aeneas and his companions in The Aeneid. ‘I see Tiber streaming and foaming with blood.’20 To Erasmus, this prophecy of impending war and bloodshed seemed to be fulfilling itself under the bellicose Julius. Included among his numerous targets in The Praise of Folly were harsh words for popes who made war in the name of the Church. ‘Ablaze with Christian zeal,’ he wrote, no doubt remembering the defeat of the Venetians, ‘they fight with fire and sword … at no small expense of Christian blood.’21 And, indeed, only a few weeks after Erasmus landed in England and wrote these words, Christian blood was again shed in the name of the Pope.

  Once again Julius was having troubles with Venice. Following their defeat at Agnadello, the Venetians had sent envoys to Rome to sue for peace. At the same time, however, they duplicitously appealed for help to the Ottoman Sultan and started a fierce fightback, capturing both Padua and Mantua. Their attentions then turned to Ferrara, which was ruled by Alfonso d’Este, the commander of the Pope’s troops and the husband of Lucrezia Borgia. Taking to their galleys, the proud symbol of their far-flung military power, the Venetians sailed up the Po in early December 1509.

  Alfonso was ready for them. Though only twenty-three years old, the Duke of Ferrara was one of the best military commanders in Europe, a clever tactician whose artillery possessed a worldwide reputation. Fascinated by large guns, he cast enormous cannons in special foundries and then deployed them to devastating effect. One of his most fearsome weapons was the Lord’s Devil’, a legendary piece of artillery that in the words of Ferrara’s court poet, Lodovico Ariosto, ‘spits fire and forces its way everywhere, by land, sea, and air’.22

  In 1507, after assuming command of the papal forces while barely out of his teens, Alfonso had repelled the Bentivogli from Bologna with a tremendous cannonade. The Venetians were next to taste his lethal firepower. Posting cannons on both land and water, his gunners opened fire on the Venetian fleet, ripping it to shreds before the warships could either retaliate or escape. The swiftest and most emphatic artillery victory ever seen in Europe, it not only ended all Venetian hopes of a recovery but also served as a portent of the violent storms soon to rage across the peninsula.

  Erasmus had been careful not to name names when he attacked warmongering popes in The Praise of Folly. A few years later, however, he published, anonymously, Julius Excluded from Heaven, a vitriolic work that portrayed Julius as a drunken, impious, pederastic braggart bent only on war, corruption and personal glory. Showing a biting wit and a keen eye for historical events, the pamphlet featured Julius arriving at the gates of heaven, clad in bloodstained armour and followed by his entourage, ‘a horrifying mob of ruffians, reeking of nothing but brothels, booze shops and gunpowder’.23 He was denied entry by St Peter, who persuaded him to confess his numerous sins and then condemned his papacy as ‘the worst tyranny in the world, the enemy of Christ, the church’s bane’.24 Julius, however, was undaunted, vowing to raise an even larger enemy and take heaven by force.

  33. A frontispiece to Erasmus’s Julius Excluded from Heaven, first published in 1513.

  18

  The School of Athens

  ST PETER: Did you distinguish yourself in theology?

  JULIUS: Not at all. I had no time for it, being continually engaged in warfare.1

  SUCH WAS ERASMUS’S disparaging view of the intellectual and religious achievements of Julius II. While it is true that the Pope was not a distinguished theologian like his uncle Sixtus, he was nonetheless an important patron of letters. Although Erasmus dismissed the scholarship produced during Julius’s reign as the ‘fanciest rhetoric’ whose sole aim was flattering his vanity,2 others were more complimentary. In particular, the Pope was praised by his supporters for having revived classical learning in Rome by fostering institutions such as the Vatican Library. On the Feast
of the Circumcision in 1508, for instance, a poet and preacher named Giovanni Battista Casali delivered a sermon in the Sistine Chapel extolling his promotion of art and learning.3 ‘You, now, Julius II, Supreme Pontiff,’ Casali enthused, ‘have founded a new Athens when you summon up that prostrated world of letters as if raising it from the dead, and you command that … Athens, her stadia, her theatres, her Athenaeum, be restored.’4

  This sermon was preached almost a year before Raphael’s arrival in Rome. However, the young painter would take this idea of Julius’s foundation of a new Athenaeum as the subject for his second wall fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura. By the start of 1510, after spending nearly a year on The Dispute of the Sacrament, he had moved across to the opposing wall and begun frescoing, beneath the Muse of Philosophy, the scene known since the seventeenth century (following its designation in a French guidebook) as The School of Athens.5 Where the Disputà featured a gallery of eminent theologians, Raphael’s new fresco portrayed a host of Greek philosophers and their students on the wall above where the Pope intended to place his volumes of philosophy.

  The School of Athens shows more than fifty figures, including Plato, Aristotle and Euclid, gathered in conversation and study beneath the coffered vault of a classical temple that looks suspiciously like the interior of St Peter’s as planned by Bramante. The architect was said by Vasari to have helped Raphael to design the fresco’s architectural features. Still in charge of the thousands of carpenters and masons who were in the process of building the new basilica, the great architect was not so busy, it seems, that he could not find the time to assist his young protégé.6 Raphael in turn paid homage to Bramante by portraying him as Euclid, the bald-headed figure who bends over a slate and illustrates one of his theorems with a compass.

  Besides Bramante, Raphael included a portrait of someone else who had, in a manner of speaking, assisted him with his fresco. His depiction of Plato – bald crown, grey-blond locks, a long, wavy beard – is usually understood to be a portrait of Leonardo. Giving Plato the features of an artist was a somewhat ironic gesture, as Raphael may have known, since in the Republic Plato had condemned the arts and banished painters from his ideal city. However, the equation of this multitalented artist with the greatest of all philosophers may have had something to do with the wide range of Leonardo’s studies and accomplishments, which by 1509 had become legendary throughout Europe. It was also a tribute to a painter to whom Raphael still turned for inspiration, since the figures grouped around Pythagoras (seated in the fresco’s left foreground) are modelled closely on the passionately animated figures crowding the Virgin Mary in Leonardo’s unfinished Adoration of the Magi, an altarpiece begun thirty years earlier.7

  The fresco’s homage to Leonardo seemed to imply that this great sage was, like Plato, the teacher from whom all others must learn. One art historian has identified this sense of discipleship as a characteristic feature of Raphael’s nature.8 Consisting of a series of teacher–student relationships in which philosophers like Euclid, Pythagoras and Plato are surrounded by their respective acolytes, The School of Athens implies that learning to philosophise is a process not unlike the one through which an apprentice learns to paint by studying under a master.9 Raphael modestly portrayed himself as a student of Ptolemy, the Alexandrian astronomer and geographer. However, on the strength of his work in the Stanza della Segnatura, he was soon to become a revered master in his own right, a teacher in demand by flocks of eager students. Vasari described, in a scene that could have come straight out of The School of Athens, how the young painter was always surrounded by dozens of pupils and assistants: ‘He was never seen to go to court without having with him, as he left his house, some fifty painters, all able and excellent, who kept him company in order to do him honour.’10

  The sociable and popular Raphael was therefore a simpatico member of the sort of company that he portrayed in The School of Athens. His generosity of spirit is typified by the inclusion in the fresco of a portrait of Sodoma – the swarthy man in the white robe on the extreme right of the fresco who converses happily with Zoroaster and Ptolemy.11 Though Sodoma was, of course, no longer at work in the Stanza della Segnatura, Raphael chose to memorialise him, presumably in tribute to his earlier work on the vault.

  This kind of sociable existence – and style of art – was, of course, alien to the solitary, self-absorbed Michelangelo. Far from portraying elegant groups engaged in polite and learned conversation, Michelangelo’s crowd scenes, such as The Battle of Cascina or The Flood, were always violent, every-man-for-himself struggles for survival, full of straining limbs and wrenched torsos. Nor was Michelangelo ever surrounded by a team of students. On one occasion, legend has it, Raphael was leaving the Vatican in the company of his vast entourage when he encountered Michelangelo – who, typically, was alone – in the middle of the Piazza San Pietro. ‘You with your band, like a bravo,’ sneered Michelangelo. ‘And you alone, like the hangman,’ retorted Raphael.

  Living and working in such close proximity, the two artists were destined occasionally to cross paths. However, Michelangelo seems to have kept to one corner of the Vatican, Raphael to another. Such were Michelangelo’s suspicions of Raphael, whom he regarded as an envious and malicious imitator, that the younger artist was one of the last people who would ever have been allowed on to the scaffold. ‘All the discords that arose between Pope Julius and me,’ he later wrote, ‘were owing to the envy of Bramante and Raphael,’ both of whom, he insisted, wished to ‘ruin me’.12 He even managed to convince himself that Raphael had plotted with Bramante to creep into the chapel for a sneak preview of the fresco. The young artist had supposedly played an ignominious role in the episode in which Michelangelo fled to Florence after hurling planks at the Pope. Taking advantage of Michelangelo’s absence, he was secretly admitted to the chapel by Bramante, after which he proceeded to study his rival’s style and technique, hoping to give his own works the same majesty.13 Though Raphael would naturally have been curious to see Michelangelo’s work, talk of such a conspiracy should probably be dismissed. Nonetheless, it seems clear that the rude, suspicious Michelangelo was the one person in Rome on whom Raphael’s famous charm was entirely lost.

  Raphael was already becoming the leader of a team of talented assistants and apprentices by the time he worked on The School of Athens. Proof that he used at least a couple of helpers comes from a series of different-sized handprints found in the plaster during conservation work in the 1990s. These impressions date from the time of the fresco’s execution, having been left in the wet intonaco by the painters as they supported themselves on the wall while balancing on the scaffold.14

  The presence of these assistants notwithstanding, Raphael himself seems to have done most of the actual painting, which took forty-nine giornate, or some two months of work. On the neck of the tunic worn by Euclid he even inscribed his signature, four letters – RVSM – that stand for ‘Raphael Vrbinus Sua Mano’ (‘Raphael of Urbino, His Hand’). This inscription leaves in little doubt whose hands were ultimately responsible for the work.

  Raphael made scores of sketches and designs for The School of Athens, beginning with pensieri, or ‘first thoughts’, tiny ink squiggles which he turned into much more detailed drawings in red or black chalk. One of his sketches, a silverpoint study of Diogenes, who sprawls on the steps of the temple, shows how extensively the poses were rehearsed on paper, with the careful attention paid to every detail – arms, torso, even the toes. Unlike Michelangelo’s fresco, more than fifty feet above the heads of its viewers, Raphael’s would be subject to close scrutiny. Scholars and other visitors to the Pope’s library would be able to stand within a few feet of the lower figures, hence Raphael’s concern with every minute wrinkle and digit.

  Having completed his numerous drawings of the faces and stances of his fifty-odd philosophers, Raphael used the technique known as graticolare (‘squaring’) to enlarge the figures and transfer their designs on to the glued-together sheets of paper ma
king up his cartoon. This enlargement was a fairly simple process that involved dividing the sketches into a grid of ruled squares which was then reproduced on the cartoon, enlarged by a factor of, say, three or four.

  The enlargement squares can still be seen on Raphael’s cartoon for The School of Athens, the only cartoon from either the Stanza della Segnatura or the Sistine Chapel to survive.15 Nine feet high and over twenty-four feet wide, it was done in black chalk, with the ruled lines of the enlarging squares visible beneath the detailed drawings of Plato, Aristotle and company. Intriguingly, none of the architectural backdrop is included in the cartoon – evidence, perhaps, that these details were indeed contrived by Bramante.16

  The cartoon is intriguing for another reason. Although either Raphael or his assistants meticulously perforated its outlines, the cartoon itself was never actually applied to the wet plaster. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to transfer a cartoon of this size to the wall. In such cases, artists usually cut their cartoons into a number of smaller and more manageable pieces. But Raphael did not choose this method. Instead, in a procedure entailing even more work, its design was transferred by means of spolvero to smaller pieces of paper that have been dubbed ‘auxiliary cartoons’.17 These smaller cartoons were then fixed to the intonaco, while the large ‘master cartoon’ remained intact. This time-consuming approach raises the question of why Raphael should have wished to preserve his cartoon, and why it was never used for the purpose for which it was seemingly created.