Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  The Romans themselves were no better. Luther, who would later become renowned for his obscene wit and toilet humour, was disgusted at how people shamelessly relieved their bladders in the street. They urinated so indiscriminately that to deter the culprits it was necessary to hang on the exterior wall a religious icon such as a portrait of St Sebastian or St Anthony. He found ridiculous the Italian habit of making flamboyant hand gestures as they spoke. ‘I do not understand the Italians,’ he later wrote, ‘and they do not understand me.’10 Equally ludicrous, in his opinion, was the Italian male’s refusal to allow his wife out of doors unless she first donned a veil. Prostitutes seemed to be everywhere, as did the poor, many of whom were destitute monks. While this rabble occupied the ancient ruins — from which they might emerge to attack unwary pilgrims — the cardinals lived decadently in their palaces. Luther learned that syphilis and homosexuality were rife among the clergy, and that even the Pope suffered from the French pox.

  Luther had therefore seen quite enough of Holy Rome by the time he finally returned to Germany. Nor had the mission been a success, for Egidio, bent on pushing through his reforms, denied the request for an appeal. The two monks arrived in Nuremberg some ten weeks later, after passing through Florence and Milan — the latter swarming with French soldiers — and recrossing the Alps in the dead of winter. Still, even though Luther did not have fond memories of Rome to cherish on the long journey, he later insisted the trip had been a miracle. It allowed him to see for himself, he claimed, how Rome was the seat of the Devil and the Pope worse than the Ottoman Sultan.

  fn1 Santa Maria Nuova, founded in 1285, served as a deposit bank as well as a hospital. Its enormous revenues, earned from shrewd investments, made it a safer bet than the more traditional banks, which had a woeful habit of going bust. This financial security meant that many well-to-do Florentines – Leonardo da Vinci as well as Michelangelo – opened deposit accounts in the hospital in return for a 5 per cent interest rate.

  22

  The World’s Game

  THE POPE’S CONDITION failed to improve in the period between Christmas and New Year. So ill was he on Christmas Day that Mass was celebrated in his chamber as he lay prone and feverish in bed. Soon afterwards, on St Stephen’s Day, his persistent fever and more bad weather prevented him from making the short trip to Bologna’s cathedral. He was therefore still in bed as the papal forces, led by his nephew Francesco Maria, waded through the snow towards Mirandola.

  Francesco Maria was proving a grave disappointment to his uncle. One of the few members of the extensive Rovere clan whom Julius had chosen to promote, he had been named Duke of Urbino following the death of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, and afterwards Captain General of the Church. This latter post had once been held by Cesare Borgia, but thus far Francesco Maria was showing himself a tamer warrior than the bloodthirsty Cesare. Raphael had portrayed him in The School of Athens, placing him next to Pythagoras. Depicted as a coy, almost effeminate young man with flowing white robes and shoulder-length blond hair, he looked an unlikely soldier. Julius probably selected him for his unstinting loyalty rather than for any qualities he had displayed as a leader of men.

  The Pope knew he could count even less on another of his commanders, Francesco Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua. Gonzaga was a commander of dubious aptitude at the best of times, having been known to use supposed attacks of syphilis (a disease from which he did indeed suffer) to absent himself from the battlefield. And now his loyalties were divided. His daughter was married to Francesco Maria, which placed him in the Pope’s camp, but he himself was married to Alfonso d’Este’s sister Isabella, meaning he was about to attack his brother-in-law. Gonzaga was therefore considered so untrustworthy that, during the previous summer, his ten-year-old son Federico had been sent as a hostage to Rome to ensure his fidelity to the Pope.

  The days passed and still no assault was made on Mirandola. The Pope grew ever more furious at the dawdling of his commanders. Finally, on 2 January, undeterred by either illness or foul weather, he rose like Lazarus and began preparations for the thirty-mile march over the frozen roads to Mirandola, including shipping his sickbed to the front. ‘Vederò si averò sì grossi li coglioni come ha il re di Franza!’ he muttered. ‘Let’s see if I’ve got balls as big as the king of France!’1

  By January, no painting had been done in the Sistine Chapel for more than four months. Work was still proceeding in the studio, since in September Michelangelo had received from Giovanni Michi a letter reporting that Giovanni Trignoli and Bernardino Zacchetti were busy making a drawing for the project. But Michelangelo was exasperated by the lost opportunity. The absence from Rome of the Pope and his cardinals meant no Masses would have interrupted work in the chapel. The Papal Chapel convened for Mass some thirty times each year, occasions when Michelangelo and his men were prevented from mounting on the scaffold. Not only did these ceremonies drag on for several hours, the preparations overseen by Paride de’ Grassi also took up a good deal of time.

  ‘When the vault was nearly finished,’ Michelangelo bitterly recalled a decade later, ‘the Pope returned to Bologna, whereupon I went there twice for money that was owed me, but effected nothing and wasted all that time until he returned to Rome.’2 Michelangelo exaggerated when he claimed that his two journeys ‘effected nothing’, since several weeks after Christmas he received the requested five hundred ducats, almost half of which he sent home to Florence. However, it was true that painting could not begin on the second half of the vault until the Pope returned to unveil the first.

  The long hiatus at least gave Michelangelo and his men some respite from their strenuous physical labours on the scaffold. It also offered Michelangelo the opportunity to prepare more sketches and cartoons, a task at which he occupied himself during the early months of 1511. One of the drawings executed at this time, done in red chalk on a small piece of paper measuring only 7½” X 10½”, was a highly detailed sketch of a reclining male nude extending his left arm while bending his left knee — a pose now famous the world over. The only surviving sketch of Adam in the famous Creation of Adam scene,3 it may have been inspired by the figure of Adam in Jacopo della Quercia’s Creation of Adam on the Porta Magna of San Petronio, a work with which Michelangelo could have reacquainted himself during one of his recent trips to Bologna. Quercia’s scene depicted a nude Adam recumbent on a sloping patch of ground, reaching out to the heavily robed figure of God. However, the posture of Michelangelo’s figure actually owes more to Lorenzo Ghiberti than to Quercia, since the Adam on the Porta del Paradiso in Florence — a figure with an extended left arm and retracted left foot — served as a kind of template for the Adam in Michelangelo’s drawing.

  39. Michelangelo’s sketch of Adam.

  Michelangelo’s meticulous drawing gives the rather stiff figure from Ghiberti’s bronze relief the languid, voluptuous beauty of one of his own Ignudi. The image was undoubtedly drawn from life. After deciding to pose his own Adam like Ghiberti’s bronze version, he would have arranged a nude model in the desired position, then carefully sketched the trunk, limbs and muscles. He may even have used the same model for Adam as he did for many of the Ignudi. As it was the middle of winter, Michelangelo was presumably unable to follow Leonardo’s sensible advice about using nude models only in the warmer weather.

  The refinement of detail in this sketch of Adam suggests it was probably the last one executed before the cartoon was made. Its small size meant, of course, that Adam’s dimensions needed to be increased by a factor of seven or eight before being transferred to the ceiling. However, since neither this sketch nor any of the others done for the vault shows signs of having been squared, how exactly Michelangelo enlarged his preparatory drawings remains a mystery.4 Possibly yet another drawing — one that was squared for enlargement — came between this red-chalk study and the cartoon for The Creation of Adam. Or perhaps Michelangelo executed two of these red-chalk studies, dividing the one into enlargement squares and retaining the other, as a
memento, in a more pristine condition.

  Whatever the case, the cartoon for The Creation of Adam must have been completed sometime during the early months of 1511. However, Michelangelo still faced a long wait before he would be allowed to apply it to the vault of the chapel.

  ‘This is something to put in all the histories of the world,’ wrote Girolamo Lippomano, the amazed Venetian envoy, in a dispatch from Mirandola a few weeks after Julius rose from his deathbed. ‘That a pope should have come to a military camp, when he has just been ill, with so much snow and cold, in January. Historians will have something to write about!’5

  It may have made history, but the expedition against Mirandola did not begin auspiciously. The cardinals and envoys, still stunned by the Pope’s plan, begged him to reconsider, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. ‘Julius was not restrained’, the chronicler Francesco Guicciardini later wrote, ‘by the consideration of how unworthy it was for the majesty of so high a position, that the Roman pontiff should lead armies in person against Christian towns.’6 So, to the sound of trumpets bleating in the frigid air, Julius set off from Bologna on 6 January, bellowing such shocking profanities that Lippomano could not bring himself to commit them to paper. To everyone’s amusement, he also started chanting ‘Mirandola, Mirandola!’

  Alfonso d’Este was lying in wait. No sooner had the Pope and his train passed San Felice, only a few miles from Mirandola, than Alfonso’s troops ambushed them, moving their guns swiftly through the deep snow on sledges designed by an enterprising French master of artillery. Julius hastily fell back, taking refuge in the sturdy castle at San Felice. Alfonso’s gunners were in such hot pursuit that, to avoid capture, he was forced to scramble from his litter and help raise the castle’s drawbridge — ‘the deed of a wise man’, noted a French chronicler, ‘for had he but waited long enough to say a paternoster, he would have been crunched’.7

  But Alfonso’s troops chose not to press their advantage, and once they retreated the Pope again took to the road. Following a short journey, he halted at a farm a few hundred yards outside the walls of Mirandola, taking up residence in the house while his cardinals competed for the stables. After a brief respite, winter had returned with a vengeance. The rivers froze, more snow fell and bitter winds howled across the plain — none of which gave Francesco Maria any more appetite for battle. He huddled in his flapping tent, playing cards with his troops and trying to hide from his uncle. But the Pope was not to be ignored. Bare-headed and wearing nothing warmer than his papal robes, he rode about the camp on a horse, cursing at the troops as he ordered the proper placement of the artillery. ‘Apparently he has quite recovered,’ wrote Lippomano. ‘He has the strength of a giant.’8

  The siege of Mirandola commenced on 17 January. A day earlier a shot from an arquebus had narrowly missed the Pope as he stood outside the farmhouse. He responded by moving even closer to the action, commandeering the kitchen of the convent of Santa Giustina, in the shadow of the walls, from where he could direct the gunners as they trained cannonballs at the fortifications. Some of these weapons — and possibly other equipment such as assault ladders and catapults — were designed by Donato Bramante. The architect had left his projects in Rome and, besides reading Dante to the Pope, was busy inventing ‘ingenious things of the greatest importance’ for the siege.9

  On the first day of bombardment, the Pope cheated death a second time as a cannonball smashed into the kitchen and injured two of his servants. He thanked the Virgin Mary for deflecting the shot and kept the cannonball as a souvenir. As more fire rained down on Santa Giustina, the Venetians began to suspect Julius’s own troops of secretly signalling his location to the gunners inside Mirandola, hoping he would be driven back by a fierce cannonade. But Julius declared that he would rather be shot in the head than retreat a single step. ‘He hates the French worse than ever,’ Lippomano observed.10

  Mirandola did not hold out long under the furious assault, surrendering after only three days. The Pope was exultant. Eager to set foot inside the conquered town, he had himself hauled over the fortifications in a basket when the huge mounds of earth piled behind the gates by the defenders proved difficult to move. His soldiers, as their reward, were allowed to plunder, while Francesca Pico, the Countess of Mirandola, was promptly sent into exile. Yet the Pope was not satisfied with his latest conquest. ‘Ferrara!’ he promptly started chanting. ‘Ferrara, Ferrara!’11

  If it was any consolation to Michelangelo, work in the Stanza della Segnatura had also slowed somewhat during the Pope’s absence from Rome.12 Raphael did not, however, chase after Julius as Michelangelo had done. Instead, showing his entrepreneurial flair, he took advantage of the situation to accept other commissions, including the design of some salvers for Agostino Chigi, the Sienese banker who was Sodoma’s patron. The blue-eyed, red-haired Chigi, one of the wealthiest men in Italy, also had bigger plans in mind for Raphael. In about 1509 he had started building a palace for himself beside the Tiber. Designed by Baldessare Peruzzi, the Villa Farnesina would boast lush gardens, vaulted rooms, a stage for theatricals and a loggia overlooking the river.13 It would also feature some of the finest frescoes in Rome. To decorate its walls and ceilings, Chigi hired both Sodoma and a young Venetian, Sebastiano del Piombo, a former pupil of Giorgione. Determined to employ only the best artists, he also engaged Raphael, who, sometime in 1511, began making preparations to paint on a wall in the villa’s spacious ground-floor salon a fresco showing The Triumph of Galatea, complete with tritons, cupids and a beautiful sea nymph drawn across the waves by a pair of dolphins.14

  Yet Raphael did not abandon his work in the Vatican. After finishing The School of Athens he had moved on to decorate the wall whose window overlooked the Belvedere — and the one against which the bookcases holding Julius’s volumes of poetry would be placed — with a fresco now known as Parnassus. While the Disputà portrayed famous theologians and The School of Athens a distinguished cast of philosophers, the Parnassus fresco featured twenty-eight poets, both ancient and contemporary, gathered around Apollo on Mount Parnassus. Included among them were Homer, Ovid, Propertius, Sappho, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, all sporting wreaths of laurel and conversing together with the expressive hand gestures that so irritated Martin Luther.

  Raphael included living as well as dead poets in his scene, their portraits, according to Vasari, painted from life. Among these luminaries was Lodovico Ariosto, the beleaguered envoy of Alfonso d’Este, whom Raphael sketched before the poet fled Rome in the summer of 1510 under threat of being thrown into the Tiber.15 Ariosto returned the compliment in Orlando furioso, describing Raphael as the ‘boast of Urbino’ and naming him as one of the greatest painters of the age.16

  In contrast to the almost exclusively masculine companies featured in the Disputà and The School of Athens, Raphael’s Parnassus included a number of women, including Sappho, the great female poet from Lesbos. Raphael, unlike Michelangelo, frequently used women as his models. According to a rumour in Rome, he once requested five of the city’s most beautiful women to pose nude for him so he could select the best features of each — the nose from one, the eyes or hips from another — to create a portrait of the perfect woman (an anecdote that recalls one that Cicero told about the Greek painter Zeuxis). Nevertheless, it is said that when Raphael came to paint Sappho, he needed the features of only one Roman beauty, since the portrayal of the great female poet was said to have been inspired by his neighbour in the Piazza Scossa Cavalli, the famous courtesan Imperia. Thus, while Michelangelo was trudging the frozen roads of Italy in search of ducats from the Pope, Raphael, it seems, was enjoying the comfort of Agostino Chigi’s palace on the Tiber and the company of Rome’s most beautiful woman.

  The Pope did not, following the conquest of Mirandola, press forward to Ferrara. He had hoped, as usual, to lead the expedition himself, but as French reinforcements were gathering along the Po, he feared capture should the attempt fail. On 7 February he therefore returned to Bologna on a sledge dra
wn through the deep snow by an ox. Soon Bologna was no longer safe from the French, and only a week later he rode the sledge fifty miles east to Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast. Here he lingered for the next seven weeks, making plans for the assault on Ferrara and spending his leisure hours watching from the shore as galleys rode up and down the coast on a stiff breeze. Though a small earthquake that shook Ravenna in March was interpreted by everyone else as an evil omen, it failed to dampen Julius’s spirits. Nor were they doused by the heavy rains that caused ponds to overflow and rivers to burst their banks.

  Without the Pope on site to rally the troops, the campaign against Ferrara soon spluttered out of steam. To take matters in hand, Julius returned to Bologna in the first week of April. Here, he gave an audience to an envoy from the Emperor Maximilian, who urged him to make peace with the French and war on Venice, rather than the other way round. But the embassy came to nothing, as did another attempt to mediate. Julius’s daughter Felice tried to reconcile her father with Alfonso d’Este by proposing a marriage between her infant daughter and the duke’s infant son. Julius did not respond favourably to the idea, sending Felice home to her husband with gruff orders to attend to her sewing.17

  May arrived, bringing better weather. For a second time the French army closed in on Bologna, and for a second time Julius slipped away to Ravenna. Francesco Maria and his troops tried to do the same, fleeing the enemy in such a shameful panic that their artillery was left behind in their camp, along with their baggage, all of which was captured by the French. Bologna, defenceless, fell soon afterwards, and the Bentivogli were returned to power after almost five years in exile. Amazingly, the Pope did not fly into one of his customary rages when the disastrous news was brought to him. He calmly informed his cardinals that the fault was his nephew’s, and that Francesco Maria would pay with his life.