Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  The source of Michelangelo’s complaint seems to have been that he felt he was owed a payment above and beyond the three thousand ducats promised in his contract — a sort of a bonus for a job well done. He implied in one of his letters home that this bonus had been agreed in advance, and he was therefore irked when he did not receive it immediately after completing the vault. He was satisfied in due course, however, since a generous payment of two thousand ducats was eventually disbursed to him. This payment, he later claimed, ‘saved my life’.11 Ironically, he would discover to his extreme displeasure, years afterwards, that this largesse had not been for the fresco at all; it was paid, instead, as an advance on work he was about to undertake on the long-delayed tomb. No bonus was ever paid for the fresco, leaving Michelangelo feeling, not for the first time, cheated by the Pope.12

  But for the moment, at least, Michelangelo was contented. And, with the vault completed, he was finally able to set down his brushes and, for the first time in years, prepare to take up his hammer and chisel.

  More than six years after it was quarried, the marble for the Pope’s tomb still sat in the Piazza San Pietro, ignored by everyone except the thieves who had stolen several blocks. The tomb had never been far from Michelangelo’s thoughts as he worked on his fresco, and he would have passed the pile of marble — a painful and vivid reminder of how his ambitions had been sacrificed — whenever he made his way from the Piazza Rusticucci to the Sistine Chapel.

  Having finished his fresco, Michelangelo was determined to resume work on the project for which Julius had brought him to Rome in the first place, and within a few days of uncovering his work he began making new sketches for the tomb. He also started preparing a wooden model from these sketches and arranging the lease on a large house owned by the Rovere family in Macello de’ Corvi (‘Raven’s Lane’), across the Tiber near Trajan’s Column. This was a more commodious property than the small studio behind Santa Caterina, complete with a garden for vegetables and chickens, a well, a wine cellar, and two cottages in which he could ensconce his assistants. Two assistants arrived from Florence soon afterwards, though, as usual, Michelangelo suffered agonies with them. One of them, Silvio Falcone, fell ill soon after arriving in Rome, requiring Michelangelo to nurse him. A second — a ‘dunghill of a boy’13 — harassed Michelangelo so incessantly that he was forced to evict him from the premises and make arrangements for his prompt return to Florence.

  The task of carving the Pope’s tomb soon became acute. Julius celebrated his sixty-ninth birthday a few weeks after the fresco was unveiled. He also entered the tenth year of his tumultuous reign. He had cheated death many times, having survived dangerous bouts of illness and several assassination attempts, eluded ambushes and kidnappings, dodged cannonballs on the field outside Mirandola, and defied unfavourable prophecies and portents. Finally, he had come back from disappointment and defeat to quell a rebellion by a faction of French cardinals and win an almost miraculous victory against Louis XII. And he had also, of course, bullied Italy’s most obstreperous artist into completing, in under five years, a masterpiece of enormous proportions.

  These adversities inevitably took their toll and, soon after the dawn of the year 1513, the Pope began to ail. By the middle of January, he had lost all appetite — an alarming symptom in a gourmand like Julius. Convinced, however, of the restorative properties of wine, he insisted on tasting eight different varieties to see which would do him the most good. Eager to continue working, he had his bed moved next door into the Camera del Pappagallo, where he received ambassadors and other visitors while lying on his back in the company of his caged parrot.

  Still unable to eat or sleep, by the middle of February the Pope had nevertheless improved enough to sit up in bed and drink a glass of malmsey with Paride de’ Grassi, who was pleased to find him ‘looking quite well and cheerful’.14 It briefly seemed as if Julius was preparing to cheat death yet again. However, on the following day he was given a drink containing powdered gold — a quack remedy for all ailments — and overnight his condition swiftly deteriorated. The next morning, 21 February, the people of Rome learned that il papa terribile was dead.

  ‘I have lived forty years in this city,’ an incredulous Paride de’ Grassi wrote in his journal a few days later, ‘but never have I seen such a vast throng at the funeral of any former pope.’15 Julius’s funeral, which took place during carnival time, caused an unprecedented and almost hysterical outburst of emotion among the people of Rome. The crowds pushed aside the Swiss Guards and insisted on kissing the feet of the dead pontiff as he lay in state in St Peter’s. Even Julius’s enemies, it was said, burst into tears, declaring that he had delivered both Italy and the Church from ‘the yoke of the French barbarians’.16

  The funeral oration in St Peter’s was delivered by Fedro Inghirami. ‘Bone Deus!’ he exclaimed in his sonorous voice. ‘Good God! What talent was his, what prudence, what experience at the ruling and administration of empire. What strength could match that of his lofty, unbreakable spirit?’17 Afterwards, Julius was laid to rest in the choir of the half-built basilica, beside the grave of Sixtus IV, in a temporary tomb from which he would be moved when Michelangelo’s memorial was completed.

  Plans for this memorial were finally going ahead. Two days before his death, in one of his very last acts, Julius had issued a bull confirming that he wished Michelangelo to carve the tomb, setting aside ten thousand ducats for the purpose. He also made special plans for the structure. Whereas the monument had originally been destined for San Pietro in Vincoli, and afterwards the rebuilt St Peter’s, on his deathbed Julius decided he wanted his body to repose beneath what was, of all his many achievements, the finest testament to his reign. Once completed, the magnificent tomb was to be installed, he insisted, inside the Sistine Chapel. Julius wished to be entombed beneath not just one, but two, of Michelangelo’s masterpieces.

  Michelangelo’s reaction to Julius’s death is not recorded. Once an intimate of the Pope, from whom he had expected great things, he became estranged following their disagreement over the tomb in 1506, an episode that he was never to forget and one to which, many years later, he still made bitter references. However, he must have recognised that Julius, whatever his shortcomings, had been the greatest of patrons, a man whose plans and visions were as impossibly grandiose as his own, whose energies and ambitions were as unflagging, and whose terribilità was manifest, like his own, in every inch of the painted vault.

  Shortly after Julius was buried in St Peter’s, the 37-year-old Giovanni de’ Medici, the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was elected Pope Leo X in a conclave that took place beneath Michelangelo’s new fresco.fn1 A childhood friend of Michelangelo, Leo was a cultivated, genial and generous man, both reverent towards the memory of Julius II and, initially at least, favourably disposed towards Michelangelo, whom he promised to keep working as a sculptor on grand projects for years to come. He gave evidence of this intention immediately after his election by issuing a new contract for Michelangelo to carve Julius’s memorial. Forty life-sized marble figures were still planned for the tomb, and Michelangelo’s remuneration was increased to a hefty 16,500 ducats. The hundred tons of Carrara marble were promptly carted from the Piazza San Pietro to the studio in Macello de’ Corvi. A full seven years after fleeing Rome on horseback, Michelangelo finally returned to what he called his ‘true profession’.

  fn1 During the conclave Cardinal de’ Medici did not occupy the lucky cell beneath Perugino’s Giving of the Keys to St Peter. Instead, debilitated by a suppurating anal fistula, he was assigned by Paride de’ Grassi a cell at the front of the chapel, convenient to the sacristy, where he could receive the necessary medical attention.

  Epilogue

  The Language of the Gods

  MICHELANGELO WOULD LIVE another fifty-one years, creating many more masterpieces in both paint and marble during the course of his long career. In 1536, he even returned to the Sistine Chapel to paint another fresco, The Last Judgement, on its
altar wall. And, in a strange twist, towards the end of his life he served as the Master of the Works for St Peter’s. Donato Bramante died in 1514, aged seventy, but the construction of the new basilica dragged on for more than a century after Julius first pushed its foundation stone into place, thereby giving rise to the contemporary Italian expression la fabbrica di San Pietro (‘the building of St Peter’s), used to describe a never-ending process. Raphael succeeded Bramante as architect-in-chief, making a number of changes to his mentor’s original design. Michelangelo inherited the enormous project more than three decades later, in 1547, having proved himself, among his other accomplishments, the most inventive and influential architect of the century. Accepting the commission from Pope Paul IV only with the greatest reluctance – he claimed that architecture was not his ‘true profession’ – he proceeded to design for the basilica the majestic dome that dominates not only the Vatican but the skyline of Rome itself.1

  Raphael would not have nearly so long a career. He did not even live to see the decoration of the Vatican apartments completed. At the time of Julius’s death, he had been starting work on his third fresco in the Stanza d’Eliodoro, The Repulse of Attila. One more fresco, The Liberation of St Peter, then remained to be executed. Once it was completed, in 1514, Leo immediately commissioned him to paint the next room in the papal apartments, that now known as the Stanza dell’Incendio. Named after one of its frescoes, Fire in the Borgo, this room was finished, with the help of a large number of assistants, in 1517.

  Raphael took on numerous other projects, including designs for tapestries, portraits of courtiers and cardinals, and of course more frescoes. Besides working on St Peter’s, he also served as an architect in the Vatican, completing and then decorating the loggias begun years earlier by Bramante. He designed a mortuary chapel for Agostino Chigi and started a villa outside Rome for the new Pope’s brother, Giuliano de’ Medici. Abandoning his more humble lodgings in the Piazza Scossa Cavalli, he eventually moved into a palace of his own, the Palazzo Caprini, a grand lodging that had been designed by Bramante.

  Raphael also kept busy with love affairs. Despite his dalliance with Margherita Luti, the baker’s daughter, he became engaged, in 1514, to a young woman named Maria, the niece of Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, a powerful cardinal who was the subject of one of his many portraits. Vows were never exchanged, however, since Raphael kept on postponing the wedding. According to Vasari, his reasons for procrastinating were twofold. He was hoping to be made a cardinal – an office for which marriage would obviously disqualify him – and he was eager, Vasari claimed, ‘to divert himself beyond measure with the pleasures of love’.2 The incessant postponement of her nuptials supposedly caused Maria to die of a broken heart. Soon afterwards, on Good Friday in 1520, Raphael himself died following a night of debauchery in which, Vasari maintained, he ‘indulged in more than his usual excess’.3 Like Shakespeare, he died on his birthday – in his case, his thirty-seventh.

  Raphael’s untimely death left the papal court, according to one observer, ‘in the utmost and most universal grief. Here, people are talking about nothing but the death of this exceptional man, who has completed his first life at the young age of thirty-seven. His second life – that of his fame, which is subject neither to time nor death – will endure for all eternity.’4 To the people of Rome, the heavens seemed to give a sign of their own grief at the painter’s death, for cracks suddenly appeared in the walls of the Vatican, causing Leo and his entourage to flee the crumbling palace. These cracks were probably less celestial mourning, however, than a result of Raphael’s recent structural modifications to the Vatican.

  Raphael’s body was exposed to public view on a catafalque beneath his latest painting, The Transfiguration, after which he and his frustrated bride-to-be, Maria da Bibbiena, were finally brought together in death and buried side by side in the Pantheon. As for Margherita, the baker’s daughter, she is said to have entered a convent after Raphael left her the means to live a decent life. However, she may well have carried a secret with her into the cloisters. Recent X-ray analysis of La Fornarina, Raphael’s 1518 portrait of her, has revealed a square-cut ruby ring on the third finger of her left hand, suggesting another reason why Raphael was anxious to postpone his wedding day: he was already married to Margherita. Then, as now, the fourth finger of the left hand was recommended for the wedding ring because it was believed a special vein, the vena amoris, passed directly from that finger to the heart.5 This ring remained unseen for almost five centuries, having been painted over, probably by one of Raphael’s assistants, in order to avoid a scandal after his death.

  At the time of Raphael’s premature death, the scaffolding was being constructed for the fourth and final room to be frescoed in the papal suite, the Sala di Costantino. If his frescoes in the Vatican apartments had been overshadowed by Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel, Raphael at least won a posthumous victory over his great rival. A short while after Raphael’s burial, Michelangelo’s friend Sebastiano del Piombo applied to Pope Leo to have Michelangelo (who was not enthusiastic about the plan) fresco the Sala di Costantino, only to have the appeal rejected on the grounds that Raphael’s students – who included the talented young Giulio Romano – possessed their master’s cartoons and would fresco the walls according to these designs. The Sala di Costantino was duly finished by these assistants in 1524.

  *

  48. Michelangelo’s tomb for Julius II in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli.

  Julius’s tomb engaged Michelangelo interminably, causing him, if anything, even more anguish than his fresco in the Sistine Chapel. He carved it, off and on, for more than thirty years before finally completing it in 1545. It was not installed in the Sistine Chapel, as Julius had wished, but instead in the transept of San Pietro in Vincoli, the church across from the Colosseum. Nor was it the grandiose monument envisioned by the Pope, since both its dimensions and the number of statues had been greatly reduced at the behest of Julius’s heirs. The ten-foot-high figure of il papa terribile wearing a tiara – the statue intended to crown the tomb – was never even started. In fact, much of the work was eventually done by other sculptors hired by Michelangelo, such as Raffaello da Montelupo. What is more, Julius’s body was never exhumed, as planned, so it could repose within the massive sepulchre. Instead, his remains were left in their temporary grave in St Peter’s, beside those of Sixtus IV.

  Michelangelo’s family would also continue to exasperate him in the years that followed. However, he finally came good on his promise to Buonarroto and, in 1514, loaned his three younger brothers a thousand ducats for a wool shop in Florence, which they ran with modest success for about a dozen years. Buonarroto, the only brother to marry and have children, died from the plague in 1528, aged fifty-one, much mourned by his older brother. Giovansimone died twenty years later, never having fulfilled his youthful dreams of voyaging to far-flung lands and making his fortune from the trade in exotic goods. On his deathbed, he expressed contrition for his sins – an act which reassured Michelangelo that he would find his salvation in heaven. Sigismondo, the soldier, died in 1555, at the family farm in Settignano. The death of Lodovico in 1531, at the ripe old age of eighty-seven, prompted Michelangelo to write one of his longest poems, a lament about his ‘great sorrow’ and ‘weeping woe’ for a man who had so frequently antagonised and infuriated him.6

  Michelangelo himself died in Rome in 1564, a few weeks shy of his eighty-ninth birthday. His body was returned to Florence for burial in the church of Santa Croce, beneath a tomb sculpted by Giorgio Vasari. Poems and other tributes from the people of Florence were immediately pinned to the monument. Most praised him as the greatest artist who had ever lived, supreme above all rivals in the fields of sculpture, painting and architecture.7 This opinion was given official sanction during a state funeral in which the consul of the Florentine Academy, a poet and historian named Benedetto Varchi, delivered an oration proposing that Raphael of Urbino would have been the greatest artist
the world had ever known – if Michelangelo had not existed. More than five decades after the two men first started work on their frescoes in the Vatican, their rivalry was still green in everyone’s memory.

  None of Michelangelo’s other works would ever win him quite the same renown as his fresco in the Sistine Chapel, a building now virtually synonymous with his name. Almost immediately, it became, like the cartoon for The Battle of Cascina, an academy for artists. It generated intense interest, in particular, among a new generation of Tuscan painters such as Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo da Pontormo, exponents of the movement later known as Mannerism. Both Rosso and Pontormo made artistic pilgrimages south to Rome during the pontificate of Leo X and then filled their works with the same luminous colours and sensual vigour that they saw on the vault of the Sistine Chapel.

  Artists from further afield also took note of Michelangelo’s work. Titian began imitating some of the figures in the fresco before it was even finished. In the autumn of 1511, the Venetian painter, then twenty-six, painted in the Scuola del Santo in Padua a small fresco in which he copied the reclining figure of Eve from the Temptation.8 Titian is not known to have visited Rome by this point, therefore he must have seen some of the sketches of Michelangelo’s figures which had been done by other artists as soon as the first half of the vault was unveiled, and which were then passed from hand to hand. A market soon developed for these sorts of sketches, which were used like model books. Sometime after the full version was uncovered, an obscure artist named Leonardo Cungi executed a set of drawings of the entire fresco. This particular collection was purchased by one of Raphael’s assistants, Perino del Vaga, who then used some of the motifs in his own ceiling decorations, including a chapel in San Marcello al Corso in Rome, where he frescoed a Creation of Eve.