R. A. Scotti (11 page)

Because the Renaissance Church was both a marketplace and a meritocracy, a man like Agostino Chigi, a merchant, a banker, and a moneylender, through sagacity, shrewdness, and a dearth of scruples, could make himself not just a man of means but a man of position. Chigi pursued power so adroitly and gained the pope's trust so absolutely that Julius adopted him, actually and metaphorically, grafting a new branch onto the della Rovere oak, the symbol on his papal crest.
*
It was the ultimate noblesse oblige.

The scheme that Chigi proposed to underwrite St. Peter's was a centuries-old custom—the granting of indulgences. If allowed by the pope, a penitent who in good faith had confessed his sins with a sincere heart could earn an indulgence, or redemption, by performing a specific charitable or selfless deed.

Chigi advised Julius to set up a separate building fund for the Basilica and grant an indulgence to anyone who made an annual contribution to it. The idea was similar to a pledge drive today, except that instead of an immediate thank-you gift, say a logo tote bag, donors received a reduced sentence in purgatory—the inherent presumption being that if you could afford to contribute, you were probably not on the fast track to heaven.

Julius did not act immediately to implement Chigi's proposal, but neither did he reject it out of hand. It is not clear why he hesitated, since indulgences were an accepted way to raise money for capital projects and charitable causes. Instead, Julius continued cutting costs.

In the interest of economy, he limited the use of expensive material, particularly travertine, which was costly to quarry and transport. Bricks and breccia, a form of crushed tufa that was cheap and plentiful, were used as much as possible to build the walls. Bramante had applied a fake travertine finish on an earlier project, and he planned to use it for the Basilica walls as well. He was casting the vaults and the shafts of the giant columns and using travertine for only the bases, capitals, and cornices.

At the same time that Julius was practicing fiscal restraint, he was pursuing his imperial ambitions. It was a precarious balancing act. Urged on by his brash
magister operae,
Julius began to imagine the new St. Peter's not just as a grand enterprise but as the centerpiece of a papal Palatine, modeled on the Forum of ancient Rome. At the start of his papacy, much of the city was still a ramshackle medieval town. A traveler visiting Rome in 1500 wrote: “There are parts within the walls which look like thick woods and wild beasts, hares, foxes, deer, and even porcupines, so it is said, breed in the caves.”

All that was changing. Under the patronage of Julius, Rome replaced Florence as the capital of art and imagination. Humanists rambled through the imperial wilderness, reading poetry, philosophizing, and more than likely gossiping about their Curial employers. Rome was the site, the very dust and stones, the overgrown forums and crumbled baths, of one of the classical civilizations that they revered. The romantic imagination could wander freely among the mossy ruins where Ovid once recited his odes and Seneca tutored the young Nero in his pre-despotic puberty. The lolling cattle on the imperial hillsides and the meandering goats added to the picturesque scene.

But papal Rome was more than broken cornices and fallen columns. It was also the place to land a plum job. The Church was the best career opportunity for young intellectuals. If you were intelligent and played your cards right, you could gain fame, wealth, even the papal tiara. Francesco Petrarch, the original humanist, set the tone when he said, “The true noble is not born but made.”

The best and the brightest—painters, architects, Greek scholars, scientists, historians, poets, and musicians—flocked to Rome and found employment and advancement in the
famiglia,
or household, of the pope and his cardinals. The Vatican had the first Arabic printing press and produced the first cookbook as well as works on historical criticism, gardening, and fishing, one of the pope's favorite pastimes.

In a papal bull issued in 1507, Julius gave tax concessions to those who built, spurring a boom. Across the Tiber, cardinals, Curial bankers, and ambassadors to the papal court were building palaces, and much of the city became a construction site.

The pope and his architect set the pace. They planned their Palatine together, poring over classical texts in the papal library to learn more about the imperial buildings. The descriptions of Nero's Golden House, the Domus Aurea, in Tacitus and Suetonius, and Pliny the Younger's descriptions of his own villas became their guides.

Bramante designed a three-level complex in the Vatican to rival the imperial palaces. Covering more than five acres and called the Belvedere Court, it connected an enlarged and refurbished papal palace with a villa that Nicholas V had built on the north slope of the Vatican hill about three hundred yards away, called the Belvedere—“beautiful view.”

The Belvedere Court would have lush terraced gardens and fountains, a permanent open-air arena with tiered seats for dramatic performances and bullfights, and a courtyard museum to display the pope's collection of antiquities, including his prized sculpture now known as the Apollo Belvedere. Buildings and gardens would flow from each other as parts of the same architectural landscape. A wider bridge and broad new avenues leading from the Vatican would create easy access to the center of Rome. It was a plan fit for the Christian imperium of the second Julius.

 

Although Raphael painted him as Euclid holding a pair of compasses and demonstrating the principles of geometry so integral to the Renaissance architectural ideal, Bramante was an experimenter. According to Vasari, he invented a kind of flying scaffold to use in casting vaults and devised a way to cast using wooden molds so that patterns would seem to be carved in the plaster. Bramante was constantly looking for new and better ways to build. To some contemporaries, he was “a capricious genius,” impulsive and often inattentive to detail, but Julius gave him more commissions than anyone could carry through with care and competence.

As
magister operae,
Bramante was charged not only with building the Basilica, in itself the work of many lifetimes, but also with executing all the works throughout the city and the Papal States. With an enthusiasm that matched the pope's own, he accepted every assignment that fired Julius's restless mind: naval fortifications in the port of Civitavecchia, hydraulic machines, an apostolic palace in Loreto, a staircase in the Palazzo Communale in Bologna, a choir in the Roman church of Santa Maria del Popolo, even a machine for printing papal bulls “with a very beautiful screw.”

To carry out the commissions, Bramante oversaw an operation so vast that a contemporary dubbed it “Bramante & Co.” He employed a huge construction force: his surveyor Riniero da Pisa, his chief carpenter Venttura da Pistoia, his overseer Giuliano Leno, and scores of artisans and laborers, including draftsmen, foremen, two types of masons to hew and lay stones, bricklayers, carpenters, wood-carvers, and unskilled workers. They drew the plans, quarried the stones, split the timber, drove the mule carts and oxen, raised the scaffolding, and dug the foundations. They fired the furnaces, mixed the cement, cut the bricks, and moved mountains of earth and stone. A virtual army of suppliers provided tons of lime and sand, miles of rope, and forests of timber.

The first architectural firm in Rome and very likely in the world, Bramante & Co. also employed five sub-architects and the most gifted fresco painters in Italy.

Julius wanted every great artist in his service, which he equated with the service of the Church and the glory of God—and what he wanted, Bramante usually gave him. But one giant of the Renaissance eluded his reach. Oddly enough, he was Bramante's old friend, Leonardo.

Why not da Vinci? It is tantalizing to speculate. Why didn't Julius call him to the Vatican after the Sforzas lost power in Milan? Leonardo was looking for a new patron then. If by some improbable fluke he had escaped the pope's notice, why didn't Bramante introduce them?

When he wanted to impress Julius and diminish the influence of Michelangelo, Bramante turned instead to an inexperienced young painter from his hometown of Urbino.

R
aphael Sanzio arrived in Rome in 1508 when some of the finest painters in Italy were at work in the papal palace frescoing the walls of a new second-floor apartment for the pope. Julius refused to live in the Borgia Apartment on the first floor because his hated predecessor had decorated it with frescoes of his mistress, Giulia “la Bella” Farnese, displayed as the Madonna.
*
On a bright autumnal day, Bramante brought his eager young protégé upstairs to the new papal apartment.

What did they think—Pinturicchio and Luca Signorelli; Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, known as Sodoma; Bartolomeo Suardi, nicknamed Bramantino (“Little Bramante”) for his teacher; the Venetian Lorenzo Lotto, the Dutchman Johannes Ruysch, and Perugino, an old man now? They were painters of rich experience and enviable talent, accustomed to respect.

They must have been tired of making the circuit from Florence to Perugia, Milan to Urbino to Venice—tired of the road, the capricious patrons, the never-ending contest for commissions. They had landed a cushy assignment in the Vatican of Julius, employed by the best. Accommodations were plush, and there was plenty of work, until Bramante brought in the boy, a stripling of twenty-five.

Arm thrown across the young man's shoulder, Bramante introduced him as a friend and protégé—Raffaello Sanzio, son of Giovanni. Some of the older artists must have remembered Giovanni Santi, the court painter in Urbino in the exalted days of Duke Federigo, and the little boy with the face of an angel and a crown of golden ringlets who painted beside his father.

Perugino, eyes moist, rushed forward and embraced Raphael like a son. It was an emotional moment for the old painter. He pinched the boy's cheek affectionately, marveling at how he had grown. After Giovanni died, Perugino had taken the boy into his studio and taught him to paint, replacing the father and teacher that Raphael had lost. Perugino took pride in the youngster who learned so well that “his copies could not be distinguished from his master's.”

Seeing Perugino embrace the boy, the other artists welcomed him. They probably looked on Raphael as an assistant more than an equal. They may have heard of him from the brief time he spent in Florence, but Raphael had never frescoed a large space or composed a complex dramatic painting. On Bramante's word, the pope was giving him a chance to “show his worth.” There is no reason to suppose that they felt threatened by him—at least not at first. Unlike Leonardo or Michelangelo, Raphael did not provoke fear.

Most artists have “a certain element of savagery and madness,” Vasari writes. “Raphael had no fight neither against men nor against his own heart. He was not obliged like so many other geniuses to give birth to his works by suffering; he produced them as a fine tree produces fruit. The sap was abundant and the cultivation perfect.” He had the face of an innocent and manners to match, respectful toward the older painters, deferential to his teacher Perugino. But his amiable character concealed intense ambition.

When he arrived at the Vatican, most of the rooms were already frescoed. Piero della Francesca had finished one scene. Signorelli was completing another wall, and Bramantino, the Milanese, had painted many figures. Raphael began in the Stanza della Segnatura. Although he was the greenest of the pope's painters, he quickly outshone all the other artists, stunning them with his unexpected skill.

When Julius saw Raphael's first fresco, he recognized a special gift. Overnight, Perugino and the rest found themselves unemployed, their paintings obliterated, and the entire work of frescoing the papal apartments given to the boy-genius “so that he alone might have the glory.”

The more seasoned and celebrated artists were packing their cases when the workmen came in. They brought chisels to chip off the old frescos and cloth bags of sand and lime to mix into plaster to recoat the walls. As the frescoes began disappearing, the floors were covered with a blanket of brilliant flakes, the labor of months now broken plaster. Raphael would not allow the work of his old teacher Perugino to be touched, but the other walls were chiseled bare, then replastered, rendered smooth and blank to receive the genius of the wunderkind.

What must have seemed like reckless caprice on the pope's part was a prescient stroke in the light of history. Vasari writes that Raphael gave “such a proof of his powers as made men understand that he was resolved to hold the sovereignty, without question, among all who handled the brush.”

For all his self-effacing charm and easy grace, Raphael was immodest. He wanted to prove that he was the best. There was only one more artist to surpass, and a few months later, he returned from Bologna.

 

Sweet-talked with promises, Michelangelo came back to Rome in the spring of 1508, expecting to resume sculpting the tomb. But Julius had a very different project in mind, one that would honor the memory of his uncle, Sixtus IV, who had set him on the road to the papacy and built the Sistine Chapel. He asked Michelangelo to fresco the central vault of the chapel ceiling and offered him the very generous sum of three thousand ducats.

Michelangelo was furious. He was a sculptor, not a painter. His wet nurse was the wife of a stonecutter. “With the milk of my nurse, I sucked in the chisels and hammers wherewith I make my figures,” he liked to say. He had come back to Rome to carve the tomb, he told Julius. “Get Raphael to fresco your ceiling.” Michelangelo's refusals were “so insistent,” Condivi wrote, “that the pope was about to fly into a rage…. But then seeing his obstinacy, Michelangelo set out to do the work.”

Because the ceiling was so high—sixty-eight feet—Bramante had built a hanging scaffold. Michelangelo refused to mount it, insinuating that a faulty scaffold was a convenient way to dispose of a rival. Muttering that “a poor man could marry off two daughters” with the money he was saving on rope, he tore down Bramante's scaffold and built his own freestanding device.

On May 10, with extreme ill will and dark protestations, Michelangelo closed himself in the Sistine Chapel. A short time later, still complaining, he went back to Julius and renegotiated his contract. For six thousand ducats, he would paint not just the central vault but the entire ceiling—three thousand square feet—and not with the twelve apostles, as Julius had ordered. They were poor men, Michelangelo told him, and they would make a poor fresco. He wanted to choose his own subject matter.

 

Pride and faith impelled him. He painted for God and Michelangelo, and to show up Bramante, a man of bonhomie, as sly as a fox. Each day, as long as the light held, suspended five stories in the air, tempera in his eyes and splattering his beard, the chapel reeking of egg yolks, Michelangelo worked like a slave at forced labor. His brain roiled. Ideas for cartoons came to him mixed with dark suspicions. Bramante had foisted the ceiling on him to humiliate him. A vast space, a difficult shape, a treacherous height, an impossible position, an uncongenial medium—he was set up to fail. Even for an experienced painter, the Sistina was an impossible assignment.

Michelangelo had expanses of ceiling to paint before he could sculpt the tomb. His marble was still piled in the square, awaiting his chisel. It was the prize, the consolation that kept him climbing the scaffolding at dawn each day. One more panel, and one more, then he could return to the tomb. Weeks turned to months and months to years. His neck stiffened from peering up for so many hours, and his eyes became bloodshot from constantly wiping away the drips of paint. His body “bent like a bow,” he said, and his “beard touched heaven.” He wrote to his brother: “I am living here in a state of great anxiety and of the greatest physical fatigue. I have no friends and want none.”

 

While Michelangelo struggled with dampness and mildew, Raphael was completing
The School of Athens,
the first of his extraordinary narrative paintings for the papal apartments. Raphael didn't paint in quietude. The Stanza della Segnatura was Julius's personal library, and Tomasso Inghirami, his corpulent, boisterous librarian, was often in attendance. The librarian's sonorous voice could be heard booming from the book stacks, declaiming on politics and religion or reading aloud. Julius looked in often. The library was a personal room, and the frescoes Raphael was creating were for the pope's own pleasure—a portrait of Rome in the age of Julius. Raphael welcomed the pope's visits, flattered and pleased by the attention.

The atmosphere in the Sistina was far less cordial. Michelangelo banned Julius from the chapel and guarded against intruders by rigging a canvas beneath the scaffolding. It had the double effect of a canopy protecting the chapel from splattering paint and a horizontal screen concealing his work. No one except his assistants could see the ceiling in progress, and he didn't even trust them. Michelangelo suspected that they were accepting bribes to sneak in the curious, and he took measures to deal personally with anyone who dared to come snooping.

Once, hearing the chapel door open and close stealthily, he prepared to pounce. As footsteps approached, he hurled boards down from his scaffold on the head of the intruder. Julius let out such a mighty roar that, Vasari reports, Michelangelo “became afraid” and “had to fly from his presence.” He escaped again to Florence, where he stayed until the papal temper cooled.

While Michelangelo was in Florence, Raphael, who had become increasingly curious about the frustrating unknown on the other side of the chapel door, borrowed the key from Bramante and slipped in. Staggered by the raw beauty and muscular intensity of what he saw, he returned to his own finished fresco and inserted a new figure. Then, he slyly tried to dislodge his incomparable rival.

“Raphael, when he saw the new and brilliant style of this work, being a brilliant imitator, sought through Bramante to paint the remainder himself,” Condivi writes. When Michelangelo discovered the duplicity, he blamed Bramante. In high dudgeon, he protested bitterly to the pope.

Michelangelo felt trapped in an artistic triangle, subservient to Bramante and competing with Raphael. They worked in close proximity, separated only by a few corridors, the most talented artist in Italy and his wunderkind challenger—three hundred feet apart in physical distance, worlds apart in every other way except talent.

The metamorphosis of Raphael is one of the unresolved mysteries of art history. In the span of a few years, with the full confidence of the pope and the support of Bramante, he transformed himself from an unexceptional painter of Madonnas into the purest expression of the High Renaissance. It was an extraordinary and rapid evolution.

His critics, Michelangelo as vociferous as any, scorned him as a copyist, not an original talent. “Raphael did not inherit his excellencies from Nature, but obtained them through study and application,” Michelangelo said dismissively. Both he and Leonardo were iconoclasts who scorned the Renaissance's golden rules. Michelangelo said, “One cannot make fixed rules, making figures as regular as posts,” and broke them. Leonardo said, “I wish to work miracles,” and ignored them. Raphael's easy genius flowed within the parameters of the Renaissance. He was the quintessential artist of an age that wanted to return to a classical world, not invent modern times.

Like a sea sponge, he was amorphous and absorbent. He drank in styles and techniques, made them his own, and then made them better than anyone else. “Other paintings may be said to be pictures, but those of Raphael were life itself,” Vasari writes.

Michelangelo was jealous of Raphael's ease and popularity. The dueling artists met once in the square. Raphael, as always, was the center of a lively group. Michelangelo, as always, was alone. “You with your band like a bravo,” he scoffed as he brushed by. “And you alone like a hangman,” Raphael countered.

The papal palace became a viper's nest. The animosity that had rankled between Bramante and the Florentine faction turned venomous. The Tuscans believed that Bramante felt threatened by Michelangelo's enormous talent. They saw the sculptor's banishment to the Sistina as a perfidious plot to keep Michelangelo away from the tomb, away from the new Basilica, and occupied endlessly on an impossible assignment.

Michelangelo imagined the tomb as his masterwork—“the grand showcase of his talent”—just as the Basilica was Bramante's. Ultimately, both men lost. Neither Michelangelo's tomb nor Bramante's Basilica would be completed as planned. But in the all-consuming throes of creation, when everything was still possible, they vied for their artistic vision. The stakes were high—immortality and the pope's favor, the one dependent on the other.

Although their characters were incompatible, the contention between Michelangelo and Bramante was as much artistic rivalry as personal animosity. Each recognized the talent of the other, and like jealous suitors, they competed for the favor of Julius. They intrigued, connived, and carped to displace each other and be first in his affection, his opinion, and his patronage.

Julius would not choose between them. He insisted on having them both in his service—the sculptor of the
Pietà
and the architect of the Tempietto. There was no escape. Their fortunes were snarled inextricably in the person and patronage of
il pontefice terribile
.

Bramante made himself agreeable, always aware that his reputation and success depended on the pope's favor. Michelangelo seemed perpetually at war with himself or another—and very often, the other was the pope. They were twin Terribiles, with huge, easily bruised egos and absolute conviction in the truth as they saw it. Both had the highest standards and the shortest fuse. When they exploded, they continued to burn. Michelangelo, who endured longer, seethed for decades.