R. A. Scotti (8 page)

The St. Peter's (drawn in gray) is shown in relation to Constantine's basilica (broken black line) and the imperial Circus of Caligula and Nero (solid black line). The small square to the left of the words “Caligula and Nero” indicates the original location of the obelisk.

I
f Julius had chosen a more circumspect personality to be his architect, he might have had second thoughts about replacing Constantine's church, but the two men shared an exuberance, a rashness, and a rush to glory. Julius and Bramante were the same age, and they were conspiring in the most glorious escapade of the century.

In late fall of 1505, Bramante went to work, Vasari says, “with various extraordinary methods of his own and with his fantastic ideas.” He started excavating the foundation for the northwest pier, known today as St. Veronica's. It was the first of the four massive piers that would support the Basilica dome. Digging started behind the old church, just west of the abandoned tribune of Rossellino and Nicholas.

In place of the planes and boxes that characterize Renaissance buildings, Bramante was constructing an architecture of cylinders and hemispheres. His interest was in the space itself, not the walls that enclosed it. The dynamic central space he devised gives the illusion of a centrifugal force pushing an ever-expanding space out into the arms of the church and beyond. In his architecture, solid geometry replaces plane geometry. Space and volume seem to come to life, becoming active dimensions on a scale so awesome that they suggest an omnipotent agent.

Even a perfect miniature like the Tempietto cannot compete with a flawed but colossal construction. Heroic size is itself a claim to divinity, the ultimate chest-pounding. Modest men don't attempt the Colosseum or the Basilica of St. Peter, and if Bramante's Basilica had been built, it would have been the marvel of the High Renaissance. No wonder Michelangelo's tomb seemed diminished by comparison.

 

Returning to Rome after eight months in the quarries of Carrara, the sculptor found a noisy, boisterous construction yard in St. Peter's Square. Oxen dragged broken arches and columns from the Palatine to recycle in the new church. Although much of the interior would be sheathed in the marble of the classical city, travertine was becoming the building stone of papal Rome.

So much of the honey-toned limestone was needed for its churches, fountains, and palaces that the Holy See leased an entire quarry in nearby Tivoli. Transporting the stone the twenty-mile distance to the work yard was a logistical enterprise, requiring a complete transportation system. Landing docks and convoys moved the stone by barge from Tivoli down the narrow Anio tributary that flows into the Tiber. Then mule trains and oxcarts carried the stone overland from the river to the Vatican.

Michelangelo was excited by the pope's new plans and proud to be the cause of the hectic, busy scene. “
Venner ad esser a cagione di me
,” he boasted—“It is happening on account of me.” The new St. Peter's would be a magnificent home for his extravagant tomb, and he added happily to the chaos, dumping his own marble boulders in the piazza. The first load was probably “34
carrate,
including two pieces that are 15
carrate
.” Michelangelo had signed a contract on November 12 to have the stone sent to Rome. With one
carrata
equaling about 1,875 pounds, 34
carrate
was more than 30 tons.

“So great was the quantity of marble that spread out on the square, it aroused wonder among all and joy in the Pope, and Julius showered such boundless favors on Michelangelo that after he started work, many and many a time the pope went right to his house in order to find him, discussing with him the tomb and other matters just as if they were brothers.”

Michelangelo's studio was located behind the church of Santa Caterina della Cavellerotte,
*
close by the elevated stone passageway leading to Castel Sant'Angelo. The
passetto
was the popes' escape route in times of turmoil, and Julius ordered a bridge slung from it so that he could visit Michelangelo's atelier at any time.

In the first months of 1506, the pope visited often. Michelangelo didn't like to be interrupted when he was working, and even more, he didn't like someone looking over his shoulder. Julius barged in anyway at unexpected hours, unannounced and uninvited. Then in early spring, he promoted Bramante to
magister operae,
and soon after, his visits to Michelangelo stopped.

Michelangelo didn't complain. He worked without interruption through the forty days of Lent, too engrossed in sculpting the tomb to be anything but relieved that the pope wasn't banging down his door. Work in the construction yard quickened. At daybreak on
domenica in albis,
**
the first Sunday after Easter, the pope was planning to lay the foundation stone of the new St. Peter's.

In the beginning of April, Michelangelo received the bill of lading for an additional shipment of marble, probably another 56 tons, that had arrived at Ripa, a port on the Tiber. Just before leaving Carrara, on December 10, he had signed a second contract for “the extraction of the last 60
carrate,
comprising four large stones—two of eight
carrate
and two of five
carrate
—with the remainder each weighing two
carrate
or less.”

When he brought the bill to the papal palace for payment, he was told that the pope was too busy to see him—be patient, and try again tomorrow. He returned to the Vatican the next day, and the next. Each time, he was turned away, the bill unpaid, the door barred. Michelangelo did not doubt that the pope was occupied with the liturgies of Holy Week, and he paid the freight charges of 150 to 200 ducats himself. “I found myself very frustrated by lack of money,” he wrote later. But more than Holy Week had intervened.

Michelangelo's grandiose sculpture had impelled Julius to replace Constantine's church. Now, building the new St. Peter's was consuming his attention.

On Saturday morning, April 17, a bishop from Lucca, who happened to be going into the palace, saw Michelangelo denied entry. “Don't you know who this is?” he said to the man.

“Forgive me, sir,” the sentry replied, “but I have been ordered to do this.”

Michelangelo was stunned. “No curtain had ever been drawn nor door bolted” against him before. “You tell the Pope,” he shouted at the sentry, “that from now on if he wants me, he can seek me elsewhere.”

Michelangelo suspected that Bramante was behind his banishment, and he scribbled an angry note to Julius: “This morning I was turned out of the palace by your orders; therefore, I give you notice that from now on, if you want me, you will have to look for me elsewhere than in Rome.” In spite of his renown, he was still a naïf, and this was his first taste of treachery. With the lessons of Holy Week fresh in his mind, he saw it not as one artist outmaneuvering another but as a dark plot by the architect and a personal betrayal by the pope.

By superior skill, duplicity, or an amalgam of the two, Bramante had displaced Sangallo. Now he had sidelined Michelangelo. The Basilica had eclipsed the tomb. Julius was pouring all his enthusiasm and funds into Bramante's masterwork. There was nothing left for Michelangelo's.

In pique and paranoia, believing that Bramante had “deprived him of the pope's favor” and “the glory and honor he deserved,” Michelangelo fled from Rome under cover of night, just hours before Julius would lay the first stone of the new Basilica.

 

The Renaissance art world was intimate, intensely suspicious, and covetous. To survive and thrive required craft as well as creative talent. Bramante possessed both. Free of provincial allegiances, open to new ideas, he reinvented himself in Rome. He was at the right place at the right time, and he was canny and congenial enough to exploit his good fortune. With the young sculptor back home in Florence, sulky and sore, the over-the-hill upstart installed himself in the Vatican.

As chief architect of all Vatican projects, Bramante became, ipso facto, the preeminent architect of the High Renaissance. His strengths were his enthusiasm, his curious, open mind, and a willingness, even eagerness, to experiment. In the beginning, he may have felt unsure. He was the newcomer, and beneath the bravura, the quick, often cutting, wit, and the sudden enthusiasms, he was always on his own, always unsatisfied and second-guessing himself. But as Vasari suggests, when Bramante saw a chance to upstage the Florentine artists, he “threw everything into confusion to persuade the pope to accept his proposal for a total rebuilding of the church.” He won over Julius and consolidated his new position by controlling operations, dispensing assignments, and dividing the opposition. Undercutting the papal favorites Sangallo and Michelangelo, he formed his own circle of loyal artists.

 

Although Leonardo is the most celebrated Renaissance man, he wasn't the only one. St. Peter's was designed in an age when architects were more than engineers. They were artists, which explains why their works are so enduring, and to be an artist often meant being a painter, sculptor, poet, set designer, stonecutter, actor, musician, administrator, and bill collector.

Today, when specialization has been cut so fine, the notion that someone might have so many talents may seem, at the least, an exaggeration. But what sounds incredible now was the norm in the Cinquecento. Most Renaissance artists were polymaths. Bramante, Raphael, and Baldassare Peruzzi were painters. Filippo Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Gianlorenzo Bernini were sculptors.

Renaissance artists were traveling salesmen, brushes and chisels for hire, traveling from city-state to city-state, competing for commissions. No longer bound to a specific guild as they had been in the Middle Ages, artists became independent contractors. Packing their pigments and saddling their horses, they shuttled from prince to prelate. Painting on canvas was just coming into vogue. (Michelangelo dismissed it as a pastime for dilettantes.) Since most paintings were murals of one kind or another, artists had to go wherever the work was, moving from town to town, from Florence to Pescara, Perugia to Milan, Urbino to Rome, and beyond.

The best were sought after and liberally paid. Their reputation was spread by envoys, ambassadors, and warring princes who came to Italy for conquest and found culture and the new art.

Among the seasoned artists who came from the north to work in the Vatican were Pietro Perugino and Bernardino “Pinturicchio” di Betto from Perugia and Luca Signorelli from Cortona. As long as Bramante was the unchallenged
numero uno
, he was magnanimous. He was genial and generous to his circle of artists, supporting them, not only for their talents, which were considerable, but also as a counterforce to the Florentines.

Bramante was equally generous and wily with the young artists whom he hired to work on the Basilica. He advanced the Sienese architect Baldassare Peruzzi, at least in part because he was the protégé of Julius's favorite banker, Agostino Chigi, and he employed at least three of Giuliano da Sangallo's nephews, possibly as a wedge to further divide the Florentine clique. Although his motives were not always pure, Bramante was such a fine teacher that his pupils became the leading architects of the next generation.

 

While Bramante consolidated his position, Michelangelo sulked in Florence, protected by the Signoria and comforted by his aggrieved friend Sangallo.

Michelangelo believed that he had escaped from the imputations of an incorrigible patron, from the press of his own reputation, and from the architect-assassin scheming against him. Even as an old man, he never forgave or forgot. Some forty years later, he was still blaming Bramante to justify his flight from Rome: “If I fly into a passion, it is sometimes necessary, as you know, when defending yourself against evil people.”

Julius bombarded the Signoria with missives, demanding the return of the sculptor “by force or favor.” But urged on by Sangallo, Michelangelo rejected every overture, even the gentler ones.

Although the pope enticed Sangallo back to Rome in May, the two Florentines continued to seethe and commiserate in an exchange of letters. While Sangallo certainly fed his friend's fears, Michelangelo was not without guile. Knowing that Sangallo would show the letter to Julius, he wrote to Sangallo in Rome:

Julius certainly read Michelangelo's letter, because he renewed his efforts at conciliation. He sent the Signoria another brief that was paternalistic and forgiving: