The Borgias (11 page)

Certainly, Cesare had already acquired a reputation for never forgiving what he took to be a wrong and for savagely punishing anyone who crossed him in any way; and having escaped from Charles VIII’s custody, he was now considering ways in which he might harm the French king.

Despite the spread of syphilis, the ill discipline of his troops, and the need to get back to France before an emerging alliance of Italian states, headed by Alexander VI, could march against him, Charles VIII was reluctantly obliged to turn his back on the pleasures of Naples. It was not, however, until the end of the third week in May 1495 that he began the long march north. He arrived in Rome four days later, expecting to be able to have an audience with Alexander VI, who he hoped would give formal recognition of his conquest of Naples and invest him as king, but he found only Cardinal Antoniotto Pallavicini, who had been left in charge of the city.
The wily pope had removed himself, together with nineteen cardinals, over four thousand troops, and the entire papal court, first to Orvieto and then, when the French king threatened to find him there, on to Perugia and out of harm’s way.

Meanwhile, the forces of the Holy League were massing in Lombardy to attack the French as they made for the Alpine passes. By the end of June, the returning army had crossed the Apennines, but on July 6 their march was brought to a sudden halt at Fornovo, by the banks of the river Taro, where they encountered the mercenary troops of the Holy League under the command of Francesco Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua. The battle was fierce but brief, lasting less than one hour, with little chance for the French to use their invincible artillery; the French lost just two hundred men; the Holy League counted over three thousand dead. ‘The palm of victory was generally awarded to the French,’ wrote Guicciardini, ‘because of the great difference in the number of casualties’ and ‘because they had won free passage to advance, which was the reason that the battle had been fought.’

However, since he was left in possession of the field and had captured part of the French baggage train – which included a piece of the Holy Cross, a sacred thorn, a limb of St Denis, the blessed Virgin’s vest, and a book depicting naked women ‘painted at various times and places . . . with sketches of intercourse and lasciviousness in each city’ – the Marquis of Mantua claimed the victory. The poets at his court in Mantua celebrated the success of his venture in epic verse and prose, and the marquis, for his part, began building a votive chapel in the city, commissioning his court painter, Andrea Mantegna, to paint his
Madonna della Vittoria
(now in the
Louvre), with himself in armour kneeling at the feet of the Virgin, flanked on either side by the warrior saints St Michael the Archangel and St George.

But the French army, though battered, weary, and ill, was still a powerful force and had not been beaten. Accompanied by mules, one to every two men, loaded with treasure, it moved unimpeded toward the Alps and reached France in safety. The Italians were shocked by the realization that, for all their virtues, talents, wealth, past glory, and experience, they had been unable to withstand the ruthless men from the north, and Alexander VI, so proud of his stamina and prone to comparing his strength to that of the bull on the Borgia coat-of-arms, had been unable to withstand the might of a foreign king.

‘M
ANY ARE ASSISTED BY FORTUNE WITHOUT BEING ENDOWED WITH THE NECESSARY TALENT
’

S
OON AFTER HIS ELECTION
, Alexander VI began planning a new set of rooms, seven in all, for his personal use in the Vatican, and to decorate them in a manner that would suit his ostentatious and luxurious tastes. The resulting set of apartments, known as the Appartamento Borgia, has survived, with the exception of one room that was destroyed, and it is still one of the highlights of the tour of the papal palace.

With their ornate ceramic-tiled floors, the rooms have a boldly Spanish appearance – indeed, the tiles were ordered by the pope specially from Spain – and their lavishly gilded stucco decoration made a marked contrast to the modestly austere chapel painted for Nicholas V by the Florentine Fra Angelico.

Despite his taste for lavish surroundings, Alexander VI was notoriously frugal at mealtimes, rarely having more than one course,
according to the Ferrarese ambassador Giovanni Boccaccio, who said that cardinals avoided dining with the pope if they possibly could because his table was so parsimonious compared with their own, particularly during Lent and on Fridays, when sardines were commonly served at his table instead of the meat dishes otherwise provided by the papal household’s six cooks.

The fashion for gilded stucco was a new one, and it had been inspired by the discovery, near the Colosseum, of the remains of the Golden House of Nero, the palace of legendary opulence built by the emperor, whose Circus had once resounded to the roars of the Roman populace in the place where the Vatican now stood.

Visiting the ruins was no easy matter; armed with tallow candles and lunch boxes packed with ham, bread, apples, and wine, artists and others interested in the remains of antiquity crawled into a narrow opening in the side of the Esquiline Hill and into even smaller passages, filthy and pitch-black, that had been excavated below the vaults of the palace, where they lit their torches to catch a glimpse of the glittering stuccoes and frescoes that dated back to imperial Rome; and, in their excitement, many left their own signatures on the walls.

The painter chosen by Alexander VI to decorate his apartments was one Bernardino di Betto di Biagio, better known as Pinturicchio, the gifted painter from Perugia who had established a reputation in Rome as the leading painter of works in the new ‘imperial style.’ He, too, must have crawled through the filthy dark passageways into Nero’s palace, although he did not leave his signature among the gilded stucco work.

Giorgio Vasari was less impressed with his talents:

Pinturicchio’s work for the pope, however, much pleased his patron, who rewarded the artist with grants of land in the Papal States. Alexander VI’s apartments are a forceful monument to the Borgia family. Borgia symbols, most emphatically the Borgia bulls – in one depiction mounted by a cupid – strike the eye, as do the symbols of the House of Aragon from which the pope chose to trace his ancestry. More bizarrely, on the ceiling of the so-called Sala dei Santi were images of the ancient Egyptian deities Isis and Osiris, from whom, according to one of the pope’s secretaries, Alexander VI could also trace his descent.

The rooms had other family connections. Lucrezia was portrayed as St Catherine of Alexandria, defeating the pagan emperor by the force of her argument; Jofrè and Sancia appear as a young couple in the crowd behind her, while Juan, Duke of Gandía, can be seen, superbly dressed as he always was in life, astride a white charger, and Cesare glares out of the picture from behind the throne of the disputing emperor.

Alexander VI himself appears in the fresco of the
Resurrection
, witnessing this dramatic moment in an attitude of prayer, gorgeously attired in an embroidered and bejewelled chasuble, with a skullcap over his balding head, his hands clasped in prayer, his tiara
on the ground before him. Over the door of one room, Pinturicchio painted another portrait of Alexander VI, this time adoring a beautiful Virgin, to whom, according to Vasari, he gave the face of Giulia Farnese.

While Pinturicchio and his assistants were at work in the Vatican Palace, painters, sculptors, and builders were also busy elsewhere in Rome at Alexander VI’s behest. At St Peter’s they finished the grand fountain in the piazza, which had been started by Innocent VIII, and adorned it liberally with the Borgia bulls. They also added a second storey to the Benediction loggia at the end of the piazza, where, a few years later, the pope would narrowly avoid being hit by an iron torch-holder that fell down while he was watching a bullfight; and they built a new road from Castel Sant’Angelo to the Vatican, which the pope named Via Alessandrina (now Borgo Nuovo).

Alexander VI also commissioned repairs to several churches in Rome, including San Giacomo degli Spagnuoli, the church favoured by the Spanish colony in the city; as a cardinal he had spent a considerable sum on an elaborate marble relief of the Virgin and child for the high altar in Santa Maria del Popolo, with the Borgia bulls prominently on display on shields held by putti (now in the sacristy of the church).Most memorably, he also paid for a magnificent gilded ceiling for the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, his financial contribution marked, once again, by liberal quantities of Borgia bulls; the gold, it was said, was the first to have come from the mines of Peru and had been presented to the pope by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain.

The most famous work of art from Alexander VI’s pontificate, however, was the
Pietà
by Michelangelo Buonarotti, commissioned
not by him but by the ambassador of the king of France. Michelangelo had arrived in Rome from Florence on June 25, 1496, to work under the patronage of Cardinal Raffaello Riario, who had spent 200 ducats on a life-size sleeping cupid by the sculptor under the impression that it was a work by one of the famous sculptors of antiquity.

Soon after his arrival in the city, ‘a broad field in which a man may demonstrate his worth,’ as he described it, Michelangelo called upon Cardinal Riario in his grand palace, built, it was rumoured, with the money he had made gambling with Franceschetto Cibò, the son of Innocent VIII. The cardinal asked the sculptor if he could produce some ‘beautiful work’ for his collection: ‘I replied that I might be able to make such splendid works as he possessed in his palace,’ Michelangelo recorded, ‘but we would see what I could do; so we have bought a piece of marble for a life-size figure, and I shall start work on it next Monday.’

The result of this commission was the plump and drunken Bacchus that can now be seen in the Bargello in Florence. The subject and the treatment evidently did not please the cardinal, who, it seems, rejected it, and it was later to be seen among the antique pieces in the garden of Jacopo Galli, Michelangelo’s banker.

Michelangelo, however, soon found another patron in the French Cardinal Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas, who commissioned the
Pietà
for his tomb in the French royal chapel in St Peter’s, dedicated to St Petronilla, and provided him with a letter of recommendation to the officials of the small republican city-state of Lucca, through which the sculptor would have to pass on his way to the white marble quarries of Carrara: ‘We have recently agreed with master Michelangelo di Ludovico, Florentine sculptor and bearer
of this letter, that he make for us a marble tombstone, namely a clothed Virgin Mary with the dead Christ naked in her arms, to place in a certain altar which we intend to found in St Peter’s in Rome,’ ran the letter, explaining that Michelangelo ‘was presently repairing to those parts to excavate and transport here the marbles necessary for such a work and we beg your lordships . . . to extend to him every help and favour in this matter.’

The finished
Pietà
, described as ‘the most important artistic commission of the age,’ and now to be seen in St Peter’s, was being admired by a group of visitors from Lombardy, so the story goes, when Michelangelo happened to be passing by. He heard one of the group explain to the others proudly that the fine work was by ‘our Gobbo of Milan.’ Michelangelo said nothing, but later he returned to St Peter’s in the middle of the night and, by the light of a lamp, carved his name on the band that runs diagonally between the Virgin’s breasts.

Proud as he was of this work, Michelangelo, the ‘
statuario fiorentino
,’ was not happy in the Rome of Pope Alexander VI, which he described as violent and materialistic, and was relieved when the time came for him to return to Florence. ‘Here they made helmets and swords out of chalices,’ he wrote of Rome at this time.