The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (21 page)

There are no surviving letters of condolence to Felice on the loss of her father. Those who otherwise might have written to her perhaps refrained from doing so on the grounds of wishing to create a memory of saintly behaviour for Julius. Despite the Pope’s growing unpopularity in the last years of his reign, unprecedented numbers came to see his corpse lying in state in the church of St Peter’s. They sobbed, kissed his feet and prayed aloud, venerating the Pope’s body as they would a holy relic. To draw attention at this time to the fact that Julius had left behind a daughter might have seemed indelicate. She was a reminder of the Pope’s carnality and youthful venal behaviour. His life experience had encompassed the sins of the flesh.

Beyond the money Julius left her, another part of the Julian legacy lived on with Felice. She was there for all to see in the Raphael frescos on the walls of his apartments.
The Miracle of the Mass at Bolsena
was completed towards the end of Julius’s reign in
1512
. The miracle at Bolsena, a small hill town to the north of Rome, occurred in
1263
. A German priest, celebrating Mass in the town’s church, had had doubts about the truth of transubstantiation. The moment he unwrapped the host, it began to bleed, staining the cloth holding it, thereby confirming the truth of the process. This cloth, known as the Corporal, was later transferred to the nearby Cathedral of Orvieto.
En route
to Bologna to launch his campaign against the Bentivoglio in September
1506
, Julius stopped at Orvieto to venerate the Corporal. He clearly associated the success of his Bolognese campaign, the most easily won battle of his military career, with his worship of the holy relic and chose to include it among the scenes decorating his apartments.

Raphael painted Julius kneeling at the altar, about to receive the bleeding host from the once doubting German priest. Below him, to his left, are male members of the della Rovere family, Julius’s cousins and nephews. The clerical figures are believed to include, from left to right, Leonardo Grosso della Rovere, Raffaele and Tomasso Riario and Agostino Spinola. The secular figures, the kneeling litter-bearers, may represent Julius’s nephews, Bartolomeo della Rovere, Galeazzo Riario, Francesco Maria della Rovere and Nicolò Franciotto della Rovere.
⁵
The family stands by to witness the miracle that Julius felt brought him so much good fortune.

On the left-hand side of the picture is a group of men, women and children. No della Rovere identities have been suggested for these men and, at first glance, the women appear to be simply idealized figures, none of them a representation of a real woman.
⁶
But up in the second row there is a woman kneeling at the top of the step, fixing the Pope with an earnest gaze. She is quite different from the other women painted in the picture, and there are several reasons to believe, as mentioned earlier, that she is a representation of Felice. Felice was twenty-nine in
1512
; this woman could also be in her late twenties. She is dressed in black, the colour that Felice wore every day of her life. Her physiognomy, forehead, nose and chin have much in common with those of Julius himself. And the position of this figure is not unlike Felice’s own position within the Vatican Palace. The woman here is by no means the most prominent figure in the fresco, not even the most prominent female figure. But her black dress is striking next to the pastels the other women are wearing and she stands out from them. Although distant from the figure of the kneeling Pope, she is spatially aligned with him, connected by a long diagonal. The hands of the figures surrounding her, ostensibly reaching out to the Pope, also serve to frame her face. She is at once visible and yet discreet, as Julius so often required Felice to be during his reign.

For many of Europe’s Christians, Julius had altered the path of the Christian Church for the worse. His insatiable need for money to fund his military and artistic projects and the subsequent demands in the forms of tithes and indulgences, placed on people who would never themselves visit Rome, created a fertile environment for resentment, revolt and, eventually, the Reformation. But in Rome itself there were men who mourned the Pope’s passing, humanists and artists who fully appreciated all that Julius had done for the city. His reign had brought a new golden age to the city, one that would never really be replicated. For these men, Felice became the living, breathing part of Julius’s legacy, an embodiment in flesh of the world he had made. The court poet Antonio Flaminio visualized her in a poem as ‘the fair Venus’ and those intimate with this world instantly imagined the
Venus Felix
.
7
This second-century-
ad
statue is an image of a Roman matron, perhaps a princess of the Antonine family; on its base are inscribed the words ‘Veneri Felici’. The statue had a prominent position in Julius’s sculpture garden at the Villa Belvedere, the site of so many of his family parties. There were few who, gazing at the statue, would not have connected this
Felix
to the one who was such a frequent visitor to the Belvedere.

Among those who shared Julius’s vision of Rome’s new golden age was the humanist and papal secretary Angelo Colocci. A scholar of tremendous depth and learning, he was able to support his passion for collecting antiquities through his administrative position within the curia. For many years he had been a leader of the Roman
Accademia
– the wandering academy of poets, artists and writers who met to discuss matters of religion, philosophy, science, literature and antiquities. At the beginning of
1513
, Colocci gave his academy a permanent home – the
Accademia Colocciana
.
8
He bought property near the Trevi fountain, one of Rome’s few public sources of clean water. Colocci, too, benefited from the same spring that fed the Trevi, and installed a fountain in the garden of his new house. Water fell around a statue of a naked nymph sleeping among the reeds. She was adapted from an ancient statue of Ariadne utilized as a fountain in Julius’s own sculpture garden in the courtyard at the Villa Belvedere.
⁹

Although Colocci had amassed an impressive collection of antiquities, the sleeping nymph fountain, with its enviable hydraulics, became the centrepiece of his new home and academy. Had he lived, the Pope would unquestionably have been the guest of honour when Colocci threw the door of his house open to his friends for the first time in March of
1513
. But Julius was no longer among them, and so it was Felice whom Colocci invited to attend instead as honoured guest, and honoured she was, in a way replete with sentiment and emotion. For Colocci’s party, the Neapolitian poet Girolamo Borgia composed the ‘Ecologa Felix’, which can be interpreted as the ‘Happy Poem’, or even ‘Felice’s Poem’. It had a triple dedication: the late Julius, Angelo Colocci and Felice herself. It imagined Felice as a nymph in Colocci’s garden. Its opening lines ran: ‘Under a giant oak the prettiest goddesses gathered: Venus, the Graces, the Muses, and Pallas Minerva beside them. All to honour Felice, the nymph by the banks of the Tiber.’
¹⁰

‘Ecologa Felix’ embodies many aspects of Felice’s life and world. The ‘giant oak’ is a clear reference to the della Rovere family name and her home at Monte Giordano was by the banks of the Tiber. Borgia also seeks to imply that Felice embodies all of the great qualities of the ancient goddesses: beauty, the ability to inspire and wisdom. Later in the poem, Felice the nymph ‘sings Julian praises, bringing up the benefactions of the magnanimous shepherd’. Significantly, given the preoccupations of those gathered, the poem also describes ‘Rome reborn to all her primordial splendour, as he built marvellous houses and temples to imitate Heaven’.
¹⁰

Felice received much gratification from the event at Colocci’s house. It showed her that Rome’s intellectuals, the men she truly admired, recognized her position within the Julian legacy. If her father was not to be forgotten, then neither was she.

chapter 12

Felice, Michelangelo and the Pincian Hill

Felice’s father’s death secured her a revered place among Rome’s humanists and access to some of the most precious items the Renaissance art world had to offer: drawings by Michelangelo.

The frescos on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are the largest work completed entirely by Michelangelo. The Chapel was a della Rovere commission through and through. The architectural structure was built during the reign of Sixtus IV, who gave the Chapel his name. It was Sixtus who invited Florence’s most fashionable painters, including Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio to come to Rome, to paint New Testament scenes on the lower levels of the walls of the Chapel. The Sistine Chapel subsequently became the Vatican Palace’s most substantial place of worship, the chief palatine chapel, second only to St Peter’s. It was where cardinals lived and cast their votes during conclave. Although Julius had plans for Bramante to build a new and splendid conclave hall to rival the one he remembered from the Avignon Palais des Papes, the design was never realized. The Sistine Chapel was never superseded.

The Sistine Chapel was too important a space to escape Julius’s attention. There was not only the matter of the family connection; there was also the fact that by the beginning of Julius’s reign the subsidence problems that plagued the Vatican Palace had caused cracks in the Sistine ceiling.

Julius had put Bramante to work on repairing and shoring up the vaulting. He then began to think about what he wanted on his ceiling, which was painted a traditional blue with a field of gold stars, and who he wanted to undertake this decoration. The Pope removed a disgruntled Michelangelo from sculpting his grandiose tomb project, and had him turn his attention to the art of fresco painting. The story of the frescoed ceiling is a long and complex one. It spans over four years, from
1508
to
1512
, and evolves from a simple scheme of depictions of the twelve apostles to grandiose narratives of scenes from the Book of Genesis. Painted on the vaults, the spandrels and the uppermost part of the walls are the prophets, the ancestors of Christ, the
ignudi
, the beautiful naked men who are denoted as the heroes of this Julian golden age, and perhaps the most magnificent figures of all, the sibyls, the female prophets recognized by Christians and pagans.

Few were allowed to visit Michelangelo as he laboured on the ceiling over the years. He was particularly anxious to ban Raphael, who was the equivalent of an artistic sponge, and had to look at something only once to make it his own. ‘Everything he learned about art, he learned from me,’ the Florentine said famously, crossly and somewhat inaccurately of his rival from Urbino. And a sneak visit by Raphael into the Sistine did indeed inform the work he was doing for Julius in his Vatican apartments, especially the fresco of
The School of Athens
, in which he depicts Michelangelo in a humorous tribute as Heraclitus, the brooding, melancholic genius, leaning on a block of marble. Michelangelo could not keep out the Pope, his patron, and whatever visitors he might bring with him, including a pope’s daughter, accompanying her father to what was in many ways their family chapel, to view the progress on the miraculous ceiling.

In the
1530
s, Michelangelo complemented the ceiling frescos with a depiction of the
Last Judgment
on the altar wall. A span of over twenty years separates these two commissions. Julius II is the patron of the ceiling; Popes Clement VII and Paul III are the commissioners of the
Last Judgment
, painted by Michelangelo between
1534
and
1541
.
Many see the darkness of the
Last Judgment
as a kind of pictorial
Zeitgeist
, reflecting the horrors of the Sack of Rome that was to come in
1527
, and political and spiritual uncertainty.
¹
In other words, the altar wall is viewed as an entirely separate entity from the glories of creation celebrated on the ceiling.

Consequently, it seems surprising to learn that Pope Julius himself envisaged a chapel replete not only with a frescoed ceiling but with altar and exit wall decorated with themes selected by his successors. The death of Julius prevented this work from going any further, but not before, it seems, Michelangelo had made preparatory drawings, cartoons, for the Chapel’s exit walls depicting the
Fall of Lucifer and the Rebel Angels
.
2
What Julius had imagined was a chapel that encapsulated and thus became the entire world, recording its beginning and foretelling its end.

Michelangelo had a complex relationship with the della Rovere family. His relationship with Julius was so volatile that it seems extraordinary he produced as much as he did for this patron. After Julius’s death, he found himself constrained by the pressure exerted by the Pope’s official heirs to finish his tomb. Although he had accepted payment, it was by no means easy for him to finish the task. Julius’s successor, Leo X, had sent him back to Florence to work for his family there, and he was at work on designs for the Medici church of San Lorenzo. But the Florentine artist felt an obligation to Julius’s heirs, or at any rate to Felice. As interim compensation, he endowed her with the relics of the most extraordinary pictorial project of her father’s time as pope, the cartoons that remained from his work on the Sistine Chapel.

This gesture by Michelangelo, arguably the most supremely arrogant figure of the Renaissance, who cared very little for the feelings and opinions of others, shows he did hold Felice in some esteem. Michelangelo sought to maintain tight control over everything he produced. He destroyed hundreds of drawings he felt might blemish his reputation for posterity. He was also notoriously mean. A miser, who wore clothes and boots until they were no more than rags, he pleaded abject poverty when in reality he owned the hills of Settignano where he was nursed as a baby, and had substantial bank deposits in Florence and Rome. So for him to turn over his drawings to Felice meant there was something about her that appealed to him. Michelangelo had a fondness for women of intellectual ability. He would later have a regular correspondence with the Marchesa of Pescara, Vittoria Colonna. Felice’s own reputation for wisdom made her a living relative of the powerful sibyls, the giantesses Michelangelo had painted for her father in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo cultivated a reputation as an outsider. Felice was by the nature of her birth an outsider but she had come to acquire a position and cultivate a personality of her own. These were certainly qualities Michelangelo admired. As were Colocci and others, Michelangelo was saddened by the death of the Warrior Pope, and he saw Felice as a memento of his golden age. These were all good reasons to give her the drawings made for the Sistine Chapel, the work of her father and great-uncle.