The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (35 page)

First of all a dreadful, half-forgotten scandal was raked up: five years before, the savage-tempered Duke had attacked and killed in a street in Ravenna his arch-enemy, Cardinal Francesco Alidosi. At the time a court of inquiry, of which the Pope himself had been a member, had decided that the Duke’s provocation by the unpleasant Alidosi – supposedly Julius II’s catamite – had been virtually irresistible. The Duke was now informed, however, that the murder, whether pardonable or not, made it impossible for him to hold Urbino any longer in the name of the Church. At the same time he was reminded of his refusal to comply with Pope Julius II’s request to assist in the restoration of the Medici to Florence and of his
subsequent refusal to help to defend Italy against the invading army of King Francis I. He was summoned to Rome to explain his disgraceful conduct.

When he declined to go, the Pope excommunicated him and Lorenzo de’ Medici marched out of Florence to take Urbino from him. Lorenzo experienced little trouble in doing so. The Duke was forced to flee from Mantua, and Lorenzo entered Urbino in May. Less than a year later, however, the dispossessed Duke returned with Spanish troops to take his Duchy back. The short but arduous campaigns in the mountainous districts of Urbino cost the Florentines and the Pope a great deal of money. They aroused lasting resentments and resulted in Lorenzo’s being so badly wounded by an arquebus that he was gradually to waste away both in body and in will. The Pope, however, was for the moment well satisfied. Lorenzo was proclaimed Duke of Urbino and Lord of Pesaro, and seemed well on the way to becoming master of that large, unified, Medici-dominated state in central Italy which Leo dreamed of creating.

With Italy at peace and his family established in Urbino, Leo settled down happily to enjoy the pleasures of the Vatican. His expenditure was prodigious. It has been claimed that within a year he had got through not only all the savings of his parsimonious predecessor, but the entire revenues of himself and his successor. He ‘could no more save a thousand ducats’, Machiavelli’s friend, Francesco Vettori, remarked, ‘than a stone could fly through the air.’ Soon deeply in debt to almost every banking house in Rome, some of which were charging him interest at forty per cent, Pope Leo made not the slightest attempt either to reduce the enormous number of his household or to curtail the extravagance of his almost constant entertainments and banquets.

The cardinals followed his example. ‘Yesterday,’ the Marquis of Mantua was informed by his wife’s secretary,

Cardinal Riario gave us a dinner so extraordinarily sumptuous that it might well have sufficed for all the queens in the world. We sat for four full hours at table, laughing and chatting with those most reverend cardinals.

‘The meal was exquisite,’ wrote the Venetian ambassador, describing another dinner at the palace of Cardinal Cornaro.

There was an endless succession of dishes, for we had sixty-five courses, each course consisting of three different dishes, all of which were placed on the table with marvellous speed. Scarcely had we finished one delicacy than a fresh plate was set before us, and yet everything was served on the finest of silver of which his Eminence has an abundant supply. At the end of the meal we rose from the table both gorged with rich food and deafened by the continual concert, carried on both within and without the hall and proceeding from every instrument that Rome could produce – fifes, harpsichords and four-stringed lutes as well as the voices of a choir.

Cardinals and Roman patricians alike vied with each other to provide entertainments of unparalleled splendour. The immensely rich Sienese banker, Agostino Chigi, whose bathroom fixtures were all of solid silver, once invited the Pope to dinner in a magnificent room hung with the most exquisite tapestries. The sumptuous meal was served to the guests on plate specially engraved with their individual crests. When the last course had been served the Pope congratulated Chigi on the excellence of the meal and the beauty of his new dining-hall. ‘Your Holiness, this is not my dining-hall,’ replied Chigi giving a signal to his servants to pull down the tapestries which concealed rows of mangers. ‘It is merely my stable.’ On another occasion Chigi invited the entire Sacred College to dinner and placed before each of the assembled cardinals food specially brought from his own district or country. Chigi had even been known to order his servants to toss his silver into the Tiber after every course to show that he had so much he never had to use the same piece twice – though afterwards other servants were seen pulling up nets in which the discarded dishes had been caught.

The Pope’s own dinners were noted for their rare delicacies, such as peacocks’ tongues, of which he himself, however, ate but sparingly. They were also noted for their jocularity, for such surprises as nightingales flying out of pies or little, naked children emerging from puddings. Dwarfs, buffoons and jesters were nearly always to be found at his table where the guests were encouraged to laugh at their
antics and at the cruel jokes which were played upon them – as when, for instance, some half-witted, hungry dwarf was seen guzzling a plate of carrion covered in a strong sauce under the impression that he was being privileged to consume the finest fare. The Pope himself derived a peculiar pleasure from watching his favourite jester, Fra Mariano Fetti, a Dominican friar who had once been a barber and was eventually appointed to the office of Keeper of the Papal Seals. Quick-witted, shrewd and outrageously coarse, Fra Mariano could make the Pope laugh more heartily than any other member of his court, not merely by the wit of his vulgarity, but also by his celebrated capacity to eat forty eggs or twenty chickens at a sitting and by the apparent relish with which he savoured pies specially prepared for him at his master’s instigation containing ravens cooked complete with beaks and feathers.

No practical joke in Leo’s entire pontificate seems to have afforded him more amusement than that played upon poor Baraballo, an elderly priest from Gaeta, who seems to have persuaded himself that his feeble and even ludicrous attempts at verse were the products of commanding genius. It was suggested to him that he ought to press his rightful claim to a public coronation on the Roman Capitol, an honour once accorded to Petrarch. The Pope eagerly entered into the spirit of the enterprise, assuring Baraballo that his verses undeniably merited such a mark of distinction and offering to make available to him His Holiness’s beloved elephant, Hanno, which had recently arrived in Rome as a present from King Manuel I of Portugal and which was housed in the Belvedere. On this creature, suitably caparisoned, Baraballo was to make his stately progress from the Vatican to the Capitol, clothed in a scarlet toga fringed with gold. ‘I could never have believed in such an incident if I had not seen it myself and actually laughed at it,’ wrote the Pope’s first biographer, Paolo Giovio: ‘the spectacle of an old man of sixty bearing an honoured name, stately and venerable in appearance, white haired, riding upon an elephant to the sound of trumpets.’

But the resounding fanfares, combined with the shouts and cheers of the spectators, so frightened the elephant that he stood trumpeting loudly before the bridge of Sant’ Angelo, refusing to cross it.
Baraballo had to climb down from his ornately decorated saddle and the joke was over, much to the evident mortification of Leo who had been sitting on a nearby balcony happily watching the proceedings through his spy-glass.

Although this kind of display could not often be arranged, the Pope was able to indulge himself more frequently in his palace with a succession of those dramatic performances, plays, masques, ballets, mummings and
moresche
, in which he took a far deeper delight. Two of the earliest blank verse historical tragedies, Giovanni Rucellai’s
Rosmunda
and Gian-Giorgio Trissino’s
Sophonisba
, were both performed in his presence. But apparently he preferred the broad comedies and more or less indecent farces of Ariosto, Machiavelli and Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena. He witnessed with evident pleasure the performances of Ariosto’s
Cassaria
and
Suppositi
; Machiavelli’s
Mandragola
was performed for him in 1519; and his favourite piece of all appears to have been Dovizi’s
Calandria
, whose plot, involving a stupid young man in love with a girl who changes clothes with her twin brother to play a trick upon her paramour, presented the kind of situation which made a strong appeal to Pope Leo’s taste.

He would happily spend hour after hour watching these performances, or sitting at the gambling table playing
primiero
– an undemanding card game rather like beggar-my-neighbour – losing money without complaint or throwing his winnings over his shoulder. Whole days at the time of the Carnival were spent attending bull-fights, sitting through endless banquets, watching cardinals and their ladies dancing at masked balls, or contemplating the Romans enjoying their favourite sports, their regattas and processions, their orange-throwing contests, and the violent, dangerous game of rolling barrels down the grass slopes of Monte Testaccio, at the bottom of which crowds of peasants risked broken limbs to seize the pigs inside.

Yet Leo’s life was not entirely given over to frivolity. If he spent vast sums on entertainments, on French hounds and Cretan falcons, on furs and gold chains, and on his ever growing household, he lavished money, too, on the improvement and development of
Rome. He built the Via Ripetta so as to provide a new outlet from the congested old town up towards the Piazza del Popolo; he restored the church of Santa Maria in Domnica and provided it with its splendid porticoed façade; above all, he enthusiastically continued the reconstruction of the Vatican Palace and the rebuilding of St Peter’s, retaining Julius II’s architect, Donato d’Angelo Lazzari, known as Bramante, who had begun work on the new church in 1505. Pope Leo also conceived an ambitious plan to drain the Pontine Marshes and asked Leonardo da Vinci to devise an appropriate method.

Determined to make Rome the most cultured city in Europe, he offered numerous inducements to attract the most accomplished artists, writers and scholars to live there, making freely available to them his extensive library to which he was constantly adding valuable new manuscripts. He loved books himself, both the reading and possessing of them, and could quote long passages from his favourite authors. Even when his finances were peculiarly strained he always contrived in some way – often selling benefices or cardinals’ hats – to help those writers and scholars, poets and dramatists, who came to him for help. He gave his support to the Roman Academy; he helped to reorganize the University, increasing the range of facilities and the number of professors; he encouraged the use and study of the Latin language and made money available to Latin prose writers and poets; he brought Lascaris to Rome and suggested that he should edit and print the Greek manuscripts in his possession.

It had to be admitted, though, that his own taste was far from impeccable. Those few of his writings that have survived display none of his father’s talent. His attempts at musical composition were even less successful; and, although he engaged the best European choristers for the Sistine Chapel, the music that he liked to listen to best, humming to himself and waving his plump, white hands in the air, was considered trivial. So, too, was his taste in the literature of his own times. Apart from their comedies, he did not esteem Machiavelli or Ariosto highly; nor did he admire Guicciardini. Indeed, those who profited most from his lavish patronage were far inferior writers such as Bernardo Accolti, whose work Leo professed to admire almost as highly as did Accolti himself.

The Pope’s neglect of Michelangelo, however, seems to have been due less to his failure to appreciate his greatness than to his lack of patience with the artist’s abrasive temperament. Michelangelo, who had been encouraged to come to Rome by Julius II, was gloomy, touchy, independent and self-absorbed, choosing to work in a locked room, quite unwilling to follow unquestioningly any patron’s brief or to undertake to finish a work in any given period. The Pope professed to feel a deep affection for him and would relate ‘almost with tears in his eyes’ how they had been brought up together as boys; but they never really got on well together. The Pope encouraged Michelangelo to become an architect and urged him to leave Rome and return to Florence in order to provide a new façade for Brunelleschi’s San Lorenzo.
⁴
Leo far preferred to deal with the younger, more complaisant, unobtrusive and polite Raffaello Sanzio.

Raphael, a native of Urbino, had already been set to work on the decoration of the official apartments of the apostolic palace by Julius II to whose notice he had been recommended by Bramante. Pope Leo asked Raphael to continue with the work; and under their combined direction the Loggie di Raffaello and the lovely halls known as the Stanze di Raffaello were completed.
⁵

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