The Ugly Renaissance (42 page)

Money was the greatest concern and the source of the greatest sin. There was, of course, no escaping the fact that cultivating an image of power cost a great deal of cash. Cardinals were not short of a penny or two. Although there was a good deal of variation,
it has been estimated that the incomes of the twenty-five to thirty cardinals who lived in Rome at the beginning of the next century generally fell between 3,000 and 20,000 ducats (where a ducat was roughly equivalent in value to a florin). Yet even these enormous sums paled in comparison to the day-to-day running costs of courtly life. In the 1540s, the humanist
Francesco Priscianese estimated that
Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi spent at least 6,500 scudi (the scudo was worth approximately the same as the ducat and the florin) each year on maintaining a household of one hundred retainers in a fitting style. This, however, only accounted for the bare necessities. Buying, renting, building, or maintaining a palace could cost thousands of ducats, while the pressure to commission artists to decorate a cardinal’s apartments imposed a colossal additional burden. As time went on and competition between the cardinals increased, the financial pressure only mounted. By the beginning of the seventeenth century,
Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga reckoned that it was nearly impossible for him to maintain his dignity in Rome on an annual income of less than 36,000 scudi, and protested that he would have to leave the city if he couldn’t be sure of having the money to hand. As this rather late example suggests, almost from the moment of the papacy’s return to Rome, cardinals—and, it must be said, popes—were
perpetually short of cash. Despite the occasional subsidies provided to those who could not hope to draw on dynastic reserves, they often struggled
to make ends meet. As the Venetian ambassador
Girolamo Soranzo noted in 1563, “
There [are] some who are very poor who lack many of the things needed to maintain [their] rank.”

This pressure to keep up appearances led cardinals to become inordinately preoccupied with increasing their incomes by fair means or foul. Greed swiftly became endemic at the papal court, and each of the princes of the Church became obsessed with accumulating ever more benefices, no matter how small or trifling the money they brought in. In his memoirs, Aeneas highlighted Pietro Barbo as the very archetype of the moneygrubbing cardinal. Having denounced the grotesquely fat Pietro as “
an expert seeker of worldly preferment,”
Aeneas went on to describe how he demanded the relatively small church of Santa Maria in Impruneta after the death of its rector, and kicked up a tremendous row when he was turned down by the pope. In the same vein, in 1484, the Florentine humanist
Bartolomeo della Fonte (Bartolomeo Fonzio) lamented the fact that at the papal court “
faith in Christ flourishes no longer, nor love, piety, or charity; virtue, probity, and learning now have no place.” “Need I mention,” he asked Lorenzo il Magnifico, “the robberies that go unpunished, the honor in which greed and extravagance are held?” Writing to
Bernardo Rucellai on the same day, he pointed to the “
whirlpool of vice” that consumed the Curia, and observed that the cardinals, “in the guise of shepherds of vice … destroy the flocks committed to their care” since “their greed … can never be satisfied.”

The Curia’s other sins were even worse. Given the luxury and splendor of Renaissance courts, there was always a serious danger of overindulgence and excess. The more potentates endeavored to cultivate magnificence, the more tempting it was to give in to the pleasures of the body. As Castiglione observed in
The Book of the Courtier
, “
Nowadays rulers are so corrupted by evil living … and it is so difficult to give them an insight into the truth and lead them to virtue.” And what was true of secular courts was even more true of the papal court, which exceeded all others in opulence.

Gluttony was, as Bartolomeo della Fonte observed, all but universal. A typical example was that of
Cardinal Jean Jouffroy, the bishop of Arras, of whom Aeneas provided a vivid portrait in his memoirs. Although Jouffroy “
wished to seem devout,” he was a
“heedless, pernicious fellow” who could not resist the pleasures available at the tables of the papal court, but who was badly affected by the massive amounts he consumed:

When he was dining, he would be angered at the least offence and throw silver dishes and bread at the servants and sometimes, even though distinguished guests were present, in his rage he would hurl to the ground the table itself with all the dishes. For he was a glutton and an immoderate drinker and when heated with wine had no control of himself.

Although all were not quite so outrageous, drunkenness and overeating were quite normal faults for a Renaissance cardinal. Indeed, even after his election to the papacy,
Alexander VI made it a regular practice to get horribly drunk. As
Benvenuto Cellini noted, “
It was his custom, once a week to indulge in a violent debauch, after which he would vomit.” Similarly, Paul II ate and drank so much that even the most flattering portraits show him as a grotesquely overweight blob.

Lust, however, was the most prevalent of all the vices at the papal court. Admittedly, it was nothing new. During the
Babylonian Captivity, Petrarch complained bitterly about the extent to which cardinals would give themselves over to sexual abandon. Condemning a personified
Avignon as the paradigmatic example of sinfulness, he observed that “
through your chambers young girls and old men go frisking and Beelzebub in the middle with bellows and fire and mirrors.” But now that the papacy was back in Rome, things had got even worse. Palaces thronged with courtesans, and vows of chastity were regarded with amused disdain. In this regard, it is telling that
one of Aeneas’s most well-read works was actually an erotic novella, and he also penned a wild sexual comedy called
Chrysis
. It was quite normal for cardinals to keep mistresses openly, and the gossip that inevitably spread was more like that seen in modern soap operas than what might be expected of the Church. Aeneas himself had fathered at least two children before taking holy orders, but even he could not help recording a few little tidbits about the sexual habits of the notorious Cardinal Jouffroy, which provide a nice illustration of courtly norms:

He was fond of women and often passed days and nights among courtesans. When the Roman matrons saw him go by—tall, broad-chested, with a ruddy face and hairy limbs—they called him Venus’ Achilles. A courtesan of Tivoli who had slept with him said she had lain with a wineskin. A Florentine woman who had been his mistress, the daughter of a countryman, angry with him for some unknown reasons, waited for the time when the cardinal on his way from the Curia should pass her house and then, as he was going by, she spat out on his hat saliva that she had held for a long time in her mouth and mixed with phlegm, marking him as an adulterer by that vilest of brands.

The popes were particularly renowned for their affairs. Julius II, for example, was the father of numerous children and did not trouble to hide the fact too carefully. Rather more famously, Alexande
r VI slept with virtually anything that moved, and is unique in having been suspected of having had sex with his mistress (Vannozza dei Cattanei), the daughter she bore him (Lucrezia), and her mother while making a virtue of siring several offspring.

Homosexual liaisons were as common as—if not more common than—heterosexual relationships.
So endemic was
sodomy at the papal court that the rumored
homosexuality of various popes became a stock feature of satirical pasquinades. Of Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici), Guicciardini remarked, “
At the beginning of his pontificate, most people deemed him very chaste; however, he was afterwards discovered to be exceedingly devoted—and every day with less and less shame—to that kind of pleasure that for honour’s sake may not be named.” The unmentionable pleasure was reputedly a particular taste for young boys, a taste that was apparently shared by Julius II. Others took it to a different level.
Sixtus IV was reputed to have given his cardinals special dispensation to commit sodomy during the summer months, perhaps to permit him to indulge his favorite predilections without fear of criticism. Worse still was Paul II, who was not only lampooned for wearing rouge in public but also rumored to have died while being sodomized by a page boy.

In the early days of Aeneas’s cardinalate, the papal court thronged with rich, powerful churchmen who were utterly devoted to greed,
gluttony, and lust. The magnificent halls of their palaces buzzed with every variety of sin, giving the Curia a very bad name, especially among humanists like
Bartolomeo della Fonte who came to Rome to pursue their art. Vicious invectives were launched against the lifestyle of Renaissance cardinals by various learned litterateurs. Even among the ordinary people of the city, the court earned a rotten reputation, and despite the magnificence of curial palaces the very word “cardinal” became a term of abuse, as a dialogue from an anonymous pasquinade (a characteristically Roman satirical poem that took its name from the damaged remains of a statue unearthed in the fifteenth century and commonly known as Pasquino) shows:

M
ARFORIO
:
Why, Pasquino, you’re armed to the teeth!

P
ASQUINO
: Because I’ve got the devil on my back

With an insult that has placed me on the rack,

And got my deadly knife out from its sheath.

M
ARFORIO
: But who insulted you, Pasquino, what runt?

P
ASQUINO
: He’s a cunt!

M
ARFORIO
: Then what was it?

P
ASQUINO
: You stupid heel:

I’d rather have been broken on the wheel

Than ever be called by such a name.

M
ARFORIO
: He called you liar: what a shame!

P
ASQUINO
: Worse than that!

M
ARFORIO
: Thief?

P
ASQUINO
: Worse!

M
ARFORIO
: Cuckold?

P
ASQUINO
: Men of the world shrug off such sobriquets,

You simpleton, and just go on their way.

M
ARFORIO
: Well, what then? Coiner? Simonist ’gainst God?

Or did you get a little girl in pod?

P
ASQUINO
: Marforio, you’re a babe who needs a nurse:

Of all things evil there is nothing worse

To call a man than—“Cardinal”! But he

Who abused me so won’t ’scape death, e’en if he flee.

But however shameful contemporaries may have thought the habits of the papal court, it is important to underscore the fact that they
put a very different complexion on the Curia’s patronage of the arts. Although grand, richly decorated palaces, antique statuary, and fine frescoes were essential to creating an appropriate setting for a Renaissance court, the intentions and daily lives of the patrons who commissioned these works went far beyond both the strict demands of the courtly life and the artistic vision set out by Nicholas V.

The magnificence of the papal court was, therefore, deceptive. The magnitude of the
Apostolic Palace and its satellites concealed a court that was not only perennially short of cash, but that was also driven on by burning ambition and relentless greed, while the saints and angels depicted on the walls of curial residences looked down on men who willingly devoted themselves to wild sex and debauchery. In this regard it is telling that
Raphael’s
School of Athens
—perhaps the most striking affirmation of the papacy’s ostentatious endeavor to establish itself as the focus of humanistic learning and to encourage a harmonious union between ancient philosophy and patristic theology—was commissioned by Julius II, an amorous, possibly homosexual pontiff whose rise to power had been fueled by greed. Indeed, it is arguable that the further the mores of the papal court degenerated, the more intense its need for such an unrealistic public image became.

The artistic tastes of popes and cardinals were, however, neither as one-dimensional as it might initially appear nor as clearly defined as Nicholas V’s deathbed statement might suggest. Although courtly status and the well-being of the faith continued to provide a powerful reason for the preservation of a carefully designed public image, it was simply impossible for so worldly a group of people not to let their true feelings shine through once in a while.

As at secular courts elsewhere in Italy, the side effects of “courtly” behavior often crept out from behind the shadows to be celebrated and enjoyed for their own sake. Greed, gluttony, and lust found their way into decorative schemes that otherwise glossed over the sinfulness of life at the papal court. In decorating the bathroom of
Cardinal Bibbiena in the Vatican Palace, for example, Raphael was requested to paint frescoes depicting episodes from classical mythology that were definitely not reflective of a celibate mind.
Although now lost, one scene showed a voluptuous Venus lifting her leg in a highly provocative manner while extracting a thorn from her foot. Another showed Pan preparing to rape Syrinx. So, too,
Michelangelo carved his
Bacchus
—a masterpiece
of drunken revelry—for
Cardinal Raffaele Riario. Even more revealing were the decorations on the vault of the entrance loggia to the Palazzo Farnese executed by
Giulio Romano,
Giovanni da Udine, and others after a design by Raphael. In this case, the subject chosen was the erotic story of Cupid and Psyche, and the ceiling of this most elegant of rooms is divided up into panels depicting different scenes from the tale, each of which provides a hint of the daily life of the cardinals who lived in the palace. In
The Council of the Gods
, for example, the wine flows freely as gods recline in the company of bare-chested goddesses or canoodle under flowered canopies, while alluring maidens dance with desire in their eyes (
Fig. 30
). In the corner of another scene, just above Mercury’s raised hand, there is a yet more outrageous statement of curial tastes.
Among the fruit and foliage of the border is hidden an obvious and totally uninhibited sexual parody: here, an unmistakably phallic vegetable plunges into a fig that has been split in half to present a plainly vaginal appearance. Subtle it was not, but—when they were left to their own devices away from the public gaze—that was what Renaissance popes and cardinals such as Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini liked.