Michelangelo

by Miles J. Unger

  XI. More farfetched are theories linking Michelangelo’s paintings with the new heliocentric theory of the solar system, which, while it had not yet been published, was beginning to be discussed in learned circles, including on one occasion in the Vatican itself. (See especially Shrimplin-Evangelidis, “Sun-Symbolism and Cosmology in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment,” Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 21, no. 4 [Winter 1990]: 607–44.) There is little reason to suppose Michelangelo would have been particularly interested in such questions or what they might have contributed to his theological message.

  XII. In The Phaedo, Socrates says: “If we ’re ever going to know anything purely, we must get rid of the body, and must view the objects themselves with the soul by itself. . . .”

  XIII. Even those who preferred Titian as a painter had to admit that Michelangelo’s achievements as a sculptor and architect elevated the Florentine over his Venetian rival.

  XIV. Michelangelo derives his image from Dante ’s famous description in Inferno V: “There stands Minos, horrible, snarling, examines their offenses at the entrance, judges and dispatches them according as he girds himself; I mean that when the ill-born soul comes before him it confesses all, and that discerner of sins sees what is the place for it in Hell and encircles himself with his tail as many times as the grades he will have them sent down. Always before him is a crowd of them; they go each in turn to the judgment; they speak and hear and then are hurled below.”

  XV. As early as 1536, Pope Paul had called for a general council to respond to the crisis precipitated by Luther and his followers to meet in the northern Italian city of Mantua. Delayed until 1547, largely due to disagreements between the emperor and the king of France, this became the famous Council of Trent, which set the stage for the Counter-Reformation and a resurgent Catholic Church.

  XVI. Condivi testifies to Michelangelo’s intimacy with Cardinal Pole, “rare for his learning and singular goodness.” (Condivi, 161.)

  XVII. As early as 1542, Fra Bernardino Ochino was forced to flee to Calvinist Geneva to avoid being hauled up in front of the Inquisition on charges of heresy, and in 1549, the Beneficio was placed on the Church’s Index of Prohibited Books.

  XVIII. The Council of Trent ultimately declared: “If anyone says that man’s free will, moved and stimulated by God, cannot cooperate at all by giving its assent to God when he stimulates and calls him . . . and that he cannot dissent, if he so wills, but like an inanimate creature is utterly inert and passive, let him be anathema.” (Quoted in George Bull, Michelangelo: A Biography, p. 329.)

  VII

  Basilica

  [I]f the pains I endure profit not my soul, I am wasting my time and my work.

  —Michelangelo

  Michelangelo, St. Peter’s, Dome and Hemicycles, 1547–64. Scala/Art Resource, NY

  I. NOTHING GREATER, MORE SPLENDID, MORE ADMIRABLE

  On a blustery April morning in 1506, Pope Julius II led a festive procession across the rubble-strewn square behind St. Peter’s to a freshly excavated trench at the southwest corner of the ancient basilica. While the common folk trudged behind, choking on the dust stirred up by marching heralds and the hooves of the caparisoned horses ridden by the thirty-five cardinals and other assorted dignitaries, the pope sailed serenely above it all, borne aloft on the shoulders of the Swiss Guard in the ceremonial sedia gestatoria (portable throne). But anyone who assumed that the white-haired pontiff was too dainty to soil his gold brocades had not reckoned with his impatient spirit. A man who at the age of sixty-three still insisted on leading his troops into battle was unlikely to let others do all the work, particularly when the occasion being marked was one that would establish him as the greatest builder since the age of the Caesars.

  As soon as the parade reached its destination, Julius leapt from his chair and plunged into the crowd. Then, as trumpets blared and the citizens of Rome roared their approval, he grabbed hold of the wooden ladder and clambered down—accompanied by two unhappy cardinals and a pair of scarpellini—disappearing into what his master of ceremonies described rather alarmingly as a “chasm in the earth.” The ceremony almost ended in disaster when the spectators, hoping to get a better look, surged too close to the rim, sending an avalanche of dirt and small rocks down upon the sacred head. “[A]s there was much anxiety felt lest the ground should give way,” Paride de Grassis noted, “the Pope called out to those above not to come too near the edge.” Once the crowd had retreated to a safe distance, an urn was lowered into the pit, over which was laid the marble slab that would serve as the cornerstone of the new church. Inside the urn were twelve gilded medals (symbolizing the twelve apostles), each bearing on one side an image of the proposed edifice and on the other the features of the pope. The commemorative coins set forth in bronze the mixed motives that characterized most of Julius’s undertakings—a fierce devotion to the greater glory of the Church that was often indistinguishable from sheer egotism.

  One resident of Rome not in attendance that morning was the sculptor Michelangelo Buonarroti. Only the day before, he had fled the city with Julius’s minions in hot pursuit, intending to put as much distance between himself and the ceremony as possible. As self-centered as his master, he seemed to regard the event as a personal affront, as if the greatest building project in the history of the Church had been undertaken with no other purpose than to humiliate him. Over the past few months he had watched with growing dismay as Julius huddled in his apartments with the unctuous Bramante, poring over the plans for the new basilica. Julius was now so engrossed with this latest project that he no longer stopped by Michelangelo’s studio to discuss plans for his tomb. A few hours before his flight, the pope ’s servants had rudely escorted the artist from the papal audience chamber, confirming Michelangelo’s suspicion that he no longer enjoyed his master’s confidence. Hurt by Julius’s indifference and outraged by his rival’s scheming, he packed his bags, hired a horse, and galloped off to Florence.

  This was not the first time (and it would not be the last) that Michelangelo had allowed his paranoia to get the better of him, but for all his exaggerated sense of grievance, he was not wrong in concluding that Bramante ’s building had eclipsed his own less spectacular project. Julius’s interest in the tomb had clearly waned, perhaps because he understood that lavishing treasure on a monument to himself would open him up to the charge of excessive vanity, while rebuilding the shrine at the heart of Christendom would secure his reputation as a leader who put the glory of the Holy Church before his own.

  Before long, 2,500 men were swarming over the site, tearing down the old walls and laying the foundations for the new. An ambassador to the Holy See marveled at Julius’s new obsession, reporting, “His Holiness shows every happiness and frequently goes to the building of St. Peter’s demonstrating that he doesn’t have any greater concern than finishing the building.”

  Ironically, it had been Michelangelo himself who had provided the initial impetus for Julius’s grand folly, something he acknowledged when he boasted, “It’s all happening because of me.” His earliest biographers confirmed his version of events, Condivi declaring simply that “Michael Angelo was the cause that it came into the mind of the Pope to rebuild the rest of the church [of St. Peter’s] on a finer and more magnificent scale.”

  Despite Michelangelo’s conviction that everything (for good or ill) revolved around him, there was nothing petty or vindictive in Julius’s decision to replace the old church at the heart of the Vatican with a new, more magnificent edifice. The original building had become something of an embarrassment as well as a danger to the thousands of pilgrims who each year flocked to the shrine—not to mention the princes of the Church who were forced to attend Mass beneath sagging timbers and canted walls.

  Even without the imperative to house Michelangelo’s massive tomb, it was clear that something had to be done with the dilapidated structure. Begun by the Emperor Constantine in 326 C.E., the church marked the spot where Peter—Princ
e of the Apostles and first pope—was buried. But over the centuries the sacred shrine had been neglected, particularly during the decades of the so-called Babylonian Captivity (1309–78) when the popes had fled the violent, tumble-down city and taken up residence in Avignon.

  When the popes returned to Rome in the early years of the fifteenth century, they embarked on an ambitious program of urban renewal. While most preferred the more glamorous task of erecting splendid new buildings, they also turned their attention to the restoration of structures too steeped in sacred history to be carelessly swept aside. Inspecting the crumbling fabric of St. Peter’s at the request of Pope Nicholas V (1447–55), Leon Battista Alberti reported: “[T]he continual force of the wind has already displaced the wall more than six feet from the vertical. I have no doubt that eventually some gentle pressure or slight movement will make it collapse.” This dire assessment prompted the first major intervention in more than a thousand years when Pope Nicholas commissioned the Florentine architect Bernardo Rossellino to shore up and enlarge the existing structure. In 1506, Rossellino’s vast, unfinished tribune still stood at the western edge of the old basilica, a weed-covered monument to uncertain finances and even-less-certain leadership. It would take a pope of bold vision, unafraid to take on the traditionalists within the ranks of the Sacred College, one willing to step on a few toes and skewer a few sacred cows, before significant progress could be made.

  Julius II was just such a man. When it became clear that the funerary ensemble Michelangelo had designed could not be accommodated within St. Peter’s as it was currently configured, Pope Julius asked Bramante and Giuliano da Sangallo to propose a solution. While Sangallo suggested the simple expedient of adding a chapel to the existing structure, Bramante—with a far better understanding of his master’s nature—captured the pope ’s imagination with a dazzling prospect. What better way to rival the Caesars of old than to replace the first church of Christendom with a splendid new edifice, one that would proclaim the triumph of the faith while simultaneously ensuring the undying glory of the man who first conceived it?

  This last goal seemed assured even when the new structure consisted of little more than a few massive arches looming over a desolate patch of ground. In his funeral oration for Julius, Egidio da Viterbo proclaimed: “. . . all people are persuaded, on the basis of the visible pile of foundations already laid, that whatever will happen in the city of Rome and among whatever great works there come to be, this will forever be the greatest of them. Nothing in Italy and indeed nothing in the universal orb of nations will ever be more sublime, or in cost more magnificent, or in excellence greater, more splendid, more admirable.”

  Not everyone shared Egidio’s enthusiasm. Cardinals worried about the expense, and many protested at the wanton destruction of a church founded by the first Christian emperor. As Paride de Grassis noted in his journal: “The name il Ruinante [the master of ruins] has been added to the vocabulary to describe Architect Bramante.” A contemporary satire depicts Bramante arriving at the gates of heaven, where he is confronted by St. Peter, who asks the architect: “Why did you destroy my temple in Rome which, by its very antiquity, called even the least down to God? You are the rascal to whom we owe this evil deed.”

  The debate over what to do with the ancient basilica was symptomatic of the fissures and contradictions that plagued the Renaissance Church. On the one hand, Old St. Peter’s was among the most venerated monuments in all Christendom. It was one of the last remaining links in Rome to the first Christian emperor—Constantine himself had shown his commitment to the faith by filling the first twelve bags with dirt dug from the foundation—a visible sign of the unbroken chain of authority extending from the Apostle Peter to the man currently seated on his throne. “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church,” Jesus told his first disciple. “And the gates of the underworld can never hold out against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in heaven.”

  But despite Jesus’s focus on the kingdom of heaven, Julius, like most of his recent predecessors, was more comfortable in the role of a worldly prince than of a leader of the Christian flock, more attuned to the language of wealth and power than to the inscrutable mysteries of the spirit. In this world, outward display counted for more than virtue. It seemed intolerable to him that while the institution Peter founded grew in wealth and power, the actual building that marked his grave was crumbling away. The truth is that both the building and the larger institution were equally unsound, but while Julius was keenly aware of the structural deficiencies of the basilica, he was blind to the pervasive spiritual rot that threatened the fabric of the Church itself. In the end, by shoring up the one, Julius undermined the other. It was an irony not lost on Cardinal Pallavicino, who saw the folly of Julius’s great undertaking: “This material edifice had destroyed a great part of his spiritual building. To procure the prodigious millions required by a construction so enormous, recourse was had to means which gave the first occasion to the Lutheran heresy, and inflicted upon the Church, in the end, the loss of many millions of souls.”

  But in 1506 the larger threat was still invisible, at least to someone of Julius’s temperament. The instability of the existing building served as a handy excuse for what might otherwise be deemed a sacrilegious act, but a more important consideration for the pope was that Old St. Peter’s did not fit in with his conception of the Church he led or his grandiose plans for his capital. The most sacred shrine in Christendom, the physical embodiment of the pope ’s claim to be Jesus’s representative on earth, must be something more than a dilapidated structure of brick and timber, no matter how venerable. Not only was Constantine ’s church shabby, but it violated those canons of beauty and decorum set down by Vitruvius and revived by the humanists in recent decades. Ironically, the ancient building violated the standards established by the ancients themselves, testifying to the now embarrassing fact that Christianity had begun as a humble religion and had been adopted as the official creed of the state only during the last decadent years of the Roman Empire. Old St. Peter’s was a degraded product of a dying age, and while some might regard these charming flaws as evidence of Christianity’s modest origins, Julius preferred a magnificent structure that would overawe the faithful with a vision of the Church Triumphant.

  Donato Bramante was the perfect candidate to implement Pope Julius’s vision. Not only was he supremely self-confident, but he had mastered the forms and techniques of the Roman builders. While most of his colleagues derived their understanding of ancient architecture from books—particularly from Vitruvius—in the years before he entered Julius’s household Bramante had wandered about the city sketching the monuments, taking measurements, and excavating the foundations, uncovering the secrets of the engineers who had raised up soaring vaults and massive walls that, millennia later, continued to strike awe into those who pastured their sheep among the ruins. But despite his archeological investigations, Bramante was no slavish imitator. Rather than superficially aping the style of the ancients, he hoped to achieve a comparable sense of space while adapting classical forms to meet the requirements of a new age.

  Bramante was not the first architect to take his inspiration from the ruins that still poked out from the fields and olive groves like the bones of long-dead beasts. Almost a hundred years before Bramante arrived in the Eternal City, Brunelleschi, accompanied by the sculptor Donatello, had sketched among the ruins. Returning to his native Florence, he initiated the first wave of Renaissance architecture by investing his buildings with the same structural clarity and mathematical logic he discovered in the ancient monuments. Using classical columns of impeccable Vitruvian pedigree and the characteristic semicircular arch, Brunelleschi swept away centuries of Gothic clutter, creating structures marked by pleasing regularity and sober dignity.

  Brunelleschi’s architecture, however, remains planar—based on flat walls, elegantly articulated, and linear col
onnades. Interior space, while logically organized in modules based on simple ratios, is essentially inert, a void partitioned by, but not actively engaging with, the structural elements. Bramante discovered that the secret to Roman architecture was the dynamic manipulation of mass and space. Inspired primarily by the Pantheon, with its hemispherical dome, and the ruined Basilica of Maxentius, with its three imposing vaults, Bramante tried to replicate that sculptural sense of mass and void that gave these ancient buildings their dramatic power.

  When Pope Julius pitted Giuliano da Sangallo against Bramante to design a new St. Peter’s, he was setting up a confrontation between a conservative architect who would carry on the tradition established by Brunelleschi with one who dared to challenge the ancient Romans on their own turf. The contest was over before it began. While Sangallo followed his friend Michelangelo to Florence to nurse his wounded pride, Bramante set about conjuring an edifice that would astound the world.

  The building that Bramante ultimately proposed and that won the enthusiastic backing of Pope Julius, was a triumph of Renaissance idealism, a structure whose philosophical perfection was matched only by its impracticality. Perhaps such an outcome was to be expected; the rarefied air that philosophers breathe can prove too thin for mere mortals. Departing from the basic blueprint that had guided sacred architecture for millennia (at least in the West), Bramante conceived of the new St. Peter’s in the form of a Greek cross, with four equal arms replacing the longitudinal axis of the traditional basilica. The basilican form, with its central aisle and two or more side aisles usually separated by a row of columns, originated in Roman administrative buildings, where such spaces served as a center of civic life. Adapted by the early Christians to house large numbers of worshipers, the form—often supplemented by a transept that gave the church its symbolically significant cruciform shape—was ideally suited to the celebration of the Mass, allowing the congregants to focus their attention on the altar where the priest performed the sacred rites.