Michelangelo was just thirty-one and already recognized as the most talented artist in Christendom, the sculptor of David and the Pietà. He had been the pope’s favorite, commissioned to fashion an enormous funerary monument. It would be “the triumph of sculpture,” he promised, two stories of milk-white marble, carved with forty statues, each one several times larger than life. But an even grander enterprise had eclipsed all thoughts of the tomb.
At daybreak, Pope Julius would lay the foundation stone of a new Basilica of St. Peter that in size and scale would exceed the most monumental temples of the emperors. Nothing comparable had been ventured since the imperial days of Rome when a limitless supply of slave labor had made the wonders of the ancient world feasible.
Michelangelo would have no part in it.
In his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Michelangelo’s friend and student Giorgio Vasari* wrote, “The most benign Ruler of Heaven in His clemency turned His eyes to the earth, and having perceived the presumptuous vanity of men which is even further removed from truth than is darkness from light, and desirous to deliver us from such great errors, sent down to earth” Michelangelo Buonarroti.
In the tight, fractious circle of Renaissance artists, where papal patronage was coveted and rivalry was intense, there was no fair way to compete successfully against such a talent, and no easy way to handle him.
Michelangelo already had the dimensions of myth and the disposition of a martyr. He was the patent for the artistic temperament—rickly, uncompromising, egotistical, immodest, self-absorbed, and slipping toward paranoia. “It is only your devotion to the great work to which you have given yourself that makes you seem terrible to others,” a Florentine patron reassured him.
The sky was growing lighter when Michelangelo crossed into Tuscany, his home ground and beyond the jurisdiction of Julius. Still shaken by the anguished day, he stopped to sleep in a hostelry in the town of Poggibonsi, still twenty miles from Florence. He was slouched over a wooden refectory table, its surface scarred and stained, with a heel of bread and a flagon of wine, when he heard the stomp of boots and the clamor of demanding voices.
Like the Roman emperors, Pope Julius had eyes and ears everywhere, and Michelangelo had barely left the walls of the city behind when papal horsemen were in pursuit. With a sudden rush of wind and flash of light, the door of the inn burst open. Five papal couriers surrounded him, and in the name of Pope Julius II of Liguria, commanded him to return with them to the Vatican. They carried a personal message from “His Blessed Holiness.”
Breaking the wax seals—the crossed keys of the Apostolic See and the della Rovere oak tree, the pope’s family crest—the captain barked out the message: “From the Most Holy Father: Return to Rome under threat of punishment.”
The words were as portentous as the snarl of Cerberus, but Michelangelo could disobey with impunity because he was on the soil of the Signoria of Florence. There were rude exchanges, some shoving, and more threats, before he agreed to an uneasy compromise. He would write an answer to Julius.
The innkeeper brought pen, ink, and parchment, a coarse sheet, not worthy of its recipient, but there was nothing else. The table was cleared, a fresh lamp lighted. Michelangelo loosened his cloak to free his arm, wiped his hands on his breeches to clean them of crumbs and sweat, and flexed his fingers, stiff from gripping the reins for so many hours. Bending over the parchment, he scratched out each word: “Most Blessed Father…”
For the sculptor of the giant David, almost seventeen feet tall and carved from a single marble block, his letters were small and cramped. After a perfunctory request for pardon, he wrote with indignation and wounded pride, in effect serving warning to Julius “that he would never again return to the sacred presence, since the pope had caused him to be driven away like a criminal, that his faithful service had not deserved such treatment, and that his Holiness should look elsewhere for someone to serve him.”
Later, Michelangelo would hint of a nefarious plot against him: “If I were to remain in Rome, my own tomb would have come before the pope’s,” he would write. “This is the reason for my sudden departure.”
Within the walls of the Vatican, boulders of abandoned marble loomed like snowy mountains in the shadowed piazza. Bonfires burned and torches flared in the windswept night. Pickaxes swung, cracking ancient stones. Shovels clanged against broken skulls. The laborers sweated in the chillness, enclosed in twenty-foot walls of earth, and digging deeper, through the gardens of Agrippina and the stones of her son Caligula’s Circus, through the necropolis of ancient Rome and the killing fields of the emperor Nero.
The piers of the new Basilica of St. Peter would be so massive that each foundation trench had to be twenty-five feet deep. Huge baskets were lowered into the pit by a series of pulleys, filled with dirt, raised, emptied, lowered, and filled again. The laborers dug in a steady rhythm, displacing layer upon layer of history. Ager Vaticanus was not virgin soil.
Named for the vati, or “soothsayers,” who augured there in classical times, the Vatican field lay on the west bank of the Tiber River, between the hills of Monte Mario to the north and the Gianicolo to the south. Since it was located across the river and well outside the main city, the Vatican had been a convenient place for Roman emperors to bury their dead and slaughter converts to the radical messianic cult of Jesus of Nazareth.
In the first, inky morning hours, the weary laborers drew up the last baskets of dirt and climbed out of the trench. Shovels slung over their shoulders, they filed home across the Ponte Sant’Angelo, their sweat polluting the air. The wisteria that spread in wild abandon over the seven hills of Rome should have been sending its sweet perfume across the city, but this was a nasty April. The wind rushed south from the bony Apennines, churning the murky water of the Tiber. It flattened the tall grasses of the marshes, incubator for the malaria virus that swept through Rome every year or so, thinning the population, and blew away the fetid odors of garbage, fish bones, and offal that made the Vatican Borgo as malodorous as a cesspool.
Yards of canvas like the sails of a Roman galley billowed over the excavated earth. The wind slapped the canvas and swirled through the construction yard by the papal palace, raising a fine white dust that turned the site into a flour bowl. At first light, April 18, 1506, a ribbon of cardinals began snaking across the cluttered yard. Trailed by an entourage of secretaries and servants, they picked their way around the ancient stones, pilfered from the Colosseum on the pope’s orders, around the mounds of travertine carted from quarries in Tivoli and Michelangelo’s boulders of milk-white marble.
By dawn, every prominent figure in Rome had converged on the site. Cesare Borgia, the vicious bastard son of the previous pope, was in the audience, feigning goodwill. Rumor was that Julius held him hostage. There was a contingent from Florence: the ambassador and wit, Niccolò Machiavelli; and the heirs of Lorenzo il Magnifico, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici and his bastard cousin Giulio. Both would become deplorable popes. A third future pope, the elegant young monsignor Alessandro Farnese, who would become Paul III, attended with his mistress. Julius’s current favorites—the banker Agostino Chigi, on his way to becoming the richest man in Rome, and the architect Donato Bramante, who was designing the new Basilica—occupied places of honor beside members of the pope’s family, his youngest daughter, Felice, and his cardinal-cousin Raffaele Riario, the chief financial officer of the Church.
To the blare of trumpets and the ring of applause, a line of thirty-five cardinals processed to the lip of the excavation pit. The wind whipped their crimson cassocks and swirled through the crowd, carrying gossip with the dust. The renegade artist Buonarroti had absconded in the night like a criminal, his contract unfulfilled, his work in limbo. Pope Julius was in a fury, his day of glory spoiled by the sculptor’s surreptitious flight.
Behind the cardinals, carried aloft in the sedia gestatoria, Julius towered above the crowd like a thunderhead and tossed commemorative coins into upstretched hands.
He was sixty-three years old, an old man by Cinquecento standards, but he was built like a bull—powerful neck, powerful shoulders—and his tendency was to charge like a bull, trampling impediments and opponents alike. He never retreated except to regroup, to gain time and disarm his enemies. He charmed. He finessed. He even managed an occasional moment of humility, if it assured that his will would prevail. But he was never deterred.
As bearers lowered the chair by the lip of the pit, he stepped out, shrugging violently to shake the dust off his cope. The heavy brocade embroidered with gold thread was beginning to look like a baker’s smock. Two masons descended first, followed by two cardinals, and then the pope, grim-faced. He climbed down the ladder carefully, his ringed fingers grasping the rungs, encumbered by the heavy clothing, the weighty tiara, descending lower, lower yet. The Ager Vaticanus was marshy, the earth in the pit damp, the air close.
As Julius disappeared into the trough, the crowd pressed forward for a better view. Dirt flew, striking his tiara. For a terrifying moment, he thought the sides would cave in and bury him. The foundation pit would become his tomb, not the magnificent sarcophagus abandoned without permission the night before by the impudent Buonarroti.
The trench was “like a chasm in the earth,” the papal master of ceremonies, Paris de Grassis, recorded in his journal, “and as there was much anxiety felt lest the ground should give way, Pope Julius thundered out to those above not to come too near the edge.”
An urn holding a dozen commemorative medals, signifying the twelve apostles, was lowered into the pit. Cast of bronze and gilded, the medals featured on one side an image of the pope and on the other a picture of the new church. Julius placed them in an opening dug beneath the spot where the foundation stone would fit—a block of marble, “four palms wide, two broad, and three fingers thick”—the first stone of the new Basilica of St. Peter.
Looking back across centuries of checkered history, across the lapses in Christianity and compassion, across the bloody crusades and Inquisition, it seems more than happenstance that, of his twelve apostles, Christ chose Peter to lead his new church.
Simon Peter, so clearly flawed, seemed to be the least among the disciples. He lacked the poetry of John, the curiosity of Thomas, even the boldness of Judas. He was ignorant, impulsive, unreliable, and boastful. He was one of us. He shared our ebullience and our errors. He was the first to swear his undying faith, and the first to fail. The first to volunteer to watch through the night with Christ, and the first to fall asleep. Even after he became the first pope, it was said that Jesus caught him on the Via Appia fleeing from Nero’s dangerous city.
On the shoulders of this empathetic, eminently fallible man, Christ placed the future of the Church, and the humanity of Peter, that uneasy balance of sinner and saint, has sullied and sustained his Church ever since. A communion of sinners who would be saints, led by the most mortal of men—such is the enduring strength of the Roman Catholic Church. That boundless acceptance of a willing spirit foiled time and again by weak flesh has confounded those who have prematurely prophesied its end, from the unforgiving Luther to the unyielding evangelicals.
As a historical entity, the Church of Rome is unparalleled. It has operated without interruption for more than two thousand years—no other institution is even a close second. Never a monolith that spoke with a single voice, it always had room for the beatific and the base. At no time in its often unedifying history has it seemed more wanton and wondrous, more earthy and existential than in the era of the Renaissance popes, and no pontiff has embodied those excesses more extravagantly than il Terribilis, Julius Secondo.
Giuliano della Rovere was elected supreme pontiff of the Church of Rome in a single ballot, having taken the prudent step of crossing the palms of key cardinals with silver. As pope he chose the name Julius, not for the sainted Pope Julius I, but for the original Julius, the conquering Caesar and empire builder who made Rome glorious.
Now, on the very spot where Peter was buried, the Christian Caesar was building a citadel of faith for God and eternity. The enterprise was audacious, but so were the times. Gutenberg had invented the printing press, Columbus had stumbled on a new continent, and the Renaissance was in full bloom. Before the new Basilica was finished, Magellan’s fleet would sail around the world; Henry VIII would take six wives and dispose of four; Shakespeare would make all the world a stage, the Mayflower would drop anchor off Plymouth Rock, and Europeans would taste chocolate and coffee for the first time.
But from the foundation stone, Peter’s new house was both a splendor and a scandal. One thousand two hundred years before, the emperor Constantine had raised a shrine to the apostle on the very same ground. To destroy Constantine’s basilica—a hallowed site almost as old as the Church of Rome—was a desecration.
The scandal that his plan provoked only steeled the pope’s resolve. Julius imagined the new Basilica as the centerpiece of a Christian Rome more magnificent and mighty than the city of the Caesars. And the fact that the original St. Peter’s was the most revered shrine in Europe, the repository of a millennium of sacred history and art, be damned. He would rip it down and replace it with something more immense, immutable. A new edifice for a new age.
CHAPTER TWO
THE FIRST ST. PETER’S
According to the historian Tacitus, thirty years after Jesus of Nazareth was sentenced to death by crucifixion for inciting rebellion in the empire of the Caesars, his followers had spread to Rome and were attracting a devout group of converts. Although the messianic cult was not much bigger than a storefront church today, the emperor Nero viewed it with mistrust.
Nero was notorious for his public debauchery and lethal family squabbles. He had poisoned his half brother, assassinated his mother, and sentenced his wife to death. When a suspicious fire scorched Rome, blazing unchecked for nine days and nights in the summer of A.D. 64, angry Romans blamed him. Pliny the Elder charged, “Nero has burned Rome,” torching the old city to build a new and grander one. The historian Suetonius described the emperor playing the lyre as he watched the distant fire from a tower: “Charmed by the beauty of the flames, he sang of the ruin…in theatrical costume.”
To quiet the outcry against him, the emperor needed to deflect blame for the controversial fire, and the Christians made a convenient scapegoat. On August 1, across the river from the charred city in Caligula’s imperial Circus in the Vatican field, Nero slaughtered the alleged arsonists. It was history’s first pogrom.
In the first century, the spectacle of surly slaves, clever rivals, or fickle wives tossed into an arena with hungry beasts was enjoyed with the unabashed enthusiasm that twenty-first-century Europeans lavish on soccer matches. But even to a populace for whom blood sport was an afternoon’s diversion, the treatment of the Christians seemed sadistic.
Tacitus describes the scene in the fifteenth book of his Annales:
Nero inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians…. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired…. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths.
Although the disciples Peter and Paul may have been in Rome at the time, they escaped the first purge. Three years later, in another lethal Roman summer, the two old proselytizers were apprehended and killed. Paul, according to legend, was beheaded on his way to the port of Ostia. Peter was captured inside the city and forced to follow his own Via Dolorosa.
The old fisherman, his face tanned to leather by years of wind and sea, carried his cross through the Vatican field. His executioners walked behind him, and behind the soldiers, a jeering mob pressed forward. By the Circus of Caligula, beside the killing fields of Nero, he staggered. And it was there that the cross was raised, and Simon Peter was hung upside down, according to his wish, because at the end he knew, as he had always believed, that he was an unworthy proxy f
or Jesus.
Subsequent emperors continued the persecutions that Nero instigated with varying degrees of zeal. Suspected believers were tortured and killed in an assortment of grisly ways—boiled in oil and roasted on spits. Christianity became an outlaw religion, practiced in tunnels or catacombs beneath the streets of the imperial city.
All that changed in A.D. 312 with the cross, the Milvian bridge, and the young general who would be emperor. Leading an army to Rome to claim the throne of the Caesars, Constantine saw the cross in the sky over Ponte Milvio: “By this sign you will conquer.” With his rival’s head on a pike, he entered the city and was crowned emperor. It was the answer to a mother’s prayers.
The Christian Church is usually viewed as a father-son narrative, yet at critical junctures in the Old and New Testaments and beyond, it is a tale of mothers and sons: Eve and her boys Abel and Cain, Jacob protected and warned by his mother, Mary standing by her accused son, Jesus, and Helena, whose faith moved an empire. Helena was Constantine’s mother, and Christianity’s most influential convert. Convinced that Christ had brought her son victory, she prevailed on him to accept the faith and make it legal.
Because Constantine’s reign was unchallenged then, he could afford to humor his mother. He made Christianity respectable and built a basilica to honor Simon Peter, Christ’s first apostle and first pope. The site he chose was both symbolic and pragmatic.
Ager Vaticanus was the very spot where Christians believed Peter had been crucified and buried. It was at the foot of the Vatican hill, opposite the main marketplace of the Foro Romano yet far enough away from the imperial city—outside the walls and across the Tiber—not to offend Rome’s pagan aristocracy. Taking up a shovel, the emperor broke the ground himself. According to Roman lore, he filled twelve bags with soil, one for each of Christ’s apostles.
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