R. A. Scotti

by Basilica: The Splendor;the Scandal: Building St. Peter's

  Giuliano—I have heard from one of your people how the Pope took my departure badly…and that I should return and not worry about anything…. I was sent away, or rather driven out, and the person who sent me packing said that he knew me but that he was under orders. So, when I heard those words that Saturday, and then saw what followed, I fell into deep despair. But by itself, that was not entirely the reason for my departure; there was something else again, but I don’t want to write about it. Enough then that it made me wonder whether if I stayed in Rome my own tomb would not be finished and ready before the Pope’s. And that was the reason for my sudden departure.

  Julius certainly read Michelangelo’s letter, because he renewed his efforts at conciliation. He sent the Signoria another brief that was paternalistic and forgiving:

  Michelangelo, the sculptor, who left us without reason, and in mere caprice, is afraid, we are informed, of returning, though we, for our part, are not angry with him, knowing the humors of such men of genius. In order then that we may lay aside all anxiety, we rely on your loyalty to convince him in our name, that if he returns to us, he shall be uninjured and unhurt, retaining our Apostolic favor in the same measure as he formerly enjoyed.

  Caught between two towering tempers, Piero Soderini, the leader of the Signoria, tried to soothe them both. While urging Julius to “show the artist love and treat him gently,” he warned Michelangelo that his insolence was on a scale that “not even the King of France would dare against the Vicar of Christ.” Negotiations between the two camps continued with no resolution. By the end of summer, the soldier-pope was on the warpath.

  The highlighted areas show the territory claimed by the papacy.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

  In August 1507, il pontefice terribile strapped on his armor and led an army north into the Papal States of Umbria and Romagna, lost when the popes were in Avignon. Local princes and condottieri had taken advantage of the power vacuum to usurp control, and Julius was determined to retake the pivotal territory.

  Although the unholy sight of the Vicar of Christ leading a battle charge appalled many devout believers, Julius’s military campaigns were not motivated solely by a warlike disposition. While he relished every battle, military, political, and personal, it was prudence of a sort that drove him to war. The Papal States were strategic territory on the land route between Europe and the East, and if he could bring them to heel, they would once again be a lucrative source of income to replenish the Vatican treasury.

  Julius had inherited a bankrupt Church. His predecessor, Alexander VI, the most carnal of all the popes, had lived in open adultery and plundered the Vatican treasury, squandering an inordinate sum of money and time on his profligate brood. At his death, the behavior of the clergy was raising alarms even in liberal, humanistic circles. The Papal States were going their own way. Only one of the ancient aqueducts was still functioning, which meant that most Romans were drinking dirty river water, and there wasn’t enough money in the treasury to meet even half the basic administrative costs of the Church and the city.

  In contrast with his often impulsive behavior, Julius was a fiscal conservative. He needed to balance the budget and create a firm financial basis for the future.

  The Church of Rome was the first huge international enterprise. It was a global company centuries before the word globalization was coined, and like any global organization today, it had multiple sources of revenue. While money flowed in from so many directions that one English king complained, “The successor of the Apostles was commissioned to lead the Lord’s sheep to pasture not to fleece them,” the prime revenue sources were real estate, religion, and natural resources.

  As far back as Gregory the Great, popes had invested in property throughout Europe. By the sixteenth century, they also controlled a sizable chunk of the Italian peninsula. This included an area known as the Patrimony of Peter, which encompassed the city of Rome and the surrounding region, and also the Papal States—Umbria, the Marches, and the Romagna. The Holy See had acquired the Papal States in two gifts—one in the eighth century, from Pepin the Short, the conquering king of the Franks and father of Charlemagne, the other in the eleventh century, from Countess Matilda of Tuscany.*

  At some point between receiving these two generous gifts, a document known as the Donation of Constantine turned up, purportedly signed by the emperor and confirming the pope’s dominion over Rome. Once Constantine moved the capital of his empire to Byzantium in A.D. 326 and built Constantinople (now Istanbul), he never returned to Rome. The Church claimed that he had ceded the city and the surrounding countryside to the popes. Although the humanist Lorenzo Valla proved the Donation of Constantine a forgery in the pontificate of Nicholas V, the region remained firmly under Vatican jurisdiction.

  The status of the Papal States was more complex and somewhat contradictory. Machiavelli, the Renaissance’s most acerbic political commentator, explained it slyly:

  Only these princes [popes] have dominions and do not defend them, have subjects and do not govern them, and although their dominions are undefended, they are not taken from them, and their subjects, although they are not governed, pay no attention to the fact and do not, nor can they, quit the papal dominion.

  The Papal States cut a broad swath across the middle of the Italian boot from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic. The Church imposed customs on goods transported by land through its territories and by sea through the ports it controlled. It also levied taxes on just about everything imaginable: wine, grain, livestock, timber, and firewood from the campagna.

  Substantial revenue also accrued from the accoutrements of religion. Besides the payment of annates and tithes, every dispensation or “grace” granted to a petitioner and every benefice (cardinal’s hats, bishoprics, abbeys, monasteries, and convents) came with a price tag. Indulgences and Peter’s Pence, the annual collection, were additional and long-standing sources of income. And most Vatican jobs, from apostolic secretary to librarian, were venal offices, meaning they were for sale. The higher the office, the dearer the price.

  Jubilees, traditionally the first year of a new century, also brought money pouring into Rome. In the first Jubilee, in 1300, Rome, then a city of fifty thousand, was overrun by two hundred thousand eager Christians, one of them the poet Dante Alighieri. The Holy Year of 1300 was such a success that Boniface VIII made it a centenary event. His successors, recognizing a prime opportunity, shortened the span between jubilees to fifty, then to twenty-five, years.

  The third substantial revenue source was natural resources. The Church enjoyed a monopoly on two vital commodities, salt and alum.

  Although the Vatican had its own mint, it needed moneymen to juggle its complex finances. Its chief financial officer, the apostolic chamberlain, contracted with a bank or countinghouse to “farm” the salt and alum mines, cover a shortfall with advances against expected revenue, collect taxes, transfer money to and from every part of Europe, and float papal loans, known as monti.

  During the pontificate of Julius, Rome became one of the busiest money markets in Europe. Like artists vying for papal patronage, international bankers competed fiercely to win papal contracts. As many as fifty banking houses had offices in Rome, including the House of the Medici of Florence and Fugger Bank of Augsburg. But no “farmer” operated with greater success than Agostino Chigi.

  Born in Siena in 1466 to a banking family, Chigi moved to Rome when he was a young man with one ambition: to become the pope’s banker, and the first among equals. Early on, he adopted a pattern that never varied. He ingratiated himself with each pope by extending a substantial personal loan.

  As brilliant in finance as the Renaissance masters were in art, Chigi was wily, devout, and social climbing. A man of legendary charm, diplomacy, and ambition, he maneuvered adroitly through the Vatican labyrinth. At one time or another, he was treasurer of the Patrimony of Peter, collected taxes on salt and grazing, and floated loans for a succession of
popes. But he made the bulk of his fortune as the Church’s alum farmer.

  Alum was the oil of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. From Byzantium to Britain, and notably in Flanders and the Low Countries, the leading industry was cloth. Alum was an essential mineral in the dyeing process. Since the largest mines were in Asia Minor, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 had an effect on Christian wool merchants comparable to the OPEC oil shortage of the 1970s.

  By the end of the century, when Christian merchants had become desperate to find new sources of alum, mirabile dictu, rich veins were discovered in Tolfa, a mountainous area north of Rome that happened to lie within the Patrimony of Peter. Smaller deposits were also discovered in Naples and Tuscany. And so, by luck or Divine Providence, the Church became the leading alum exporter in Europe.

  Agostino Chigi won the contract to farm alum under Alexander VI and assured that it would be renewed with the strategic loan that secured the papacy for Julius. It was the beginning of an intense and fruitful friendship. Although the alum mines had always been profitable, Chigi enriched the Church and himself by turning them into a monopoly. In this, he was aided and abetted by the incorrigible pope. Julius forbade any Christian from buying infidel alum on pain of excommunication.

  This was a man who once excommunicated the entire Republic of Venice, and threatened to do the same with the king of England. His threats were never idle, but they occasionally backfired. One trader, Francesco Tommasi, who incurred the pope’s wrath by breaking the alum monopoly, turned out to be Chigi’s agent. Tommasi was running a little scam for his boss. He was buying alum from the Turks, then Chigi was reselling it in Europe at an inflated price.

  The pope and his banker were pragmatists, unconcerned with ethical niceties. They delighted in a vision of a supreme Christian imperium with themselves in the roles of Julius and Augustus Caesar. Now in the summer of 1507, the two were charging into battle.

  When Julius II rode to war, the papal court rode with him. It was a huge and colorful cavalcade. His personal army comprised six hundred Swiss Guards, gorgeously outfitted in uniforms of purple and gold striped velvet.* Augmenting the fighting force were his cohorts Bramante and Chigi, and a cadre of cardinals. Most were reluctant warriors, more at ease in a salon than a saddle, whom Julius coerced into joining the fray. Waging war was often less dangerous than incurring his wrath.

  In the rear guard were secretaries and servants from the papal household. It was an astounding spectacle and a logistical challenge. Transporting and feeding the army of guards, clerics, and clerks was the equivalent of moving an entire town.

  The pope’s expeditions were for show, not carnage. In the city-states of Italy, war was more a jousting for the political upper hand than a duel to the death. Since most battles were fought by condottieri, mercenaries who needed to keep their troops intact to fight again tomorrow, warfare was more often a fight to the last ducat than a fight to the last man.

  Riding behind the red star-spangled flag* of the papacy, brandishing his weapons of eternal terror—writs of excommunication and papal interdictions—Julius advanced on the principal towns of Umbria and Romagna. Perugia capitulated first, then Bologna, both without bloodshed.

  In Florence, the Signoria watched the papal advance with apprehension. Unless Michelangelo turned himself in, the Florentines feared that il Terribilis would march on Tuscany to retake the stubborn sculptor. First Bologna, next Buonarroti.

  “The pope will no longer wait to be asked,” Solderini told Michelangelo. “We don’t want to wage war with him over you and put our State at risk, so prepare to go back.”

  No longer guaranteed sanctuary, Michelangelo threatened to leave Italy and sell his services to the enemy—and not to some two-bit Lombard upstart, but to the devil himself, the invidious sultan of Islam. Bayezid II wanted Michelangelo to build a bridge at Constantinople.

  “Choose to die going to Julius,” Solderini cautioned, “rather than live going to the Turk.”

  Finally relenting, however grudgingly, Michelangelo consented to meet Julius on neutral ground. In the winter of 1507, accompanied by a bishop to assure that he was “safe from bodily harm,” Michelangelo rode to Bologna. He went “with a rope around my neck,” as he put it, and “had scarcely drawn off his riding boots” when he was conducted to a papal audience.

  Flush with victory and forgiveness, Julius welcomed him like the prodigal son. We have the details of the audience from Condivi, and it was a meeting of sincere warmth and cordiality.

  “We have come to you, son, and you know that is not as it should be,” Julius said. It was a gentle reproach after so many months of impudence.

  Begging forgiveness, Michelangelo answered that he had acted in anger, “not being able to endure being driven away so abruptly, but that if he had erred, His Holiness should once more forgive him.”

  The bishop-bodyguard, trying to mediate, interjected, “Your Holiness, pay no regard to his error, because he has erred from ignorance. Painters, except for their art, are all just as ignorant.”

  Julius turned on the priest. “You are abusing him, and we are not. It is you who are ignorant, and you are a miserable wretch, not him.” Pummeling the stunned bishop with a hail of blows, the pope shouted, “Get out of my sight, and bad luck to you.”

  A chastened Michelangelo knelt in contrition, kissed the “Blessed foot,” and made his peace. For his penance, he received a new commission. Julius ordered a life-size equestrian statue of himself cast in bronze to commemorate his victory in Bologna. Michelangelo fashioned a clay model of the pope astride a horse, one hand raised in triumph.

  When Julius saw the model, he asked, “This statue of yours, is it giving a benediction or a malediction?”

  As arrogant as ever, Michelangelo answered, “It is a warning to the people here, Holy Father, to be prudent.”

  By the end of the year, Julius was preparing to withdraw his troops from Bologna. Leaving one thousand ducats for Michelangelo to cast the triumphal bronze, the warrior-pope set out on the long, slow trek back to Rome. Chigi and Bramante rode with him, their thoughts filled with the grand enterprise that lay ahead.

  Invigorated by his victorious sally to return the Papal States to the fold, Julius was eager to take on another campaign. The clash of armies was won. The clash of genius was just beginning.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A CHRISTIAN IMPERIUM

  The year 1507 was pivotal in the building of the new St. Peter’s. By the time the papal calvacade rode into Rome to a triumphant welcome, the first pier of the new Basilica was rising behind Constantine’s church. It was an astounding sight. The titanic northwest pier stood 90 feet high and was almost 30 feet thick, with a circumference of some 232 feet. Work was already under way on the corresponding southwest pier. Since neither impinged on the existing structure, the old basilica was still intact. By April, though, the inevitable could no longer be delayed.

  Bramante began to raze the millennium-old church. In his enthusiasm, he ripped the roof off the Confessio, the main altar area, and tore down the walls, destroying priceless art, altars, votive chapels, and mosaics. His reckless bravado provoked widespread fury. Romans jeeringly named him “the wrecker,” and Paris de Grassis noted in his journal, “The name il Ruinante has been added to the vocabulary to describe Architect Bramante.”

  Perhaps because his heedless demolition was raising such an outcry, Bramante adopted a novel approach. Instead of leveling the old church entirely and laying a new foundation, he worked in sections, building the new Basilica piece by piece and continuing to demolish the old one as needed.

  Although the roof was gone, he preserved the main altar. Unfazed by either the construction going on around him or the weather, Julius continued to hold ceremonies there. As long as he was pontiff, he celebrated the papal mass al fresco to the distress and vexation of many of his cardinals. Paris de Grassis complained ceaselessly of the trouble he had organizing papal functions amid the scaffolding and
boards in the maledetta fabbrica—“the accursed construction.”

  Destruction and construction became an ongoing process that would stretch over the course of the century. At the same time, Bramante continued to draft new plans. His methods were unorthodox. In his rush to build, he seemed to try out each new idea as it came to him. He began work while his own architectural plans were still jelling, returning to Julius repeatedly with revisions and changes.

  The Basilica that was rising in 1507 was not the design that Julius had accepted originally. There is no way to know why Bramante went back to the drawing board, beyond the ferment of his endlessly fertile mind. Vasari wrote that he bombarded Julius with hundreds of designs. Although his sketches include both cruciforms—the T-shaped Latin cross and the equi-armed Greek cross—Bramante’s preference was the central plan. It was a truer reflection of the Renaissance ideal and a truer spiritual metaphor.

  The metaphysical core of the Basilica was Peter’s grave, the “rock” of the Roman Church. In the Greek cross, it was located at the very center of the building. The dome rose over it, symbolizing the transcendent Christ, and the arms of the Basilica stretched out in equal length from it, representing the Church reaching to the four corners of the world.

  The Basilica that Bramante probably adopted is a variation of the Parchment Plan. A sketch of the new design was drawn by one of his assistants, Domenico Antonio de Chiarellis, known as Menicantonio, a diminutive of the first and middle names. Only discovered in the 1950s and now in the Mellon Collection of the J. Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, the Menicantonio Sketchbook is crudely made, with cardboard covers, the front one strengthened with a sheet of parchment, and measures roughly eight inches by seven inches. There are eighty-one folios on strong drawing paper, and the signatures and covers are bound with double strings.