R. A. Scotti

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

  In the Mellon Codex plan, the essence of Bramante’s Greek cross remains “the dome of the Pantheon raised on the shoulders of the Basilica of Maxentius.” Only the details changed. Once again, Bramante began with the Renaissance ideal, and then went beyond it—establishing an exact geometry before deviating from it. In that, he was truer to Vitruvius than architects who hewed more closely to the Renaissance conventions. Vitruvius never encouraged the slavish adherence to ratio and proportion that became the rule of the Renaissance. “The architect’s skill must be brought in,” he wrote. “He will introduce those corrections into the general symmetry, increased in some places and reduced in others, which will make the building seem to have no fault.”

  Although the “corrections” Bramante introduced seem small, they created striking architectural illusions. The towering height of the apses introduced a vertical drama that was lacking in the more horizontal church pictured on the commemorative medal.

  While his massive dome was still set on discrete piers rather than on a solid cylindrical base, Bramante turned the piers on the diagonal. Instead of making four corners, the angled piers form an octagon. He turned the piers in the corner chapels on the diagonal as well. What may seem like a simple deviation had an exhilarating effect. By eliminating the ponderous square corners, he created a dynamic central crossing. Bramante, who has been famously criticized for cutting corners in his rush to build enormous structures in the shortest possible time, here cut them to brilliant effect.

  Although the body of Bramante’s Basilica seems to have changed many times, its essence remained the enormous central dome. His enthusiasm for it was so great that he began building St. Peter’s from the center out. By the end of the year, the foundation stones of all four piers had been blessed and laid, and work was proceeding at a furious speed.

  Julius visited the construction site often and showed it off to visiting dignitaries. One envoy wrote, “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.”

  Another reported, “The pope went today to visit the church of St. Peter and inspect the work. I was there also. The pope had Bramante with him, and he said to me smiling, ‘Bramante tells me that 2,500 men are at work here. One might review them. It is an army!’”

  The parts of a column.

  Bramante raised the ninety-foot piers and crowned them with Corinthian capitals, twelve palms high, or about six feet, carved with olive leaves. All the double pilasters and columns throughout St. Peter’s repeat the same colossal Corinthian order. In an intense surge of construction that continued through 1510, he joined the piers with coffered barrel vaults that soar one hundred and fifty feet, higher than the dome of the Pantheon.

  Bramante’s heroic crossing arches established the height of the transept and nave,* as well as the diameter of the dome. His unorthodox strategy—building from the center out—fixed the nucleus of St. Peter’s immutably. By concentrating construction on the Basilica crossing, he ensured that the monumental scale could not be diminished no matter who succeeded him, and he kept his options open. Until the crossing was finished, he could continue experimenting with the shape of the surrounding Basilica.

  The cost of building the Basilica was commensurate with the astonishing progress. In the Middle Ages, construction of the Gothic cathedrals had been consigned to an independent organization. Often called a chapter or an opera, it handled all building issues, mediated disputes among the various craftsmen, paid the bills, secured the material, and generally took care of details, large and small.

  But Julius didn’t delegate. In spite of his impetuous rush to build and his scandalous disregard for history, he was a conscientious manager, and he signed off personally on every detail—aesthetic, practical, and financial. As long as he was pope, there was only one authority. While his accountant Girolamo de Francesco, his bankers Stefano Ghinucci and Agostino Chigi, and his cousin and cardinal-chamberlain Raffaele Riario advised him, the pope held the purse strings himself. Julius allocated funds from the Camera Apostolica and the Tesoreria Segreta, his personal expense accounts, and paid his architect directly. Bramante, in turn, paid his assistants out of his own pocket. Ghinucci disbursed payment to suppliers, laborers, and craftsmen.

  Artisans were paid by the piece—so many ducats for a square foot of flooring, wall, roofing, or pavement; so many for a cornice or capital. Each expenditure was noted in a liber mandatorum. Still filed in the archives of St. Peter’s, this slim, eighty-page “book of commissions” is a concise record of the cost of the new Basilica and the pace of construction during Julius’s pontificate.

  In 1506, the first year of building, total expenses were 12,500 ducats. The papal ducat was comparable to the euro today. It was an international coin—three and a half grams of pure gold. Although it is difficult to make an accurate comparison with today’s dollar, in 1506 a laborer worked for 15 to 20 ducats a year, a teacher or clerk earned 25 to 30 ducats, and a skilled craftsman brought home on average about 50 ducats. On the other end of the social scale, lifestyles were so lush that a nobleman with an income of 1,000 ducats was just making ends meet. Two thousand ducats relieved financial headaches.

  Depending on how you liked to spend your money, for 2,000 ducats you could buy twenty translations of Homer, hand-lettered; muster your own army for a couple of months; hire an artist to fresco your house; or buy your way into the Curia, the main governing body of the Church.

  In 1507, building expenditures more than doubled from the first year, and Julius saw no end in sight. The new St. Peter’s would be an enormous expense for the Church for years to come. Much as nonprofit institutions do today, he appealed to the conscience of wealthy donors, in effect launching a capital campaign to underwrite construction. In a papal bull, signed on February 13, 1507, he asked the crowned heads of Europe for donations.

  “The New Basilica, which is to take the place of one teeming with venerable memories, will embody the greatness of the present and the future. In proportions and splendor we believe it will surpass all other Churches of the Universe,” he wrote.

  Henry VII of England sent tin for the Basilica roof and was rewarded with wheels of Parmesan cheese, globes of provolone, and barrels of wine. In spite of the generous response, much more was needed. Operating costs were soaring, and in April, Julius imposed a tribute on all apostolic properties, with 10 percent of the revenue earmarked for the Basilica.

  If the monies flowing into the Vatican treasury were enormous, so too were the outlays. The Church was a religious institution, a charitable and humanitarian enterprise, a civil authority, an educator, and a patron. It operated in many countries, had a large payroll, administered the city of Rome, maintained an army, ran numerous charities, social services, and universities, and funded the arts and sciences.

  Total annual expenses were always substantial, but the pope’s military campaigns, lavish patronage, and ambitious building projects made 1507 especially costly. Over time, the revenue returning from the Papal States, the increased income from the alum monopoly, and a lucrative new source—gold and silver from the New World—would ensure the financial stability of the Church. But Julius faced an immediate cash-flow problem, and so his operating budget was strained.

  With expenditures on the Basilica escalating from 12,500 ducats in 1506 to 27,200 in 1507 and facing years of building, he looked for a way to underwrite future construction, and he called on Agostino Chigi for advice. Among the many bankers who attended to the Church business, only Chigi was the pope’s confidant and friend as well as his financier.

  At a time when 2,000 ducats was a comfortable annual income for a noble, Chigi had paid 3,000 to purchase the coveted position of apostolic secretary, which assured him full access to Julius. Apostolic secretaries numbered only thirty and worked directly for the pope. Chigi continued to improve his portfolio, buying a position as notary of the Apostolic Chamber in 1507
, and later, gilding his venal offices with the purchase of a noble title, court palatine.

  The Apostolic Chamber was the finance department of the Curia. A classical Roman term referring to the Senate, the Curia of the early 1500s was small and informal—much different than it is today. Governance was divided among an administrative arm called the Apostolic Chancellery, a judiciary called the Rota, or wheel, and the Apostolic Chamber, the finance department, which was headed by a cardinal-chamberlain.

  The pope’s cousin Raffaele Riario served as cardinal-chamberlain. It was a position of substantial power. He hired the papal bankers, let out contracts, and oversaw a network of notaries, scribes, and clerks. Since Chigi’s tax concessions and alum monopoly came under the jurisdiction of the Apostolic Chamber, becoming a notary was comparable to buying a seat on the board of directors of the corporation that owned your company. To Chigi, it was insurance. If the papacy changed hands, his leases would be renewed and his operations continue without interruption.

  Because the Renaissance Church was both a marketplace and a meritocracy, a man like Agostino Chigi, a merchant, a banker, and a moneylender, through sagacity, shrewdness, and a dearth of scruples, could make himself not just a man of means but a man of position. Chigi pursued power so adroitly and gained the pope’s trust so absolutely that Julius adopted him, actually and metaphorically, grafting a new branch onto the della Rovere oak, the symbol on his papal crest.* It was the ultimate noblesse oblige.

  The scheme that Chigi proposed to underwrite St. Peter’s was a centuries-old custom—the granting of indulgences. If allowed by the pope, a penitent who in good faith had confessed his sins with a sincere heart could earn an indulgence, or redemption, by performing a specific charitable or selfless deed.

  Chigi advised Julius to set up a separate building fund for the Basilica and grant an indulgence to anyone who made an annual contribution to it. The idea was similar to a pledge drive today, except that instead of an immediate thank-you gift, say a logo tote bag, donors received a reduced sentence in purgatory—the inherent presumption being that if you could afford to contribute, you were probably not on the fast track to heaven.

  Julius did not act immediately to implement Chigi’s proposal, but neither did he reject it out of hand. It is not clear why he hesitated, since indulgences were an accepted way to raise money for capital projects and charitable causes. Instead, Julius continued cutting costs.

  In the interest of economy, he limited the use of expensive material, particularly travertine, which was costly to quarry and transport. Bricks and breccia, a form of crushed tufa that was cheap and plentiful, were used as much as possible to build the walls. Bramante had applied a fake travertine finish on an earlier project, and he planned to use it for the Basilica walls as well. He was casting the vaults and the shafts of the giant columns and using travertine for only the bases, capitals, and cornices.

  At the same time that Julius was practicing fiscal restraint, he was pursuing his imperial ambitions. It was a precarious balancing act. Urged on by his brash magister operae, Julius began to imagine the new St. Peter’s not just as a grand enterprise but as the centerpiece of a papal Palatine, modeled on the Forum of ancient Rome. At the start of his papacy, much of the city was still a ramshackle medieval town. A traveler visiting Rome in 1500 wrote: “There are parts within the walls which look like thick woods and wild beasts, hares, foxes, deer, and even porcupines, so it is said, breed in the caves.”

  All that was changing. Under the patronage of Julius, Rome replaced Florence as the capital of art and imagination. Humanists rambled through the imperial wilderness, reading poetry, philosophizing, and more than likely gossiping about their Curial employers. Rome was the site, the very dust and stones, the overgrown forums and crumbled baths, of one of the classical civilizations that they revered. The romantic imagination could wander freely among the mossy ruins where Ovid once recited his odes and Seneca tutored the young Nero in his pre-despotic puberty. The lolling cattle on the imperial hillsides and the meandering goats added to the picturesque scene.

  But papal Rome was more than broken cornices and fallen columns. It was also the place to land a plum job. The Church was the best career opportunity for young intellectuals. If you were intelligent and played your cards right, you could gain fame, wealth, even the papal tiara. Francesco Petrarch, the original humanist, set the tone when he said, “The true noble is not born but made.”

  The best and the brightest—painters, architects, Greek scholars, scientists, historians, poets, and musicians—flocked to Rome and found employment and advancement in the famiglia, or household, of the pope and his cardinals. The Vatican had the first Arabic printing press and produced the first cookbook as well as works on historical criticism, gardening, and fishing, one of the pope’s favorite pastimes.

  In a papal bull issued in 1507, Julius gave tax concessions to those who built, spurring a boom. Across the Tiber, cardinals, Curial bankers, and ambassadors to the papal court were building palaces, and much of the city became a construction site.

  The pope and his architect set the pace. They planned their Palatine together, poring over classical texts in the papal library to learn more about the imperial buildings. The descriptions of Nero’s Golden House, the Domus Aurea, in Tacitus and Suetonius, and Pliny the Younger’s descriptions of his own villas became their guides.

  Bramante designed a three-level complex in the Vatican to rival the imperial palaces. Covering more than five acres and called the Belvedere Court, it connected an enlarged and refurbished papal palace with a villa that Nicholas V had built on the north slope of the Vatican hill about three hundred yards away, called the Belvedere—“beautiful view.”

  The Belvedere Court would have lush terraced gardens and fountains, a permanent open-air arena with tiered seats for dramatic performances and bullfights, and a courtyard museum to display the pope’s collection of antiquities, including his prized sculpture now known as the Apollo Belvedere. Buildings and gardens would flow from each other as parts of the same architectural landscape. A wider bridge and broad new avenues leading from the Vatican would create easy access to the center of Rome. It was a plan fit for the Christian imperium of the second Julius.

  Although Raphael painted him as Euclid holding a pair of compasses and demonstrating the principles of geometry so integral to the Renaissance architectural ideal, Bramante was an experimenter. According to Vasari, he invented a kind of flying scaffold to use in casting vaults and devised a way to cast using wooden molds so that patterns would seem to be carved in the plaster. Bramante was constantly looking for new and better ways to build. To some contemporaries, he was “a capricious genius,” impulsive and often inattentive to detail, but Julius gave him more commissions than anyone could carry through with care and competence.

  As magister operae, Bramante was charged not only with building the Basilica, in itself the work of many lifetimes, but also with executing all the works throughout the city and the Papal States. With an enthusiasm that matched the pope’s own, he accepted every assignment that fired Julius’s restless mind: naval fortifications in the port of Civitavecchia, hydraulic machines, an apostolic palace in Loreto, a staircase in the Palazzo Communale in Bologna, a choir in the Roman church of Santa Maria del Popolo, even a machine for printing papal bulls “with a very beautiful screw.”

  To carry out the commissions, Bramante oversaw an operation so vast that a contemporary dubbed it “Bramante & Co.” He employed a huge construction force: his surveyor Riniero da Pisa, his chief carpenter Venttura da Pistoia, his overseer Giuliano Leno, and scores of artisans and laborers, including draftsmen, foremen, two types of masons to hew and lay stones, bricklayers, carpenters, wood-carvers, and unskilled workers. They drew the plans, quarried the stones, split the timber, drove the mule carts and oxen, raised the scaffolding, and dug the foundations. They fired the furnaces, mixed the cement, cut the bricks, and moved mountains of earth and stone. A virtual army of suppliers
provided tons of lime and sand, miles of rope, and forests of timber.

  The first architectural firm in Rome and very likely in the world, Bramante & Co. also employed five sub-architects and the most gifted fresco painters in Italy.

  Julius wanted every great artist in his service, which he equated with the service of the Church and the glory of God—and what he wanted, Bramante usually gave him. But one giant of the Renaissance eluded his reach. Oddly enough, he was Bramante’s old friend, Leonardo.

  Why not da Vinci? It is tantalizing to speculate. Why didn’t Julius call him to the Vatican after the Sforzas lost power in Milan? Leonardo was looking for a new patron then. If by some improbable fluke he had escaped the pope’s notice, why didn’t Bramante introduce them?

  When he wanted to impress Julius and diminish the influence of Michelangelo, Bramante turned instead to an inexperienced young painter from his hometown of Urbino.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A VIPER’S NEST

  Raphael Sanzio arrived in Rome in 1508 when some of the finest painters in Italy were at work in the papal palace frescoing the walls of a new second-floor apartment for the pope. Julius refused to live in the Borgia Apartment on the first floor because his hated predecessor had decorated it with frescoes of his mistress, Giulia “la Bella” Farnese, displayed as the Madonna.* On a bright autumnal day, Bramante brought his eager young protégé upstairs to the new papal apartment.

  What did they think—Pinturicchio and Luca Signorelli; Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, known as Sodoma; Bartolomeo Suardi, nicknamed Bramantino (“Little Bramante”) for his teacher; the Venetian Lorenzo Lotto, the Dutchman Johannes Ruysch, and Perugino, an old man now? They were painters of rich experience and enviable talent, accustomed to respect.