R. A. Scotti

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

  They must have been tired of making the circuit from Florence to Perugia, Milan to Urbino to Venice—tired of the road, the capricious patrons, the never-ending contest for commissions. They had landed a cushy assignment in the Vatican of Julius, employed by the best. Accommodations were plush, and there was plenty of work, until Bramante brought in the boy, a stripling of twenty-five.

  Arm thrown across the young man’s shoulder, Bramante introduced him as a friend and protégé—Raffaello Sanzio, son of Giovanni. Some of the older artists must have remembered Giovanni Santi, the court painter in Urbino in the exalted days of Duke Federigo, and the little boy with the face of an angel and a crown of golden ringlets who painted beside his father.

  Perugino, eyes moist, rushed forward and embraced Raphael like a son. It was an emotional moment for the old painter. He pinched the boy’s cheek affectionately, marveling at how he had grown. After Giovanni died, Perugino had taken the boy into his studio and taught him to paint, replacing the father and teacher that Raphael had lost. Perugino took pride in the youngster who learned so well that “his copies could not be distinguished from his master’s.”

  Seeing Perugino embrace the boy, the other artists welcomed him. They probably looked on Raphael as an assistant more than an equal. They may have heard of him from the brief time he spent in Florence, but Raphael had never frescoed a large space or composed a complex dramatic painting. On Bramante’s word, the pope was giving him a chance to “show his worth.” There is no reason to suppose that they felt threatened by him—at least not at first. Unlike Leonardo or Michelangelo, Raphael did not provoke fear.

  Most artists have “a certain element of savagery and madness,” Vasari writes. “Raphael had no fight neither against men nor against his own heart. He was not obliged like so many other geniuses to give birth to his works by suffering; he produced them as a fine tree produces fruit. The sap was abundant and the cultivation perfect.” He had the face of an innocent and manners to match, respectful toward the older painters, deferential to his teacher Perugino. But his amiable character concealed intense ambition.

  When he arrived at the Vatican, most of the rooms were already frescoed. Piero della Francesca had finished one scene. Signorelli was completing another wall, and Bramantino, the Milanese, had painted many figures. Raphael began in the Stanza della Segnatura. Although he was the greenest of the pope’s painters, he quickly outshone all the other artists, stunning them with his unexpected skill.

  When Julius saw Raphael’s first fresco, he recognized a special gift. Overnight, Perugino and the rest found themselves unemployed, their paintings obliterated, and the entire work of frescoing the papal apartments given to the boy-genius “so that he alone might have the glory.”

  The more seasoned and celebrated artists were packing their cases when the workmen came in. They brought chisels to chip off the old frescos and cloth bags of sand and lime to mix into plaster to recoat the walls. As the frescoes began disappearing, the floors were covered with a blanket of brilliant flakes, the labor of months now broken plaster. Raphael would not allow the work of his old teacher Perugino to be touched, but the other walls were chiseled bare, then replastered, rendered smooth and blank to receive the genius of the wunderkind.

  What must have seemed like reckless caprice on the pope’s part was a prescient stroke in the light of history. Vasari writes that Raphael gave “such a proof of his powers as made men understand that he was resolved to hold the sovereignty, without question, among all who handled the brush.”

  For all his self-effacing charm and easy grace, Raphael was immodest. He wanted to prove that he was the best. There was only one more artist to surpass, and a few months later, he returned from Bologna.

  Sweet-talked with promises, Michelangelo came back to Rome in the spring of 1508, expecting to resume sculpting the tomb. But Julius had a very different project in mind, one that would honor the memory of his uncle, Sixtus IV, who had set him on the road to the papacy and built the Sistine Chapel. He asked Michelangelo to fresco the central vault of the chapel ceiling and offered him the very generous sum of three thousand ducats.

  Michelangelo was furious. He was a sculptor, not a painter. His wet nurse was the wife of a stonecutter. “With the milk of my nurse, I sucked in the chisels and hammers wherewith I make my figures,” he liked to say. He had come back to Rome to carve the tomb, he told Julius. “Get Raphael to fresco your ceiling.” Michelangelo’s refusals were “so insistent,” Condivi wrote, “that the pope was about to fly into a rage…. But then seeing his obstinacy, Michelangelo set out to do the work.”

  Because the ceiling was so high—sixty-eight feet—Bramante had built a hanging scaffold. Michelangelo refused to mount it, insinuating that a faulty scaffold was a convenient way to dispose of a rival. Muttering that “a poor man could marry off two daughters” with the money he was saving on rope, he tore down Bramante’s scaffold and built his own freestanding device.

  On May 10, with extreme ill will and dark protestations, Michelangelo closed himself in the Sistine Chapel. A short time later, still complaining, he went back to Julius and renegotiated his contract. For six thousand ducats, he would paint not just the central vault but the entire ceiling—three thousand square feet—and not with the twelve apostles, as Julius had ordered. They were poor men, Michelangelo told him, and they would make a poor fresco. He wanted to choose his own subject matter.

  Pride and faith impelled him. He painted for God and Michelangelo, and to show up Bramante, a man of bonhomie, as sly as a fox. Each day, as long as the light held, suspended five stories in the air, tempera in his eyes and splattering his beard, the chapel reeking of egg yolks, Michelangelo worked like a slave at forced labor. His brain roiled. Ideas for cartoons came to him mixed with dark suspicions. Bramante had foisted the ceiling on him to humiliate him. A vast space, a difficult shape, a treacherous height, an impossible position, an uncongenial medium—he was set up to fail. Even for an experienced painter, the Sistina was an impossible assignment.

  Michelangelo had expanses of ceiling to paint before he could sculpt the tomb. His marble was still piled in the square, awaiting his chisel. It was the prize, the consolation that kept him climbing the scaffolding at dawn each day. One more panel, and one more, then he could return to the tomb. Weeks turned to months and months to years. His neck stiffened from peering up for so many hours, and his eyes became bloodshot from constantly wiping away the drips of paint. His body “bent like a bow,” he said, and his “beard touched heaven.” He wrote to his brother: “I am living here in a state of great anxiety and of the greatest physical fatigue. I have no friends and want none.”

  While Michelangelo struggled with dampness and mildew, Raphael was completing The School of Athens, the first of his extraordinary narrative paintings for the papal apartments. Raphael didn’t paint in quietude. The Stanza della Segnatura was Julius’s personal library, and Tomasso Inghirami, his corpulent, boisterous librarian, was often in attendance. The librarian’s sonorous voice could be heard booming from the book stacks, declaiming on politics and religion or reading aloud. Julius looked in often. The library was a personal room, and the frescoes Raphael was creating were for the pope’s own pleasure—a portrait of Rome in the age of Julius. Raphael welcomed the pope’s visits, flattered and pleased by the attention.

  The atmosphere in the Sistina was far less cordial. Michelangelo banned Julius from the chapel and guarded against intruders by rigging a canvas beneath the scaffolding. It had the double effect of a canopy protecting the chapel from splattering paint and a horizontal screen concealing his work. No one except his assistants could see the ceiling in progress, and he didn’t even trust them. Michelangelo suspected that they were accepting bribes to sneak in the curious, and he took measures to deal personally with anyone who dared to come snooping.

  Once, hearing the chapel door open and close stealthily, he prepared to pounce. As footsteps approached, he hurled boards down from his scaffold on t
he head of the intruder. Julius let out such a mighty roar that, Vasari reports, Michelangelo “became afraid” and “had to fly from his presence.” He escaped again to Florence, where he stayed until the papal temper cooled.

  While Michelangelo was in Florence, Raphael, who had become increasingly curious about the frustrating unknown on the other side of the chapel door, borrowed the key from Bramante and slipped in. Staggered by the raw beauty and muscular intensity of what he saw, he returned to his own finished fresco and inserted a new figure. Then, he slyly tried to dislodge his incomparable rival.

  “Raphael, when he saw the new and brilliant style of this work, being a brilliant imitator, sought through Bramante to paint the remainder himself,” Condivi writes. When Michelangelo discovered the duplicity, he blamed Bramante. In high dudgeon, he protested bitterly to the pope.

  Michelangelo felt trapped in an artistic triangle, subservient to Bramante and competing with Raphael. They worked in close proximity, separated only by a few corridors, the most talented artist in Italy and his wunderkind challenger—three hundred feet apart in physical distance, worlds apart in every other way except talent.

  The metamorphosis of Raphael is one of the unresolved mysteries of art history. In the span of a few years, with the full confidence of the pope and the support of Bramante, he transformed himself from an unexceptional painter of Madonnas into the purest expression of the High Renaissance. It was an extraordinary and rapid evolution.

  His critics, Michelangelo as vociferous as any, scorned him as a copyist, not an original talent. “Raphael did not inherit his excellencies from Nature, but obtained them through study and application,” Michelangelo said dismissively. Both he and Leonardo were iconoclasts who scorned the Renaissance’s golden rules. Michelangelo said, “One cannot make fixed rules, making figures as regular as posts,” and broke them. Leonardo said, “I wish to work miracles,” and ignored them. Raphael’s easy genius flowed within the parameters of the Renaissance. He was the quintessential artist of an age that wanted to return to a classical world, not invent modern times.

  Like a sea sponge, he was amorphous and absorbent. He drank in styles and techniques, made them his own, and then made them better than anyone else. “Other paintings may be said to be pictures, but those of Raphael were life itself,” Vasari writes.

  Michelangelo was jealous of Raphael’s ease and popularity. The dueling artists met once in the square. Raphael, as always, was the center of a lively group. Michelangelo, as always, was alone. “You with your band like a bravo,” he scoffed as he brushed by. “And you alone like a hangman,” Raphael countered.

  The papal palace became a viper’s nest. The animosity that had rankled between Bramante and the Florentine faction turned venomous. The Tuscans believed that Bramante felt threatened by Michelangelo’s enormous talent. They saw the sculptor’s banishment to the Sistina as a perfidious plot to keep Michelangelo away from the tomb, away from the new Basilica, and occupied endlessly on an impossible assignment.

  Michelangelo imagined the tomb as his masterwork—“the grand showcase of his talent”—just as the Basilica was Bramante’s. Ultimately, both men lost. Neither Michelangelo’s tomb nor Bramante’s Basilica would be completed as planned. But in the all-consuming throes of creation, when everything was still possible, they vied for their artistic vision. The stakes were high—immortality and the pope’s favor, the one dependent on the other.

  Although their characters were incompatible, the contention between Michelangelo and Bramante was as much artistic rivalry as personal animosity. Each recognized the talent of the other, and like jealous suitors, they competed for the favor of Julius. They intrigued, connived, and carped to displace each other and be first in his affection, his opinion, and his patronage.

  Julius would not choose between them. He insisted on having them both in his service—the sculptor of the Pietà and the architect of the Tempietto. There was no escape. Their fortunes were snarled inextricably in the person and patronage of il pontefice terribile.

  Bramante made himself agreeable, always aware that his reputation and success depended on the pope’s favor. Michelangelo seemed perpetually at war with himself or another—and very often, the other was the pope. They were twin Terribiles, with huge, easily bruised egos and absolute conviction in the truth as they saw it. Both had the highest standards and the shortest fuse. When they exploded, they continued to burn. Michelangelo, who endured longer, seethed for decades.

  Julius loved Michelangelo, but he enjoyed the company of Bramante. Michelangelo was so young, half his age, and a hothead. Bramante was a contemporary. There was not even a year’s difference between them. Both were impulsive, decisive, and uncluttered by the doubts that plagued Michelangelo. They shared a passion for the antiquities of Rome and the poetry of Dante. A touching letter written from Bologna in December 1510, when Julius was recovering from a serious illness, describes Bramante reciting Dante to him like an actor on a stage.

  A sixteenth-century writer called Bramante “a man of great talent, a cosmographer, vernacular poet, and excellent painter.” A pupil described “my teacher, Bramante” as “an artist of the first order…familiar with the works of the Italian poets. Though he could not write, he had a wonderful memory and spoke with ease and eloquence.”*

  Neither artist was an easy man. Even at the peak of his celebrity, lionized as the papal architect, with the ear of Pope Julius, Bramante remained essentially a loner. He may have been gay. He never married or fathered a child. Vasari refers to his “intimate friend” Giuliano Leno, who made himself wealthy overseeing the construction yard of St. Peter’s. “Avoiding melancholy and boredom as far as possible, I have always nourished my soul on happiness and pleasure,” Bramante himself wrote. “What I am permitted to do, I also think I have the right to do.”

  He was mercurial, unable to make a firm commitment, either personally or architecturally. “As time changes in a moment, / So my thought that follows it changes too,” he wrote in a sonnet. Still, he plunged into life, as he plunged into work, with gusto. He lived lavishly in an apartment in the Belvedere. “The pope made him rich and gave him gifts and offices,” a contemporary said. Asked once how he was doing, Bramante answered, “Excellently, for my ignorance pays my expenses.”

  Michelangelo was a tortured soul. He once said, “I live as a happy man with an unhappy destiny.” He always tottered on the brink of ruin—or imagined he did. Although he had invested shrewdly in real estate in his native Tuscany, he lived poor, nickel-and-diming himself and his patrons. If he smelled rank, it probably meant he was working well. Michelangelo may have been the original unwashed artist. He didn’t like to break his concentration by taking time to wash, eat, or change his clothes. Often, he fell asleep with his boots on.

  Life and art were a ceaseless, often painful, struggle. In a sonnet on art, he wrote:

  This savage woman, by no strictures bound,

  Has ruled that I’m to burn, die, suffer….

  My blood, however, she drains pound by pound;

  She strips my nerves the better to undo

  My soul….

  Faith was the fuse that fired his imagination. Bramante, in typical Renaissance style, rarely allowed religion to impinge on life, especially when it came to lining up a prize commission like the Basilica. Vasari writes: “He was not over-scrupulous although his ideas were clearly better than his rivals’.”

  Bramante was brash, a man of keen enthusiasms and quick actions, often too quick. He was not a precise man, a dangerous failing in an architect, and certainly not a technocrat, and he gained a negative reputation as a structural engineer, even as he became acknowledged as the foremost architect in Rome. His weakness was his rush to build. Vasari notes the “extraordinary speed,” even fury, with which he produced his architecture. When it worked, he was called resilient and adaptable; when it failed, foolish, even dangerous.

  To Michelangelo, who was consumed by every detail, Bramante’s often hap
hazard, hasty construction was reckless, and his Basilica yard was corrupt. Because of his loose management, overseers enriched themselves, substituting shoddy materials. Michelangelo was appalled by the architect’s cavalier building methods. According to Condivi, Bramante “feared the judgment of Michelangelo who revealed many of his errors.”

  Memories were long, and rivalries enduring. In 1542, thirty-four years later, Michelangelo was still brooding over perceived slights and persecution. Bramante and Raphael “wanted to ruin me,” he wrote. “All the occasions for discord arising between Pope Julius and me, all of them resulted from the envy of Bramante and Raphael of Urbino; and this was the cause of his not continuing his tomb while he was still living, and was meant to ruin me. Raphael had good reason for this, for all his art he had from me.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE DEATH OF JULIUS

  Raphael’s frescoes are painted stories as vivid as writings, and the dramas of Julius’s pontificate unfold in them. Almost thirty years after Melozzo da Forlì painted the four nephews of Sixtus IV, Raphael painted the Mass of Bolsena in the Stanza di Heliodorus. Julius kneels on a prie-dieu. Behind him to the right is Raffaele Riario, and gathered below them are the Swiss Guards. Riario and the guards represent money and might, apt symbols for this redoubtable soldier-pope who charged into battle to subjugate errant states and charged into building, demolishing the most sacred shrine in Europe on a whim.

  There is no trace of the young cardinals who attended their uncle in this later fresco. Riario appears portly, balding, and eminently self-possessed. Julius’s physical presence is diminished. The hair is white. The shoulders, though still straight, are narrower now, compressed, the cheeks sunken. The once-handsome face is bearded, a symbol of mourning in the 1500s.