He is an old man, kneeling in prayer at the end of his life (he would die the next year), and although his hands are joined, his expression is not that of a humble man. No head bowed. No eyes lowered. He stares defiantly into the distance, weary, besieged but undefeated, and still determined. He doesn’t look like a contrite sinner begging forgiveness, or even benediction. More likely, he is ordering God to annihilate his enemies with a thunderbolt and grant him another ten, twenty, one hundred years—however long it would take to complete his grand enterprise.
Next door, in his library, was The School of Athens. It was Raphael’s first major fresco, and to help his young protégé, Bramante had sketched the setting. What Bramante did not build in stone, he drew for Raphael. The School of Athens is the closest approximation we have to the Basilica commissioned by Julius and conceived by Bramante.
Julius must have sat in his library in front of the fresco, only his banker or his architect for company, imagining the Basilica he would never enter. He was at the end of his pontificate. His health was declining, and his artists were sniping at one another. The great art he commissioned was composed in an atmosphere of jealousy and suspicion.
Bramante had finished the Basilica crossing. The piers were arched, and the vaults were being coffered with ornamental panels recessed into the ceiling. Julius would never see the dome raised or the Basilica finished. But in Raphael’s fresco the arching vaults rise over an enormous space that seems itself a dramatic element of the architecture. Classical thinkers discourse beneath towering ceilings that converge from four arms to a central dome. There, where liturgical ceremonies should unfold, the luminaries of ancient Greece and the artists of the new papal Rome gather and become one.
Like guests at a masked ball, the Renaissance artists appear in the guise of classical Greek thinkers: Plato painted with the face of Leonardo, Euclid in the person of Bramante, the astronomer Ptolemy lecturing to the student, Raphael. In the foreground, Heraclitus, “the weeping philosopher,” sits alone. More muscular than the other figures, he slumps on the steps, apart from them and looking as if he doesn’t want to be there. Heraclitus, who has the broad square forehead, flat squashed nose, and melancholy scowl of Michelangelo, came late to the fresco after Raphael’s clandestine visit to the Sistina.
Knowing now that he would not live to witness the dome of the Pantheon rising over the Basilica, Julius wanted at least to see the Sistine ceiling finished in his lifetime. But after four years, Michelangelo was still barricaded in the chapel. He was never satisfied. A deeper shadow here, the finger crooked a fraction more there. He couldn’t let the smallest detail go, and his slowness, his perfectionism, drove the old pope to tirades. Health and patience failing, Julius threatened to knock down the scaffolding if Michelangelo didn’t finish and come down.
On All Hallows’ Eve, October 31, 1512, one day shy of the last anniversary of his pontificate, Julius unveiled the ceiling to the marvel and amazement of all who beheld it. Locked in a monumental battle of wills, the twin Terribiles, irascible patron and painter, had wrenched out of misgiving and mistrust, fury and impatience, one of the sublime achievements of mankind.
If Bramante thought that he was marginalizing Michelangelo by relegating him to the Sistina, the aerial act did not turn out exactly as he had hoped. Michelangelo dumbfounded his rivals and made their jealousy seem like petty malice. It was sweet revenge.
The Sistina “placed Michelangelo beyond all envy.” He was without peer, and his greatest work, he believed, was ahead of him. Certainly now, Julius would allow him to return to the tomb. It was not to be.
On Christmas Eve, 1512, two months after unveiling the Sistine ceiling, the old warrior received the last sacrament. Julius had seen the Sistine ceiling and convened the Fifth Lateran Council, which presaged the coming reform of the Church. Now, in his final weeks, his mind was preoccupied with the grand enterprise he would not see—and the grand price tag it carried into the future.
The four arches of the dome were complete up to the pendentives, the curved, triangular sections that form a transition between arches and drum. “All four arches of the great chapel of St. Peter’s are vaulted which is a lovely thing and admirably fine to see,” a visitor wrote in July 1511. Bramante was making preparations to raise the dome—but slowly, and only on paper.
The clearest way to gauge the pace of construction is to look at the annual expenditures. From a high of 27,200 ducats in 1507, Julius spent 14,300 ducats on the Basilica in 1508, 13,438 in 1509, and 14,391 in 1510. In the last two years, 1511–12, he tightened the purse strings so drastically that building slowed almost to a standstill, and no further entries were made in the liber mandatorum.
Julius did not want his grandest and most controversial enterprise to become a financial burden for the Church, but neither did he want it scuttled by future popes. He needed to generate an ongoing cash flow that would continue to underwrite St. Peter’s after his death. With the future of the Basilica and the fiscal soundness of the Church weighing on his mind, he decided to implement the financing plan that Agostino Chigi had proposed.
In the final days of his life, Julius issued a papal bull granting an indulgence to all those who contributed to la fabbrica di San Pietro. It was the last and arguably the most momentous act in a momentous papacy. What seemed like a sound solution to the dying pope would have unimagined consequences for the Church. Building St. Peter’s would become the costliest crusade that the Church ever undertook.
Giuliano della Rovere—Pope Julius Secondo, the Christian Caesar and pontefice terribile—died on February 21, 1513, after asking his closest aides to pray for his immortal soul. What regrets did he have at death? What sins did he confess? Bribery? Misuse of power? Warmongering?
According to Paris de Grassis, the pope’s conscience was heavy in his last hours, “for he had sinned greatly and had not bestirred himself for the good of the Church as he should have done.”
Few popes provoked more vitriol in their lifetimes. Anti-Julius fury was pitiless. Scurrilous plays, cartoons, pasquinades, and diatribes of every sort condemned the della Rovere pope for his bellicosity, his wily politics, and his duplicitous power grabs.
To such critics as Erasmus, the Dutch satirist and armchair reformer, the Church was triumphant when it was most Christlike. The pope should be humble and penitent, concerned with saving the least among us, not strident and belligerent, hurling sacred weapons at any who dared to cross him. Erasmus abhorred Julius for his militancy and his arrogance:
The Popes are sufficiently generous with…the terrible bolt of the papal bull, which by a flicker hurls the souls of men to the depths of hell. Our Christian fathers and Vicars of Christ wield the bolt against no one with more zeal than against those who are moved by the devil to nibble at and diminish the Patrimony of Peter…. They look on themselves as true apostles…scattering what they are pleased to call her enemies. As if the Church had more deadly enemies than impious Popes who by their silence cause Christ to be forgotten, who use His laws to make money, who adulterate His word with forced interpretations, and who crucify Him with their corrupt life.
But to Julius, the Church was triumphant when it was seen to be the supreme authority, when the kingdom, the power, and the glory were radiant and absolute. To that end, he envisioned a single Italian nation-state* under the auspices of the Church. With the battle cry, “Fuori i barbari!”—“Out with the foreigners!”—he drove intruders back across the Alps. His political alliances were expedient, because they served a larger ambition: to make the Church of Rome preeminent. He switched allegiance as it suited his ends, and if all else failed, he had no compunction in declaring an enemy state in schism. This is essentially what he did when the French retook Bologna and announced that they were convening a council to try the pope as an apostate. Retreating in mock submission, Julius retaliated by convening the Fifth Lateran Council.
In 1512, the pope’s favorite orator, the Augustinian monk Egidio da Viterbo, opened the pr
oceedings with a clarion call for reform and renewal. Few believed it was sincere. In an unpublished diary, a skeptical Venetian expressed the widespread sentiment: “In an authentic council every recent pope from Innocent VIII and Alexander VI to the present pope would have been condemned and dethroned.” Although generally dismissed as a sham, one more contemptible misuse of power by an unscrupulous pontiff, Lateran V proved to be a prelude to the genuinely reforming Council of Trent.
History has been kinder to Julius than his contemporaries were. The Renaissance scholar Jacob Burckhardt called him “the savior of the Papacy,” which had reached its nadir under the Borgias. Julius may have gambled the Church and risked his own eternal soul, as his critics charged, but his legacy is unmatched. He brought recalcitrant princes to heel, reclaimed papal territories (which would remain loyal to the Church until 1870), and ennobled the world with art. “It was through him that Rome became the Classical City of the World…and the Papacy the pioneer of civilization.”
Judged by his art and not his actions, Julius was an extraordinary civilizing force. He was certainly no saint, but in the context of the Renaissance, and compared with other popes, there were worse sinners. He didn’t transgress as heedlessly as other Renaissance popes. He was not guilty of nepotism or simony* except when absolutely necessary—as in the synod that elected him pope—and he seldom indulged in concupiscence, although he fathered three daughters: Felice, Clarissa, and Giulia. In the Renaissance Church a lapse in celibacy was not a detriment to career advancement.
He inherited a Church that was spiritually and financially bankrupt. When he died, the Lateran Council was in session and the Vatican treasury was full. In spite of his costly initiatives, he left the Church richer than any other pope. According to a contemporary account, there were more than 200,000 ducats in the cash box at his death, as well as tiaras and precious stones valued at 150,000 ducats and gold and silver plate valued at 50,000 ducats.
For all that wealth, Julius left the Church an incomparably greater gift—the gift of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bramante. Today, we look back at the artists he supported with the certitude of hindsight and history, and their talent seems obvious. But the best contemporary talent is not always clear, and in the heat of the moment, the truest are often passed over for the most facile.
Julius saw ability, even genius, where none was evidenced. Whether the intrigues ascribed to Bramante were real or imagined, in art as in everything, Julius made up his own mind. With extraordinary prescience, he coerced the best sculptor into painting, and the result is the Sistine ceiling. He commissioned an unproven twenty-five-year-old to paint over three rooms in the Vatican palace where more seasoned artists were at work, and the result is the Stanze di Raphael. And he appointed an over-the-hill artist with only a couple of buildings to his credit to build the first church of Christendom.
Like a sea surge or a mountain avalanche, Julius overwhelmed everything and everyone and wrested from history, from bickering monarchs and pleasure-loving prelates, from carping artists with superheated egos, from the ruins of an empire and the excesses of the Renaissance Church, a vision that became forever after the symbol of the kingdom of Christ on earth.
His ambition was inscribed on the medal struck to commemorate that cold April Sunday in 1506: Non nobis, Domine, sed tuam gloriam—“Not for ours, Lord, but for your glory.” And if he could not always distinguish clearly between the two, his patrimony is enduring.
After he died, a satirical dialogue entitled Julius exclusus became a sensation throughout Europe. The anonymous author imagined the pope arriving at the gates of heaven and confronting Peter:
JULIUS: Why don’t you cut out the nonsense and open the door, unless you would rather have it battered down? Do you see what a retinue I have?
PETER: To be sure, I see thoroughly hardened brigands. But, in case you don’t know it, these doors you must storm with other weapons.
JULIUS: Enough talk, I say! Unless you obey right away, I shall hurl—even against you—the thunderbolt of excommunication, with which I once terrified the mightiest of kings, or for that matter whole kingdoms…. In my Pontificate I carried on in such away that there is no one…to whom the Church, to whom Christ Himself, owes so much as to me…. Perhaps you are still dreaming of that old Church, in which you and a few starveling bishops ran a really frigid Pontificate, subject to poverty, sweat, dangers, and a thousand nuisances. Time has changed everything for the better. The Roman Pope is now quite a different thing…. What if you could see today so many sacred buildings erected by kingly wealth, so many thousands of priests everywhere (many of them very rich), so many bishops equal to the greatest kings in military power and in wealth, so many splendid palaces belonging to priests, and especially if you could see today in Rome so many Cardinals dressed in purple with regiments of servants crowding around them, so many horses better than those of a king, so many mules decorated with linen, gold, and jewels, some of them even shod in gold and silver? But then, if you caught sight of the Supreme Pontiff being carried high in the air in a golden chair by soldiers, and everyone worshipping him all along the way as he waves his hand; if you could hear the booming of cannon, the noise of horns, the blare of trumpets; if you could see the flash of artillery, hear the applause of the people, their shouting, see everything glowing in torchlight, and even the most powerful princes having difficulty being admitted to kiss the blessed feet…then, I say, if you had seen and heard all of this—what would you say?
PETER: That I was looking at a tyrant worse than worldly, an enemy of Christ, the bane of the Church.
When Julius exclusus was published, a friend in Louvain wrote to Erasmus, “Everyone here is reading the little book on Pope Julius excluded from heaven.” The satire became the first international bestseller, and the anonymous author turned out to be Erasmus.
PART TWO
THE DEPLORABLE MEDICI POPES 1513–1534
My nature has always disposed me to desire the overthrow of the government of the Church. But fortune has so willed it that my relations with two Popes have been of a kind to force me to labor and strive for their advancement. Were it not for this, I should have loved Martin Luther more than myself, in the hope that his following might destroy, or at any rate, clip the wings of this vile tyranny of the priests.
—Francesco Guicciardini
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE FIRST MEDICI PRINCE
The death of Julius II settled over Rome like the calm after a storm. He was a turbulent force, roiling the waters and wresting from the turmoil immortal art and architecture. But the man was exhausting, and when he died, there was a desire for serenity and civility—a relief from the heroic and a return to life on a more human scale. In that spirit, the papal conclave turned to a cardinal-prince of Florence, heir to a great humanist legacy—thirty-eight-year-old Giovanni de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo il Magnifico. The new pope took the name Leo X.
A Roman hostess planning a dinner party might have hesitated to invite the intemperate Julius, but Leo was the perfect guest—impeccable manners, broad interests, amusing, and just naughty enough. The quintessential Renaissance prince, born to wealth, nurtured in luxury, and enamored of beauty, Giovanni de’ Medici was a pretty child of great curiosity, who grew up to be pudgy and effete—not at all a dashing figure like his father. From his earliest years, he was destined for the clergy. He was a priest at age eight, abbot of the Benedictine house at Monte Cassino at eleven, and a prince of the Church at thirteen.
When the young cardinal was leaving Florence for Rome, his father offered this advice. “Rome is a sink of all iniquity,” Lorenzo told his son. You will meet men “who will endeavor to corrupt you and incite you to vices. All the Christian world would prosper if the cardinals were what they ought to be, because in such a case there always would be a good pope, upon which the tranquility of Christendom so materially depends.” It was a dire Godspeed, and like a typical teenager, the young son ignored his father’s warning and reveled in
the sink of iniquities.
If the medieval Church exerted a seductive hold on the imagination with the promise of salvation, the Renaissance Church held out the promise of an earthly paradise—“thy kingdom come…on earth as it is in heaven.” Humanists were secular and worldly, and they made Renaissance Rome their arena. They staged the festivals and the pageantry, delivered the sermons and orations, and wrote the histories of the period. They gave the city its style and expressed its cultural ideals.
The Renaissance has been called “an adventure of the mind” that engaged not only artists and intellectuals but also bankers, businessmen, and heads of state. No daunting chasms separated the ivory tower or atelier from the marketplace. Men of ideas and men of action shared a delight in knowledge and a passion for Plato. In reaction to the Aristotelian dialectic of Thomas Aquinas, they enshrined him as their philosophic god. These sixteenth-century neo-Platonists made beauty their ideal and man the measure of all things—the harmonious center of creation, freed from the constraints of the medieval Church to express and realize every desire.
Amid the easygoing morality, the God of the Thomists receded from the footlights and the idea of the individual, messy and flawed, in need of confession and contrition, was replaced by the idealized man—perfectly proportioned, free to express himself sensually, artistically, and intellectually.
If Florence and Urbino, city-states of refined culture, were the Boston of their day, Renaissance Rome was New York—noisy, flashy, and cosmopolitan. It drew churchmen and ambassadors, artists and intellectuals, from every part of Europe. It was a time of spectacle and splendor, when life, thought, eccentricity, and art were committed on a grand scale. It was also a time of malfeasance and myopia.
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