The Renaissance clergy believed less, enjoyed more, and blithely risked their immortal souls. Success was prized over virtue, beauty over goodness, freedom over restraint, audacity over humility. Aesthetics, not morality, were the measure, and a commandment might be broken with impunity now and then, if done with style.
The cardinals who administered the religious and political affairs of the Church were not always ordained. The office did not require them to be. They were diplomats and administrators—the Roman Senate of the Roman Church. Their red hats didn’t impede their enjoyment of life. Eclectic, vain, curious, slanderous, capricious, they surrounded themselves with artists, musicians, and intellectuals, and wallowed in conspicuous consumption. The same cardinal who subsidized Leonardo for sixteen years paid one hundred ducats, three times the average yearly salary, for a parrot that could recite the Apostles’ Creed. But the best of them made their palaces salons where controversial ideas were debated and construed.
In art and ideas the Renaissance of Florence emulated Athens. By contrast, the Renaissance of the popes was thoroughly Roman. Where the Greeks strove for a universal ideal, the Roman Church sought the perfection of the individual. Its preoccupation was matter and spirit, the dichotomy that makes us human—the belching, sweating, aching, lusting body versus the animating soul. An effort to camouflage, even deny, the body would emerge from the Counter-Reformation, but the Renaissance Church reveled in the fullness of human nature. The sinner didn’t whine and make excuses. He expected to pay for his sins in the next life. In the meantime, though, there was this rambunctious, expansive life to enjoy.
Since humanism had exalted man as the measure of all things, nothing was too huge, too outlandish, too extreme, to be thought and tried. Art and ideas flowed freely in the halls of the pontifical palace. Papal patronage extended to painting, sculpture, decorative arts, architecture, music, theater, literature, and science, often at the expense of pastoral care.
Leo set the tone for his pontificate on the day he was elected. “Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us,” he said to his cousin Giulio. And enjoy it he did. For his coronation, he threw the biggest party that Rome had seen since the reign of Nero.
Florentines flocked south for their Medici son’s consecration. Leonardo arrived for the event, as did many less illustrious Tuscans. In the crowd was a physician who recorded each gaudy detail and wrote with unabashed envy, and perhaps a trace of tongue-in-cheek: “I experienced so violent a desire to become Pope myself that I was unable to obtain a wink of sleep or any repose all that night…. I really believe that everyone would rather be made apope than a prince.”
Riding sidesaddle on a white stallion, the new pope blessed the carousers with a silk-gloved hand. Triumphal arches marked the procession route. There were days of feasting, carnivals, festivals, and pageants, and fountains gushed red wine.
In Leo X’s pontificate, amusement became an art, not a diversion. There were pageants on the Capitoline, bullfights in the Belvedere gardens, and hunting parties of three hundred in the campagna. The Medici pope reveled in entertainment. Francesco Guicciardini, a contemporary historian and a Florentine partial to the Medici, wrote: “Rome and the whole court basked in the highest flower of felicity…Leo being by nature given to ease and pleasure and now in his overweening careless grandeur…estranged from practical affairs.”
The Medici prince kept a menagerie of civet cats, chameleons, apes, parrots, lions, and the king of his animal kingdom—a snow white elephant named Hanno. It was a gift from King Manuel of Portugal, and the purest thing seen in Rome in years. Hanno arrived at the Vatican wearing two pairs of red shoes identical to the pope’s and genuflected three times. Leo was enchanted. Anything odd or exotic captured his fancy, from wild beasts to dwarfs. The flamboyant humanist Pietro Aretino remarked after watching him applaud the ribald antics of a midget: “It is difficult to judge whether the merits of the learned or the tricks of fools afford the most delight to his Holiness.”
Leo was generous to a fault—a young man of unwavering family loyalty, sweet disposition, and expensive taste. He was an amateur in the true meaning of the word—a lover of wit, poetry, music, and theater. He cultivated the most skilled artisans and intellectuals of the day, surrounding himself with painters, poets, and scholars, among them Raphael, Pietro Bembo, Jacopo Sadoleto, Aretino, Castiglione, and Erasmus, whose criticism of Julius had been so scathing. Although his intentions smacked of noblesse oblige, they were generally laudable:
Since God called us to the high dignity of the Pontificate we have devoted ourself to the government and extension of the Church, and, among other subjects, we have conceived it to be our duty to foster especially literature and the fine arts: for, from our earliest youth we have been thoroughly convinced that, next to the knowledge and true worship of the Creator, nothing is better or more useful for mankind than such studies, which are not only an adornment and a standard of human life, but are also of service in every circumstance.
Prudence and temperance were not the new pope’s virtues. He preferred opulence to order, spectacle to substance, and ease above all.
Characteristically, Leo’s first intervention in the new St. Peter’s was dictated by personal comfort. For seven years, the cardinals had suffered the vagaries of wind and weather at Julius II’s alfresco masses. Leo had shivered in the icy winters and sweltered in his heavy vestments in the sticky Roman summer. Once, on a turbulent June morning at the solemn feast of the apostles Peter and Paul, the wind churned up so much dust from the construction yard that it felt like a sirocco. Led by Leo, then Cardinal de’ Medici, the buffeted princes of the Church, grit clinging to their chasubles and filling every pore, rose up as a single body and sought sanctuary in the Sistine Chapel.
Unlike Julius, Leo was more epicure than stoic. He ordered Bramante to erect a temporary shelter over the papal altar so that he could perform his liturgical duties without distress.
Bramante began to build a tegurium, an altar house, between the new foundation piers. He designed a graceful chapel in the style of a small Doric temple, but he left it for his assistants to complete. The Basilica had exhausted him, and he no longer had the energy of Julius to feed his own.
When Leo was elected pope, the earth shifted for Bramante. The Medici papacy brought a resurgence of the Florentine faction that he had so successfully marginalized. Tired and disheartened, Bramante had to watch Giuliano da Sangallo return to Rome and embark on plans for an elaborate new villa for the Medici in Piazza Navona.
Bramante felt beleaguered without Julius and disconcerted by the ascension of a young Medici cardinal-prince with very different priorities than, and at best ambivalent feelings about, his predecessor. The relationship between the della Rovere and Medici families was long and tangled. The bad blood between them went back to the pontificate of Sixtus IV, when two papal nephews were implicated in the Pazzi conspiracy to unseat Leo’s father and uncle.
Although being Julius’s man did not endear the architect to the new pope, Leo approached the problem of Bramante gingerly. The capomaestro was the preeminent builder in the city, and he was too well connected to be replaced. But Bramante was an old man now, in constant pain from gout. The gentlest touch made him wince, and his fingers were so gnarled and swollen that he couldn’t grip a pencil to draw a plan. His health was failing, and his hasty construction was raising questions.
Bramante had always been a one-man show. As magister operae, he controlled design, planning, construction, and oversight—every aspect of the enterprise. It was a Herculean task—and the Basilica was only one of the multiple Vatican projects that he administered. If every detail was not closely attended to, it was understandable, but serious structural problems were becoming apparent.
Leo made no attempt to oust the architect. Instead, he diluted Bramante’s power by bringing in assistants purportedly to lighten the old man’s burden. That both assistants were at least Bramante’s age or older, and that one was hi
s longtime rival, suggest that Christian kindness was not the pope’s sole motivation. In place of a single chief of works, Leo created a hydra. He let Bramante maintain artistic control and his title, but he put construction and administration in the hands of the Florentines.
Leo called on eighty-year-old Fra Giovanni Giocondo to work with Bramante and address the structural concerns. The elderly Dominican monk had worked for the pope’s father, Lorenzo, in Florence. He was a quintessential Renaissance man—a teacher, philosopher, bridge builder, architect, expert on classical antiquities, editor of the letters of Pliny, and illustrator of Vitruvius’s De architectura libri decem. Most significant, he was arguably the best engineer in Italy. As Bramante prepared to raise the enormous dome, Fra Giocondo’s engineering skill would be invaluable.
The monk’s appointment was a wise decision, and Bramante may have welcomed it. But six months later, his position was weakened further when Giuliano da Sangallo assumed operational control of St. Peter’s. The architect whom Julius had passed over in favor of Bramante finally had the opportunity denied him eight years before.
It was quite a triumvirate—the independent and proud capomaestro Bramante forced to share power with his gifted old rival Sangallo and the practical-minded Fra Giocondo. How it would have worked in actual terms is conjecture. Bramante did not live long enough for any real collaboration. He died in the second year of Leo’s pontificate.
A dialogue written by Andrea Guarna, a much gentler satirist than Erasmus, circulated around Rome. Bramante had refused to enter paradise because he didn’t like the steep approach from earth.
“I will build a new, broad, and commodious road,” the architect proposed to St. Peter, “so that old and feeble souls may travel on horseback. And then I will make a new Paradise with delightful residences for the blessed.”
When St. Peter rejected his proposal out of hand, Bramante offered to go down to hell and build a new and better inferno. Bramante’s grand plans didn’t interest the keeper of the keys.
“Tell me,” St. Peter demanded, “what made you destroy my church?”
Trying to assuage him, Bramante answered, “Don’t worry, Peter. The new Pope will build a new, more beautiful church for you.”
“Well, then,” Peter replied, “you must wait at the gate until it’s finished.”
Bramante died in 1514. Another century would pass before St. Peter’s was consecrated, and all the major architects in Rome would have a hand in its construction.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AN EMPTY STAGE
The stage was suddenly empty. Within seventeen months, the twin engines of the Roman Renaissance were gone, leaving the old St. Peter’s partially demolished and the new Basilica a work barely in progress. Between 1505 and 1510, Bramante had completed the Basilica crossing. He had raised the four giant piers that would support his flying-saucer dome, joined them with soaring coffered vaults, and established an internal order of paired Corinthian pilasters so colossal that the stepped bases alone were ten feet high and the shafts began far above eye level. Every element of his construction drew the eye upward. At the western end, he had completed Rossellino’s tribune and faced the exterior with Doric columns, and he had begun building the corner chapels.
It has been said that Bramante built the skeleton of the Basilica, and those who came after him covered it with muscle, sinew, and skin. A truer description is that Bramante gave St. Peter’s its soul, and his successors added the body.
In his eulogy, Egidio da Viterbo, the fiery orator and friend of Julius, declared:
…all people are persuaded, on the basis of the visible pile of foundations already laid, that whatever will happen in the city of Rome and among whatever great works there come to be, this will forever be the greatest of them. Nothing in Italy and indeed nothing in the universal orb of nations will ever be more sublime, or in cost more magnificent, or in excellence greater, more splendid, more admirable.
Although Bramante had made extraordinary progress in a very few years, when he died nothing was certain except the scale of the Basilica. His design was so unsettled that in his good-natured satire, Guarna has St. Peter saying, “We still don’t know where to put the doors of my church.” More alarming than the vacillation were the structural concerns. The foundations of the new Basilica were shifting. Cracks appeared in the piers. From the outset, the project had been ambitious. Increasingly, it seemed impractical.
The Pantheon is a solid cylinder, and the dome rests on top of it. In effect, it stands on the ground, and the massive weight is distributed evenly. The design of the dome, which is four times thicker at the base than at the top, also reduces the weight that the continuous wall must bear. Because space was an active element in Bramante’s architecture, he wanted to keep the core—the central circle beneath the dome—open, allowing the arms of the Basilica to extend from it like roads from a hub. The four discrete piers would have to absorb the full weight of the dome.
After Bramante’s death, there was concern that the piers were not strong enough to support the dome, and worse, that the construction of the dome was beyond technical competence. Bramante’s concept was untried. No one had ever vaulted such a broad expanse at such a dizzying height and balanced it on such dubious supports. It was a risky and daring experiment—a fantasy, some said.
Serlio called the design “a great revelation to architects,” but he doubted that it could be executed. Criticizing the dome as “bold rather than well-considered” and Bramante’s calculations as “utopian,” he wrote: “As the elevation shows, the great mass and weight of the dome was to rest on four soaring piers; any prudent architect would do well to place a mass of this kind on the ground, and not so high up.”
Prudent or not, the great piers were in place and vaulted, determining irrevocably the diameter and elevation of the dome and the height of the nave. From that starting point, everything else had to proceed organically. But the surrounding Basilica was still on the drawing board.
There were three contenders to replace Bramante: Michelangelo, Giuliano da Sangallo, and Raphael.
Michelangelo had no interest in the position. As a token of esteem or an effort to assuage his conscience, Julius had left him ten thousand ducats in his will to complete a much-reduced sculpture, and Michelangelo had finally resumed work on the tomb. Still, he seemed the obvious choice. He was a unique talent, a Florentine, and a boyhood friend of the new pope. But Leo wanted him immortalizing the Medici, not building an Olympian edifice for the della Rovere pope. Also, Leo knew Michelangelo too well, and he preferred to keep a comfortable distance between them. “Buonarroti is an alarming man,” he said, “and there is no getting on with him.”
Instead of appointing Michelangelo to work on the Basilica or allowing him to sculpt the tomb, Leo dispatched him to Florence to the Church of San Lorenzo. Denied his dream again by a second capricious pope, Michelangelo “went off in tears.”
With his old friend out of contention, the candidacy of Giuliano da Sangallo looked more promising. Sangallo had several points in his favor: he was Florentine, he had designed many projects for the Medici, he was an accomplished architect, and he was already in place at St. Peter’s. But once again, he was passed over in favor of an artist with much less architectural experience.
Although Raphael was a painter, not a builder, he had one clear advantage. He was the new pope’s favorite artist. The Italian word simpatico best describes the relationship between Leo and Raphael. Pope and painter were two of a kind—young, happy hedonists who seemed to breeze through life. A contemporary described them as “amiable epicureans who made Christianity a pleasure and took their heaven here.”
In the summer of 1514, Leo appointed the thirty-one-year-old painter to succeed Bramante as magister operae. Raphael wrote excitedly to his uncle:
I cannot be anywhere else [but Rome] for any length of time on account of the building of St. Peter’s, where I have taken the place of Bramante, but where in the world is there
a worthier place than Rome, and what work is worthier than St. Peter’s, which is the foremost temple in the world. This is the greatest building project ever seen, which will cost more than a million in gold, and you know that the Pope has authorized spending 60,000 ducats a year on it, and thinks of nothing else.
Although he had passed them over, Leo prevailed on the two venerable architects, Sangallo and Fra Giocondo, to stay and work with the inexperienced new capomaestro. The solution seemed inspired, and Raphael, at least, was pleased with the arrangement. In the same letter to his uncle, dated July 1, 1514, he explained:
The Pope has given me as partner a very learned friar, more than eighty years old; seeing that he cannot live much longer, His Holiness decided to make him my partner, as he is a man with the reputation for great wisdom, so that I can learn from him if he has any secret of beauty in architecture, so that I can reach perfection in that art. His name is Fra Giocondo. The Pope gives us audience every day, and keeps us long in conversation on the subject of the building.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A ROMAN CANDLE
As architect of St. Peter’s, Raphael became the toast of Rome. He lived more like a prince than a painter in a palace built by Bramante and moved through the city in a swarm of fifty or so disciples, assistants, sycophants, and hangers-on. He was young, gifted, rich, and as beautiful as a Roman god.
Raphael led a charmed life. Everything seemed to come easily. His talent was effortless, as if he had a touch of divinity. His art raised no doubts, evoked no terrors, and idealized whatever it depicted. It was the apogee of Renaissance painting.
His signature velvet beret angled over his golden curls, Raphael cut a romantic figure in the streets of Rome and the salons of the Vatican. He was the darling of Pope Leo, and of a fair percentage of the most beautiful women in the city. They found excuses to visit his studio in the Spina di Borgo and dispensed their favors generously.
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