Although the Basilica was saved from disaster, Sangallo’s unexpected death left a void. The architect had controlled the building projects of the Vatican for more than a quarter century. He would be difficult to replace.
Fabbrica officials considered various artists. There was talk of Jacopo Sansovino, but he was content in Venice. Giulio Romano, who had been Raphael’s student, was offered the position, but he was an old man retired in Mantua, and he died in November before he could take up the assignment. Fabbrica officials were still debating a successor when the pope made his own choice. Only one artist remained from the glory days of Julius, and he was bent with age and anguish. Paul summoned him to an audience.
Michelangelo’s Last Judgment was a defiant response to the Protestants, affirming the authority of the Church. Now desiring a Basilica “clear and luminous” to proclaim its unity, Paul turned again to Michelangelo.
It is one of the intriguing what-ifs of history. What if Paul and Michelangelo had succeeded Julius and Bramante without the interruption—damaging for the city, divisive for the Church, costly for the Basilica—of the Medici interregnum? It is too much to suggest that northern Europe would not have broken with the Latin Church, because the moral decay was so pervasive. But the demands for reform might have been heeded, the rift healed, and the grand enterprise of the century progressed without corrupt indulgences, confused plans, or extravagant expense, in an unbroken line, Julius to Paul, Bramante to Michelangelo.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
MOTU PROPRIO
The old man shuffling back to center stage was as combative and uncompromising as he had been when Julius and Bramante relegated him to the impossible ceiling. Michelangelo had resisted then, and he resisted even more forcefully when Paul asked him to complete the Basilica.
He had never supervised a big construction yard like St. Peter’s. He had never worked for a committee, and he was leery of the Fabbrica. Organized by Pope Clement, it had gained authority and influence in collusion with Sangallo. Michelangelo dismissed it as a factory intent on enriching itself.
Paul pressed. Michelangelo made excuses. Paul pressured. Michelangelo refused. The whims of popes infuriated him. Paul flattered, insisted, wheedled, commanded. He was willing to conciliate, but just so far.
A century after Nicholas V imagined a new Basilica and almost four decades after Julius II laid the foundation stone, Michelangelo agreed “with infinite regret” to become chief architect, sculptor, and painter to the Vatican. Julius had been seventy when he died, and Michelangelo would be seventy when, having finally conceded defeat and let go of the tomb, he agreed to take over Julius’s grand enterprise.
Michelangelo had reasserted the supremacy of the Church with the Last Judgment. Now he would renew the simple faith of Peter in its grandest construction. Under Antonio the Fabbrica had corrupted a glorious expression of Christian faith into an ostentatious display of vanity. The Basilica had become a work of show. He would make it once again a work of faith, affirming again the words on the foundation-stone medal—“Not for ours, Lord, but for your glory.”
Michelangelo complained that the work of St. Peter’s had been imposed on him as a penance by God and refused to accept payment.* It was an act of conscience and maybe a grudging contrition. He would build the first church of Christendom for the glory of God, and, perhaps, the memory of Julius—but on one condition: that he would have full and complete authority, responsible to no one except the pope himself.
After a lifetime wrestling with pontiffs and prelates over the doomed tomb of Julius through charges and countercharges, slavish labor repeatedly halted, aborted, and diminished, Michelangelo insisted on setting his own unequivocal terms. He refused to work on St. Peter’s unless Paul put in writing that he, Michelangelo Buonarroti, born in Florence in the year 1475, would have absolute, complete, and total authority, and that it could be altered or overridden only by the Holy Father himself.
What Michelangelo demanded, Paul III decreed. He issued two official, apostolic letters, one in January 1547 and a second in October 1549, granting Michelangelo complete authority motu proprio—“of his own accord.” Reluctantly, grudgingly, and as he described it, “contro mia voglia con grandissima forza messo da papa Paolo nella fabbrica di San Pietro”—“building St. Peter’s against my will and with the greatest force exerted by Pope Paul”—Michelangelo turned to the Basilica. He had full authority, and he used it like a bludgeon.
The officials of the Fabbrica assumed that construction would continue according to Sangallo’s model and at a comparably high cost. They may have expected an elderly man mellowed by the years, whom they could manipulate. Or an impractical artist who wouldn’t bother with such details as supplies and costs. They certainly didn’t anticipate Michelangelo.
He was a singular talent and a singularly difficult individual—crabby, suspicious, beatific, inspired—who always wanted to do everything himself. In a perfect world, he would have chosen the supplies, quarried the travertine, cut and placed the stones, built the scaffolding, slaked the lime, mixed the cement, and carved the cornices. No detail was too mundane to consider. No idea was too challenging to confront.
Michelangelo rejected the dark designs of Sangallo. Antonio’s model was an elaborate, overwrought conception—a mistaken notion that more ornate meant more majestic. It had “so many projections, spires and bits of pieces,” Michelangelo complained, “that it looked more like a German work than a good antique style or a beautiful charming modern manner.”
After what the German troops had wreaked on Rome, the comparison was incendiary, but his criticism did not stop there. Antonio’s Basilica was too big, too osten$tious, and too expensive. In his always-colorful hyperbole, Michelangelo said, “If it were attempted, one would sooner have been able to hope to see the last day of the world than St. Peter’s finished.”
According to his harsh, always dramatic judgment, Antonio had bastardized Bramante’s design, mangled and desecrated it:
Anyone who has distanced himself from Bramante’s arrangements, as did Sangallo, has distanced himself from the truth. Sangallo’s plan has no light of its own and its numerous hiding places, above and below, all dark, lend themselves to innumerable knaveries, such as providing shelter for bandits, for coining money, ravishing nuns, and other rascalities.
Michelangelo had been a lifelong friend of Giuliano da Sangallo, but he had little use for Antonio. He found the nephew artistically dull and personally arrogant, his building solid but uninspired. Added to his personal distaste and artistic disdain were Michelangelo’s suspicions that Antonio’s cronies had been fleecing the Church, more intent on lining their own pockets than in glorifying God with a new Basilica. He accused la setta Sangallesca—the Sangallo set—of giving suppliers kickbacks, accepting shoddy materials, and padding the accounts.
On November 30, 1546, he fired Antonio’s two closest collaborators, saying that he didn’t want anyone who had worked for Sangallo to work for him (“che non voleva…homo et officiale e ministro che fossero stato al tempo del Sangallo”). The next day, he assembled the officials of the Fabbrica and announced that he was in sole control of the construction yard and would answer only to the Holy Father.
Late in January, when his nomination was officially ratified, Michelangelo put the Fabbrica on further notice. There would be no more stealing or fraudulent acts. Special arrangements with the quarries were forbidden, and all supplies would go through him. He did not mince words:
Those who accept supplies which I have refused connive with and make friends of my enemies. All their pourboires and presents and inducements corrupt the true sense of justice. I beg of you, therefore, in the name of the authority with which I have been invested by the pope not to accept henceforth any building materials that are not perfect, even if they come from heaven.
When Michelangelo came to St. Peter’s, integral parts of the Basilica were fixed. The monumental crossing that defined the scale of the edifice and the size
of the dome was complete. The south arm of the Basilica was finished and vaulted, fixing the size of the transept, and the east arm was partially finished. Working within those constraints, he made a clay model in just fifteen days, compared with Antonio’s five years, and for a fraction of the cost—87 ducats, compared with the four-to-six-thousand-ducat cost of Antonio’s model. As much as possible, given how far construction had progressed, Michelangelo returned to the essence of Bramante’s original plan.
Michelangelo had a long memory for treacheries, real or imagined. All these years later, he still blamed Bramante for the failed tomb, yet he recognized the purity of the architect’s design. Personal animosities were incidental beside artistic merit. Michelangelo had not forgiven the man but he admired the artist.
Bramante was “as skillful in architecture as anyone from the time of the ancients up to now,” he wrote. “The first stone of St. Peter’s was laid by him, not as an obscure or confused plan, but in accordance with a design which is clear, comprehensive, and luminous. Those who departed from his thought left truth behind.”
Michelangelo’s model stripped away Antonio’s extraneous additions—bell towers, atrium, ambulatories, and chapels—and returned the Basilica to a central dome rising over a pure Greek cross. He shortened the barrel-vaulted arms and freed the cross from the inscribed square in which Bramante had set it, in effect eliminating the perimeter and creating a diamond shape, each point being an apse, the semicircular end of a main arm.
Michelangelo repeated Bramante’s colossal order of Corinthian pilasters on the exterior and gave the outer walls the contours of a sculpture. Like the David that the young Michelangelo hewed from a huge block of marble, the exterior of St. Peter’s seemed truly the rock of Peter, chiseled from a single stone.*
His Basilica was smaller than Bramante’s or Antonio’s, and stark. He imagined an interior and exterior of bare, unembellished stone. After the tumult the Church had endured, out of years of incoherence and confusion, Michelangelo created unity. As Vasari wrote, “He reduced St. Peter’s to its simplest form and greatest power.”
Not everyone saw it with that same clarity. When Michelangelo began tearing down Antonio’s ambulatories, the Fabbrica deputies complained to the pope. His architect was squandering Basilica funds by demolishing work that was already complete. Paul supported Michelangelo, replying that he was saving three times what he was losing.
Backed by the full authority of the pope, Michelangelo followed his own schema, as secretive about St. Peter’s as he had been about the Sistine ceiling. He never disclosed his ideas, only making blueprints of a specific section as construction was ready to start. Like Bramante, he was constantly revising, his design continuously in flux.
Although the dome had dominated the plans of Bramante and every architect who followed him, the engineering challenge it posed was so daunting that no one had attempted to raise it. Michelangelo played with the proportions of each part—base, drum, attic, cupola, and lantern—and the ratio of one to the other. As consumed by the dome as Bramante had been, he wrote to Florence for the specifications of Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome, built a century before.
While he was experimenting with designs, Michelangelo took a number of practical measures to fortify Bramante’s structure and disperse the weight of the dome. Antonio had strengthened the piers. Michelangelo reinforced them further and sank well-holes under their foundations, which he filled with concrete. He thickened both the piers and the exterior walls, shortening the distance between them. This reduced the breadth of the crossing from 69 to about 58.5 feet. Michelangelo also checked the strength of the Basilica foundations and devised a series of ramps so that mules could haul loads of material up to the various stages of scaffolding. These linked walkways allowed men and supplies to easily reach each level of construction.
Once these practical steps were complete, Michelangelo began building a circular base, about 12.5 feet high and 28.5 feet thick, for the drum to rest on. A passageway almost six feet wide ran through it, forming an external wall eight feet thick and an internal wall approximately fifteen feet thick. Narrow passageways, slightly less than three feet wide, cut through the interior wall, making stairwells to connect four spiral staircases within the wall of the drum.
Bramante’s drum was similar to the tympanum of his Tempietto—a circle of evenly spaced columns with a continuous entablature. In Michelangelo’s drum, colossal fifty-foot paired Corinthian pilasters frame sixteen windows and continue the unified order of the Basilica. The windows are large to flood the crossing with light and are designed to alternate with a triangular or half-circle eyebrow. More than sixty-five feet in height and more than six hundred feet in circumference, the drum is built of cemented masonry faced with thin slabs of travertine.
Michelangelo intended to carve statues to stand on the drum, forming a circle around the cupola. Although Carlo Fontana would revive the idea many years later, it was never carried out. With Bernini’s “cloud of witnesses” over the colonnades and Maderno’s giant Christ and his apostles commanding the façade, more statues would have been overkill.
Still a firebrand defending truth and beauty, Michelangelo built with undiminished fervor—and received the unwavering support of a succession of popes. Although repeatedly challenged by younger architects and Fabbrica administrators, he would not concede a pilaster, a cornice, or a column. For seventeen years, through five pontificates, he battled attempts to dislodge him or dilute his authority. Paul III and his successors—Julius III, Marcellus II, Paul IV, and Pius IV—repudiated all efforts to interfere with the impolitic artist. They ratified and extended his authority, and each remained true to his word.
Julius III, who followed Paul, not only renewed Michelangelo’s mandate, he reinforced it with the threat of interdiction against anyone who dared “to reform or change in the least, at any time or in any way, the model and design made by you.” Julius would not even listen to a complaint against Michelangelo.
His successor, Marcellus II, tried to be more conciliatory. In an appearance of evenhandedness, he allowed the Fabbrica a hearing to vent its grievances. The officials rebuked him with bitterness:
From 1547 to the present day, during which time we deputies of the Fabbrica have counted absolutely for nothing and have been kept by Michelangelo in absolute ignorance of his plans and doings, because such was the will of the late Pope Paul III and of the reigning one, the expense has reached the total of 136,881 ducats. As regards the progress and the designs and the prospects of the new Basilica, the deputies have known nothing whatever, Michelangelo despising them worse than if they were outsiders. They need, however, to make the following declarations to ease their own conscience: they highly disapprove Michelangelo’s methods, especially in demolishing and destroying the work of his predecessors. This mania of pulling to pieces what has been already erected at such enormous cost is criticized by everybody; however, if the pope is pleased with it, we have nothing to say.
If Marcellus had hoped to be a peacemaker, the attempt failed utterly. Michelangelo delivered a fierce rebuttal:
I am not and will not be obliged to tell either you or any of the deputies what I expect to do. Your only business is to collect and administer the funds, and see that they are not squandered or stolen; as regards plans and designs, leave that care to me.
Although the next four popes reaffirmed Michelangelo’s mandate, the pace of construction slowed after Paul III’s death. The river of gold that had been flowing through Spain to the Vatican since the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella dried up. In 1556, when the wall of the drum had reached the height of the windowsills, construction was suspended for lack of funds. It did not resume until 1561. Although the work of quarrying and transporting the travertine for the drum continued, Michelangelo lost five critical years. It was a lonely, despairing time. “I have lost my memory and my wits,” he wrote to Vasari, but “if I quit…I would make a few thieves happy and would be the cause of the building’s ru
in, and perhaps even of having it shut up forever.”
When work finally resumed, Michelangelo was half-crippled, his body weakened by age and illness. He needed help now to mount and dismount, but he still rode to work on a docile, slow-gaited chestnut pony, plodding to the same site he had once fled. Although the young man who had galloped away from the Basilica swathed in a lavender cape was unrecognizable, his passion was undiminished.
At eighty-six, Michelangelo was still waging art—obdurate, intransigent, unforgiving, sparing neither himself nor others. Gradually, the new church began to emerge on his terms, according to his vision. The south crossing was almost finished and work was under way on the north wall.
Ambitious young architects carped that he was impossible to work with. He was too old. His faculties were failing, and the building was suffering as a result. But he refused to go gently until, as he wrote to Vasari, St. Peter’s is “brought to completion, so that it could not be changed and given a different form…. I am at the eleventh hour, and not a thought arises in me that does not have death carved within it; but God grant that I keep him waiting in suspense for a few years yet.”
Michelangelo’s method of building was very personal. Instead of drawing to scale or giving the masons precise measurements, he made small clay models and sketched individual parts—a window, say, or a cornice—to capture the effect he wanted to achieve. Sometimes he had sections made first in wood and positioned exactly so that he could see how they would look. In his last years, age and illness kept him from the work site, and misunderstandings multiplied. When a master mason miscalculated the vaulting of the south apse, a large section had to be destroyed at great expense. “If one could die of shame and suffering, I should not be alive,” Michelangelo said. Unable to cope any longer with the multiple difficulties and frustrations inherent in such a monumental project, he agreed to the appointment of a foreman.
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