Innocent VI, Pope
Innocent VIII, Pope
Innocent IX, Pope
Innocent X, Pope
Innocent XI, Pope
Innocent XII, Pope
Inquisition
Isabella, Queen of Spain
Isaiah
Italy, unification of
Jesus Christ
John VIII, Pope
John Paul II, Pope (Karol Wojtyla)
J. Pierpont Morgan Library
Jubilees (Holy Years)
Julius Caesar
Julius exclusus (Erasmus)
Julius I, Pope
Julius II, Pope (Giuliano della Rovere)
al fresco masses of
appearance of
assassination plots against
Bramante selected by
Chigi’s relationship with
Church finances and
criticism and satires about
daughters of
death of
election of
excommunication used by
exile of
in failed attempts to achieve papacy
at foundation-stone ceremony
in historical perspective
as “il Terribilis,”
imperial ambitions of
indulgences granted by
Lateran Council and
Leo X compared with
Michelangelo’s escapes from
Michelangelo’s reconciliation with
Michelangelo’s tomb project for
name selected by, 11 obelisk problem and
papal bulls of
papal palace frescoes and
simony and
Sistine Chapel and
Sixtus V compared with
warfare of
Julius III, Pope
La Cancellaria, see Palazzo Riario
Laocoön
Last Judgment (Michelangelo)
League of Cognac
Leno, Giuliano
Leo III, Pope
Leo IV, Pope
Leo X, Pope, (Giovanni de’ Medici)
amusements of
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger’s correspondence with
assassination plot against
Bramante’s successor selected by
Chigi’s relationship with
Clement VII compared with
generosity and spending of
and indulgences
Luther vs.
Riario’s relationship with
St. Peter’s and
Leo the Great, Pope
Leonardo da Vinci
Bramante’s friendship with
in Milan
Leonine City
liber mandatorum
Ligorio, Pirro
Lives of the Painters (Vasari)
Loreto
Lotto, Lorenzo
Louise of Savoy
Louis XIV, King of France
Loyola, Ignatius
Luther, Martin
theses of
Machiavelli, Niccolò
Maderno, Carlo
Madrid, Treaty of
Magellan, Ferdinand
Maidalchini, Donna Olimpia
Manetti, Giannozzo
Mantegna, Andrea
Manuel, King of Portugal
marble
Marcellus II, Pope
Marches, the
Margaret of Austria
Mass of Bolsena (Raphael)
Matilda of Tuscany, Countess
Maxentius
medals
commemorative
Medici, Cosimo de’
Medici, Giovanni de’, see Leo X, Pope
Medici, Giuliano de’
Medici, Giulio de’, see Clement VII, Pope
Medici, Lorenzo de’ (il Magnifico)
death of
as patron
Medici family
popes from
Meleghino, Jacopo
Mellon Codex plan
Melozzo da Forlì
Menicantonio (Domenico Antonio de Chiarellis)
Menicantonio Sketchbook
mercenaries
Michelangelo Buonarroti
appearance of
art forgery of
banishment of
Bernini compared with
in Bologna
Bramante as nemesis of
Bramante’s death and
Clement VII’s relationship with
death of
ego of
Fabbrica’s relations with
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
JupiterImages Corporation © 2005: x, insert pages 1 (top and bottom), 7 (bottom), 9 (top left and right, bottom left),
Archivio Montesanti: x, insert pages 3 (bottom left), 11 (bottom), 12 (bottom), 13 (top), 14 (bottom)
Trustees of the British Museum: x, insert pages 3 (bottom right), 8 (top left)
Alinari/Art Resource, NY, Uffizi, Florence, Italy: x insert page 6 (top left)
Alinari/Art Resource, NY, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark: insert page 12 (top)
Scala/Art Resource, NY, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy: x, insert pages 4 (middle), 6 (middle and bottom)
Scala/Art Resource, NY: x, insert pages 2 (top), 13 (bottom)
Scala/Art Resource, NY, Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy: insert page 14 (top)
Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy: x, insert page 7 (middle)
Douglas Steel: page 66
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Stuart Collection, Rare Books Division: insert page 8 (bottom) Michelangelo’s Basilica: “Incisione di Stefano du Perac” (source: Antoine Lafrery). Speculum Romanae manificentiae, Roma, 1681
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: insert pages 2 (bottom)
Rome in Ruins: etching Stefano du Perac. Parte del Monte Palatino, 1575, Print Collection, 4 (bottom left) Leonardo da Vinci sketch: centrally planned church, Art and Architecture Collection, 8 (middle) Basilica design of Antonio da Sangallo: engraving, 1548, Art and Architecture Collection, frontispiece and 16 (top and bottom), Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Veduta dell’ insigne Basilica Vaticana coll’ampio Portico e Piazza adjacente, 1775, Art and Architecture Collection
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY: insert page 7 (top)
Vatican Museums, Vatican State: insert page 3 (top), 4 (top), 5 (top and bottom), 10 (top)
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana: x, xii, xiii, insert pages 4 (bottom right), 9 (bottom right), 10 (middle and bottom), 11 (top left and right) (middle left and right), 15 (all)
There is also a theory that a giant statue of Nero gave the amphitheater its name. Nero’s figure was replaced in the Flavian era with a figure of the sun god.
Although Leonardo was a Tuscan, he was never part of the Florentine faction.
In a central plan, whether designed as a Greek cross or as a circular Roman temple, the main altar is placed at the central point of the church.
The church would be torn down in the next century to make room for Bernini’s colonnade.
The first Sunday after Easter was called domenica in albis—“Sunday in white”—because the newly baptized wore white tunics for the week after their baptism on Easter morning.
Countess Matilda was such a devoted benefactor of the Church that there is a memorial to her in St. Peter’s.
During the pontificate of Paul III, Michelangelo designed new uniforms for the Swiss Guard. Still worn today, the red, blue, and gold striped uniforms were sewn from 154 individual strips of cloth.
The yellow-and-white papal flag did not become official until 1824.
The transept is the north-south axis of the Basilica. The nave is the east arm that forms the large center aisle.
The distinctions between merchant and prince would be obliterated by time, merit, and money 150 years later, when a Chigi grandnephew became pope and finished the work that Julius and Ago
stino began.
Julius ordered every trace of the Borgia pope Alexander VI expunged from the Vatican, even opening his tomb and shipping his remains back to Spain.
In a.d. 849–52, after the attack of the Saracens, Pope Leo IV erected a fortified wall around the Vatican, which later popes strengthened and extended. The north wall runs from Castel Sant’Angelo to the foot of the hill behind St. Peter’s; the south wall from the river to the hill.
“Though he could not write” refers to the fact that Bramante was not versed in Latin.
It would take more than 350 years to realize Julius’s idea of a unified Italy.
Although simony assured Julius’s election in October 1503, immediately thereafter he decreed that any future papal elections tainted by simony would be invalid.
His famous portrait La Fornarina is probably misnamed.
Lorenzo, scion of one of history’s most renowned banking dynasties, virtually bankrupted the family business by his romance with humanism.
In 1567 in the reconvened Council of Trent, Pius V cancelled all grants of indulgences that involved fees or financial transactions.
The next non-Italian pope was Karol Wojtyla of Poland, who was consecrated John Paul II in 1978.
When he died, Raphael was building Villa Madama for Clement, who was then Cardinal de’ Medici.
After Columbus’s voyage, Alexander VI fixed the dominion of the New World. On a map, he traced a meridian passing one hundred miles from the Azores, giving everything to the west to Spain and to the east to Portugal. A grateful Queen Isabella sent the pope the first gold from America. It was used to gild the ceiling of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.
Eventually he received fifty ducats a month, but payment was made by the papal treasury, not the Fabbrica.
Unless otherwise noted, all the quotations pertaining to Michelangelo come from his own letters and poems or from biographies written by Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi, who were his pupils and friends. None of the three can be considered an objective source.
So many changes were made to Michelangelo’s design—the central plan reversed, the dome altered, the stark interior decorated to a fare-thee-well—that the clearest view of his work is the back of St. Peter’s.
Even with the iron rings, significant cracks eventually developed around the dome’s base. Mattia de Rossi examined them for Clement IX and found that the structure of the dome was sound. Carlo Fontana examined them for Innocent XI and reached the same conclusion. In 1743, Benedict XIV brought in Giovanni Poleni, a physicist at the University of Padua, who also saw streaky ruptures probably old and caused by a combination of factors: the weight of the dome, the process of structural setting, the materials used, and the hasty construction. He proposed adding two more iron rings as a safety precaution.
St. Peter’s Basilica was the largest church in the world until 1989, when it was surpassed by the Church of Our Lady of Peace in the Ivory Coast.
Innocent XI commissioned Carlo Fontana to produce an illustrated account of the construction story. In his book, Fontana noted the cost. Worried that the mention of such a huge price tag would provoke more criticism from the Protestants, the pope suspended publication. The book was issued in 1694 by Innocent XII.
Borromini, a lifelong rival, claimed that the Baldacchino was actually a Maderno design ordered by Paul V. He wrote: “It was the idea of Paul V to cover the high altar of St. Peter’s with a baldachin with ornament proportional to the opening made for the Confessio and tomb of Peter.” He also claimed that the design of a fountain representing the four rivers was his and was aggiustata— “adapted”—by Bernini in Piazza Navona.
Centuries later, Mussolini built such an avenue, Via della Conciliazione.
A marble disk on the side of each fountain indicates the focus of the ellipse. If you stand on either disk, the colonnades appear to be one row of columns, not four.
Ninety statues are from Bernini’s workshop. In 1703, more than twenty years after Bernini’s death, Pope Clement XI ordered fifty more statues.
The life of Christ is often called “the greatest story ever told.”
As he lay dying, Nicholas V explained his building philosophy to his cardinals: “A popular faith, sustained only on doctrines, will never be anything but feeble and vacillating. But if the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials, and witnesses seemingly planted by the Hand of God Himself, belief would grow and strengthen like a tradition from one generation to another, and all the world would accept and revere it. Noble edifices, combining taste and beauty with imposing proportions, would immediately conduce to the exaltation of the Chair of St. Peter….”
Originally built as a mausoleum for the emperor Hadrian, the cylinder of rock was christened the Castle of the Angel and turned into a fortress by a succession of beleaguered popes. Il passetto, a passageway, links the papal palace to the fortress so that a pope under siege could escape capture by retreating to Castel Sant’Angelo.
Because they stir feelings of pietà, or pity, images of Mary holding the body of her crucified son are called pietàs.
The popes issued three types of missives: encyclicals, pastoral letters on a serious topic of concern; brevi, informal, “brief” announcements; and bulls, formal proclamations stamped with the official papal bull, or seal.
The money covered new windows, supplies of timber and beaten gold, and wages.
There is some indication that Julius also consulted Fra Giovanni Giocondo da Verona, reputedly the finest architectural engineer of the day, who was working in Paris in 1505. A sketch in the Uffizi is annotated “Fra Giocondo’s opinion.”
Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Building the Basilica: Time Line
Visual Glossaries
Author’s Note
PART I. THE CHRISTIAN CAESAR 1503–1513
1. The First Stone, April 1506
2. The First St. Peter’s
3. Il Terribilis
4. A Trojan Horse
5. A Surprise Winner
6. Imperial Dimensions
7. Vaulting Ambition
8. Onward Christian Soldiers
9. A Christian Imperium
10. A Viper’s Nest
11. The Death of Julius
PART II.THE DEPLORABLE MEDICI POPES 1513–1534
12. The First Medici Prince
13. An Empty Stage
14. A Roman Candle
15. The Revenge of the Sangallos
16. Salvation for Sale
17. Sweet Revenge
18. A Brief Moment of Truth
19. Medici Redux
PART III. THE MICHELANGLELO IMPERATIVE 1546–1626
20. A Violent Awakening
21. Julius’s Folly
22. Motu Proprio
23. An Immovable Object
24. The Swineherd Who Built Rome
25. Raising the Dome
26. A New Century
27. The Knaves of St. Peter’s
28. 1,300 Years Later
PART IV. BERNINI’S GRAND ILLUSIONS 1623–1667
29. The Romance of the Baroque
30. Full Circle
Epilogue
Appendix I: The Popes from Nicholas V to Alexander VII
Appendix II: Statistics
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
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