Even amid this outpouring, however, printers did not fully grasp the power of the new medium. Before 1500, printers sought to make their books resemble medieval manuscripts as closely as possible. Most of these incunabula, as the early editions were called (after the Latin word for “cradle”), were bulky folios consisting of pages formed by folding once over the large sheets of paper that were standard at that time. In the late fifteenth century, printers began bringing out more compact quarto editions, made from sheets folded twice over. Aldus, who liked to innovate, issued many octavo editions, in which the sheets were folded three times to produce volumes that were roughly the size of modern mass-market paperbacks. For this, he has been called the father of the pocketbook revolution, helping to free books from libraries and lecture halls. He also helped popularize a typeface in which the letters all slanted to the right; winning immediate acclaim across Europe, it became known as italics, after its country of origin.
All of these changes had affected the physical properties of the book. No one had yet figured out how to exploit the potential of print from a literary standpoint. Erasmus in Venice would begin to do so. Soon after his arrival, Aldus invited him to join his academy and gave him full access to his manuscripts. When Erasmus was finally ready to begin writing, Aldus installed him in a corner of the shop. It had several presses, each operated by a three- or four-man crew. Amid the clank of the machines, the chatter of the workmen, and the rich aroma of printers’ ink, Erasmus worked from morning until well past dusk, filling page after page. (He did so despite suffering an attack of the stone—the first outbreak of a condition that would torment him for the rest of his life.) Aldus sat in the corner opposite him, reading over each printed page after Erasmus had finished with it. When Erasmus asked him why, Aldus replied, “I’m learning.” He expressed amazement that Erasmus could write so quickly amid the din of the shop, but the restless, itinerant Dutchman had learned to compose in the most chaotic of settings.
In another concession, Aldus imposed no word count on his author; thus freed, Erasmus added adage after adage. The total surpassed first one thousand, then two thousand, then three, and still he kept going. As in the first edition, many of the entries were brisk and businesslike, but here and there Erasmus began to improvise, adding anecdotes, asides, opinions, and personal reflections. Gradually, a new literary form emerged.
The process can be seen unfolding in his entry on Herculei labores (“the labors of Hercules”). Focusing on the second of Hercules’s twelve labors—his battle with the hydra of Lerna—Erasmus began in conventional humanist fashion, piling up references to Cicero, Homer, Horace, Josephus, Pindar, and Ovid. Hercules, Erasmus wrote, in slaying this multiheaded sea monster, performed a great service for mankind—one that could inspire modern-day princes. In administering their realms, they should devote themselves solely to the public good and consider what they can do for others, regardless of the cost to themselves.
Then, in an unexpected leap, Erasmus cited a group who, even more than princes, deserved to have their labors called Herculean—those dedicated “to restoring the monuments of ancient and true literature.” In performing the thankless task of preparing old manuscripts for publication, they cut themselves off from life’s ordinary pleasures, neglect their daily affairs, pay little heed to their appearances or health. Despite such sacrifices, they encounter much disdain; in return for their long nights of toil, they earn “a few snorts of contempt” from men unworthy to hold their chamber pots.
Erasmus—suddenly sounding a personal note—wearily mentioned the “immense labors and infinite difficulties” that this collection had cost him. He described the long and tedious hours he had spent rummaging through ancient works to puzzle out the meaning of obscure customs and the many texts he had had to consult to root out corruptions and determine the correct reading. He noted the many complaints he was sure he would get from readers who felt that his collection had been rushed into print and should have received greater care and diligence. And, he admitted, such complaints would not be without merit. Because of his many other projects, he had not been able to devote as much time as he would have liked to this one, and so he would not take offense if a better, more diligent scholar came along, corrected his work, and carried off the prize, as long as it was to the benefit of readers.
Offering this aside was a sly move on Erasmus’s part. Like his hero Jerome, he was often careless and slapdash in his work; by acknowledging this up front, he could perhaps deflect criticism. Whatever his aim, Erasmus’s decision to mention his own scholarly faults in an entry in a book of adages was a bold and original step. His discussion as a whole—discursive, disarming, self-referential—was unlike anything he had previously written. In fact, it was unlike anything that had yet appeared in print. Ruminating on the labors of Hercules in the chaos of Aldus’s workshop, Erasmus was giving birth to the modern personal essay.
After nearly nine months of Herculean labor, the volume was done. The final tally came to 3,260 adages, hence the collection’s name—Adagorium Chiliades (“Thousands of Adages”). As Erasmus had warned, it contained many errors, but few readers seemed to care. The volume was immediately recognized as a literary landmark, and it brought Erasmus his first real taste of celebrity.
His work in Venice completed, Erasmus in the autumn of 1508 traveled to Padua, home to another Italian university. To help meet expenses, he agreed to tutor Alexander Stewart, an illegitimate son of Scotland’s King James IV. Unlike the Boerio brothers, Alexander had an inquisitive mind and a gentle nature, and Erasmus quickly took to him. The threat of war remained ever present, however, and when it got too close to Padua, they moved to Ferrara. When Ferrara, too, became imperiled, they traveled to Siena, where Alexander took some courses in law.
There, Erasmus was only 125 miles from Rome. Leaving Italy without seeing the capital of Latin culture was unthinkable, and so in late February or early March 1509 he mounted his horse and headed south, probably along the Via Francigena, an ancient pilgrimage route stretching from France to Rome. With tremendous expectation Erasmus passed through the old Aurelian Wall—only to find a reeking, overgrown wasteland. Vast tracts of the city had been abandoned and had reverted to scrubland and pasture. The Roman Forum, where Cicero had once declaimed before the Senate, was now a cow pasture, called the Campo Vaccino; the Capitoline Hill, once the seat of the imperial government, was known as Monte Caprino, or Goat Hill. Most of Rome’s 40,000 people lived in the low-lying area within the bend of the Tiber, in ramshackle huts set on dark, narrow alleyways filled with slop and debris. On all sides lay the vestiges of Rome’s former glory—collapsed temples, shattered palaces, stumps of columns, and triumphal arches lying in heaps of stones, their inscriptions defaced and covered in moss.
“Rome is not Rome,” Erasmus would recall years later. “It has nothing but ruins and rubble, the scars and signs of the disasters that befell long ago.” Those disasters included fires, earthquakes, floods, and famines; invasions by Goths, Lombards, Normans, and Saracen pirates; bitter feuding between Rome’s noble families; strife between bands loyal to popes and antipopes; periodic insurrections; persistent gang warfare; and pervasive criminality. Rome had little manufacturing or commerce. Its economy instead relied heavily on the luxury trades and service industries. The city was a great diplomatic center, with all of the Italian states keeping ambassadors or agents there. To help them stay in touch with their governments, Rome had an elaborate courier service, able to reach Florence or Naples in three or four days, Milan or Genoa in a week, Paris or Brussels in three weeks, and London in not quite four—all helping to make the city a vital marketplace of information.
Rome’s greatest asset was the Holy See, home to the Vatican Palace (the pope’s residence) and St. Peter’s Basilica, still the central shrine of the Latin Church nearly twelve centuries after it was built. The basilica, along with the city’s other great sanctuaries—St. John Lateran, St. Paul Outside-the-Walls, Santa Maria Maggiore, and San
Lorenzo—drew pilgrims from around the Continent, and a network of inns, hostels, and taverns had sprung up to serve them. Representatives of kingdoms, principalities, dioceses, monastic orders, and trading houses from across Europe were all there to pursue their business at the Roman Curia—a labyrinth of offices, bureaus, and tribunals located on the Vatican Hill.
Even more than in the time of Lorenzo Valla, humanists dominated the Curia. With their facility in Latin, skill in writing, and knowledge of history and religion, they were ideally suited to handle the flood of paperwork and correspondence generated by the pope and his court. From the initial gift of Nicholas V, the Vatican Library had grown into the single richest book collection in Europe. It, in turn, was but one of many valuable book repositories in the city, and humanists from across the Continent came to consult them.
While in Rome, Erasmus naturally fell in with this group. The acclaim that greeted his new edition of the Adages helped him gain access to the upper reaches of Roman society. As a northerner, however, he remained to the Italians a barbarian. His status as an outsider among the Roman elite provided an ideal position from which to observe this remarkable moment in the city’s history, when it was simultaneously reaching the height of Renaissance refinement and undergoing the institutional decay that would help bring on the Reformation. During his stay, Erasmus, who would do so much to weaken Rome’s prestige, gathered the raw material for his gibes.
He gained entrée, for instance, to the exclusive world of the cardinals. About thirty of them lived in the city, and they could frequently be seen proceeding purple-robed through town, trailed by stately entourages and mules in gold-laced caparisons. Erasmus secured as his main patron Raffaele Riario. As the apostolic chamberlain (the Vatican’s chief financial officer), Riario was the second most powerful figure in Rome after Pope Julius II, who was his cousin. He lived in the Cancelleria, a massive three-story palace near the Campo de’ Fiore that had a severe classical facade made of stone blocks stripped from the Colosseum. (It still stands, the finest Renaissance palace in the city.) Riario built it with fourteen thousand ducats he won in a night of gambling with the son of Pope Innocent VIII, and he stocked it with priceless vases, statues, and sarcophagi scavenged from ancient monuments. Through Riario, Erasmus became acquainted with members of Julius’s personal entourage, including Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who was the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent and who would become Pope Leo X. “In Rome,” Erasmus would later boast, “there was not one cardinal who did not welcome me as a brother.”
One day, Erasmus went with some friends to the Vatican Palace to see a bullfight. Such spectacles had recently been introduced for the amusement of the clerical elite. Erasmus was unimpressed. “I myself never enjoyed those bloody games and remnants of ancient paganism,” he wrote years later. His one moment of diversion came between the rounds of slaughter, when a masked man leaped before the crowd and, bearing a sword in one hand and a cloak in the other, impersonated a matador in terrified retreat from a bull. “The drollness of this man seized me more strongly than the rest of the show.”
To Erasmus, Rome seemed just that—a show. The exaggerated pomp, the empty grandiosity, the gassy oratory—all repelled him. Bishops clashed with protonotaries over who (according to the rules of protocol) should be seated nearest the pope. The heads of monastic orders vied for influence with the directors of the secular clergy, and the Dominicans feuded endlessly with the Franciscans. Illegitimacy and concubinage were rampant, and the city had as many as a thousand prostitutes. The prostitution, in turn, fed the spread of a terrible new scourge, syphilis. The wine trade was one of the largest businesses in town, thanks to the enormous quantities consumed in salons and banquet halls. Most of the senior clerics in Rome had abandoned their dioceses, preferring the pageants and processions of Rome to the toil and tedium of their home parishes. Among the priests who actually performed sacerdotal duties, mockery was routine, and the Mass was pronounced in an impious and derisive manner. Erasmus would later recall hearing people in Rome “raving against Christ and his disciples in atrocious blasphemies.”
Even more off-putting was the state of Roman rhetoric. When it came to writing and speaking Latin, Rome’s humanists all sought to imitate one figure: Cicero. They strained to reproduce his vocabulary, his figures of speech, and his sentence structure while ignoring his noble sentiments and judgments. Years later, Erasmus would mock these “Ciceronian apes” in a withering satire, The Ciceronian. “For seven whole years now,” a member of the sect declares, “I have touched no books but Ciceronian ones, abstaining from all the rest as religiously as a Carthusian from meat.” Erasmus described a sermon he heard delivered on Good Friday before a large crowd that included the pope along with many cardinals and bishops. The preacher (a celebrated Latinist) spent most of his time evoking not the crucifixion of Christ but the exploits of Julius II (or “Jupiter Optimus Maximus,” as he called Julius, after the supreme deity of ancient Rome). “What,” Erasmus wondered, “had all this to do with Julius as the high priest of the Christian religion, the Vicar of Christ and successor of Peter and Paul?”
In his six years as pope, Julius had established himself as the most forceful pontiff since the return of the papacy from Avignon. Tall and thin, with a long white beard and pressed mouth, he was known for his vanity, imperiousness, and truculence. Julius carried a cane that he used to beat subordinates who displeased him and kept at hand a bell to interrupt visitors who bored him—behavior that had earned him the label il pontefice terribile. As a cardinal, he had fathered three daughters and (apparently) contracted syphilis from one of his many mistresses. He loved fine Greek and Corsican wines, collected rare silks and velvets, retained both a French and an Italian tailor, and had not one but three jewel-encrusted tiaras. An avid hunter, he arranged for falcons and eagles to be brought from Pisa and Anatolia and horses from Ferrara and Milan.
His hunting, in turn, kept him sharp for his military ventures. At the age of sixty-six, Julius still relished leading troops into battle. After his successful campaign against Bologna, he had returned to Rome in a lavish triumphal march modeled on those of the Roman emperors. He immediately began planning a new offensive against Venice, which had seized papal lands in the Romagna. To reinforce his army, Julius hired two hundred Swiss mercenaries—the origin of the famous Swiss Guard.
With the College of Cardinals debating the pope’s plans to go to war with Venice, Raffaele Riario, in the name of the pope, asked Erasmus to compose two orations, one opposing such a campaign, the other supporting it. Fond of Venice, Erasmus put much more effort into the former, but to his dismay the latter carried the day. The constant military preparations in Rome and the drain they placed on the city’s finances increased Erasmus’s antipathy toward Julius in particular and war in general.
As part of his program to reestablish Roman hegemony, Julius wanted to restore the city to its former splendor, and so he mounted an ambitious urban improvement campaign. During Erasmus’s stay, the city was one giant construction site. Streets and piazzas were being torn up, scaffolding was everywhere, and the whole area west of the Forum was filled with limekilns producing mortar and concrete for use in construction. It was under Julius that Rome as we know it today began to take shape. In undertaking these efforts, however, the pope set in motion forces that would help precipitate the greatest crisis in the Church’s history.
Julius’s skill at military strategy was matched by his taste in art. Thanks to his patronage, Rome would become a magnet for painters, musicians, poets, philosophers, and Greek scholars. As his chief architect, he enlisted Donato Bramante. A brash iconoclast from Milan, Bramante became a sort of minister for urban renewal at the papal court. Under his direction, plazas were modernized, streets were straightened, and a new mint was built.
Julius’s main focus of activity, however, was the Vatican. When he became pope, the Vatican Palace—the residence of the pope and his household—was an undistinguished jumble of offices, chapel
s, ceremonial rooms, and living quarters dating from many different decades. At Julius’s urging, Bramante drew up plans to transform its exterior by adding a two-story facade and new galleries. He also designed a new facade for the Belvedere—the papal villa that sat on a hill a thousand feet from the Vatican Palace—and created an enormous courtyard in the space between the two buildings. The lower part (near the palace) became an arena for the staging of classical plays, bullfights, and tournaments; the upper part (near the Belvedere) became a magnificent garden with running streams, laurel and orange trees, and sculptures from Julius’s personal collection, including the Apollo Belvedere.
To decorate the rooms of the Vatican Palace, Julius brought Raphael from Florence. At twenty-six, this charming prodigy was largely untested, but Julius, sensing his genius, assigned him to fresco the walls of the Stanza della Segnatura, or Signature Room, which served as a papal study. Beginning in the autumn of 1508 and continuing for the next four and a half years, Raphael created four murals that, in their sweep and clarity, rank among the finest works of the Renaissance. One of them, The School of Athens, showed dozens of ancient Greek philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists gathered under the vaulted ceiling of a massive basilica. Here, in the inner sanctum of the Vatican, Raphael offered complementary visions of celestial revelation and worldly reason—a harmonization of Christian and classical ideals that was the essence of Renaissance Rome.
In addition to commissioning such artistic wonders, Julius wanted to create a grand monument to himself, and it was here that the seeds of future calamity were sown. Julius envisioned a tomb on a scale larger than that of any previous pope. To design it, he wanted someone with similarly outsize talent. He had long admired the Pietà that had been installed in St. Peter’s a few years earlier, and in the spring of 1505 he called its creator, Michelangelo, from Florence. Thus began one of the most famous patron-artist relationships in history. Michelangelo (who had just turned thirty) proposed a monument that was truly colossal. It was to have three tiers with more than forty larger-than-life statues—some in the form of prisoners (representing the Papal States recaptured by Julius), others personifying the arts and sciences, and still others representing those whom Julius considered his forebears, including Moses, who would be the centerpiece. Topping it all would be a sarcophagus containing the pope’s remains. Pleased with the design, Julius gave Michelangelo two thousand ducats to purchase the marble for the tomb, and in April the artist left for Carrara, the famous quarry in northern Italy.
Fatal Discord Page 19