Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  Alexander VI had been a notoriously debauched character, fathering at least a dozen children and consorting in the Vatican with mistresses and prostitutes.1 He was even rumoured to have pursued an incestuous affair with his daughter Lucrezia Borgia. Julius was not a voluptuary on nearly the same scale, but his ecclesiastical rewards had likewise been at odds with his more worldly nature. Though the Franciscans observed strict vows of chastity and poverty, as a cardinal Julius had adopted a casual attitude towards both pledges. He used the vast wealth from his preferments to build himself three palaces; in the garden of one, Santi Apostoli, he assembled an unrivalled collection of antique sculpture. He fathered three daughters, including Felice, a celebrated beauty whom he married off to a nobleman and ensconced in a castle north of Rome. He discarded her mother in favour of his next mistress, a famous Roman courtesan named Masina. From one of his various lovers he contracted syphilis, a new disease that, according to one observer, was ‘very fond of priests – especially very rich priests’.2 Despite this ailment, however, and despite also the gout from which he suffered as a result of his rich diet, His Holiness was in the rudest of health.

  Once elected Pope, Julius devoted his considerable energies less to his own personal ambitions and more towards assuring the power and glory of the papacy. Like Rome, the papacy had been in a dire state when he ascended the throne. Its authority had been gravely weakened by the Great Schism, the period from 1378 to 1417 in which rival popes ruled in Rome and Avignon. More recently, Alexander VI’s wild extravagance had drained the Church’s finances. Julius had therefore set about collecting taxes with ruthless efficiency, halting devaluation of the currency by minting a new coin, and punishing counterfeiters. He also bolstered revenues by creating and then selling ecclesiastical offices, a practice known as simony (and a sin whose practitioners Dante had placed in the eighth circle of Hell, where they were buried upside down and had their feet roasted by flames). In 1507, Julius promulgated a bull offering indulgences, which meant people could pay to reduce the time their friends or relatives spent in Purgatory (usually calculated at nine thousand years). All of the funds accruing from this controversial measure were earmarked for the building of St Peter’s.

  Julius further planned to replenish the Church’s coffers by recovering control over the Papal States, many of which were either in open revolt against the Church or else had been usurped by ambitious foreign powers. The Papal States were a loose collection of properties – cities, fortresses, large chunks of land – over which the Church traditionally claimed political authority. Besides being the representatives of Christ on earth, popes were also temporal princes with the powers and privileges of any other monarch. Only the king of Naples governed more land in Italy than the Pope, who had dominion over as many as a million people.

  Julius took his role of prince very seriously. In one of his first acts after his election, he sent to neighbouring states stern warnings to hand back all papal lands. He had the Romagna particularly in mind, a collection of small principalities running south-east of Bologna. Though these principalities were ruled by local lords who were, in name at least, vassals of the Church, a few years earlier Cesare Borgia, the son of Alexander VI, had tried to create a dukedom for himself in the region through assassinations and brutal campaigns of conquest. On the death of his father, Cesare’s power had collapsed and the Venetians swept into the Romagna. At Julius’s insistence, they eventually handed back eleven fortresses and villages but stubbornly refused to part with Rimini and Faenza. Besides these cities, two others, Perugia and Bologna, were of concern to the Pope, since their rulers, Gianpaolo Baglioni and Giovanni Bentivoglio, ran foreign policies independent of Rome despite owing their allegiance to the Pope. Il papa terribile was determined to have all four cities firmly back under his control. In the spring of 1506, therefore, Julius began preparing himself for war.

  Despite Piero Rosselli’s assurances to the Pope over the dinner table, Michelangelo showed no signs whatsoever of quitting Florence. He refused to return to Rome with his friend Giuliano da Sangallo, the emissary dispatched to fetch him. However, he instructed Sangallo to inform the Pope that he was ‘more than ever ready to continue the work’, and that if His Holiness was agreeable he would execute the tomb in Florence rather than Rome, forwarding the statues as he finished them. ‘I shall work better. here and with greater zeal,’ he told Sangallo, ‘as I shall not have so many things to think of.’3

  Michelangelo’s preference for Florence over Rome was understandable enough. In 1503, the city’s Wool Guild had built a commodious workshop to his specifications in via de’ Pinti, where he was supposed to execute a dozen eight-foot-high marble statues for the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore – work that, along with The Battle of Cascina, had to be sacrificed for the Pope’s tomb. Altogether, an incredible thirty-seven statues and reliefs of various sizes awaited his attention in this workshop – more than enough work to keep both himself and his small team of assistants busy for the rest of their lives. Besides the twelve statues for the cathedral in Florence, he had been hired to decorate an altar in Siena’s cathedral with fifteen marble statuettes of various saints and apostles. Working on the Pope’s tomb in Florence, rather than Rome, would presumably have given him the chance to fulfil some of these obligations.

  Michelangelo was content to stay in Florence for another reason: his large and extended family – his father, brothers, aunt and uncle – lived in the city. He had four brothers in all, his mother having produced five boys at regular two-year intervals before dying in 1481, when Michelangelo was six. The oldest of the boys was Lionardo, followed by Michelangelo, then Buonarroto, Giovansimone and, finally, Sigismondo. Their father, Lodovico, had remarried in 1485 but became a widower once more when his second wife died in 1497.

  The Buonarroti clan lived in modest circumstances. Michelangelo’s great-grandfather had been a successful banker, piling up a considerable fortune that his grandfather, an unsuccessful banker, proceeded to squander. Lodovico was a low-ranking civil servant who lived mainly on an income from inherited farmland at Settignano, in the hills above Florence. Michelangelo’s earliest years were spent on this farm, where his wet nurse had been the wife of a local stonemason, a circumstance to which he attributed his skill with the hammer and chisel. In 1506, the family was renting out the farm and sharing a house in Florence with Michelangelo’s paternal uncle, a money changer named Francesco, and his wife Cassandra. Michelangelo’s older brother had entered the priesthood, but the younger trio – aged between twenty-five and twenty-nine – still lived at home. Buonarroto and Giovansimone worked as assistants in a wool shop. Sigismondo, the baby of the family, was a soldier. All of them were in no doubt that their fortunes rested squarely on the shoulders of their talented brother.

  During his self-imposed exile from Rome, Michelangelo lived at home, working on the various statues in his workshop in via de’ Pinti and tinkering with his huge cartoon for The Battle of Cascina. As if this work were not enough, he also began making plans to tackle a commission even more daunting than the Pope’s tomb. Accepting an offer from the Sultan Bayezid II, he hoped to travel to Constantinople and build a thousand-foot-long bridge – the world’s longest – over the Bosphorus, thereby linking Europe and Asia.fn1 If the Pope did not wish to pay for his services, a host of other patrons certainly did.

  Julius, meanwhile, impatiently bided his time. Two months after the sculptor’s flight, he sent to the Signoria, the political executive of Florence’s new republican government, a brief that, in its allowances for the artistic temperament, seems remarkably tolerant in tone, if somewhat condescending:

  Michelangelo the sculptor, who left us without reason, and in mere caprice, is afraid, we are informed, of returning, though we for our part are not angry with him, knowing the humours of such men of genius. In order then that we may lay aside all anxiety, we rely on your loyalty to convince him in our name, that if he returns to us he shall be uninjured and unhurt, retaining our
Apostolic favour in the same measure as he formerly enjoyed it.4

  Michelangelo was unmoved by this guarantee of safety, and the Pope was forced to send yet another request to the Signoria. Still Michelangelo defied the order, presumably because no mention was made of any plans for the tomb. By now the leader of the Florentine republic, Piero Soderini, began to lose patience, fearing the episode might end with the papal armies descending on Florence. ‘There must be an end to all of this,’ he wrote sternly to Michelangelo. ‘We are not going to be dragged into a war and risk the whole State for you. Make up your mind to go back to Rome.’5 But Michelangelo paid no more attention to Soderini than he had to the Pope.

  At this point, in the dog days of the summer, the Pope was suddenly distracted from the problem of his runaway artist by the first of his campaigns to rid the papal domains of their usurpers. On 17 August 1506, he announced to his cardinals a plan to lead an army, in person, against the rebel fiefdoms of Perugia and Bologna. The cardinals must have been thunderstruck. It was unheard of for a pope, the vicar of Christ, to lead an army into battle. Julius’s second announcement left them even more stupefied: they too would join the charge into battle. Still, no one dared object, not even when a comet appeared in the sky above Rome with its tail pointing towards the Castel Sant’Angelo – a sure sign, it was said, that evil times lay in store.

  Julius was undaunted by the omen, and for the next week Rome bustled with preparations. Finally, before dawn on the morning of 26 August, after an early Mass, he was borne in his litter to the Porta Maggiore, one of Rome’s eastern gates, where he gave a blessing to those who had risen to cheer him on his way. With him were five hundred knights on horseback and several thousand Swiss infantry armed with pikes. Twenty-six cardinals accompanied them, together with the choir from the Sistine Chapel and a small army of secretaries, notaries, chamberlains, auditors – a good part of the Vatican bureaucracy. Also among the company was Donato Bramante, who served, among his other duties, as the Pope’s military architect.

  From the Porta Maggiore, the procession snaked into the scorched countryside beyond the walls of Rome. More than three thousand horses and mules were needed to carry the mountains of baggage. At the head of this long column was the consecrated Host: not the thin white wafer of modern times, but a large, cake-like medallion that had been baked in an oven and stamped with inspiring scenes of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

  The army made good time despite such a cumbersome entourage, breaking camp two hours before sunrise each morning and covering seven or eight miles by nightfall. Along the way, the Pope and Bramante inspected various castles and fortifications. When the procession reached Lake Trasimeno, eighty miles to the north, Julius stopped for a day to indulge his two favourite pastimes, sailing and fishing. He had loved sailing ever since he earned money as a boy by transporting onions in a boat from Savona to Genoa. Now his Swiss foot soldiers pounded their drums and tooted their trumpets along the shore as he whiled away the hours on the lake. Further mixing business with pleasure, he took time to visit his daughter Felice and her husband in their castle. Even so, after less than a fortnight his troops had gained the steep hills and plunging valleys of Umbria and come within striking distance of their first target: the walled, hilltop city of Perugia.

  For the preceding few decades, Perugia had been ruled by the Baglioni, a family notable even in the gory annals of Italian politics for their violent mayhem. So hideous was one of their massacres that Perugia’s cathedral was afterwards washed with wine and reconsecrated in the hope of removing the taint of blood from the city. But not even the murderous Baglioni clan wished to cross swords with the Pope. Gianpaolo Baglioni, the Lord of Perugia, swiftly surrendered to Julius, and on 13 September the city gates swung open without a drop of blood being shed. The Pope and his entourage entered to the sound of tolling bells and a cheering populace. It was a homecoming of sorts, since as a young man Julius had taken holy orders in Perugia. Triumphal arches were hastily erected, and people thronged the streets as, preceded by the Blessed Sacrament, Julius was carried to the cathedral in the papal chair, every inch the conquering hero.

  So pleased was the Pope with this bloodless victory that he began entertaining plans of leading a Crusade to liberate Constantinople and Jerusalem. But first other duties beckoned. He remained in Perugia for only a week before setting off for Bologna, striking east through a pass in the Apennines and making for the Adriatic coast. Progress this time was slow because the weather had broken. By the end of September, the tops of the Umbrian hills lay deep in snow, and the narrow roads through the valleys turned treacherous in the rain, causing the packhorses to stumble and the spirits of the cardinals and papal retainers – who were accustomed to the good life in Rome – to sink. At one point, Julius was even forced to ascend a steep stretch of muddy road on foot. After a journey of 150 miles, they finally reached Forlì, where the Pope suffered the indignity of having his mule stolen by a local thief. Soon afterwards, word arrived that Giovanni Bentivoglio and his sons, the self-proclaimed rulers of Bologna, had fled to Milan.

  The Bentivoglio family were, if anything, more savage and unruly than the Baglioni. For all that, they were highly popular with the people of Bologna. After a coup by their rivals a few decades earlier, their supporters had hunted down and murdered the conspirators, then nailed their hearts to the doors of the Bentivoglio palace. But now the Bolognese did not hesitate to welcome the Pope through their gates. His entry was even more spectacular than the one into Perugia two months earlier. Once more, he was carried through the streets in the papal chair, wearing a tall, pearl-encrusted tiara and a purple cope shot through with gold thread and glittering with sapphires and emeralds. As in Perugia, triumphal arches were erected over streets that thronged with spectators, whose celebrations, complete with bonfires, lasted for three days. The legend of the ‘Warrior Pope’ was born.

  Following the Pope’s arrival in Bologna his likeness was fashioned in stucco and erected in front of the Palazzo del Podestà. But Julius longed for a more permanent memorial and, accordingly, made plans for an enormous bronze statue of himself that would loom over the porch of the church of San Petronio and proclaim to the people of Bologna his lordship over their city. And to cast this enormous bronze statue – which would stand fourteen feet tall – he naturally wanted Michelangelo. If the sculptor refused to paint the vault of the Sistine Chapel, Julius reasoned, then perhaps he would execute a sculpture.

  Yet another summons, the fourth, was promptly sent to Florence, this time ordering Michelangelo to appear before the Pope in Bologna.

  fn1 Michelangelo no doubt got the idea for this project from Leonardo da Vinci, who had written to the Sultan several years earlier with a proposal to build a bridge linking Europe with Asia. Neither bridge was ever built. The Sultan rejected Leonardo’s design as unrealistic, but in 2001 the artist Vebjorn Sand constructed a scaled-down, 220-foot-long version of the bridge to span a Norwegian motorway, proving the design would have worked.

  4

  Penance

  THE POPE’S MOST trusted friend and ally was a man named Francesco Alidosi, the Cardinal of Pavia. The 39-year-old Cardinal Alidosi had been a favourite of Julius ever since, years earlier, he had foiled Rodrigo Borgia’s plot to have him poisoned. However, the handsome, hook-nosed Alidosi had few other friends and supporters in Rome, mainly because of his supposed immoral behaviour. It was said by his numerous enemies that he consorted with prostitutes, dressed up as a woman, seduced boys and dabbled in the occult. Yet Cardinal Alidosi did have one other sympathiser, for he was one of the few people in Rome whom Michelangelo was prepared to trust. A great lover of the arts, Alidosi had been instrumental in bringing him to Rome in 1505 to carve the Pope’s tomb, and Michelangelo seems to have come to regard him as his protector and ally in the treacherous world of Vatican politics.1

  One reason for Michelangelo’s refusal to return to Rome had been his fear that he would not be left ‘uninjured and unhurt�
�, as the Pope had promised. Whether he actually feared for his life at the hands of Bramante is doubtful, but he did have good reason to fear the wrath of Julius. Before the summer ended he had therefore appealed to the Pope’s trusted lieutenant for a written guarantee of his safety.

  The cardinal, who had accompanied Julius on his military expedition, duly provided Michelangelo with a written assurance, and with this in his pocket the sculptor finally rode north to Bologna, also bearing a letter from Piero Soderini that proclaimed him ‘an excellent young man, in his own art without a peer in Italy, and perhaps even in the Universe’.2 However, Soderini’s letter also cautioned that Michelangelo’s nature ‘is such that he requires to be drawn out by kindness and encouragement’.

  The Pope received Michelangelo in Bologna at the end of November, more than seven months after he had fled Rome. Begging pardon from Julius was not a pleasant experience, as various of his enemies would soon discover. Michelangelo got off lightly, though the reunion was nonetheless a stormy one. One of the papal equerries, spotting Michelangelo during Mass in San Petronio, escorted him across the piazza to the Pope’s residence in the Palazzo de’ Sedici. His Holiness was at dinner.

  ‘You were supposed to come to us,’ bellowed the disgruntled pontiff, ‘and you have waited for us to come to you.’3

  Falling to his knees, Michelangelo begged forgiveness and explained that he had simply been enraged by his unfair treatment after returning from Carrara. The Pope made no reply, at which point a well-meaning bishop, having been urged by Soderini to put in a good word for Michelangelo, leapt to the sculptor’s defence.