Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  Probably best known as the man who ignited the ‘bonfire of the vanities’, the incineration of a sixty-foot-high pile of ‘vanities’ and ‘luxuries’ in the middle of the Piazza della Signoria,fn1 Girolamo Savonarola came to Florence from Ferrara in 1491, at the age of thirty-nine, to serve as the prior of the Dominican convent of San Marco. Under Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence celebrated the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome. Plato was translated and studied, the university taught Greek, preachers quoted Ovid from the pulpit, the populace frequented Roman-style bathhouses, and artists such as Sandro Botticelli depicted pagan rather than religious subjects.

  19. Girolamo Savonarola.

  These classical splendours and obsessions offended Savonarola, who believed this mania for the antique world was turning the young men of Florence into sodomites. ‘Abandon, I tell you, your concubines and your beardless youths,’ he thundered from the pulpit. ‘Abandon, I say, that abominable vice that has brought God’s wrath upon you, or else woe, woe to you!’8 His solution to the problem was a simple one: sodomites should be burned along with the vanities. And by ‘vanities’ he meant not only chessboards, playing cards, mirrors, fancy clothing and bottles of perfume. He also exhorted the people of Florence to throw on to his bonfire their musical instruments, tapestries, paintings, and copies of books by Florence’s three greatest writers, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.

  The adolescent Michelangelo was soon under the spell of this fanatic, whose sermons he would reread throughout his life. Savonarola was a man for whom, Condivi wrote, Michelangelo ‘always had great affection’, and decades later he claimed he could still hear the friar’s voice.9 Lean and pale, with black hair, intense green eyes and thick eyebrows, Savonarola had held all of Florence in his thrall in 1492 as he preached hair-raising sermons from the pulpit of Santa Maria del Fiore during Lent, recounting blood-curdling visions in which daggers and crosses appeared to him in the thunderous, darkened sky above the city. The message of these visions was crystal clear: unless the Florentines mended their ways, they would be punished by a wrathful God. ‘O Florence, O Florence, O Florence,’ he cried like one of the Old Testament prophets to which he was always comparing himself, ‘for your sins, for your brutality, your avarice, your lust, your ambition, there will befall you many trials and tribulations!’10

  As it happened, the friar’s prophecy was fulfilled in due course. Two years later, bent on claiming the throne of Naples for himself, Charles VIII of France had swept across the Alps with an army of more than 30,000 men. Savonarola compared this massive invasion force – the largest ever to set foot on Italian soil – to the waters of a great flood. ‘Behold,’ he cried from the pulpit on the morning of 21 September 1494, ‘I shall unloose waters over the earth!’ Comparing himself to Noah, he cried that if the people of Florence wished to escape these flood waters they needed to take refuge in the ark – the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.

  The impact of this sermon on the people of Florence was electric. ‘So full of terrors and alarms, cries and lamentations’ were Savonarola’s sermons, wrote one observer, ‘that everyone went about the city bewildered, speechless and, as it were, half-dead.’11 Their fearful demeanours earned the friar’s followers the nickname Piagnoni, or ‘Snivellers’. The Medici were soon expelled from Florence, and in November Savonarola’s ‘Scourge of God’ – the short, scrawny, hook-nosed, ginger-bearded Charles VIII – entered the city on horseback. Charles stayed for eleven pleasantly hospitable days before departing for Rome to confront Pope Alexander VI, a man whose decadence made that of Florence pale in comparison. As if on cue, the city was flooded by the Tiber – proof of the Lord’s displeasure with the Romans.

  The flood was therefore an evocative image for Michelangelo, a potent reminder, not of the power of nature, but of the wrathful God of the Old Testament that Savonarola’s sermons brought so vividly to life. These sermons would influence a number of other images on the ceiling, and may even have been behind the switch in the fresco’s subject matter from a New Testament theme – the twelve Apostles – to a series of Old Testament stories, some of which featured in the friar’s most scarifying harangues.12 For the previous two centuries, Italian artists had concentrated mainly on New Testament subjects such as the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Assumption, and so forth – gentle, elegant scenes telling reassuringly optimistic stories of God’s grace and mankind’s salvation through Christ. With the exception of his own most famous New Testament subject, the Pietà, as well as his Madonna-and-Child reliefs and panels, Michelangelo had displayed little interest in such motifs. He was fascinated, instead, by tragic, violent narratives of crime and punishment such as those – complete with hangings, plagues, propitiations and beheadings – that he was soon to fresco on the vault of the Sistine Chapel. And these turbulent visions of a vengeful God, doomed sinners and prophets crying in the wilderness were undoubtedly part of Savonarola’s legacy.13

  Savonarola’s story ended tragically, with all of the flames, wrath and retribution of one of his sermons. He had earlier written a book, Dialogo della verità profetica, in which he claimed that God still sent prophets to walk the earth as in the days of the Old Testament, and that he, Fra Girolamo, was just such an oracle. He believed his visions to be the products of angelic intervention, and his sermons and dialogues explained how his gloom-and-doom predictions had supposedly been fulfilled by recent historical events. These prophecies became his downfall since according to the Church’s official line the Holy Spirit spoke to the Pope alone, not to rabble-rousing friars from Ferrara. In 1497, Alexander VI therefore ordered Savonarola to stop preaching and prophesying, eventually excommunicating him when he failed to do so. When the friar continued stubbornly to preach even while under excommunication, he was tortured and then, in May 1498, hanged in the middle of the Piazza della Signoria. His corpse was, ironically, incinerated in a bonfire and the ashes dumped into the Arno.

  Michelangelo had been in Carrara at this time, quarrying marble for the Pietà. However, he would soon have learned of Savonarola’s fate, not least from his older brother Lionardo, a Dominican priest, who had visited him in Rome soon after the execution, and who been defrocked because of his devotion to Savonarola. While the Pietà, with its dead Christ cradled in the arms of the Virgin, was a supreme example of the redemptive Christianity of the New Testament,14 a decade later, as he started work in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo was able to give a freer rein to the more apocalyptic imagination shaped by Savonarola.

  fn1 There were in fact two of these brucciamenti della vanità: one on 7 February 1497, another on 27 February in the following year.

  10

  Competition

  AS MICHELANGELO AND his assistants commenced work on their fresco, the Pope was busy with affairs of state. Since his return from Bologna in 1507, Julius had been hatching schemes for further conquests. He may have successfully retrieved Perugia and Bologna, but the Venetians still had their hands on territories that he considered the property of the Church. Hoping to resolve the situation peacefully, he had sent his great advocate, Egidio da Viterbo, to Venice to request the return of Faenza. However, not even Egidio’s flawless eloquence could persuade the Venetian senators to hand back their ill-gotten gains. The Venetians had further trodden on the Pope’s toes by appointing their own bishops. Even worse, they had provided a safe haven for the leaders of the Bentivoglio clan from Bologna, flatly refusing to turn them over to the Pope. Julius fumed at these insults. ‘I will never rest,’ he bellowed at the Venetian envoy, ‘until you are brought down to be the poor fishermen that you once were.’1

  The Venetians had made other enemies even more powerful than the Pope. The republic’s various land-grabs over the previous few years had also alienated the French, who, like Julius, wanted the return of their former fiefs, including cities such as Brescia and Cremona. Julius did not trust Louis XII, the King of France, whose territorial ambitions in Italy were clearly worrying to the Church. But if the Venetians remained
intransigent, Julius made it clear, he would make an alliance with the French.

  However, fierce politicking did not prevent the Pope from attending to more personal matters, namely the decoration of his private apartments. Since his election, Julius had done his best to blot the hated Borgia name from history. He had struck Alexander VI’s name from all documents in the Vatican, shrouded the portraits of the Borgias in black, and ordered the opening of the dead Pope’s tomb and the shipping of his remains back to Spain. It would therefore have come as no surprise when, in November 1507, he made it known that he no longer intended to use as his official residence the set of apartments on the second floor of the Vatican previously occupied by Alexander. His Holiness could ‘no longer live there’, Paride de’ Grassi reported, ‘in the presence of that wicked and criminal memory’.2

  These rooms, in the north wing of the palace, had been decorated a dozen years earlier by Pinturicchio, who had covered the walls and ceilings with stories from the Bible and the lives of the saints, including St Catherine, the model for whom was the blonde-haired Lucrezia Borgia. Since Pinturicchio had also portrayed both Alexander and the Borgia coat of arms everywhere on the walls, the decor of the apartments was offensive to Julius. Paride suggested that the frescoes should be chipped from the walls, but the Pope protested that such desecration was not proper.3 Instead, he planned to move upstairs, on to the third floor of the palace, into a suite of intercommunicating rooms offering even more stunning views of Bramante’s new Cortile del Belvedere. These apartments – which would include an audience hall and a library – were therefore in need of decoration.

  When, in 1504, Piero Soderini had hired Michelangelo as Leonardo’s sparring partner in the Hall of the Great Council, he was perhaps hoping that a little healthy competition might force Leonardo, a notorious procrastinator, to complete his work on time.4 The Pope may have resorted to a similar sort of tactic with Michelangelo in 1508. Whatever the case, no sooner had Michelangelo begun painting in the Sistine Chapel than he learned that work was commencing on another major project only a short distance away. Four years after his contest with Leonardo in Florence, Michelangelo was again plunged into open competition.

  20. A plan of the Vatican Apartments.

  Michelangelo’s new competitors made a formidable team. Determined, as always, to hire only the best craftsmen, the Pope had assembled the most daunting group of frescoists seen in Rome since Pietro Perugino led the team that decorated the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Perugino was in fact a member of this new group, which included at least a half-dozen other highly experienced frescoists, such as Pinturicchio, whose authorship of the offending frescoes in the Borgia apartments did not deter Julius, and the 58-year-old Luca Signorelli, another veteran of the wall frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.

  Michelangelo must have recognised that these men possessed expertise that no one on his team – least of all he himself – could hope to match. The competition was further sharpened by Michelangelo’s hatred for Perugino. A few years earlier, in Florence, the pair had traded public insults, their feud eventually becoming so heated that they were summoned to appear before the Otto di Guardia, Florence’s criminal magistracy.5 Even more alarming was the fact that this team of painters had been recruited for the Pope by Donato Bramante, who was on close personal terms with them, having been responsible for bringing a number of them to Rome and launching their careers.6

  The other painters on Bramante’s team were less familiar to Michelangelo, but they too had solid reputations. They included Bartolomeo Suardi, who was called Bramantino (‘Little Bramante’) in honour of his former master, and a 31-year-old Lombard named Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, nicknamed Sodoma. Bramantino’s skill was especially renowned. Forty-three years old, he could paint figures so realistic that it was said they lacked nothing but the powers of speech. The team also had an international flavour, with a Dutch artist named Johannes Ruysch and a Frenchman, Guillaume de Marçillat, best known as a designer of stained-glass windows. Another member was a promising young Venetian painter named Lorenzo Lotto, who had arrived in Rome a short while earlier.

  This Vatican team must have undertaken their task with more enthusiasm and fewer trepidations than Michelangelo, since the total surface area to be frescoed in the four rooms was less than half that awaiting Michelangelo’s brush in the Sistine Chapel. Furthermore, as the ceilings were less than thirty feet from the floor, the job was easier from a logistical point of view. Bramante no doubt designed their scaffolds and, in doing so, presumably enjoyed greater success than he had in the Sistine Chapel. More importantly, he also designed the mythological and religious scenes for the vaults, which were to be painted in dazzling colours.7

  Bramante involved himself in this major project in one further and ultimately even more significant respect. Scarcely had work in the rooms begun than early in the new year yet another of the architect’s protégés, the youngest member of the team, started worked on the Vatican frescoes. He was the new boy wonder of Italian painting, a prodigiously gifted 25-year-old named Raffaello Santi.

  Raffaello Santi – or ‘Raphael’, as he signed his paintings – would have been known to Michelangelo from his growing reputation in Florence. The most promising and ambitious member of the Vatican team, he came from Bramante’s home town of Urbino, a hilltop city seventy-five miles east of Florence. Unlike Bramante, who was the son of a farmer, he had enjoyed a privileged upbringing. His father, Giovanni Santi, had been court painter to the Duke of Urbino, Federigo da Montefeltro, a wealthy and sophisticated patron of the arts. Giovanni died when Raphael was eleven, leaving him to serve his apprenticeship under Evangelista di Pian di Meleto, who had been Giovanni’s assistant.8 Evangelista was a mediocre artist, but the boy’s genius was not long in showing itself. He earned his first commission at seventeen, when he was hired to paint an altarpiece for the church of Sant’Agostino in Città di Castello, a small fortified town twenty-five miles from Urbino.9

  21. Raphael, a self portrait.

  Raphael’s precocious talents soon came to the attention of a more acclaimed painter than Evangelista. In about 1500, Perugino was preparing for the sizeable task of frescoing the Collegio del Cambio, the guildhall of bankers and moneylenders in his home town of Perugia. Always one for spotting gifted young assistants, Perugino had trained, among others, the young Pinturicchio, who aided him in the Sistine Chapel. Another of his helpers had been an apprentice from Assisi named Andrea Luigi, known because of his dazzling skills by the enviable nickname L’Ingegno (‘the Genius’). After Andrea’s promising career was brought to a tragic halt when he went blind, Perugino must have been thrilled with the discovery of another young prodigy from the hills of Umbria.

  Perugino seems to have invited Raphael to Perugia to work with him in the Collegio del Cambio,10 after which the city’s two feuding families, the Baglioni and the Oddi, were soon vying with each other to commission work from the talented young artist. Their savageries proved good for business. Madonna Maddalena, matriarch of the Oddi clan, hired Raphael to paint an altarpiece for a family funeral chapel that housed the bones of some of the 130 men slaughtered by the Baglioni a decade earlier. No sooner had he finished this piece than the matriarch of the Baglioni clan asked for an Entombment which she intended to hang in the church of San Francesco in atonement for the sins of her son who, in the bloodbath known as the ‘Scarlet Wedding’ – a ghastly carnage even by the odious standards of Perugia – had slain four members of his own family in their beds after a wedding celebration.

  But Raphael was in search of more exalted patrons than the warring clans of Perugia, and more renowned masters than Perugino. In 1504, he was assisting Pinturicchio with the frescoes for the Piccolomini Library in Siena when he learned that Leonardo and Michelangelo were frescoing the walls of the Palazzo della Signoria. He promptly abandoned Pinturicchio and headed north to Florence, hoping to study the works of the two older artists and seek his fortune among Europe’s most vibrant and discerning ar
tistic community.

  In order to make his mark in Florence, Raphael needed to come to the attention of Piero Soderini, the head of the republican government. He therefore decided to exploit his late father’s connections with the Montefeltro family by asking Federigo’s daughter, Giovanna Feltria, for a letter of recommendation. No commissions were forthcoming from Soderini, but over the next four years Raphael was much in demand in Florence, painting numerous works for a host of wealthy merchants. Most of these pictures were variations on the Madonna and Child theme, showing the pair with a goldfinch, a lamb, in a meadow, under a canopy, between a pair of saints, and so forth – a series of sweetly impassive Madonnas fondly observing shy, frolicksome Christ Childs. He likewise proved himself adroit at what had been his father’s speciality, painting a series of amazingly lifelike portraits of prominent Florentines, among them Agnolo Doni, the wool merchant and collector of antiquities who, a year earlier, had commissioned the Holy Family from Michelangelo.

  Despite all of this work, Raphael still dreamed of a major commission from Soderini, something along the lines of the awe-inspiring projects with which Leonardo and Michelangelo had been entrusted in the Hall of the Great Council. In the spring of 1508, therefore, he once again tried to pull some strings, asking his uncle to obtain from Giovanna Feltria’s son, Francesco Maria, a letter to Soderini requesting that Raphael be allowed to fresco a wall in the Palazzo della Signoria. Though not explicit about the commission, Raphael may have hoped to complete one of the two abandoned frescoes in the Hall of the Great Council, perhaps even both.11 If so, it was a bold request that revealed the mammoth scale of the young painter’s aspirations. With a few small exceptions, almost all of his own works had been done on panel, in either tempera or oil. Like Michelangelo, he did not have a great deal of fresco experience, only a stellar reputation in another medium. Though he had worked on frescoes with both Perugino and Pinturicchio, his only solo work had been done in about 1505, when he began decorating a wall of the Lady Chapel in the monastery of San Severo in Perugia. Work appears to have gone well, but after about a year of sporadic work he left the fresco incomplete. His reasons for doing so remain a mystery. However, decorating one wall of a chapel in a tiny church belonging to an obscure order of monks in the backwater of Perugia was not the prestigious sort of work he craved.