Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  Fortunately for Michelangelo, by the time of Tedesco’s departure he already had another assistant on hand, one who was as different from Tedesco as could be imagined. Sometime late in the autumn of 1508 yet another alumnus of the Ghirlandaio workshop had joined the team, a 32-year-old named Jacopo Torni, known as Indaco (‘Indigo’). A competent if unspectacular painter, Indaco was attractive to Michelangelo because, like Granacci and Bugiardini, he was a loquacious, happy-go-lucky character whom Michelangelo had known for the better part of two decades. Indaco was, in fact, one of Michelangelo’s closest friends. ‘No one was more pleasing to him,’ Vasari writes, ‘or more suited to his humour, than this man.’21

  Michelangelo must have been delighted to exchange the one Jacopo for the other — the surly, griping Tedesco for the jovial and fun-loving Indaco. However, despite his affability, Indaco was actually a less than ideal choice for the Sistine Chapel. He had first come to Rome a decade earlier to work with Pinturicchio on the frescoes in the Borgia apartments that so offended Julius. Since then he had painted frescoes of his own in the church of Sant’Agostino, near the Piazza Navona. But lately his output had been shamefully slight. ‘Jacopo worked for many years in Rome,’ Vasari wrote, ‘or, to be more precise, he lived many years in Rome, working very little.’22 Even by the standards of the work-shy Granacci, Indaco was a notorious shirker, never working ‘save when he could not help it’.23 All work and no play, Indaco declared, was no life for a Christian.

  Though this philosophy of life may have lightened the mood in the studio or on the scaffold, especially at a time when the work was going so badly, it hardly seemed the most befitting doctrine for a man now expected to help Michelangelo fresco 12,000 square feet of vault for an obstreperous and demanding patron such as Julius II.

  12

  The Flaying of Marsyas

  IF MICHELANGELO WAS slovenly and, at times, melancholy and antisocial, Raphael was, by contrast, the perfect gentleman. Contemporaries fell over themselves to praise his polite manner, his gentle disposition, his generosity towards others. Even the poet and playwright Pietro Aretino, a man known for his vicious character assassinations, could not find a bad word to say about him. Raphael, he wrote, lived ‘like a prince rather than a private person, bestowing his virtues and his money liberally on all those students of the arts who might have need of them’.1 A papal pronotary named Celio Calcagnini enthused that Raphael, despite his formidable talents, ‘is far removed from any kind of arrogance; indeed, his behaviour is friendly and courteous, nor does he reject any advice, or refuse to listen to an expression of opinion’.2

  Giorgio Vasari, who did not know him personally, also praised Raphael’s flawless character. He observed (no doubt with an eye to Michelangelo) that until Raphael came along most artists showed ‘a certain element of savagery and even madness’.3 Vasari attributed Raphael’s sweet, civilised nature to the fact that he was breastfed by his mother, Magia Ciarli, instead of being sent to a wet nurse in the country. A wet nurse, Vasari believed, would have exposed him to ‘the less gentle and even boorish ways and habits in the houses of peasants or common people’.4 Suckled by his own mother, Raffaello Santi grew into such a saintly figure that it was said even the animals loved him – a legend that recalls another equally angelic character from the Umbrian hills, St Francis of Assisi, likewise said to have charmed the birds and animals. Added to Raphael’s appealing personality were his good looks: a long neck, oval face, large eyes and olive skin – handsome, delicate features that further made him the antithesis of the flat-nosed, jug-eared Michelangelo.5

  While Michelangelo was sorting out the problems with The Flood, Raphael was establishing himself in the Vatican apartments. He was put to work not with either of his old mentors, Perugino or Pinturicchio, but in a room with Giovanni Antonio Bazzi. The two made an unlikely pair, since Bazzi was, if anything, even more bizzarro e fantastico than Michelangelo. He possessed ample fresco experience, having just spent five years on a large cycle on the life of St Benedict in the monastery of Monte Oliveto, near Siena, and he was the favoured artist of the wealthy Chigi family of bankers. However, he was more famous as a flamboyant eccentric than for his work with a paintbrush. Foremost among his numerous oddities was the zoo he kept in his house, which included badgers, squirrels, monkeys, bantam hens, and a raven that he taught to speak. He also sported garish clothing, such as brocaded doublets, necklaces, rich caps, ‘and other suchlike fripperies’, sniffed Vasari, ‘fit only for clowns and charlatans’.6

  Bazzi’s oddball antics had flabbergasted the monks of Monte Oliveto, who took to calling him II Mattaccio, ‘the Maniac’. To the rest of the world he was known as Sodoma (‘Sodom’). This nickname was given to him, Vasari claimed, because ‘he had about him boys and beardless youths, whom he loved more than was decent’.7 Why Bazzi alone should have earned this sobriquet is a bit of a mystery considering the sexual preferences of the average Renaissance painter. In Rome, the punishment for sodomy was burning at the stake, so it is unclear how Sodoma could have survived, let alone flourished, had he indeed been the flagrant sodomite his name suggests. Whatever the case, far from objecting to this nickname, he revelled in it, ‘writing about it songs and verses in terza rima, and singing them to the lute with no little facility’.8

  The room assigned to Raphael and Sodoma was a few steps away from Julius’s bedroom. Later in the sixteenth century, after seeing use as the seat of the papal tribunal known as the Signatura Graziae et Iustitiae, the room came to be known as the Stanza della Segnatura. Julius intended to use it, however, as his private library.9 He was no bookworm, but even so he had managed to amass a respectable collection of 220 volumes. Known rather grandly as the Bibliotheca Iulia, these treasures were in the care of the learned humanist scholar Tommaso Inghirami, who also oversaw the much larger holdings of the Vatican Library.10

  The style in which libraries were decorated had been standard since the Middle Ages. Raphael would have been familiar with the scheme from, among other examples, Federigo da Montefeltro’s library in Urbino. Each of the four subjects into which the books were divided – theology, philosophy, justice and medicine – were represented by an allegorical female figure on the wall or ceiling. The painter usually also added portraits of men and women who had won acclaim in these particular fields. The design for the Stanza della Segnatura faithfully followed this tradition, although poetry replaced medicine, no doubt because of Julius’s preference for poets over doctors. Each wall was devoted to a scene illustrating one of the faculties, while above them, on the vault, four corresponding goddesses were to be framed inside the sort of geometric pattern of circles and squares that Julius had originally planned for the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.11 The books themselves, meanwhile, would occupy rows of cases on the floor.

  This particular design was settled before Raphael arrived in Rome, and Sodoma had already made a start on the vault by the time Raphael joined him. However, the exact division of labour during the early stages of the decoration in the Stanza della Segnatura is as ambiguous as the early stages of work in the Sistine Chapel. Vasari claimed in his biography of Sodoma that the eccentric artist’s preoccupation with his zoo meant work on the vault did not proceed to the satisfaction of the Pope, who then drafted in Raphael. Whatever the case, Raphael started work on the rectangular panels in the corners of the Stanza della Segnatura, ultimately painting three out of four of them.12 Each of these panels is a modest three and a half feet wide by four feet tall, an area that would take an experienced frescoist a single giornata.

  The first of these panels shows the Temptation in the Garden, an episode with which Raphael would have been familiar, among other places from Masolino’s rendering of it in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. In Raphael’s depiction, Eve offers the tiny fruit to Adam while the serpent, wrapped round the trunk of the tree of knowledge, watches from behind a branch. In keeping with misogynistic medieval tradition, the serpent is a woman, complete with long hair and bare breasts –
a sort of mermaid with coils instead of fins.

  More interesting than the serpent, though, is the figure of Eve herself. The scene gave Raphael the opportunity to fresco a pair of nude figures, the standard by which all great artists were judged. Naked but for some strategically placed shrubbery, his Eve stands with her hips turned in one direction, her shoulders in the other, and her weight resting on her right foot, causing her left side to elongate and her right to contract. This asymmetrical pose, known as contrapposto (‘placed opposite’), was revived from antiquity a century earlier by sculptors like Donatello who contrasted the hip and shoulder axes of their figures in order to create an illusion of bodily movement. Raphael could have seen Donatello’s St Mark, a famous early example, in its niche on the outside of Orsanmichele in Florence. However, his Eve was inspired not by Donatello but by the work of another artist whose influence, for the past four years, had loomed over him like a colossus.

  When Raphael moved to Florence in 1504 to witness the fresco contest between Michelangelo and Leonardo, he had, like every other aspiring artist in Florence, made sketches of the two monumental cartoons when they were displayed together in Santa Maria Novella. But it was Leonardo rather than Michelangelo who seemed, at this point, to inspire him most, and he studied Leonardo’s style even more closely than he had Perugino’s a few years earlier. He was clearly influenced not just by The Battle of Anghiari, for very quickly motifs from Leonardo’s other drawings and paintings appeared in his own. Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne cartoon, first displayed in Florence in 1501, taught him to balance his composition and allow for a compact and ordered group by arranging his figures in a pyramid. Each of the numerous Madonna and Child combinations that Raphael painted during his time in Florence explores the permutations of this design so exhaustively that one art critic has labelled them ‘variations on a theme by Leonardo’.13

  Likewise, from the Mona Lisa, probably painted about 1504, Raphael took the pose for a number of his Florentine portraits. Portraits usually featured their subjects in profile, possibly in imitation of the silhouettes on antique medals and coins. But Leonardo painted La Gioconda more or less face on, with her hands folded and an aerial perspective of an eerie landscape in the background – a pose whose sheer iconic familiarity tends to blind modern viewers to its originality. Raphael duplicated this pose almost exactly when he painted a portrait of Maddalena Strozzi in 1506.

  About the time of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo executed another masterpiece in Florence, one that has long since been lost. Leda and the Swan was transported to France soon after completion, then burned 150 years later, supposedly on the orders of Madame de Maintenon, the second wife of Louis XIV. The redoubtable Madame, who was reforming the morals of the court in Versailles by, among other unpopular measures, banning opera during Lent, objected to what she regarded as the indecency of Leonardo’s work. Indecent or not, the painting (which is known through copies) was one of Leonardo’s rare nudes: a naked, contrapposto Leda with her hands on the swan’s straining neck.

  Though wary of the younger generation of artists, Michelangelo in particular, Leonardo nonetheless seems to have allowed Raphael access to a number of his drawings, possibly because of the young artist’s association with his great friend Bramante.fn1 At any rate, Raphael somehow saw, and made a sketch of, Leonardo’s cartoon for Leda and the Swan, which he then used to generate his pose for Eve in the Stanza della Segnatura. Raphael’s Eve is actually a mirror image, rather than a direct copy, of Leonardo’s Leda, a common trick used by artists to disguise an otherwise familiar image.

  22. Raphael’s Temptation from the ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura.

  23. Raphael’s sketch of Leonardo da Vinci’s Leda and the Swan.

  The last of the four rectangular panels on the ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura, Apollo and Marsyas, was painted, most art historians agree, by Sodoma rather than Raphael. A tale of artistic competition, it was an apt subject for Rome in the winter of 1508–9 – and an apt subject, as it transpired, for Sodoma.

  The story of the musical duel between Marsyas and Apollo is told by Herodotus and Ovid, among numerous others. It is one of a grotesque mismatch, of an underdog challenging an opponent with vastly superior powers. While Apollo was the god of, to name a few, music, archery, prophecy and medicine, Marsyas was a silenus, one of a race of ugly, satyr-like creatures that artists usually portrayed with donkey’s ears.

  According to myth, Marsyas took up the flute after finding the one invented by Athena, who hoped to imitate the keening wail of the Gorgons as they mourned the dead Medusa. The flute had captured the sad sound, but the vain goddess threw it away after catching sight of her unflattering reflection in the water as she puffed a melody. Marsyas soon became so confident and expert on her flute that he challenged Apollo, on the lyre, to a duel. This was a rash act given that Apollo once murdered his own grandson, Eurytus, for daring to challenge him to an archery contest. Apollo agreed to the competition, adding the grisly clause that the winner should be allowed to do whatever he pleased to the loser.

  The outcome was all too predictable. With the Muses serving as judges, both Apollo and Marsyas played so beautifully that no winner could be declared until Apollo craftily turned his lyre upside down and continued to play, an act the silenus was unable to duplicate on his flute. The victorious Apollo then took his due, hanging Marsyas from a pine tree and viciously flaying him alive. As the woodland creatures wept at his cruel death, their tears became the River Marsyas, a tributary of the Meander, down which bobbed the flute until it was plucked from the water by a shepherd boy. The shepherd had the good sense to dedicate the instrument to Apollo, who was also the god of flocks and herds. Marsyas’s skin, meanwhile, became a museum piece, having supposedly been exhibited in ancient times at Celaenae, in present-day Turkey.

  The myth was given various interpretations over the centuries. For Plato, in the Republic, the story showed how the dark, unruly passions aroused by the flute were vanquished by the calmer tones of the Apollonian lyre. Christian moralists were no more sympathetic to Marsyas, seeing in the contest a parable for how overweening human pride was quite rightly swatted down by an effortlessly superior being.

  Sodoma’s scene depicts the moment of Apollo’s victory. The god receives the laurels and tut-tuts the defeated silenus with a wagging index finger. Marsyas is already bound to a pole, and one of Apollo’s henchmen stands at the ready, holding a knife under the loser’s nose, eagerly awaiting his cue.

  24. Sodoma’s Apollo and Marsyas from the ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura.

  The irony of his own situation as he painted the scene cannot have been lost on Sodoma, who had suddenly found himself playing the part of the underdog as he worked side by side with the immensely talented Raphael. For the painters in the Vatican were not only in competition with Michelangelo and his team in the Sistine Chapel; they were also, it transpired, competing against one another. As Leonardo and Michelangelo had discovered, patrons often arranged contests among their teams of frescoists. To give another example, when Perugino and his team frescoed the walls of the Sistine Chapel in the 1480s, Pope Sixtus IV decided to award a prize to the artist whose work he deemed the best – giving it, ironically, to Cosimo Rosselli, usually considered the weakest of the lot.

  The terms of the competition in the Vatican were somewhat harsher than those imposed by Sixtus. Like a number of the other artists, Sodoma had been paid fifty ducats as an advance on his work in the room.14 Since this sum amounted to a payment for roughly six months’ work, he must have been aware that his contract might not be renewed, and that the Pope was pitting him against Raphael, as well as the other artists, in order to find among Bramante’s recruits the frescoist most capable of doing justice to the rooms.

  Sodoma, like Marsyas, was vanquished soon enough. Apollo and Marsyas was the last scene he would paint in the Vatican Palace, for sometime early in 1509 he was relieved of his duties, supplanted for the simple reason
that Raphael had proved himself more proficient in both design and execution. While Sodoma resorted to numerous secco touches, the younger and less experienced artist showed himself skilfully in command of the buon fresco technique.15

  Sodoma was not alone in his dismissal from the Vatican. Perugino, Pinturicchio, Bramantino, Johannes Ruysch – the rest of the team were likewise removed from the commission, their half-finished frescoes destined to be scraped from the walls to make room for the creations of Raphael. So impressed had the Pope been with Raphael’s work in the Stanza della Segnatura that from then on the young painter from Urbino would be in charge of decorating the apartments, bringing him into even sharper confrontation with Michelangelo.

  fn1 No evidence suggests that Raphael and Leonardo ever actually met, either in Florence or elsewhere, though opportunities existed as early as 1502, when Leonardo toured Umbria as Cesare Borgia’s military engineer.

  13

  True Colours

  PIETRO PERUGINO MAY have been past his best when, like Sodoma and the rest of the team, he was unceremoniously relieved of his duties in the Vatican. Nonetheless, he had been the most prominent member of the team that frescoed the walls of the Sistine Chapel some thirty years earlier. While neither Ghirlandaio nor Botticelli really did justice to himself in the chapel, Perugino positively excelled, executing an undisputed masterpiece – and one of the finest frescoes of the fifteenth century – on the north wall of the chapel. The Giving of the Keys to St Peter was therefore a scene against which Michelangelo knew his own work on the vault would inevitably be measured.

  Found thirty feet directly beneath The Flood, The Giving of the Keys to St Peter is one of the six scenes from the life of Christ that decorate the north wall of the Sistine Chapel. It illustrates the episode from Matthew 16:17–19 in which Christ confers unique priestly powers on St Peter, making him the first pope. Perugino portrayed a blue-robed Christ handing the ‘keys to the kingdom of heaven’ – a symbol of the papacy – to his kneeling disciple. The pair are surrounded by the other disciples in the middle of a huge, Renaissance-style piazza that features an octagonal temple and two triumphal arches in the background, all represented in flawless perspective. A subtle piece of papal propaganda, Perugino’s fresco portrays Peter in the colours of the Rovere clan, blue and gold, thus emphasising that. Pope Sixtus IV, the patron of the work, was one of Peter’s successors.