Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  It is no surprise, perhaps, that Michelangelo, a man obsessed with his own family tree, should have decided to paint that of Christ. However, the Ancestors of Christ were not a common theme in Western art. Giotto had frescoed them in decorative strips on the vault of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, and they also appeared on the façades of a number of Gothic cathedrals in France. Still, these forbears of Christ had never won the same popularity as other figures from the Bible, such as the prophets or the Apostles. Michelangelo chose to depict this uncommon subject, moreover, in a highly unconventional manner, one without literary or artistic precedents. Hitherto, the forefathers of the Messiah had been shown as regal characters with crowns and sceptres, as befits an illustrious line that stretched from Abraham to Joseph and included kings of Israel and Judah such as David and Solomon. Giotto even added haloes to their heads. Michelangelo, on the other hand, planned to portray them as considerably humbler characters.

  This idiosyncratic interpretation shows itself in one of the first Ancestors that Michelangelo painted. Josiah, whose story is told in the second Book of Kings, was one of the greatest heroes of the Old Testament. Among his various reforms, he sacked idolatrous priests, burned their idols, halted the ritual sacrifice of children, banned mediums and wizards, and knocked down the houses of a notorious cult of male prostitutes. After an eventful reign of thirty-one years, he died bravely on the battlefield from arrow wounds sustained in a skirmish with the Egyptians. ‘Before him there was no king like him,’ the Bible reports. ‘Nor did any like him arise after him’ (2 Kings 23:25).

  Michelangelo was renowned for designing and sculpting heroic male figures. However, there is not the faintest flicker, in his portrait of Josiah, of this awe-inspiring scourge of wizards, idolaters and male prostitutes. The lunette shows what appears to be a domestic spat in which a mother with a squirming child angrily turns her back on a husband who gestures at her in helpless exasperation as he wrestles with a child on his own lap. The spandrel above the window, meanwhile, features a wife sitting on the ground with a baby in her arms and her husband sprawled beside her, eyes closed and head drooping. If their lethargic bodies contrast dramatically with the gusto of the biblical Josiah, they are also at odds with both the burly nudes a few feet above their heads and the vigorous aplomb of Michelangelo as he dashed about the scaffold, painting each of these torpid figures in only a day or two.

  Michelangelo would portray the rest of the Ancestors of Christ – a grand total of ninety-one figures running in a colourful frieze above the windows – in similar fashion. His preparatory drawings are full of characters whose heads droop, limbs flop and bodies slouch in poses that could in no way be described as ‘Michelangelesque’. Many of them perform humdrum routines, such as combing their hair, winding yarn, cutting cloth, falling asleep, tending children or gazing into mirrors. These actions make the Ancestors virtually unique in Michelangelo’s oeuvre, since images of everyday life are few and far between in his work. And something else makes the Ancestors noteworthy. Among these ninety-one passive, nondescript figures Michelangelo would paint twenty-five women – something completely unheard of in previous depictions of the Ancestors of Christ, except, of course, for Christ’s most immediate female relative, the Virgin Mary.fn1

  The inclusion of women in these mundane scenes serves to transform Michelangelo’s illustrations of the Ancestors into several dozen family groups. With their father-mother-child combinations, his figures are actually more akin to representations of the Holy Family than to earlier characterisations of the ancestors. Several years later, in fact, Titian would use some of the figures from the IOSIAS IECHONIAS SALATHIEL lunette as the model for his own version of the Holy Family, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, painted about 1512.19

  The Holy Family was a relatively new subject in art. Evolving from portraits of the Madonna and Child, it tended to accent the human and familial aspect of the Incarnation, featuring candid pictures of Joseph and Mary in homely poses with which viewers would easily identify. Raphael painted several renditions in Florence, including one for Domenico Canigiani in which a benevolent-looking Joseph leans on his staff while the Virgin and St Elizabeth repose under his watchful eye and their two children happily disport themselves on the grass. Michelangelo’s own Holy Family, painted about 1504, shows Mary seated on the ground with a book in her lap as a grey-bearded Joseph passes the Christ Child into her hands.

  Portraits of the Holy Family were often private commissions that served as domestic devotional pieces. Hung in the home or ancestral chapel, they were intended to shape and strengthen family identity by offering examples of loving bonds between husband and wife as well as parent and child.20 Michelangelo’s Holy Family was no exception. Painted for Agnolo Doni at the time of his marriage to Maddalena Strozzi, it offered the newlyweds an inspiring image of the perfect domestic unit to contemplate as they embarked on their future together.21

  Several years later, Michelangelo presented a very different vision of domestic life. The acrimonious and exhausted couples in the Sistine Chapel’s spandrels and lunettes occupy a harsher and more infelicitous world than the avuncular Josephs and blissful Madonnas of the Holy Family genre. Far from offering virtuous examples of loving little units, Michelangelo’s Ancestors express a range of less desirable emotional states, including anger, boredom and sheer inertia. Given that these slothful, bickering figures graphically illustrate a ‘wretched family life’22 (as one art historian calls it), one is tempted to see a connection between them and Michelangelo’s discontentment and frustration with his own rather unhappy family. He may have been close to his father and brothers, but the Buonarroti home was still a place of squabbles, worries, divisions and incessant demands and complaints. With domestic irritations such as the lawsuit of his aunt and the aimless lives of his brothers forefront in his mind as he designed the spandrels and lunettes, Michelangelo seems to have incorporated into his fresco what a psychoanalyst has called his ‘confused and conflicted feelings about his own ancestry’,23 thereby rendering the family of Christ as miserable and unruly as his own.

  fn1 Apart from the Virgin Mary, of the forty Ancestors of Christ listed in the Bible, only four women are mentioned: Tamar, Bathsheba, Rahab and Ruth. Michelangelo does not, however, inscribe their names on any of the tablets.

  14

  Rejoice Greatly, O Daughter of Zion

  ON 14 MAY 1509, the Venetian army was defeated in battle by the French at Agnadello, in northern Italy. More than 15,000 soldiers were either captured or killed, including Venice’s most senior commander, Bartolomeo d’Alviano. It was a shattering defeat for the republic, and their first on dry land since AD 452, when Attila the Hun came rampaging through Italy on his way to Rome. Now, it seemed, another enemy from across the Alps was poised to storm the peninsula.

  Louis XII, leader of Europe’s greatest superpower, had invaded Italy with an army of 40,000 men, bent on reclaiming what he regarded as French possessions. He did so with the blessing of the Pope, who had excommunicated the Venetian republic three weeks earlier for refusing to surrender the Romagna. Julius had declared that the Venetians combined the cunning of the wolf with the ferocity of the lion, to which Venetian satirists retorted with accusations that he was a homosexual, a paedophile and a drunkard.

  Julius did not merely excommunicate Venice; in March 1509 he also made public his adherence to the League of Cambrai. Drawn up a few months previously, the League was supposedly an agreement between Louis XII and the Emperor Maximilian to launch a Crusade against the Turks, but it also included a secret clause calling for the two parties, along with Julius and the King of Spain, to join forces to make Venice give back her spoils. Learning the true aims of the League, the Venetians hastily offered to return Faenza and Rimini to the Pope. But the overture came too late, since Louis XII’s juggernaut was already rolling into Italy. In the weeks after the battle of Agnadello, papal forces under the command of Julius’s nephew, Francesco Maria, the new Duke of Urbino, moppe
d up after the French, sweeping through the Romagna and reclaiming its cities and fortresses.

  The crushing defeat of the Venetians was celebrated in Rome with a display of fireworks over the Castel Sant’Angelo. In the Sistine Chapel, a preacher with the imperial-sounding name of Marcus Antonius Magnus delivered an oration praising the great French victory and the welcome return of papal lands. The Pope himself was in no mood for festivities, however. It was little more than a decade since French troops under Charles VIII had invaded Italy, spreading terror throughout the peninsula and forcing Pope Alexander to flee inside the Castel Sant’Angelo. In the spring of 1509, history appeared in danger of repeating itself.

  The 47-year-old Louis XII had come to the throne of France in 1498, when his cousin Charles VIII died after striking his head on a low timber beam in his chateau at Amboise. He was a distinctly unimposing specimen, thin and frail, with a weak constitution and a domineering wife. Still, with his royal blood, he fancied himself more than a match for Julius. ‘The Rovere are a peasant family,’ he once sniffed haughtily to a Florentine envoy. ‘Nothing but the stick at his back will keep this pope in order.’1

  25. King Louis XII of France.

  Despite the celebrations, then, Julius had good reason to be troubled. Soon after Agnadello, he claimed to be ‘counting the hours until the King of France leaves Italy’.2

  The festivities in Rome after the Venetian defeat at Agnadello must have brought to mind, for those who witnessed them, the ones that had taken place when the Pope returned from his triumphant campaign against Perugia and Bologna. On that occasion, Julius and his cardinals had ridden in a splendid three-hour procession from the Porta del Popolo to St Peter’s. In front of the half-demolished basilica a full-size replica of the Arch of Constantine had been built, and coins tossed into the crowd were inscribed IVLIVS CAESAR PONT II, a legend explicitly comparing the victorious Pope to his namesake.fn1 One of the triumphal arches erected along the via del Corso even read ‘Veni, vidi, vici’.

  The Pope did not see himself merely as the new Julius Caesar. His return to Rome had been carefully timed to coincide with Palm Sunday, the commemoration of the time enthusiastic crowds tossed palm leaves into Christ’s path as he entered Jerusalem on the back of an ass. To make sure no one missed the point, Julius was preceded through the streets by a horse-drawn chariot from which ten youths dressed in angel costumes waved palm fronds at him. The reverse of the Julius Caesar coin bore the text for Palm Sunday: ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’, the words shouted by the ecstatic crowds as Christ entered Jerusalem. Such a display of megalomania must have given even the Pope’s most devoted supporters pause for thought.

  Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on the back of an ass was foretold, like many of the Messiah’s other activities, in the Old Testament. ‘Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!’ wrote the prophet Zechariah. ‘Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you, triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt, the foal of an ass’ (Zechariah 9:9).

  Zechariah’s vision of Christ’s arrival took place when the Jews returned to Jerusalem following their long exile in Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar had laid waste to Jerusalem in 587 BC, knocking down its walls, burning its palaces, pillaging the Temple of Solomon of everything including the candle-snuffers, and carrying off the population into captivity. As the Jews returned to their ravaged city seventy years later, Zechariah received not only his vision of a Messiah entering the city on the back of a colt, but also one of the Temple’s reconstruction: ‘Behold, the man whose name is the Branch: for he shall branch out in this place, and he shall build the temple of the Lord, and shall bear royal honour, and shall sit and rule upon his throne’ (Zechariah 6:12–13).

  Zechariah was the first of seven Old Testament prophets to be frescoed on the Sistine Chapel’s vault. Thirteen feet in height, and wrapped in heavy crimson and green robes, he was given a yellow-ochre shirt with a brilliant blue collar and held in his hands a book with a morellone cover. As befits someone who foresaw the reconstruction of the despoiled Temple – a building on whose dimensions the Sistine Chapel was built – he occupied a conspicuous location, directly above the entrance. Some six months into the fresco project, Michelangelo finally felt confident enough of his abilities to begin work above the door of the chapel.

  Zechariah was also painted directly above the Rovere coat of arms, placed in their prominent location over the door by Pope Sixtus IV. The word rovere means scrub oak, and the Rovere armorial bearings punningly featured an oak tree with intertwined branches sprouting twelve golden acorns. As Louis XII had been quick to point out, the Rovere were not actually a noble family. Sixtus IV took the coat of arms from a blue-blooded, but unrelated, family from Turin, also named Rovere. Henceforth, as one commentator has observed, ‘the shadowy claim of the Rovere popes to the rovere tree was only matched by the zeal with which they applied it in every possible situation’.3 The fresco on the Sistine’s vault presented Julius with an opportunity to display his coat of arms too splendid to miss. There are frequent allusions to it – and to the chapel’s two great patrons – in the borders of some of the Genesis scenes which are decorated with fat garlands of oak leaves and acorns.

  These green swags were not Michelangelo’s sole homage to Julius. Little more than a year after his bronze statue of the Pope was installed above the door of the church of San Petronio, Michelangelo placed a portrait of his patron above the door of the Sistine Chapel as well. Zechariah not only sits a few inches above the Rovere coat of arms but also wears clothing featuring the Rovere colours, blue and gold. Furthermore, his tonsured head, aquiline nose and strong, stern features all look suspiciously familiar. Michelangelo’s Zechariah looks so much like the Pope, in fact, that a black-chalk study of the prophet’s head was thought until 1945 to be a preparatory sketch for a portrait of Julius.4

  It was common for an artist to immortalise his patron in a fresco. Ghirlandaio portrayed Giovanni Tornabuoni and his wife in the Tornabuoni Chapel, and Pope Alexander and his children were prominently displayed, much to Julius’s annoyance, in Pinturicchio’s frescoes in the Borgia apartments. But if Zechariah was indeed intended as a portrait of Julius, then Michelangelo may have included it only reluctantly. Relations between the artist and his patron had never really recovered from the events of 1506, for Michelangelo was still consumed with regret over the failure of the tomb project. The portrait almost seems to imply that someone besides Michelangelo did in fact have a hand in designing the programme, for it hardly seems likely that he would have chosen to memorialise the man whom he regarded as his persecutor. At the very least it suggests that he took certain instructions or requests from either the Pope or his advisers.

  Zechariah’s prophecy is generally said to have been fulfilled by Zorobabel, who completed the Temple’s reconstruction in 515 BC. But another interpretation was possible during the reign of Julius II. Able to present himself unblushingly as both Caesar and Christ, the Pope – with his coat of arms featuring sprouting branches – most certainly would have glimpsed himself in the prophetic words of Zechariah, especially since he was both repairing the Sistine Chapel and rebuilding St Peter’s.

  26. Michelangelo’s sketch for Zechariah.

  This staggering conceit smacks of the Pope’s official propagandist, Egidio da Viterbo, whose speciality was spotting allusions to Julius in Old Testament prophecies. In December 1507, he had preached a sermon in St Peter’s explicating the vision in which the prophet Isaiah, following the death of Uzziah, saw ‘the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up’. Egidio believed the prophet had not properly expressed himself. ‘He meant to say,’ he informed the congregation, ‘“I saw Julius II, the Pope, both succeeding the dead Uzziah and seated on the throne of religious increase.”’5 As Egidio made clear in his sermons, Julius was the Messianic agent of the Lord, the man destined to fulfil Scriptural prophecies and God’s providential design. Not surprisingly, he had been
the man who had planned the symbolic Palm Sunday festivities the previous March.

  Michelangelo entertained no such fantasies about the Pope’s glorious mission. Unsympathetic to his military aspirations, he once composed a poem lamenting the state of Rome under Julius. ‘They make a sword or helmet from a chalice,’ he wrote bitterly, ‘and sell the blood of Christ here by the load, / And cross and thorn become a shield, a blade.’6 The poem is signed ‘Michelangelo in Turkey’, an ironic comparison between Rome under Julius and Istanbul under Christianity’s greatest foe, the Ottoman Sultan – and hardly the sentiments of a man who believed Julius to be the architect-in-chief of the New Jerusalem.

  The portrait of the Pope above the door of the Sistine Chapel was not the only image of Julius to be painted in the Vatican in 1509. After completing the vault of the Stanza della Segnatura with Sodoma, Raphael began his first wall fresco in the early months of 1509, helped by a small band of assistants whose identities history has failed to record.7 This large fresco, whose surface covers some four hundred square feet, decorated the wall against which Julius’s books on theology would be placed. The fresco was therefore, not surprisingly, given a religious theme. Known since the seventeenth century as The Dispute of the Sacrament, or the Disputà, it actually portrays not so much a debate as an exaltation or celebration of the Eucharist, and of the Christian religion in general.

  The area on which Raphael had to work was a semicircle of wall some twenty-five feet wide at the base. This flat wall was easier to paint than the curved expanses on which Michelangelo was working and also much easier to reach. Like all frescoists, Raphael started at the top of the painting and worked his way downwards as the scaffold was progressively dismantled, so that by the end he was working only a few feet off the ground. Art historians agree that most of the fresco is ‘autograph’, that is, painted in Raphael’s own hand. It is a curious fact that the affable and sociable Raphael should have begun his fresco with so little outside help, while in the Sistine Chapel a solitary and taciturn genius had found himself at the head of a boisterous group of collaborators.