Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  Raphael would spend more than six months planning and then executing the Disputà, creating, in one estimate, more than three hundred preparatory drawings in which, like Michelangelo, he worked out the individual poses and features of his characters.8 There are sixty-six figures in all, grouped around and above an altar, the largest just over four feet high. They form a huge cast of famous characters. Christ and the Virgin Mary are surrounded by a host of other biblical characters, such as Adam, Abraham, St Peter and St Paul. Another group of animated figures includes many familiar faces from Church history: St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, various popes, Dante and even, lurking in the background, Girolamo Savonarola. Two other figures are equally unmistakable, for Raphael painted portraits of both Donato Bramante and, in the guise of Gregory the Great, Pope Julius II.

  Julius was never averse to having himself immortalised in art, but the portraits of the Pope and Bramante were not slipped into the Disputà for reasons of vanity alone. As in Michelangelo’s fresco, Julius was memorialised as a builder, or rebuilder, of the Lord’s temple. On the left of the Disputà, far in the background, a church is under construction, sheathed in scaffolding and dotted with figures who roam the building site. Yet another architectural tableau occupies the opposite side of the fresco, where huge blocks of half-dressed marble – what appear to be the beginnings of some colossal building – loom behind the clutch of poets and popes, making the scene look as if it takes place amid the half-built piers of St Peter’s as they would have appeared in 1509.

  The portrayal of the Roman Church is therefore a celebration, Raphael implies, of both its architectural monuments and its two chief builders, the Pope and his official architect. This idea, like the portrait of Zechariah, bears the stamp of Egidio da Viterbo, according to whom the construction of the new basilica – which Egidio wanted to rise ‘up to the very heavens’ – was an important part of God’s design and a sign that Julius was fulfilling the destiny for his pontificate.9

  The portrait of Bramante may indicate that the architect was still closely involved in the decorations of the papal apartments. More likely, though, he had relinquished responsibility for the design of the wall frescoes to someone else. Raphael’s friend and biographer Paolo Giovio, the bishop of Nocera, wrote that the design of the Disputà was, like those of the other frescoes in the papal apartments, the brainchild of Julius himself.10 The Pope probably outlined the general themes and characters, and he was no doubt the force behind the inclusion of Savonarola, since Julius had been sympathetic to his revolutionary aims so long as they were directed against Pope Alexander VI. Indeed, one of the reasons for Savonarola’s execution had been his confession (albeit under torture) that he had plotted against Alexander with the help of the exiled Giuliano della Rovere.11

  However, neither the Pope nor Bramante, the latter of whom read no Latin, would have been responsible for the fresco’s finer details, such as the Latin epigraphs. Indeed, the detailed historical scenes must have been invented in collaboration with an adviser, and the most logical candidate was a disciple of Egidio da Viterbo, Julius’s librarian, the 38-year-old Tommaso ‘Fedro’ Inghirami. One of the Vatican’s more audacious personalities, Fedro was not merely a librarian and a scholar but also an actor and orator who earned his nickname – and his reputation as Rome’s greatest actor – by improvising in rhyming Latin couplets as stagehands scrambled to replace a piece of scenery that had collapsed behind him during a production of Seneca’s Phaedra. Fedro, at any rate, soon became friends with Raphael, who painted his portrait a few years later, showing a fat, moon-faced canon with a severe squint and a ring on his right thumb.12

  The fresco was not created without a few false starts that slowed Raphael’s progress. Surviving compositional sketches show how the young artist struggled to find a suitable design, plotting various arrangements and perspectival schemes only to abandon them a short time later. Like Michelangelo, he was clearly trying to find his feet in a difficult medium in which he had limited experience – and he was also, no doubt, a little abashed by both the magnitude and the prestige of the task that had unexpectedly befallen him. The Disputà required numerous secco touches, which indicate that, like Michelangelo, Raphael was much less confident in buon fresco than he would presently become.

  As if executing the Disputà was not difficult and ambitious enough, Raphael also took several commissions on the side soon after arriving in Rome. Barely had work on the fresco started than he was engaged by the Pope to execute a Madonna and Child – what would become the Madonna di Loreto – to hang in Santa Maria del Popolo. A short time later he also accepted from Paolo Giovio a commission to paint the so-called Alba Madonna, which Giovio planned to send to the church of the Olivetani in Nocera dei Pagani. These works also help account for the fairly slow pace at which work proceeded in the Stanza della Segnatura.

  Whatever minor setbacks Raphael might have suffered in designing and then executing the Disputà, the finished product spectacularly justified the Pope’s decision to hand the commission to him. In ranging his characters in lively, elegant postures across the 25-foot-wide wall, he not only demonstrated flawless perspective and superb use of pictorial space but also proved his incontestable superiority over the high-powered team of frescoists he had just displaced. And Raphael had not simply outstripped veteran artists such as Perugino and Sodoma. The adroit orchestration of the dozens of figures in the Disputà made Michelangelo’s Flood, painted only a few months earlier, look ponderous and disorganised in comparison. Raphael, unlike Michelangelo, had made a thoroughly brilliant start.

  fn1 Julius was not the only leader at the time to suffer from a Caesar complex: Cesare Borgia had chosen for himself the motto Aut Caesar, aut nihil (‘Caesar or nothing’).

  15

  Family Business

  AS THE HOT Roman summer approached, Raphael’s ascendancy looked set to continue. The speed and self-assurance with which Michelangelo had painted the Ancestors of Christ on the first spandrels and lunettes deserted him as he and his assistants returned to a larger and more difficult scene, The Drunkenness of Noah, the easternmost of the ceiling’s nine episodes from the Book of Genesis. Occupying a spot above the door of the chapel, this scene took even longer to paint than The Flood, consuming a grand total of thirty-one giornate, or some five or six weeks.

  The Pope was not, of course, a patient man. So anxious was he to see the Cortile del Belvedere completed – a structure he wished to see ‘spring up from the ground’, according to Vasari, ‘without needing to be built’1 – that the beleaguered Bramante had taken to carting building materials to the site in the dead of the night and unloading them by torchlight. Julius was equally eager to have the Sistine Chapel fresco completed, and Michelangelo’s halting progress inevitably proved a source of frustration to him. Michelangelo was constantly aggravated by the Pope’s impatient urgings as he worked on the vault; on occasion he was even subjected to his violent rages. Ascanio Condivi gives one example of these deteriorating relations. ‘Michelangelo was hampered’, he writes, ‘by the urgency of the Pope, who asked him one day when he would finish the chapel. And when Michelangelo answered, “When I can,” the Pope, enraged, retorted, “You want me to have you thrown off the scaffolding.”’2

  Another time, according to Vasari, the Pope grew so incensed at Michelangelo’s slow progress and impudent replies that he thrashed him with a stick. Michelangelo had wished to return to Florence for a feast day, but Julius stubbornly refused him permission on the grounds that the artist had made too little headway on the project. ‘Well, but when will you have this chapel finished?’ ‘As soon as I can, Holy Father,’ replied Michelangelo. Julius then struck Michelangelo with a staff. ‘As soon as I can! As soon as I can! What do you mean? I will soon make you finish it.’

  The story concludes with an apologetic Pope assuring Michelangelo that the blows were meant ‘as favours and marks of affection’. He was also wise enough to give the artist five hundred ducats, ‘fearing lest he
might commit one of his caprices’.3

  The gift of five hundred ducats may have been one of Vasari’s embellishments, since Julius was niggardly with his gold. But the flailing stick at least rings true. Disobliging courtiers and servants often received similar marks of affection, and Julius also resorted to pushing and punching.4 Nor was it wise to come close when His Holiness was in good spirits. News of a military victory or other such good tidings would cause him to clap his subordinates so violently on the shoulder that it was said one needed body armour to approach him.

  Julius did not merely exasperate Michelangelo with demands to know when he might finish the fresco; he also wanted to see it for himself, a privilege the artist was not especially keen to grant. Michelangelo’s obsessive secrecy differed sharply from the atmosphere of the Stanza della Segnatura, to which Julius had unlimited and convenient access. Raphael was painting his frescoes only two rooms from the Pope’s bedchamber – a walk of less than twenty yards – and, as one of the driving forces behind the fresco’s subject matter, Julius probably spent a good deal of time in the room, inspecting Raphael’s progress and making suggestions.

  The Pope could not count on the same kind of courtesy in the Sistine Chapel. According to Vasari, Julius eventually grew so exasperated with Michelangelo’s secrecy that one night he bribed the assistants to sneak him into the chapel to see the work for himself. Michelangelo already suspected the Pope of donning disguises so he could bluff his way on to the scaffold for a peek. So this time, catching wind of a plot, he concealed himself on the scaffold and, as the intruder entered the chapel, repelled him by hurling planks at his head. Julius angrily fled the scene, bellowing curses and leaving Michelangelo to contemplate the possible repercussions of his outburst. Fearing for his life, he escaped through a window and bolted to Florence, where he lay low for a spell and waited for the Pope’s famous temper to cool.5

  This story is probably an exaggeration if not an outright invention on Vasari’s part. Still, no matter how dubious, it was nonetheless inspired by the undeniable fact that there was no love lost between the artist and his patron. The major problem seems to have been that Michelangelo and Julius were remarkably alike in temperament. ‘His impetuosity and his temper annoy those who live with him, but he inspires fear rather than hatred, for there is nothing in him that is small or meanly selfish.’6 Penned by a frazzled Venetian ambassador, this description of Julius might easily have been applied to Michelangelo. The adjective most often used to describe Julius was terribile. Julius himself, however, used the term to refer to Michelangelo – one of the few people in Rome who refused to cringe before him.

  The scene on which Michelangelo and his team were labouring so falteringly, The Drunkenness of Noah, is found in Genesis 9:20–7. This episode describes how Noah planted a vineyard after the Flood and then proceeded to overindulge on the fruits of his labours. ‘He drank of the wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent,’ the Bible records. As Noah lay slumped in this naked and insensible state, his son Ham happened to enter and, seeing his father’s undignified posture, summoned his older brothers and mocked the old man. Shem and Japheth showed more respect for the inebriated patriarch, covering him with a garment after walking backwards into the tent with their eyes averted in order to protect his modesty. Waking at last from his stupor and realising how his youngest child had sneered at him, Noah rather gracelessly cursed Ham’s son Canaan, who went on to become the father of not only the Egyptians but also the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  This scene featuring an elderly father at the mercy of his three sons, one of whom pitilessly mocks him, bore odd analogies to Michelangelo’s own family situation in the spring of 1509. ‘Most revered Father,’ Michelangelo wrote home to Lodovico at this time, ‘I learn from your last letter how things are going at home and how Giovansimone is behaving. I have not had, these ten years, worse news than on the evening I read your letter.’7

  Once more, domestic problems – in the form, predictably, of an unruly Giovansimone – intruded on Michelangelo’s work. Almost a year had passed since Giovansimone visited Rome, fell ill and, much to Michelangelo’s relief, returned to the wool shop. Michelangelo still hoped to establish Buonarroto and Giovansimone in the wool business if, in the meantime, the pair could behave themselves and learn the secrets of the trade. ‘Now I see that they are doing the contrary,’ he wrote angrily in response to Lodovico’s report on their behaviour, ‘and particularly Giovansimone, whence I realise that it is useless to help him.’

  The exact nature of Giovansimone’s transgression, to which Michelangelo’s letter alludes with anger and revulsion, remains unclear. Certainly it was more than his usual aimless loafing about the family home. He appears to have stolen either money or property from Lodovico and then struck him, or at least threatened to strike him, once the theft was discovered. Whatever the offence, Michelangelo was incandescent with rage when word reached him in Rome. ‘If, on the day I received your letter, I had been able to, I would have mounted my horse and by this time have settled everything,’ he assured his father. ‘But not being able to do this, I am writing him the letter I think he deserves.’

  And what a letter it was. ‘You are a brute,’ he railed at Giovansimone, ‘and as a brute I shall treat you.’ As with all of his family crises, he threatened to return to Florence and sort things out himself. ‘If I hear the least little thing about you, I will ride post to Florence and show you the error of your ways … You are not in the position you think. If I do come home, I will give you cause to weep scalding tears and you will learn what grounds you have for your presumption.’8

  The letter concluded with a self-pitying diatribe of the sort that Giovansimone must have been accustomed to hearing from his older brother. ‘For twelve years now,’ Michelangelo wrote, ‘I have gone about all over Italy, leading a miserable life. I have borne every kind of humiliation, suffered every kind of hardship, worn myself to the bone with every kind of labour, risked my very life in a thousand dangers, solely to help my family. And now when I begin to raise it up a little, you alone must be the one to confound and destroy in one hour what I have accomplished during so many years and with such pains.’

  Giovansimone’s delinquent behaviour forced Michelangelo to reappraise his plans for his family. Far from establishing the young man in his own shop, Michelangelo vowed to his father that he planned to ‘leave that wretch to scratch his arse’. He discussed taking the money for the wool shop and giving it instead to his youngest brother, Sigismondo, the soldier. He would then lease both the farm in Settignano and the three adjoining houses in Florence to tenants, using the money to support Lodovico and a servant in lodgings of his choice. ‘With what I will give you,’ he promised his father, ‘you can live like a gentleman.’ Meanwhile, his brothers, turned out from both house and farm, would be left to fend for themselves. He even mentioned bringing Lodovico to Rome to live with him – but then hastily dismissed the idea. ‘It is not the season, for you would not long survive the summer here,’ he pointed out, alluding once again to the city’s conveniently unhealthy climate.

  To compound matters, Michelangelo fell ill in June, probably due to a combination of overwork and the noxious air of Rome. His illness eventually became so serious that reports soon reached Florence that the great artist had died. He was therefore required to assure his father that rumours of his demise were greatly exaggerated. ‘It is a matter of little importance,’ he informed Lodovico, ‘because I am still alive.’9 However, he let his father know that all was not well with him. ‘I am living here ill-content and not too well, faced with an enormous task, without anyone to manage for me and without money.’

  Like The Flood, Michelangelo’s second effort at a large-scale composition was not a great triumph. Though he would have seen Jacopo della Quercia’s version of The Drunkenness of Noah on the porch of San Petronio, his depiction more closely resembled another one equally familiar to him: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s bronze relief of the subj
ect on the Porta del Paradiso in Florence. The fact that Michelangelo drew on Ghiberti’s work indicates how he was still thinking largely in terms of sculpture rather than graphic composition, blocking out individual characters without regard to their position on the picture plane or their interplay with the other figures. As a result, the four characters in The Drunkenness of Noah lack the grace and suppleness of those in the Disputà, where Raphael animated his cast of dozens with a variety of lively poses and fluent gestures. They are stiff and solid – ‘petrified beings’, as one commentator has called them.10

  The unsurpassed master of composing animated group scenes was Leonardo da Vinci. His Last Supper displays his gift for evoking what he called the ‘passions of the soul’ through telling movements, such as grimaces, frowns, shrugs, hand gestures, whispered confidences, all of which lend the figures their verisimilitude and the mural its unity and intense drama – qualities expertly captured by Raphael in the Stanza della Segnatura.

  While Ghiberti and Quercia both showed Noah’s three sons dressed in flowing robes, Michelangelo depicted them – somewhat surprisingly, given the import of the story – every bit as naked as their father. This theme of nudity being shamed makes The Drunkenness of Noah a strangely appropriate scene to place over the door of the Sistine Chapel. Never before had so much naked flesh been put on display in a fresco, much less on the vault of such an important chapel. The nude was a controversial subject in art even during the peak of Michelangelo’s career, having made a triumphant reappearance in European art only during the previous century. If for the ancient Greeks and Romans the nude body had been a symbol of spiritual beauty, in the Christian tradition it was almost exclusively confined to naked sinners suffering the torments of Hell. Giotto’s nudes in The Last Judgement in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, for instance, are a far cry from the noble, idealised bodies found in Greek and Roman art. Painted between 1305 and 1313, this fresco shows a host of nudes figures undergoing some of the most horrific tortures the medieval mind could summon.