Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  Until four or five years earlier, cartoons had been nothing more than utilitarian drawings that almost never survived the projects for which they were designed. Fixed to the damp intonaco and traced with a stylus or pricked with hundreds of holes, they were by nature ephemeral and disposable. All of this changed in 1504, when Leonardo and Michelangelo exhibited their giant cartoons in Florence. So popular and influential were these two drawings that henceforth cartoons came to be celebrated as works of art in their own right. Though the contest in the Hall of the Great Council never reached a conclusion, it served to catapult cartoons, as one art historian has observed, ‘to the forefront of artistic expression’.18

  34. Raphael’s cartoon for The School of Athens.

  In creating a showpiece cartoon for The School of Athens, Raphael was both emulating his two artistic heroes and testing his own powers of draughtsmanship and design against theirs. No records indicate that his cartoon was ever exhibited, but the ambitious young Raphael always craved a wide audience for his work. Michelangelo was assured of a steady stream of spectators for his fresco in the Sistine Chapel, where, once unveiled, it would be appreciated not only by the two hundred members of the Papal Chapel but also by thousands of pilgrims from all over Europe. Raphael, on the other hand, could expect a more circumscribed group of admirers in the Pope’s private library, an area off-limits to all but the most eminent and erudite churchmen. His grand cartoon could therefore have been intended to make his work known outside the confines of the Vatican, and to invite comparisons to the works of both Michelangelo and Leonardo.

  Raphael had good reason to wish to publicise The School of Athens far and wide, since it undoubtedly represented the zenith of his career to date. A masterpiece of pictorial composition in which the young artist skilfully integrated his large cast of uniquely expressive characters into a striking architectural space, it goes beyond artists’ usual stores of poses and gestures – blessing, prayer, adoration – to express more subtle feelings through the imaginative gestures, movements and interactions of his figures.19 The four young pupils surrounding Euclid, for example, were all given different poses and expressions to show their varying emotions – wonder, concentration, curiosity, comprehension. The overall result is a group of distinctive individuals whose graceful movements ebb and flow across the wall, drawing the spectator’s eye from one figure to another, all expertly integrated within a brilliantly realised imaginary space. It reveals, in short, exactly the sort of drama and unity that had escaped Michelangelo in his first few Genesis scenes.

  19

  Forbidden Fruit

  THE ROMAN CARNIVAL that took place in the February of 1510 was even more jubilant and unruly than usual. All of the familiar entertainments were on show. Bulls were released into the streets and slain by men on horseback armed with lances. Convicted criminals were executed in the Piazza del Popolo by a hangman dressed as a harlequin. South of the piazza, races along via del Corso included a competition between prostitutes. An even more popular attraction was the ‘racing of the Jews’, a contest in which Jews of all ages were forced to don bizarre costumes and then sprint down the street to insults from the crowd and sharp prods from the spears of the soldiers galloping behind. Cruelty and bad taste knew no bounds. There were even races between hunchbacks and cripples.

  In addition to these regular delights, the carnival of 1510 offered yet another diverting spectacle. The ceremony officially lifting the excommunication of the Venetian republic took place on the steps of what remained of the old St Peter’s, in front of a huge crowd that swarmed into the piazza to watch. Five Venetian envoys, all noblemen clad in scarlet, the biblical colour for sin, were forced to kneel on the steps before the Pope and a dozen cardinals. Julius perched on his throne with a Bible in one hand and a golden wand in the other. The five envoys kissed his foot and then remained on their knees as the terms of absolution were read out. Finally, as the papal choir broke into the Miserere, the Pope lightly struck the shoulder of each envoy with his wand, magically absolving them and the republic of St Mark of their sins against the Church.

  The conditions for Venice’s absolution were severe — as the kneeling envoys learned. Besides giving up all claim to the towns in the Romagna, Venice lost all other possessions on the mainland as well as the exclusive right of navigation in the Adriatic. The Pope also demanded that the Venetians stop taxing the clergy and return goods taken from religious associations. The republic had little choice in any of these matters following the defeat at Agnadello and the annihilation of its galleys by Alfonso d’Este.

  In France, news of the reconciliation between the Pope and Venice was received with rage and disbelief. Having longed for nothing less than the complete destruction of the Venetian republic, Louis XII protested that the Pope, by making peace, had thrust a dagger into his heart. Julius was no happier with Louis. He had been eager to make peace with Venice precisely in order to curb the growing power of France. Louis was by now lord of both Milan and Verona, pro-French regimes ruled Florence and Ferrara, while in Genoa, the Pope’s home town, the French had just raised an enormous fortress to keep the rebellious population in check. The complete ruin of Venice, Julius knew, would have rendered French domination of northern Italy complete, leaving Rome vulnerable to both the whims and assaults of the French monarch. Louis had already meddled in ecclesiastical affairs by insisting on appointing French bishops, a demand that did not sit well with Julius. ‘These French’, he bellowed to the Venetian ambassador, ‘are trying to reduce me to nothing but their king’s chaplain. But I mean to be pope, as they shall find out to their discomfiture.’1

  Having reclaimed the papal territories and made peace with Venice, Julius turned his energies to achieving his next goal: ousting foreigners from Italy. Fuori i barbari (‘out with the barbarians’) became his battle slogan. A ‘barbarian’ was for Julius anyone who was not Italian, but especially anyone who was French. He tried to enlist the help of the English, the Spanish and the Germans, but none of them relished the prospect of tangling with the French. Only the Swiss Federation agreed to an alliance. In March 1510, therefore, Julius confirmed a five-year treaty with the twelve cantons, who agreed to defend the Church and the Holy See against its enemies. They promised the Pope the services, should he need them, of six thousand soldiers.

  Swiss soldiers were the best in Europe, but even six thousand of their infantrymen was a modest force with which to face the 40,000 French troops encamped on Italian soil. Nonetheless, with this treaty in his pocket, an emboldened Julius began making plans to attack the French on all fronts — Genoa, Verona, Milan, Ferrara — with the help of both the Swiss and the Venetians. He appointed his twenty-year-old nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere, the Duke of Urbino, as Captain General of the Church, making him the supreme commander of the papal forces. He then concerned himself with one battle in particular.

  The Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso d’Este, had once been the Pope’s good friend and ally. Barely two years earlier, Julius had presented Alfonso with a priceless ornament, the Golden Rose, which he awarded each year to the leader who had best served the interests of the Church. In Alfonso’s case, the Golden Rose was a reward for helping the Pope expel the Bentivoglio from Bologna. More recently, Alfonso’s ferocious display of firepower on the banks of the Po had been responsible, more than anything else, for bringing the Venetians, quite literally, to their knees.

  Thereafter, however, Alfonso had not behaved so commendably. He was persisting with his attacks on the Venetians, even though the peace treaty had been signed. Worse, he was doing so at the urgings of the French, with whom he had allied himself. Finally, adding insult to injury, he continued to work a salt marsh near Ferrara in defiance of the papal monopoly on salt, an impudence for which he was castigated in a sermon by Egidio da Viterbo. Julius therefore determined to bring the rebellious young duke to heel.

  The people of Rome seemed to approve of Julius’s sabre-rattling. On 25 April, the Feast of St Mark, a batter
ed statue known as the Pasquino, which occupied a pedestal near the Piazza Navona, was dressed by merrymakers in the garb of Hercules chopping off the head of the Hydra, a reference to the Pope vanquishing, his enemies. This ancient statue had recently been unearthed — so the story goes — in the garden of a schoolmaster named Pasquino. Featuring one man carrying another in his arms, the statue was probably meant to illustrate the episode in The Iliad where Menelaus hefts the body of the slain Patroclus. One of the most popular sights in Rome, the Pasquino was yet another ancient statue from which Michelangelo quoted as he frescoed the Sistine Chapel, since his tableau of the older, bearded man bear-hugging the limp corpse of his son in The Flood — one of the very first scenes painted — was clearly inspired by it.

  35. Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara.

  Yet not everyone in Rome was prepared to celebrate the Pope’s new military campaign. That spring, Giovanni Battista Casali — the man who had praised Julius for creating a ‘new Athens’ — delivered another oration in the Sistine Chapel. This time he was not so flattering to the Pope, condemning kings and princes who made war against each other and shed Christian blood. The long-haired Casali was a wise and eloquent speaker whose sermon was aimed at the Pope as much as at Louis and Alfonso. No one, however, seems to have paid heed to him — certainly not Julius, who, in the bitter words of Michelangelo’s poem, was busily beating chalices into helmets and swords.

  The early months of 1510 were not a happy time for Michelangelo for reasons other than the Pope’s impending war. In April, he learned of the death in Pisa of Lionardo, his older brother. Lionardo had reconciled himself with the Dominicans after his defrocking and, in the years before his death, lived in the convent of San Marco in Florence. After moving to the monastery of Santa Caterina in Pisa early in 1510, he died there of unknown causes, at the age of thirty-six.

  Michelangelo seems not to have travelled home to Florence for the funeral, though it is unclear whether his absence was due to his heavy commitments in Rome or some breach with Lionardo, whom he almost never mentioned in his letters. Strangely, he was not nearly as close to his older brother as he was to the three younger ones, none of whom shared the same intellectual and religious interests.

  By this time Michelangelo had moved on to the large field next to The Sacrifice of Noah and close to the centre of the vault. Here he put the finishing touches to The Temptation and Expulsion, his latest Genesis scene. Frescoed more swiftly than its predecessors, the scene took only thirteen giornate, roughly a third of the time of the others. The feat was impressive considering how Indaco, Bugiardini and the others had returned to Florence, leaving Michelangelo to carry out his complex preparations and routines with some new assistants. Giovanni Michi, who had joined the team in the summer of 1508, remained with Michelangelo during this time, as did the sculptor Pietro Urbano.2 Among the new frescoists were Giovanni Trignoli and Bernardino Zacchetti, both of whom came, not from Florence, but from Reggio nell’Emilia, fifty miles north-west of Bologna. The pair were somewhat undistinguished as artists, but Michelangelo later became good friends with them.

  Michelangelo’s latest Genesis scene was split in two. The left half showed Adam and Eve reaching for the forbidden fruit in a rocky and barren Eden, the right their subsequent expulsion from the garden by an angel brandishing a sword above their heads. Michelangelo, like Raphael, painted the serpent with a female torso and head. With her fat coils knotted round the tree of knowledge, she hands the piece of fruit to Eve, who reclines on the ground next to Adam, her left arm extended to receive it. The simplest of the Genesis scenes painted so far, it featured only six figures, all considerably larger than those in the previous panels. In contrast to the tiny figures in The Flood, the Adam of The Temptation stands almost ten feet tall.

  The Bible makes it perfectly clear who was responsible for first tasting the fruit and therefore causing the Fall of Man. ‘So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food,’ the Book of Genesis reports, ‘and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate’ (Genesis 3:6—7). Theology traditionally followed this passage and therefore blamed Eve for leading Adam astray. As the first one to transgress a covenant, she caused not only the expulsion from Paradise but also, as further punishment, her subordination to her husband. ‘Your desire shall be for your husband,’ she was told by the Lord, ‘and he shall rule over you’ (Genesis 3:16).

  This passage was used by the Church — as it had been by the ancient Hebrews — to justify the inferior position of women. However, Michelangelo departs from both the biblical account of the Temptation and previous depictions such as Raphael’s. Whereas Raphael featured a curvaceous Eve holding a piece of fruit for Adam to sample, Michelangelo’s Adam is far more aggressive, reaching into the branches to seize a piece of fruit for himself — a greedy initiative that almost seems to exonerate Eve, who adopts a far more languid, passive posture on the ground beneath him.

  New theories about Eve were in the air in 1510. A year before Michelangelo painted his scene, a German theologian named Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim published On the Nobility and Superiority of the Female Sex, in which he argued that Adam, not Eve, had been forbidden from eating fruit from the tree of knowledge, ‘so it was man, not woman, who sinned in eating; man, not woman, who brought in death; and we have all sinned in Adam, not Eve’.3 Agrippa concluded that on these grounds it was unjust to prevent women from holding public office or even preaching the gospel — a liberal view that promptly got him expelled from France, where he had been teaching the Cabala in Dôle, near Dijon.

  Michelangelo’s novel portrayal of the scene created no such stir. His motive was not so much an exculpation of Eve as an equal condemnation of Adam. The true nature of their sin seems to be pantomimed by the provocative tableau of the robust, straining male straddling the sprawled female — a pose made all the more suggestive by the proximity of Eve’s face to Adam’s genitalia. Michelangelo further stresses the sexual element of the story by portraying the tree of knowledge as a fig tree, since the fig was a well-known symbol of lust. These erotic implications are perfectly justifiable given that commentators through the ages have agreed that the Fall of Man — in which primordial innocence is doomed by the combination of a woman and a serpent — cries out for a sexual interpretation.4 If carnal desire was believed to have brought sin and death into the world, nowhere is the fateful concupiscence in the Garden of Eden more graphically on show than in Michelangelo’s Temptation. Testament to the scene’s graphically sexual nature is the fact that, unlike most other parts of the fresco, it was not reproduced in an engraving for almost three centuries after its completion.5

  Michelangelo’s anxious, ascetic views on sex were neatly summed up in a piece of advice he once gave to Ascanio Condivi. ‘If you want to prolong your life,’ he informed his pupil, ‘practice it not at all, or the least that you can.’6 This abstemious philosophy was behind his depiction of the Virgin in the Pietà, which came in for criticism because it appeared to show a mother much too youthful to have an adult son. Michelangelo would have none of it. ‘Don’t you know,’ he asked Condivi, ‘that women who are chaste remain much fresher than those who are not? How much more so a virgin who was never touched by even the slightest lascivious desire which might alter her body?’7

  Lascivious desires have certainly left their mark on the body of the Eve portrayed in the right-hand side of Michelangelo’s panel. The woman that the angel evicts from Paradise has been transformed from the sensuously reclining, rosy-cheeked young woman of the Temptation — ‘one of the most beautiful female figures Michelangelo ever painted’,8 according to one observer — into a hideously ugly old crone with tangled hair, wrinkled skin and a hunched back. Cowering and covering her breasts, she flees Paradise with Adam, who throws out his arms to ward off a blow from the angel’s sword.

  Michelangelo’s fears about the ener
vating effects of the sexual act may have been stoked by the scholar Marsilio Ficino, who wrote a treatise explaining how sex was the enemy of the scholar because it sapped the spirit, enfeebled the brain and led to both indigestion and heart problems. An ordained priest and devout vegetarian, Ficino was famous for his abstinence and chastity. Yet he was also the lover — in the spirit if not the flesh — of a man named Giovanni Cavalcante, whom he bombarded with letters addressed to ‘my sweetest Giovanni’.

  Michelangelo’s anxieties about sex are sometimes linked to his own perceived homosexuality. Any study of Michelangelo’s sexual preferences is beset, however, by lost or suppressed evidence. Moreover, ‘homosexuality’ is largely a modern, post-Freudian category of erotic experience which people in the Middle Ages and Renaissance clearly did not understand in terms equivalent to ours.9 These different cultural practices and beliefs are exemplified by the Neoplatonic descriptions of love with which Michelangelo would have been familiar from the Garden of San Marco. For example, Ficino coined the term ‘Platonic love’ to describe the spiritual bond between men and boys expressed in Plato’s Symposium, which celebrated such unions as the ultimate manifestation of a chaste, intellectual love. If love between men and women was merely physical, and resulted in feeble brains and indigestion, Platonic love ‘seeks to return us’, according to Ficino, ‘to the sublime heights of heaven’.10