Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  Francesco Maria had other ideas about who should pay for the defeat. He blamed Cardinal Alidosi, whom the Pope had appointed Legate of Bologna in 1508. Through his ruthless stewardship, Alidosi had succeeded in making himself every bit as unpopular in Bologna as he had in Rome, so alienating the populace that they longed for the return of the Bentivogli. When the city was recaptured, Alidosi fled through the gates in disguise, fearing the Bolognese even more than the French.

  Both Cardinal Alidosi and Francesco Maria were summoned to Ravenna to account for themselves before the Pope. They arrived on 28 May, five days after Julius. As luck would have it, the pair met by accident in via San Vitale, Alidosi on horseback and Francesco Maria on foot. The cardinal smiled and saluted the young man. Francesco Maria’s reply was not nearly so cordial. ‘Traitor, art thou here at last?’ he demanded. ‘Receive thy reward!’ Taking a dagger from his belt, he stabbed Alidosi, who fell from his horse and died of his wound an hour later. His last words were: ‘I reap the reward of my misdeeds.’18

  News of Alidosi’s cold-blooded murder was greeted in many quarters with outright celebration. Paride de’ Grassi even thanked God for the cardinal’s death. ‘Bone Deus!’ he wrote joyously in his diary. ‘How just are Thy judgements, and what thanks we owe Thee that Thou has rewarded the false traitor according to his deeds.’19 Only the Pope mourned the loss of the man who had been his best friend, ‘lamenting and crying out to heaven and wailing in misery’.20 Abandoning his dreams of conquest, he demanded to be taken back to Rome.

  But even larger problems suddenly loomed. On the journey back to Rome the grieving Pope discovered, plastered to the door of a church in Rimini, a document announcing that Louis XII and the Holy Roman Emperor proposed to summon a General Council of the Church. Councils of this sort were a serious business. Attended by all cardinals, bishops and other major prelates of the Church, they were grand assemblies at which new policies would be set and existing ones updated or reformed. Though quite rare, they often had far-reaching aims and consequences, occasionally even going so far as to dethrone the reigning pope. One of the more recent examples, the Council of Constance, convoked in 1414, had ended the Great Schism (the forty-year period when rival popes reigned in Rome and Avignon) by deposing the antipope John XXIII and electing Martin V. While Louis XII claimed that the purpose of his council was to reform abuses within the Church and make preparations for a crusade against the Turks, no one believed its purpose was anything other than to remove Julius and install a rival pope in his place. If the Council of Constance had ended the Great Schism, this new council, which was scheduled to meet on 1 September, threatened to reopen it.

  After the loss of Bologna and the death of Cardinal Alidosi, none of the Pope’s advisers had dared tell him this latest news. The citation affixed to the door of the church therefore came as a complete surprise to him. Having just lost his temporal authority in Bologna, he was suddenly menaced with the loss of his spiritual powers as well.

  It was a gloomy procession that, on 26 June, passed through the gates of Porta del Popolo and entered Rome. The Pope halted at Santa Maria del Popolo, where he celebrated Mass and hung on a silver chain above the altar the cannonball that the Virgin had deflected at Mirandola. The procession then wound its way, in blazing sunshine, towards St Peter’s. ‘This was the end of our toilsome and useless expedition,’ sighed Paride de’ Grassi.21 A full ten months had passed since the Pope had departed on his crusade to rid himself of the French. As he rode along the via del Corso in full pontificals, he was still wearing his white beard. It did not seem likely that he would shave any time soon.

  23

  A New and Wonderful Manner of Painting

  IN JULY 1510 Michelangelo had written to Buonarroto that he expected to finish the first half of the Sistine’s vault and then uncover it within the week. One year later, the unveiling was finally made possible, though Michelangelo still had to wait seven weeks after the Pope’s return from Ravenna for the ceremony to take place. The reason for the delay was that Julius had selected the Feast of the Assumption, which always fell on 15 August, as the day for the unveiling. This was a significant date for him, since in 1483, as the archbishop of Avignon, he had consecrated the Sistine Chapel – complete with its decorations by Perugino and his team – on the Feast of the Assumption.

  Julius had doubtless seen the frescoes at various earlier stages of the composition, having climbed on to the scaffold, as Condivi reported, to inspect Michelangelo’s progress. But the dismantling of this massive wooden staging allowed him to see the work for the first time as it was intended to be seen, from the floor of the chapel. The removal of the planks from the lugholes in the masonry at the tops of the windows must have created a lot of dust, but the Pope was undeterred. Anxious to view Michelangelo’s handiwork, on the evening before the feast he rushed into the chapel ‘before the dust raised by the dismantling of the scaffold had settled’.1

  At nine o’clock in the morning on the fifteenth, a Mass like no other was celebrated in the Sistine Chapel.2 The Pope was robed for the ceremony, as usual, on the third floor of the Vatican, in the Camera del Pappagallo, the ‘room of the parrot’, so named because it was occupied by a caged parrot. (There was a good population of birds in the Vatican. If Julius climbed a staircase leading from his bedchamber he came to an aviary – the uccelliera – on the fourth floor.) After the ritual of robing, he was carried in his ceremonial chair, the sede gestatoria, down two flights of stairs to the Sala Regia. Then, flanked by two rows of Swiss Guards, he and his cardinals entered the Sistine Chapel, preceded by the cross and censer. The Pope and his cardinals momentarily kneeled on the rota porphyretica, a stone disc in the floor, before rising and passing slowly through the eastern half of the chapel, past the marble choir screen, and into the sanctum sanctorum at the far end.

  The chapel was crammed with pilgrims and other sightseers eager to view the ceiling for the first time. ‘The opinion and expectation which everyone had of Michelangelo’, Condivi reported, ‘brought all of Rome to see this thing.’3 One member of the congregation was especially zealous. Raphael would have been assigned a comfortable seat from which to contemplate his rival’s achievement, since two years earlier he had become a member of the Papal Chapel when he was appointed scriptor brevium apostolicorum, that is, a secretary in the papal bureacracy – an honorary position (for which he probably paid about 1,500 ducats) entitling him to a place close to the Pope’s throne in the sanctum sanctorum.

  When he laid eyes on Michelangelo’s fresco, Raphael was, like everyone else in Rome, absolutely amazed by the ‘new and wonderful manner of painting’4 that now became the talk of Rome. In fact, so impressed was Raphael with the fresco that, according to Condivi, he decided to try and secure the commission to finish it. Once again he relied on help from Bramante, who, Condivi claimed, appealed to the Pope on his behalf soon after the Feast of the Assumption: ‘This greatly disturbed Michelangelo, and before Pope Julius he gravely protested the wrong which Bramante was doing to him … unfolding to him all the persecutions he had received from Bramante’.5

  It seems surprising that Raphael should have wished to take over Michelangelo’s commission. He had completed the four wall frescoes of the Stanza della Segnatura soon after Julius returned to Rome, following some thirty months of work.6 After Parnassus, he had turned his attention to the final wall in the room, that before which the Pope’s volumes on jurisprudence were destined to sit. Above the window, he had painted female personifications of the cardinal virtues: prudence, temperence and fortitude, the latter of whom, in a tribute to Julius (who certainly needed fortitude at this low point in his career), clutched an oak tree hung with acortis. Historical scenes were frescoed on either side of the window, the one on the right bearing the unwieldy name Pope Gregory IX Approving the Decretals Handed to Him by St Raymond of Penafort, that on the left the equally cumbersome title Tribonian Presenting the Pandects to the Emperor Justinian. The former scene featured a portrait
of Julius, complete with his white beard, in the role of Gregory IX. A bewhiskered Julius approving the decretals was deeply ironic given how this collection of papal decrees expressly forbade priests from wearing beards.

  Julius was evidently pleased with the decoration of the Stanza della Segnatura and, immediately upon its completion, commissioned Raphael to fresco the adjoining room. Still, if Condivi is to be believed, Raphael seems not to have been especially honoured by the new assignment.

  Taking over the commission in the Sistine Chapel may indeed have held a certain appeal for Raphael. He would have recognised how the chapel, with its large congregations, was a better stage for displaying and publicising talent than the more exclusive Stanza della Segnatura. Brilliant though they were, Raphael’s frescoes do not seem to have attracted the same attention in the summer of 1511, or created the same sensation, as Michelangelo’s, despite the fact that The School of Athens was, unarguably, a better tableau than any of Michelangelo’s individual scenes from Genesis. The showpiece cartoon for The School of Athens had been intended to remedy exactly this situation – to capture a wider audience for his work than it could otherwise have expected in the Pope’s private apartments, where it remained inaccessible to most people in Rome. However, it seems that this work was never actually put on display.

  Whatever his schemes and ambitions, Raphael did not succeed in securing the commission to paint the western half of the Sistine Chapel’s vault. Instead, soon after Michelangelo’s fresco was uncovered he began work on the next room in the Pope’s apartments. First, however, he made a major alteration to The School of Athens – one that revealed the influence of Michelangelo’s style, not to mention something of Raphael’s opinion of the morose ‘hangman’.

  Even though he had finished The School of Athens more than a year earlier, Raphael returned to this work in the early autumn of 1511. Using a piece of red chalk, he sketched a single figure in freehand on to the painted plaster beneath Plato and Aristotle. He then counterproofed the image, placing an oiled piece of paper against the wall and taking the impression of the chalk. This paper with its chalk outline was subsequently turned into a cartoon and reapplied to the wall once the original intonaco had been chipped away and a fresh patch of plaster laid. Raphael then proceeded to paint, in a single giornata, the slumped, solitary philosopher known as the pensieroso, or ‘The Thinker’.7

  This figure – the fresco’s fifty-sixth – is generally thought to represent Heraclitus of Ephesus. Heraclitus was one of the few philosophers in The School of Athens to remain outside the teacher–student groups through which, in Raphael’s view, knowledge was transmitted. No eager philosophical apprentices huddle around Heraclitus. A self-absorbed, downcast figure with black hair and a beard, he rests his head on his fist as he scribbles distractedly on a piece of paper, utterly oblivious to the philosophical debates raging about him. With leather boots and a shirt cinched at the waist, he is dressed in considerably more modern garb than his fellow philosophers, all of whom are barefoot and wrapped in flowing robes. Most interesting of all, his nose is broad and flattened – a feature that has convinced a number of art historians that the model for him was none other than Michelangelo, whom Raphael added to the fresco as an act of homage after seeing the Sistine ceiling.8

  If Michelangelo was in fact the model for Heraclitus, the compliment was double-edged. Heraclitus of Ephesus, known as both Heraclitus the Obscure and ‘The Weeping Philosopher’, believed the world to be in a state of constant flux, a proposition summed up in his two most famous sayings: ‘You cannot step into the same river twice’ and ‘The sun is new every day’. But it is not this philosophy of universal change that seems to have inclined Raphael to lend him the features of Michelangelo; more likely it was Heraclitus’s legendary sour temper and bitter scorn for all rivals. He heaped derision on predecessors such as Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus. He even abused Homer, claiming the blind poet should have been horsewhipped. The citizens of Ephesus were no more popular with the cantankerous philosopher. Every last one of them, he wrote, ought to be hanged.

  40. The pensieroso, Raphael’s addition to The School of Athens.

  The appearance of Heraclitus in The School of Athens was therefore perhaps both a tip of the hat to an artist whom Raphael greatly admired and a joke at the expense of the surly, remote Michelangelo. Its addition also possibly carried the implication that the grandeur and majesty of Michelangelo’s style on the Sistine ceiling – with its robust physiques, athletic posturings and vibrant colours – had somewhat overshadowed Raphael’s own work in the Stanza della Segnatura. Put another way, Michelangelo’s individualistic and isolated figures from the Old Testament had eclipsed the elegant and congenial classical worlds of Parnassus and the ‘new Athens’.

  One way to understand the differing styles of the two artists is through a pair of aesthetic categories developed two and a half centuries later by the Irish statesman and writer Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1756. For Burke, those things we call beautiful have the properties of smoothness, delicacy, softness of colour and elegance of movement. The sublime, on the other hand, comprehends the vast, the obscure, the powerful, the rugged, the difficult – attributes which produce in the spectator a kind of astonished wonder and even terror.9 For the people of Rome in 1511, Raphael was beautiful but Michelangelo sublime.

  Raphael recognised this difference more astutely than anyone. If his fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura represented the perfection and apotheosis of the best art of the past few decades – that of Perugino, Ghirlandaio and Leonardo – he seems immediately to have realised how Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel marked an entirely new direction. Especially in his prophets, sibyls and Ignudi, Michelangelo had brought the power, vitality and sheer magnitude of works of sculpture such as the David into the realm of painting. The art of fresco would never be the same again.

  Nevertheless, the contest was about to resume. As Raphael moved himself and his assistants into the new room, Michelangelo and his own team began preparing to assemble the scaffold over the western half of the Sistine Chapel. After a year’s delay, The Creation of Adam was ready to be painted.

  Or so it had seemed. But then, three days after the unveiling of the fresco, the Pope fell dangerously ill with a fever and severe headaches. The diagnosis of his doctors was clear: malaria. Faced with the prospect of his imminent death, Rome was plunged into chaos.

  24

  The First and Supreme Creator

  THE POPE HAD been hectically busy since his return from Ravenna in June. In the middle of July, he fixed to the bronze doors of St Peter’s a bull summoning his own General Council of the Church. This council, to be held the following year in Rome, was intended to counter the one called by Louis XII and his band of schismatic cardinals. Julius had then embarked on a furious bout of politicking, dispatching briefs and emissaries to every corner of Europe, trying to drum up support for his own council and isolate the rebels. All the while, of course, he ate and drank as copiously as ever.

  It was in order to relax from his labours that, at the beginning of August, the exhausted and careworn Pope had taken a trip to Ostia Antica, the ancient Roman port on the mouth of the Tiber, for a day of pheasant-hunting. The canons of the Church forbade clerics from hunting, but Julius paid no more heed to this law than he did to the one about beards. Shooting pheasants pleased him no end, and whenever he brought down a bird with his gun he showed the mangled creature ‘to all who are near him, laughing and talking much’, according to the Mantuan envoy who joined the hunt.1 Still, tramping through the mosquito-ridden marshes of Ostia in August, searching for birds to blast from the sky, was not such a wise idea. Soon after returning to Rome, he came down with a slight fever. He rallied a few days later, but very likely he was still unwell for the Feast of the Assumption. Then, within days of the fresco’s unveiling, he fell seriously ill.

  Everyone con
cerned recognised that the Pope’s illness was far more severe than the one suffered the previous year. ‘The Pope is passing away,’ wrote Girolamo Lippomano, the Venetian envoy who had witnessed Julius’s miraculous recovery at the siege of Mirandola. ‘Cardinal Medici tells me he cannot last the night.’2 He did survive the night, but the following day, 24 August, his condition had become so hopeless that the sacraments of death were administered. Even Julius himself believed the end was nigh, and in what seemed a final act he removed the bans of excommunication from Bologna and Ferrara, and pardoned his nephew, the disgraced Francesco Maria. ‘I think I may close my Diary here,’ wrote Paride de’ Grassi, ‘for the Pope’s life is coming to an end.’3 The cardinals asked Paride to make preparations for the Pope’s funeral, as well as for the conclave to elect his successor.

  The Pope’s illness led to an unholy spectacle in the Vatican. As Julius lay on his bed, unable to move, his servants and other members of the papal household — almoners, beadles, a wine butler, bakers and cooks — began clearing the palace of their own possessions. For good measure, they also started looting much of what belonged to the Pope. In the midst of this greedy commotion, the dying Pope was sometimes left unattended in his chamber except for his young hostage, Federico Gonzaga, now eleven. Julius had become strongly attached to Federico since his return from Ravenna, and it seemed that the boy would be the only person not to desert him in his time of dying.

  An unholy spectacle was likewise taking place on the streets outside the Vatican. ‘The city is in turmoil,’ Lippomano reported. ‘Everyone is armed.’4 Two families of feudal barons, the Colonna and Orsini, tried to take advantage of the Pope’s impending death to seize control of the city and establish a republic. Their representatives met on the Capitol with some of Rome’s leading citizens, swearing an oath to put aside their differences and work for the good of the ‘Roman republic’. The ringleader, Pompeo Colonna, addressed the mob, urging them to cast aside priestly rule — meaning the authority of the Pope — and reclaim their ancient liberties. ‘Never,’ wrote the appalled Lippomano, ‘has there been such a clang of arms round the deathbed of any former pope.’5 So much violence threatened that Rome’s Minister of Police fled into the safety of the Castel Sant’Angelo.