by Ross King
Still, the Pope and the other members of the Holy League remained undaunted by these events. Their attacks on French positions finally came a month later, in the last days of January, with the Pope, for once, staying away from the field of battle. The Venetians besieged the walled town of Brescia, fifty miles east of Milan, while Cardona and his troops surrounded Bologna. When Brescia fell in a matter of days, Milan, the seat of French power in Italy, suddenly looked vulnerable. Receiving word in the Vatican, the Pope wept tears of joy.3
While Michelangelo avoided as much as possible giving a full-scale glorification of Julius’s reign on the vault of the Sistine Chapel, Raphael was about to prove a more willing propagandist. Their contrasting attitudes towards the Pope’s politics is exemplified by their treatment of the story of Heliodorus’s expulsion from the Temple of Jerusalem. Whereas Michelangelo had hidden his portrayal in a medallion that was virtually invisible from the floor, Raphael devoted an entire fresco to it. His Expulsion of Heliodorus was so impressive, in fact, that it eventually gave its name to the room adjoining the Stanza della Segnatura, which became known as the Stanza d’Eliodoro.
Raphael began The Expulsion of Heliodorus on the room’s lone bare wall, a semicircular space fifteen feet wide at the base. The first of his frescoes to be painted since the unveiling of the Sistine Chapel, it displayed the sort of robust, athletic posturing that gave Michelangelo’s work its ‘grandeur and majesty’. Ascanio Condivi later claimed that Raphael, ‘however anxious he might have been to compete with Michelangelo, often had occasion to say that he thanked God that he was born in Michelangelo’s time, as he copied from him a style which was quite different from the one he had learned from his father … or from his master Perugino’.4 With its tumult of bodies, The Expulsion of Heliodorus is the first work, together with the portrait of Heraclitus, in which Raphael revealed his absorption of Michelangelo’s style. However, as in his earlier works, the success of the fresco, actually depended on an exquisite ordering of pictorial space within a grand and carefully contrived architectural scheme.5
Raphael made the backdrop of The Expulsion of Heliodorus similar to that of The School of Athens. The interior of the Temple, where the action occurs, is a classical structure with pillars and arches, Corinthian capitals and a dome supported on large marble piers. These deliberate anachronisms lent the setting the same imperial flavour as one of Donato Bramante’s architectural creations and, in doing so, imaginatively transformed pre-Christian Jerusalem into the Rome of Julius II — a parallel that certain other touches drove home even more forcibly.
In the centre of the scene, beneath the golden dome, Raphael portrayed Onias, the high priest of Jerusalem, in the act of prayer. In the right foreground, Heliodorus and his terrified would-be plunderers sprawl beneath the hoofs of a rearing white horse ridden by what looks like a Roman centurion. Floating through the air towards them are two muscular youths who brandish their sticks as they prepare to give Heliodorus a vicious beating.
As a political allegory, the scene is virtually transparent. The defeated Heliodorus spilling his loot on the floor of the Temple has usually been understood as a frank reference to the expulsion of the French from Italy — an event which, as Raphael worked on the fresco, was little more than wishful thinking on the part of the Pope. The fate of Heliodorus was probably also a warning to Louis XII’s allies and other despoilers of the Church, such as the Bentivogli, Alfonso d’Este, the schismatic French cardinals, and even Pompeo Colonna and his republican cohorts on the Capitol — all of whom had, in Julius’s opinion, tried to claim for themselves what rightfully belonged to the Holy See.
To make the allusion to contemporary events completely clear, Raphael not only dressed the white-bearded Onias, the spiritual leader of Jerusalem, in a tiara and blue and gold robes, he also included yet another portrait of Julius in the left foreground, where an audience of a dozen people watches the dramatic fate of Heliodorus unfold. Wearing a red cope, the bearded figure borne on the shoulders of his attendants is an unmistakable rendering of Julius. Fixing his attention on the kneeling figure of Onias, he looks grimly resolute, every inch il papa terribile. It was probably no accident, given this forceful object lesson in the authority of the Church and its supreme ruler, that the fresco was later defaced by the troops of the Duke of Bourbon, who sacked the city in the summer of 1527.
The Pope’s was not the only portrait included. Raphael continued his practice of painting the likenesses of various friends and acquaintances into his frescoes, and The Expulsion of Heliodorus contains at least two other contemporary references, one more intimate than the other. Such was the Pope’s regard for Federico Gonzaga, the young hostage who had sat by his sickbed, that he wished to have the boy immortalised in a fresco: the agent for the Duke of Mantua reported to Isabella Gonzaga, the boy’s mother, how ‘His Holiness has said that he wishes Raphael to portray Signor Federico in a room which he is having painted in the palace’.6 No clear identification of Federico Gonzaga has ever been made in one of Raphael’s frescoes,7 but the most likely candidate would seem to be one of the children in The Expulsion of Heliodorus, which was painted soon after the request was made.
While conscientiously carrying out the behest of the Pope, Raphael also secreted references to his own personal life in the painting. The woman extending her right arm on the left-hand side of the scene is said to be Margherita Luti, whom a sentimental tradition celebrates as the great love of Raphael’s life. A baker’s daughter who lived near Agostino Chigi’s villa in Trastavere, this young woman became the subject of a number of Raphael’s works, most famously the one known as La Fornarina, an oil portrait of a bare-breasted woman painted about 1518.8 Raphael’s fabled sexual appetites were occasionally indulged at the expense of his work, and his dalliance with the beautiful Margherita was said to have been responsible, at one point, for his truancy from the Villa Farnesina, where he was supposed to be frescoing the Loggia of Psyche for Agostino Chigi. A dedicated womaniser himself, Chigi hit on the simple solution of moving Margherita into the villa. The fresco — a steamily erotic production — was duly brought to completion. If Raphael was involved with Margherita Luti as early as the autumn of 1511, their amours did not seem adversely to affect work on The Expulsion of Heliodorus, which was completed, albeit with the help of assistants, at some point in the early months of 1512, after three or four months of work.
Busy as ever, Raphael was also painting yet another portrait of Julius during this time, one displaying him quite differently from the determined figure of authority overseeing the rout of Heliodorus. Done for the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, this 3½-foot-high oil painting presented the Pope as if in a private audience with the viewer. Looking weary and careworn, the 68-year-old Julius is seated on his throne, his air of terribilità almost utterly evaporated. Eyes downcast, he clutches the armrest of his throne with one hand, a handkerchief with the other. Apart from his white beard, there is little of the indomitable personality who led from the front at Mirandola and subdued the city through the sheer force of his will. Instead, he looks the part of the man who, over the previous few months, has lost not only his friend Francesco Alidosi and his territories in the Romagna but very nearly his life as well. Nonetheless, however weakened Julius may have appeared, Vasari claimed this portrait was so true to life that when the people of Rome saw it hanging in Santa Maria del Popolo they were overcome by trembling as if the Pope were there in person.9
26
The Monster of Ravenna
A STRANGE AND Alarming creature was born in Ravenna in the spring of 1512. Supposedly the offspring of a nun and a monk, the gruesomely deformed child was the latest and most grotesque in a series of monstrous births, both human and animal, that had been plaguing the city. The people of Ravenna knew these creatures to be unfavourable omens, and the appearance of this most recent prodigy — the so-called ‘monster of Ravenna’ — so disturbed the governor of Ravenna, Marco Coccapani, that he immediately sent a description
to the Pope, together with a warning that such an unnatural birth meant evil times ahead.1
Both Coccapani and the Pope had good reason to be disposed to such portents, since Ravenna housed the magazines which supplied the armies of the Holy League. That, and its position in the north of Italy, made it highly vulnerable to attack from the French. During the winter, the Holy League’s victories against the French had evaporated almost as quickly as they were won, mainly because of a series of stunning manoeuvres by a young French general, Gaston de Foix, the nephew of Louis XII. Soon renowned as the ‘Lightning-bolt of Italy’, Gaston succeeded in marching his troops down the peninsula with unparalleled speed, liberating and reclaiming French territories along the way. At the beginning of February, he had swept south from Milan, bent on relieving Bologna. The city was under siege from Ramón Cardona, whose troops were bombarding the walls with long-range artillery, hoping to terrorise the populace into surrender. Instead of approaching Bologna through Modena, where the Pope’s troops lay in wait for him, Gaston arrived from the opposite direction, via the Adriatic coast, leading his troops through the deep snow on a forced march of astonishing speed. On the night of 4 February, under the cover of a blizzard, he had slipped into Bologna unseen by the besiegers. The following day, dispirited by the sight of Gaston’s reinforcements on the walls, Cardona’s men had broken camp and ended their siege.
If the Pope was furious when he learned of the aborted siege, he was even more so when he received further news of Gaston’s feats a fortnight later. Taking advantage of Cardona’s retreat, the young commander had left Bologna to lead his men on another lightning-fast cross-country march, this time north to Brescia, which he recaptured from the Venetians. These swift and unexpected victories won him, according to one chronicler, ‘an unusual reputation all over the world’.2 But Gaston was not finished yet. On orders from Louis XII, he turned round his army of 25,000 men and began marching on Rome. If the Council of Pisa was failing in its mission to depose the Pope, Gaston de Foix, it seemed, would not.
Although Julius appears not to have been overly perturbed by news of the monster of Ravenna, at the beginning of March he left his quarters in the Vatican and, for safety’s sake, took up residence in the Castel Sant’Angelo, traditionally the last refuge of besieged popes. Gaston de Foix was still some distance away, but Julius had other enemies closer to hand. The Roman barons, inspired by the proximity of the French, were now arming themselves for an assault against the Vatican. There was even a plot afoot to kidnap Julius and hold him hostage.
Soon after moving into the Castel Sant’Angelo, in a surprising gesture, the Pope shaved off his beard. His vow to oust the French from Italy was far from being fulfilled, but he was determined to open the Lateran Council at Easter, and shearing himself of his beard seems to have been an indication that he planned to reform both himself and the papacy. Not everyone was impressed. Cardinal Bibbiena cattily remarked in a letter to Giovanni de’ Medici that His Holiness looked better with whiskers.
*
The Pope was not so cowed by his enemies that he did not make the occasional sortie from the Castel Sant’Angelo. On the Feast of the Annunciation, in one of his first public appearances since shaving his beard, he left his refuge to inspect Michelangelo’s progress in the Sistine Chapel.3 This inspection was probably the first time that Julius laid eyes on the newly finished Creation of Adam, though what he made of the scene unfortunately went unrecorded, for the Mantuan envoy who reported the visit seems to have been more taken by the Pope’s beardless chin than Michelangelo’s frescoes.
After almost four years, the Pope was as anxious as Michelangelo for the project to be completed. However, work on the fresco appears to have slowed somewhat during the early months of 1512. At the beginning of January, Michelangelo had written to Buonarroto that he had almost finished the entire fresco and would return to Florence ‘in about three months or thereabouts’.4 This prediction was wildly optimistic. The first half of the ceiling had taken him and his large workshop of experienced frescoists almost two years to paint, and so it seems incredible that he could have believed himself capable of completing the second half in seven months. His statement showed either extreme confidence in his own abilities or else a desperate desire to be done with the project. Not surprisingly, three months later, as Easter loomed, he was forced to revise this timetable. ‘I reckon I shall have finished here within two months,’ he told his father, ‘and then I will come home.’5 But two months later he would still, of course, be hard at work on the fresco, with no clear end in sight.
After finishing The Creation of Adam and the figures on either side, including those in the spandrels and lunettes, he had moved along the vault to paint his seventh episode from Genesis, another Creation scene showing a steeply foreshortened God floating through the heavens with His arms outspread. There is confusion over exactly which day of Creation the scene portrays. Having decided, after viewing the fresco from the floor, that less was more, Michelangelo reduced the scene to a bare minimum of form and colour, representing nothing except God and several cherubs swirling through a two-toned greyish space. This extreme lack of detail renders identification highly speculative. Possibilities include the Separation of the Land and Water, the Separation of the Earth and Sky and the Creation of the Fishes.6 Despite its minimalism, the scene consumed twenty-six giornate, or over a month’s work, compared to the sixteen giornate in which The Creation of Adam had been completed a short time earlier.
One reason for Michelangelo’s relative slowness of execution may have been the pose of God, whose foreshortened body marks a change of approach for Michelangelo. He was painted in di sotto in sù, the virtuoso technique of illusion in which, as Bramante pointed out, Michelangelo had no experience when he was first commissioned to fresco the chapel. Later to become a staple of the frescoist’s art, di sotto in sù involved arranging the perspective of the figures or objects on a vault to give the viewer the impression of real-life figures rising overhead in a convincing three-dimensional space. Michelangelo had foreshortened several figures, such as Goliath and Holofernes, in the pendentives at the corners of the chapel’s entrance wall. For the most part, however, the numerous other figures on the Sistine’s vault were, despite their adventurous poses, parallel to the picture plane, not at right angles to it. They were painted as if on a flat, upright wall, that is, and not on a vault soaring over the head of the viewer.
Michelangelo’s decision to experiment with this technique of foreshortening was no doubt another repercussion from the uncovering of the first half of the fresco. Earlier, he had created an illusion of space rising vertically overhead by showing a banner of blue sky at the east end of the chapel — a modest trompe l’œil effect that serves to lend the architectural ensemble a weightless and almost dream-like aspect. For his new scene, he realised, something more spectacular was required.
In this latest Creation scene, then, God seems to tumble towards the viewer at a 45-degree angle to the vault’s surface. The visual effect from the floor is of the Almighty turned almost completely upside down against the grey heavens, His head and hands thrust towards the viewer, His legs trailing away. Vasari, for one, applauded the technique, noting how God ‘turns constantly and faces in every direction’7 as one walks about the chapel.
Michelangelo’s breathtaking use of foreshortening in this scene raises an interesting question. He once claimed that an artist should have ‘compasses in his eyes’,8 by which he meant the painter must be able to arrange the perspective of his paintings by instinct alone, without resorting to mechanical aids. The best example of someone with compasses in his eyes was Domenico Ghirlandaio, whose sketches of Rome’s ancient amphitheatres and aqueducts, done without measuring instruments of any kind, were found to be so accurate that artists who came afterwards were astounded by them. Not everyone was blessed with this uncanny talent, and it is possible that, despite his idealism, even Michelangelo used an artificial device to help him foreshorten figures
on the vault such as this particular God. Certainly other artists had either designed or used perspective devices. In the 1430s, Leon Battista Alberti invented what he called a ‘veil’ to assist painters in their work. It consisted of a net with intersecting threads that was stretched over a frame to create a grid of regular squares. The artist studied his subject through this grid, whose lines were reproduced, as a guide, on a piece of paper on to which he proceeded to copy the image seen through the web of squares.9
Leonardo designed (and probably used) similar aids to drawing, as did the German painter and engraver Albrecht Dürer, who found them useful in creating steep foreshortenings of the human form. Such a device would have helped Michelangelo create the marvellous effect of the Almighty flying towards the spectator. And, if he did indeed resort to such a device, it must have seen a good deal of use as he worked on the designs for the last few scenes in the fresco, where his mastery of foreshortening was about to increase dramatically.
Michelangelo does not seem to have been unduly troubled, at this point, by the turbulent political situation in Rome; or, at least, he made light of these circumstances in his letters to Florence, attempting to reassure his father. ‘As to affairs in Rome,’ he wrote to Lodovico, in a masterpiece of understatement, ‘there has been some apprehension, and still is, but not much. Things are expected to settle down — may they do so by the grace of God.’10
However, far from settling down, the situation soon became even more precarious. As Gaston de Foix and his army marched relentlessly southwards, they paused at the beginning of April to lay siege to Ravenna with the help of Alfonso d’Este. As Ravenna housed the Holy League’s arsenals, it had to be defended at all costs. Ramón Cardona and his Spanish lances therefore advanced on the French army, engaging it in battle two miles from Ravenna’s gates.