Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  Battles in Italy, according to Niccolò Machiavelli, ‘were commenced without fear, continued without danger, and concluded without loss’.11 He claimed, for example, that the Battle of Anghiari — the subject of Leonardo’s ill-fated fresco in Florence — had witnessed a single fatality, a soldier who fell from his horse and was trampled to death.12 Similarly, one of Federigo da Montefeltro’s expeditions on behalf of Pope Pius II resulted in nothing more than the capture of 20,000 chickens. But Machiavelli’s ideas about the bloodlessness of Italian warfare were belied by the battle fought outside Ravenna on Easter Sunday, 11 April 1512.

  Sunday was a day when, traditionally, armies neither fought nor moved camp, and Easter Sunday was naturally even more sacred. However, circumstances had forced Gaston de Foix to strike. He and Alfonso d’Este had been besieging Ravenna for several days, and by Good Friday Alfonso’s artillery — which now included ‘La Giulia’ — had breached the town’s southern wall. The following day the army commanded by Ramón Cardona arrived to defend the city, advancing along the River Ronco and then entrenching itself a mile from the French position. Cardona hoped to take a leaf out of Gaston’s book and slip inside the besieged city without the French firing a shot. But Gaston had other plans. His supplies were running low, and he could ill afford to let the papal troops inside the walls to prolong the siege. As Easter Sunday dawned, he ordered Alfonso d’Este and his gunners to turn their attention from the battered walls of Ravenna to the camp of the opposing army. What followed was, in the words of one author, the ‘most violent cannonade between armies in the field that the world had yet seen’.13

  Cannonades by field artillery were usually restricted to short bombardments that inflicted a minimum of damage before the hand-to-hand fighting commenced. Not so at Ravenna, where the one led by Alfonso d’Este lasted for three hours. Casualties, as a result, were unprecedented. As both armies moved forward, the Duke led his gunners at lightning speed across the plain, outflanking the Spaniards and moving to the rear of their encampment — an encircling manoeuvre without precedent in the battles of the day. From this position, his artillery proceeded to tear apart the Spanish cavalry and rearguard. ‘It was horrible to see how every shot made a lane through the serried ranks of the men at arms,’ wrote the Florentine envoy to Spain, ‘sending helmets and heads and scattered limbs flying through the air.’14.

  Faced with such a deadly barrage and heavy casualties, Cardona’s men finally panicked, plunging forward to engage the French in the open field. When the hand-to-hand fighting started, Alfonso left his guns and, collecting a troop of cavalry, took his attack to the Spanish infantry. Seeing that all was lost, the Spaniards broke off the fight and made for the bank of the Ronco. Two or three thousand men, including Cardona, succeeded in reaching it, from where they beat a hasty retreat in the direction of Forlì. Many more were not so lucky, and by the time fighting ceased at four in the afternoon, twelve thousand soldiers lay dead in the field, nine thousand of them Spaniards in the pay of the Pope, making Ravenna one of the costliest battles in Italian history.

  Lodovico Ariosto visited the scene the following day. He later described, in Orlando furioso, how the ground was dyed red and the ditches ‘brimming with human gore’.15 Ravenna marked an emphatic end to the romantic world of swords and chivalry depicted in his saga of intrepid knights, brave deeds and fair maidens. So appalled was Ariosto by the devastation of modern warfare — a devastation wrought, ironically, by the guns of his patron — that in his poem he made Orlando, his knightly hero, curse the world’s first cannon as a devilish invention and throw it into the depths of the ocean. But even an idealist like Ariosto recognised that history was running an unstoppable course. This ‘infernal contraption’ lay under a hundred fathoms of water for many years, he wrote, until it was brought to the surface with the help of black magic. The poet bitterly predicted that many more valiant men were therefore doomed to perish in a war ‘which has brought tears to all the world, but most of all to Italy’.16 Despite the heroics of Alfonso d’Este, there had been, in his view, no real victors at Ravenna.

  43. The Battle of Ravenna.

  27

  Many Strange Forms

  FOR THE POPE and his allies in the Holy League, the defeat at Ravenna was a catastrophe of stupendous proportions. When news reached Rome a few days later, panic set in. It seemed certain that the French would march on Rome, as Louis had ordered, and place a new pope on the throne. The city would be looted, it was feared, and the bishops put to the sword. Gaston de Foix himself had told his soldiers on the eve of battle that they could look forward to sacking the ‘wicked court’ of Rome, where he promised them ‘so many stately ornaments, so much silver, so much gold, so many precious stones, so many rich prisoners’.1

  Even Julius, normally the most courageous of men, quailed at this sort of rhetoric. Some of his bishops fell at his feet, begging him to make peace with Louis; others urged him to flee. Galleys at Ostia were hastily made ready to transport him to a safe haven — a course of action advised, among others, by Don Jerónimo da Vich, the Spanish ambassador, who blamed the Pope’s sinful ways for the catastrophe at Ravenna, which he claimed was a punishment from God.

  In the end, the Pope elected to remain in Rome. He informed both Vich and the Venetian ambassador that he intended to spend a further 100,000 ducats on men and arms to drive the French from Italy. Fears of an imminent invasion were allayed slightly when it was learned, a day or two later, that Gaston de Foix was among the legions of dead at Ravenna — cut down on the field of battle by Spanish men-at-arms. With the brilliant young general out of the way, there was still a chance, Julius knew, to rescue the situation.

  Michelangelo was no doubt as terror-stricken as everyone else in Rome. He must have feared not only for his life but also, once again, for the fate of his fresco. If his bronze statue of Julius had been unceremoniously ripped from the porch of San Petronio, broken to pieces and melted down only a few months earlier, why should his fresco in the Sistine Chapel escape similar treatment should forces hostile to the Pope capture the city? After all, when his troops invaded Milan in 1499, Louis XII had allowed his archers to use Leonardo’s 25-foot-high model for his equestrian statue — a clay sculpture celebrated by poets and chroniclers with the grandest hyperbole — for target practice.

  Oddly enough, Michelangelo seems not to have been unduly concerned about the destruction of his bronze statue, possibly because of his uneasy relationship with Julius and unpleasant memories of the onerous task in Bologna. Or, at least, no record of his anger or disappointment has survived.2 However, he could hardly have been indifferent to the potential devastation of a fresco cycle on which he had spent almost four years of his life. Furthermore, Gaston de Foix’s promises about looting gold and seizing prisoners meant that nothing and no one — no work of art and no inhabitant of Rome — would be safe should the French army reach the Vatican.

  Michelangelo may have been as tempted as the Pope to take to his heels in the aftermath of Ravenna. He had bolted, after all, as the army of Charles VIII approached in 1494, and in later years he would abscond while directing Florence’s fortifications during a siege — on both occasions revealing a timorousness that has become a source of both embarrassment and speculation to scholars.3 Yet in 1512 he seems to have stood his ground, and it comes as a surprise to find that, in these tumultuous times, he painted into the fresco some of his most whimsical figures.

  Not all of the 343 human forms on the vault are as noble as the Ignudi or the resplendent Adam. A good many of the figures, particularly those on the margins of the fresco, are rude-looking and downright plain. Among the most notably ugly are the children holding up the nameplates beneath the prophets and sibyls. One art critic found these little creatures unspeakably repulsive. ‘They are not only morose, stunted, grimacing,’ he wrote, ‘but often hideous in the full meaning of the word.’4 Another critic singled out the child beneath the Prophet Daniel as especially vile, calling him ‘a dwarfish
, brutal gamin dressed in rags’.5

  This grotesque little brute was painted early in 1512, a short time after the floating, foreshortened God, and around the time, coincidentally, that the real-life ‘monster’ was born in Ravenna. Soon afterwards, Michelangelo frescoed an equally ill-favoured creature in one of the lunettes, the Ancestor of Christ usually identified as Boaz (or Booz, as Michelangelo called him, following the spelling in the Vulgate). A wealthy landowner and the great-grandfather of King David, Boaz married the widowed Ruth after she came to glean barley in his fields outside Bethlehem. The Bible tells little of Boaz’s personality beyond the fact that he was gentle and generous, yet for some reason Michelangelo caricatured him as an eccentric old man in a lime-green tunic and pink hose who snarls angrily at his walking stick — a fool’s stick that features his own grotesque likeness snarling back.6

  44. Booz.

  Michelangelo was following a long tradition by inserting these undignified figures into the nooks and crannies of his fresco. The Gothic art of the preceding centuries was distinguished by its irreverent marginalia. Humorous, bizarre and sometimes impious images of monks, apes and half-human monsters regularly featured in the books and on the buildings of the Middle Ages. Scribes and illustrators doodled comical pictures of hybrid beasts in the margins of devotional manuscripts, while woodcarvers decorated misericords and other pieces of ecclesiastical furniture with equally fantastical images that scarcely seemed in keeping with the dignity of a church. Bernard of Clairvaux, the high-minded Cistercian preacher who died in 1153, condemned the practice, but his objections did little to tame the freakish fancies of medieval artists in the centuries that followed.

  The humorous and subversive images scattered across the Sistine ceiling indicate how Michelangelo did not train as an artist merely by sketching Masaccio’s frescoes or studying ancient Roman statues in the Garden of San Marco. Although obsessed with the ideal proportions of the human body, he was equally fascinated with bodies that violated these proportions. According to Condivi, one of Michelangelo’s first works was a copy of Martin Schongauer’s The Temptation of St Anthony. Engraved probably in the 1480s, this work showed the saint tormented by a clutch of demons — grotesque-looking monsters with scaled bodies, spikes, wings, horns, bat-like ears, and snouts with long suckers attached. Given a print of the work by Granacci, the young Michelangelo was determined to improve on Schongauer’s demons, making expeditions to Florence’s fish market to study the shape and colour of the fishes’ fins, the colour of their eyes, and so forth. The result was a painting with ‘many strange forms and monstrosities of demons’7 — and a work that was a far cry from the perfectly proportioned nudes sculpted for the David and the Pietà.

  When he came to paint the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo dedicated the spaces immediately above the spandrels and pendentives to a series of grotesque nudes that would not have been out of place in the comically gruesome visions of either Schongauer or the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch, whose Garden of Earthly Delights was painted only a few years earlier. Smaller in size than the Ignudi, these two dozen bronze-coloured nudes kick, squirm and scream in confined areas adorned with rams’ skulls, an ancient Roman symbol of death. While the Ignudi are angelic figures, these bronze nudes look sinister and demonic; two of them even feature pointed ears.

  It is possible that Michelangelo’s interest in such ugliness stems from his own lack of physical charm. The great artist may have become famous as the high priest of idealised masculine beauty, yet he was, as he ruefully acknowledged, a thoroughly unprepossessing physical specimen. ‘I see myself so ugly,’ he wrote in one poem.8 ‘My face has the shape that causes fright,’ he lamented in another, a series of terza-rima stanzas in which he compares himself to a scarecrow and recounts how he coughs, snores, spits, pisses, farts and loses his teeth.9 Even Condivi felt obliged to admit that his master presented an odd sight with his flattened nose, square forehead, thin lips, scanty eyebrows and temples ‘that project somewhat beyond his ears’.10

  Michelangelo’s self-portraits – of which he made any number in both marble and paint — often emphasise this homely appearance. The pendentive in the south-east corner of the Sistine Chapel, completed in 1509, featured the episode from the Apocrypha in which Judith, the Jewish heroine, decapitates Holofernes, the commander of Nebuchadnezzar’s troops. Michelangelo portrayed Holofernes lolling naked on his bed as Judith and her accomplice bear away their grisly trophy — a bearded, scowling, flat-nosed, disembodied head that served as Michelangelo’s less-than-heroic image of himself.

  The Italian Renaissance swarmed with handsome, strapping characters renowned for their amazing feats of physical strength, men who might have come straight from the pages of Orlando furioso. Cesare Borgia, for example, was said to have been the strongest and most physically attractive man in all of Italy. Tall, blue-eyed and muscular, he could bend silver coins double between his fingers, straighten horseshoes with a flick of his wrist and lop off a bull’s head with a single stroke of his axe. Leonardo, his one-time military architect, was likewise endowed with both superb looks and amazing brawn. ‘By his physical force he could restrain any burst of rage,’ Vasari claimed, ‘and with his right hand he twisted the iron ring of a doorbell, or a horseshoe, as if it were lead.’11

  Michelangelo belonged to a different tradition. With his misbegotten countenance and misshapen body he resembled gloriously ugly Florentine artists such as Cimabue and Giotto, about the latter of whom Boccaccio marvelled, in The Decameron, how Nature frequently planted genius ‘in men of monstrously ugly appearance’.12 While Raphael’s self-portraits inspired later generations to enthuse over his serene beauty and the harmonious proportions of his skull, there was always, as Holofernes demonstrates, a touch of the grotesque in Michelangelo’s images of himself. With his misshapen features, the artist had more in common, he knew, with the scrawny Boaz or the sinister Holofernes than with the freshly created Adam or the magnificent Ignudi striking their Herculean poses overhead.

  28

  The Armour of Faith and the Sword of Light

  CONTRARY TO ALL expectation, following its spectacular success on Easter Sunday the army of Louis XII did not immediately sweep south to depose the Pope and pillage Rome. Instead, completely deflated by the death of Gaston de Foix, the French troops sat idle in their camp outside Ravenna. ‘So weakened and dispirited were they by the victory which they had won with such expenditure of blood,’ wrote one chronicler, ‘that they seemed more like the conquered than the conquerors.’1 Meanwhile, both Henry VIII and King Ferdinand of Spain declared to the Pope their intention to continue their fight against the French. There was even hope that the Swiss would return to do battle. The mood in Rome swiftly improved. Less than a fortnight after the disaster, on the Feast of St Mark, the people of Rome, in a show of defiance, dressed the Pasquino in a breastplate and helmet, the costume of Mars.

  It was equally urgent that the Pope battled the French on a religious front, for the schismatic cardinals were still intent on holding their council. They had moved to Milan after a belligerent mob loyal to the Pope had driven them from Pisa. On 21 April, emboldened by events at Ravenna, the rebellious prelates passed a resolution ordering Julius to be stripped of his spiritual and temporal powers. The Pope busied himself with his response. His own ecumenical council, first proposed for Easter, had been postponed by the battle, but the preparations (overseen by Paride de’ Grassi) continued unabated, and arrangements were finally completed on 2 May. That evening, under heavy guard, the Pope was carried three miles in procession from the Vatican to the ancient basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, ‘the mother and head of all the churches of the city and the world’, as it was known.

  The Lateran Palace, next door to the basilica, had been the official residence of the popes until 1377, when Gregory XI forsook it for the Vatican, believing the latter’s position near both the Tiber and the Castel Sant’Angelo would offer better protection from outlaws and invaders. The Lateran h
ad since fallen into decay, but Julius deemed it a more practical seat for the council than the sprawling building sites of St Peter’s and the Vatican. Outlaws and invaders were still a problem, however, and the surrounding neighbourhood needed to be fortified with a strong detachment of soldiers before Julius and his cardinals could set foot in the palace.

  The Lateran Council, as it was called, opened the following day, on the Feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross. Sixteen cardinals and seventy bishops were in attendance — numbers easily dwarfing those of Louis XII’s rival council in Milan. The entertainment value was no doubt higher as well. Determined to win the propaganda battle against the French, Julius trundled out his best orators. Fedro Inghirami was chosen to serve as secretary for the council because his booming voice — one whose musical qualities had greatly impressed Erasmus — could make the proclamations audible at the back of the basilica. Better still, the opening address was delivered by the only man in Italy whose oratorical skills could surpass Fedro’s: Egidio da Viterbo.

  Egidio gave, by all accounts, a scintillating performance. Taking to the pulpit during the Mass of the Holy Ghost, he announced to the assembly that the defeat at Ravenna had been an act of divine providence — and one forecast, moreover, by creatures such as the monster of Ravenna. ‘At what other time’, he asked his audience, ‘have there appeared with so much frequency and such horrible aspect monsters, portents, prodigies, signs of celestial menaces and terror on earth?’ All of these dreadful omens pointed, he said, to the Lord’s displeasure that the Church of Rome had entrusted its battles to foreign armies. It was time, therefore, for the Church to fight its own wars — and to trust in the ‘armour of faith’ and the ‘sword of light’.2