Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

  At the end of Egidio’s oration, more than one cardinal was seen dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief. The Pope, meanwhile, was so delighted with the proceedings that he promised to make the hardworking Paride de’ Grassi a bishop.

  Over the next fortnight, the council sat for a number of sessions. The proceedings of the schismatic council were quickly declared null and void, after which other business was discussed, such as the necessity of undertaking a Crusade against the Turks. Then the Pope adjourned the assembly until November, due to the heat of the approaching summer. Julius was in fine form. The council had gone well and the military threat had begun to wane ever more. For the third time in eighteen months, an army of Swiss soldiers had crossed the Alps and finally reached Verona. Remembering all too well how they had been bribed by the king of France a few months earlier, Julius presented them with gifts — caps of honour and ornamental swords. Thus rewarded, it seemed that the Swiss were at last ready to take on the French.

  Raphael, like Michelangelo, had remained in Rome during the threat of a French invasion, continuing work on his frescoes in the Vatican. By the early months of 1512, he had been joined by several new assistants. A fifteen-year-old apprentice named Giovanni Francesco Penni, a Florentine known because of his humble duties in the workshop as II Fattore, or ‘the messenger’, had started work soon after Raphael moved into the Stanza d’Eliodoro.3 Several other assistants had also been engaged, including another Florentine, Baldino Baldini, a former apprentice of Ghirlandaio.4 Raphael had no shortage of assistants clamouring to work with him. According to Vasari, there were in Rome ‘very many young men who were working at painting and seeking in mutual rivalry to surpass one another in draughtsmanship, in order to win the favour of Raphael and gain a name among men’.5

  Although his name also attracted aspiring young artists, Michelangelo was not interested in acquiring disciples. Late in his life he declared that he had never run a workshop6 — a statement whose snobbery echoes Lodovico’s reservations about apprenticing his son with Domenico Ghirlandaio. Michelangelo was interested in finding assistants for particular tasks, merely using them as hired help rather than nurturing their talents, as Raphael did with his students. Although he sometimes gave his drawings to apprentices for them to study, for the most part Michelangelo demonstrated little interest in teaching. As Condivi wrote, he was interested in instilling his art only in ‘noble people … and not in plebeians’.7

  The subject of Raphael’s new fresco was a miracle that took place near Orvieto in 1263, when a priest travelling from Bohemia to Rome halted in Bolsena, sixty miles short of his destination, to perform Mass in the church of Santa Cristina. The priest had been haunted by doubts about the doctrine of transubstantiation, the literal transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. However, while celebrating Mass in Santa Cristina he was amazed to see a cross of blood appear on the consecrated Host. Each time he wiped at the stain with the corporal — the cloth on which the chalice was placed — a new cross appeared on the Host. His doubts were put soundly to rest, and the corporal, with its bloody crucifixes, was placed in a silver tabernacle above the high altar in the cathedral of Orvieto.8

  The miracle at Bolsena had a special meaning for Julius. When he had launched his military expedition against Perugia and Bologna in 1506, he had taken time to halt his troops in Orvieto to celebrate Mass in its cathedral. After the ceremony, he had exposed for adoration the blood-encrusted corporal from Bolsena. When, barely a week later, he marched triumphantly into Perugia, and then into Bologna two months after that, he began to look back on his visit to Orvieto as a fateful one, as a kind of pilgrimage for which God had rewarded him with the capture of the two rebellious cities.9

  Raphael may have witnessed the Pope’s victorious march into Perugia, since in 1506 he was painting his small fresco, the Trinity and Saints, on the wall of the church of San Severo in Perugia. Moreover, given the Pope’s faith in this miracle, it was fitting that he should have requested an illustration of it from Raphael at a moment of acute crisis in the Church. Raphael portrayed some thirty worshippers in Santa Cristina at the dramatic moment when the Host stained the corporal with its crosses of blood. Altar boys holding candles kneel behind the priest, while women sprawl on the chapel’s floor, cradling children on their laps. Featured prominently at the centre of the scene, kneeling before the altar, is the bare-headed Julius, still wearing a beard — the fourth time that Raphael depicted him in the Vatican frescoes.

  The contemporary relevance of the scene was made all the more apparent by the inclusion of five Swiss soldiers (one of whom is yet another of Raphael’s self-portraits) in the lower right of the fresco. These soldiers were not so out of place in a religious setting as they might seem. Julius had created the Swiss Guards as the official papal escort in 1510, granting them a distinctive costume — striped uniforms, berets and ceremonial swords — that was said to have been designed by Michelangelo. They were present during Mass to protect the Pope and, occasionally, to enforce discipline among unruly worshippers. But the appearance of the uniformed figures in The Mass of Bolsena has an additional significance. Interestingly, they were absent from Raphael’s original plan for the fresco. A preliminary sketch featured Julius, the priest and the awed congregation (albeit in different poses) but no sign of the Swiss mercenaries. This sketch was probably done during the early months of 1512, when the arrival of the Swiss was a distant hope. A few months later, however, after twice being disappointed, the Pope was finally rewarded for his faith and patience.

  After reaching Verona in the third week of May, the 18,000-strong contingent of Swiss soldiers continued to march south, arriving at Valleggio on 2 June and then joining forces with the Venetians a few days later. At almost exactly the same time, the French suffered a devastating blow when the Emperor Maximilian, under pressure from the Pope, recalled to Germany nine thousand soldiers who had fought under Gaston de Foix at Ravenna. Louis was thereby deprived, at a stroke, of almost half his army. Moreover, it would be impossible for him to dispatch reinforcements from France, since Henry VIII was landing his ships along France’s north coast and the Spanish were forcing their way over the Pyrenees.

  Faced with such massive opposition, the French had little option but to retreat from Italy. ‘The soldiers of Louis XII,’ wrote one exultant observer, ‘have vanished like mist before the sun.’10 It was one of the most breathtaking reversals in military history — something straight from the pages of Maccabees, as if the tale of Heliodorus had indeed been re-enacted on an Italian stage. Julius must have been especially delighted by the fall of Bologna, which was reclaimed from the Bentivogli in the name of the Church. ‘We have won, Paride,’ he cried to his Master of Ceremonies as word reached him of the French retreat, ‘we have won!’ ‘May God give Your Holiness joy of it,’ replied Paride.11

  The celebrations in Rome were even more jubilant than those during the Pope’s victorious return from Bologna five years earlier. ‘Never was any emperor or victorious general so honoured on his entry into Rome,’ wrote Lippomano, the Venetian envoy, ‘as the Pope has been today.’12 He was cheered through the streets as he returned to the Vatican from the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, where he had given thanks to God for the liberation of Italy. Poets sang his praises in verse. One of them, Girolamo Vida, a friend of Ariosto’s, even started an epic poem called the Juliad, in which he planned to document the Pope’s heroic military exploits.

  Meanwhile, cannons thundered on the parapets of the Castel Sant’ Angelo, while at night fireworks lit the darkness and a procession featuring three thousand torches wound its way through the streets. Alms were distributed to the city’s convents, and such were his good spirits that Julius even announced an amnesty for outlaws and criminals.

  At the end of June, a number of Swiss mercenaries, the heroes of the hour, arrived in Rome. One week later, on 6 July, the Pope issued a bull giving the Swiss the title ‘Protectors of the Liberty of the Church’, and s
ilk banners commemorating the victory were sent as gifts to every township in Switzerland. These were not, of course, the only honours granted to them by the grateful Pope, for soon afterwards Raphael altered his design of The Mass of Bolsena, giving the reluctant warriors pride of place.

  45. Detail of the Swiss soldiers from The Mass of Bolsena.

  29

  Il Pensieroso

  TWO WEEKS AFTER the Swiss soldiers arrived in Rome, Michelangelo entertained a famous guest on his scaffold in the Sistine Chapel. Alfonso d’Este had travelled to Rome to negotiate peace with the Pope. The abrupt disappearance of the French from Italy had deprived him of his allies, leaving him at the mercy of the Holy League. Not even the prodigious might of his artillery could save him from the armies that the Pope was capable of mustering against him. Forced to seek forgiveness from his erstwhile friend, he reached Rome on 4 July, accompanied by his ambassador, Lodovico Ariosto.

  All Rome was abuzz at Alfonso’s arrival. Julius had once claimed it was the will of God that he should castigate the Duke of Ferrara, and the hour of castigation had clearly now arrived. Alfonso’s absolution was expected to be a spectacle as grand — and as humiliating — as the treatment of the Venetians a few years earlier. Rumours spread that the Duke would appear on his knees on the steps of St Peter’s, wearing a hair shirt, with a rope round his neck. The prospect of witnessing the humbling of one of the greatest soldiers of the age meant that on the appointed day, 9 July, the piazza in front of the basilica was crammed with onlookers. To their disappointment, the ceremony was conducted behind the closed doors of the Vatican Palace, and featured neither a hair shirt nor a rope. Instead, while waiting to face il papa terribile, Alfonso was entertained by violinists and treated to bowls of fruit and goblets of wine. Julius then duly absolved him of his crimes against the Holy See, embracing him warmly as the ceremony concluded.

  Alfonso seems to have made the most of his visit to Rome. According to the Mantuan envoy, after a lunch in the Vatican a few days later he asked the Pope if he might see Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.1 A visit was arranged forthwith by Alfonso’s nephew, Federico Gonzaga, who was entering his third year as a hostage in Rome. Julius could deny Federico nothing, except of course his liberty, and so one afternoon Alfonso and several other gentlemen ascended the ladder and clambered on to the platform where Michelangelo and his team were at work.

  Alfonso was astounded by what he saw. Nine months had passed since work in the Sistine Chapel had resumed, and Michelangelo, working with incredible speed and facility, was finally approaching the west end of the vault. Only a few tantalisingly small fields of white plaster separated him from the altar wall and therefore the end of his labours, while on the other side of his scaffold stretched more than a hundred feet of vault, its every inch teeming with glorious images.

  The last two Genesis scenes, The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants and Cod Separating Light from Darkness, had been finished a short time before Alfonso’s visit. The first of these panels shows events from the third and fourth days of Creation. The left-hand side features a rear view of an airborne God creating the plants — a few fronds of green — with a wave of His hand. On the right-hand side, He floats through the heavens in a pose reminiscent of The Creation of Adam, pointing at the sun with His right hand and at the moon with His left. Painted a century before Galileo’s telescope first gave hints about its craterous topography, Michelangelo’s moon is simply a bland arc of grey some four feet in diameter. Its perfect outline, like that of the sun, was incised on to the intonaco using a compass. Michelangelo used the same method he had employed for the medallions, pounding a nail into the plaster, attaching a cord to it, then tracing 360 degrees around the fixed point.

  God Separating Light from Darkness, illustrating the first day of Creation, is the sparest of all the Genesis scenes, involving nothing more than the single figure of God spinning through a cloudy vortex. He strikes a contrapposto pose as He divides light and darkness, turning His hips one way and His shoulders the other as He extends his hands over His head and wrestles with the elements. Deftly foreshortened, as in the previous two Creation scenes, this figure marks Michelangelo’s most accomplished attempt at di sotto in sù so far — and, indeed, one of the finest examples seen anywhere in Italy. If he used a perspective device such as Alberti’s ‘veil’, he must have erected it at the feet of a recumbent model, who then twisted his body to the right and extended his arms above his tipped-back head, offering the artist a view through the grid of his sharply foreshortened form.

  This last Genesis scene was remarkable for another reason: covering sixty square feet of plaster, it was completed, incredibly, in a single day. Michelangelo created a cartoon for the corkscrewing figure of God but then ignored its incised outlines once he went to work with his brush, executing part of the figure in freehand on the wet plaster. The fact that this scene was painted directly above the Pope’s throne — and therefore in a highly conspicuous location — reveals Michelangelo’s dauntless self-belief in his labours at this late point. While his first Genesis scene, The Flood, ‘hidden’ in a relatively unobtrusive spot, took more than six troublesome weeks to paint, he was now able to dash off his final scene from Genesis in a single, seemingly effortless giornata.

  Despite working so frantically on his fresco, Michelangelo seems not to have objected to the sudden appearance on his scaffold of the Duke of Ferrara, the man who six months earlier had melted down his bronze statue and turned it into a cannon. Perhaps he was won over by the duke’s quick wit and deep appreciation of art, for Alfonso was, together with his wife Lucrezia, a bountiful and discriminating patron. He had recently hired Antonio Lombardo to carve marble reliefs in one room of his palace in Ferrara, while Giovanni Bellini, the great Venetian artist, was painting a masterpiece, The Feast of the Gods, for another. Alfonso even dabbled in the arts himself. When not casting enormous cannons to wreak havoc on his enemies, he made the tin-glazed earthenware known as majolica.

  Alfonso relished his visit to the chapel so thoroughly that he stayed on the scaffold to talk to Michelangelo long after the other visitors climbed down. He ‘could not not satiate himself with looking at these figures’, reported the envoy, ‘and made many compliments’.2 So impressed was Alfonso by the fresco that he tried to commission a project for himself. It is unclear whether Michelangelo accepted the offer immediately. Given his vexation with the fresco and his eagerness to sculpt the papal tomb, he can hardly have savoured the prospect of still more work with his paintbrushes. Still, the fiery-tempered Alfonso was, like the Pope, not a man to disappoint. In the end, Michelangelo did execute a painting for him, albeit eighteen years later, when he painted Leda and the Swan to adorn the palace in Ferrara.

  Alfonso did not show a similar interest in Raphael on that day, which must have pleased Michelangelo. ‘After the Lord Duke came down,’ the envoy recorded, ‘they wanted to take him to see the room of the Pope and those that Raphael is painting, but he did not want to go.’ Why Alfonso should have refused to view Raphael’s frescoes remains a mystery. Perhaps the prospect of seeing the pro-Julius propaganda in the Stanza d’Eliodoro did not appeal to the defeated rebel. Whatever the reason, it seems natural that Alfonso, the fierce man of war, should have preferred the terribilità of Michelangelo to the order and grace of Raphael.

  Alfonso’s bedevilled ambassador, Lodovico Ariosto, was among the company who climbed the ladder on to Michelangelo’s scaffold. In Orlando furioso, first printed four years later, he called Michelangelo ‘Michel più che mortal Angel divino’ (‘Michael, more than human, angel divine’),3 in recollection of this visit to the Sistine Chapel. The sightseeing tour must have come as a welcome diversion for Ariosto, who was busily negotiating details of the uneasy peace between the Duke and the Pope. Julius had absolved Alfonso from ecclesiastical censure, but he still did not trust him whole-heartedly. Believing that the Papal States would not truly be safe from the French so long as Alfonso ruled Ferrara,
he had ordered the Duke to yield the city and accept another dukedom instead, such as Rimini or Urbino. Alfonso was appalled at the idea. His family had been the lords of Ferrara for many centuries, and he did not intend to surrender his birthright in return for what he considered a lesser dukedom.

  Having just won such a remarkable victory, Julius was in no mood to compromise. Two years earlier, Ariosto had been threatened with a swim in the Tiber had he refused to quit Rome. Following Julius’s demand, relations between the Pope and Alfonso deteriorated so swiftly that suddenly neither the Duke nor his ambassador felt safe. Alfonso believed, with good reason, that Julius planned to imprison him and take control of Ferrara himself. Therefore, after dark on 19 July, just days after they had climbed Michelangelo’s scaffold, he and Ariosto forced their way through the Porta San Giovanni and fled Rome. They remained on the run for several months, hiding in the woods from the Pope’s spies and sharing experiences not unlike those of the roving heroes in Orlando furioso.

  To the surprise of no one, Ferrara was once more declared a rebel against the Church, and the Ferrarese expected the same treatment that had been meted out to Perugia and Bologna a few years earlier. But first the Pope turned his attention to another wayward state that had stubbornly supported the King of France and refused to join the Holy League. In August, the Pope and the other signatories to the Holy League dispatched Ramón Cardona and five thousand Spanish soldiers – men who badly wanted revenge for their defeat at Ravenna — on yet another campaign. The viceroy’s men left Bologna and began marching southwards through the Apennines in the heat of summer. Florence was about to be punished for her sins against the Church.

  At home in via Ghibellina in Florence, Michelangelo’s brother Buonarroto had more personal concerns on his mind. A few days after Alfonso’s flight from Rome, he had received a letter from his older brother suggesting that he would have to wait even longer before he became proprietor of his own wool shop. Michelangelo had recently invested much of the money earned from the Sistine Chapel in a farm, the purchase of which was arranged by Lodovico, newly returned to Florence from his posting in San Casciano. Named La Loggia, this property was located a few miles north of Florence in San Stefano in Pane, near Michelangelo’s childhood home in Settignano. Michelangelo had no intention of retiring to La Loggia to chop wood and cultivate his vines, even though a large house in the country had been the aspiration of every self-respecting Italian since Cicero and his illustrious peers had built themselves luxurious, vine-draped villas in which to escape from the cares of state and the heat of Rome. La Loggia was merely an investment, a means for Michelangelo to earn a higher return on his money than the 5 per cent offered at Santa Maria Nuova. Yet he was also aware that, by becoming a landowner, he was helping restore the house of Buonarroti to something of what he imagined was its former glory.