The presence of this warrior pope in the Vatican must have been a considerable draw for Hernando, and accounts from later in the century suggest he may have been carrying letters to Julius from Ferdinand, an ambassadorial role that would have given him the chance to observe the terribilità at close quarters. If Hernando might have had to spend much of his time at the court of the Sacra Rota in an attempt to save the family’s fortunes from his brother’s sexual incontinence, at least his route to the court lay through the building works in which the greatest artists of the age were giving free rein to their imaginations and ambitions. The Cortile del Belvedere had also begun to function, by the time Hernando arrived there, as a museum of the classical antiquities that were constantly being unearthed in and around the city, and passing through its corridors, he would have seen those figures of such intense perfection that even then had begun to bring European notions of beauty within their gravitational pull: the Apollo Belvedere, Hercules with the infant Telephus, and the sculpture of the walking woman, La Gradiva, which was later to inspire Freud and Dalí. As the Sacra Rota was not in session on All Souls’ Day (1 November) 1512, Hernando was free to go to the Apostolic Palace that day to witness the unveiling of Michelangelo’s ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, as the rest of Rome did (according to an eyewitness) “even before dust that had been raised from taking down the scaffolding had settled.” It was said Michelangelo had been commissioned by Julius to paint the chapel at the prompting of Bramante and Sangallo, who were certain the sculptor would fall short with the brush and so lose his fame and his hold over the pope. Yet though Michelangelo had resisted and written a sonnet complaining at the discomfort of being suspended beneath the ceiling—“with my groin crushed into my gut /And my arse hung as a counterweight”—there was no mistaking the triumph when it was revealed. Michelangelo had taken up the challenge thrown down by the original wall paintings—in which Botticelli, Perugino, and others had shown (in the parallel lives of Moses and Christ) the fulfillment of the Old Testament in the New and the triumph of the New Law over the Old—and in response had proposed a schematic diagram of all Christian time laid out over the framework of the chapel ceiling. The thirty-three individual sections of the composition treat history from Creation through the Fall and the Flood to the ascendancy of Israel, flanked by portraits of the prophets who show that the same history would be repeated after the coming of Christ, ending with the ultimate victory of the Church Militant. The ceiling entirely overwhelms any attempt to take it in whole, and it is significant that Michelangelo’s disciple Condivi, in trying to describe the composition, constantly has recourse to the grid created by the vaulting: like grid lines on a map, this framework allows Condivi to guide the reader around his master’s painting, giving the coordinates of each image. Describing Michelangelo’s ceiling, then, becomes much like plotting a course on a map.15
Hernando may just have been finding his feet in the tumultuous disorder of Rome—its pilgrims, popes, plutocrats, paupers, professors, ruins, relics, and rogues—when the spring of 1513, six months after his arrival, raised the pitch of chaos to another level of intensity. Carnival was always a time of license and release in the Christian West, but Rome went a step further by holding its traditional city festival (the Festa d’Agone) at the same time. So alongside the time-honored rituals uniting the city in a frenzied release of energy before Lent, there were the triumphal processions celebrating its glories and the achievements of its papal leader. For Carnival, there were races around the city with different handicaps—between youths, old men, donkeys, horses, buffaloes, and Jews and (a recent addition by the Borgia pope Alexander VI) a race of whores—as well as a barely concealed pagan sacrifice at Monte Testaccio. From the top of this hill made of broken pottery pieces heaped up by the ancient Romans, pigs and bulls were attached to carts and launched downhill to an awaiting mob, who smashed both carts and beasts to pieces. Other carts were brought on as floats for the Festa d’Agone in 1513, celebrating Julius as the Warrior Pope and showing the various provinces of Italy he had liberated in his many wars against the Venetians and the French. For a newcomer such as Hernando, it must have been difficult at times to tell the licensed hooliganism of Carnival apart from the brash pomposity of the Papal Triumph.16
On Ash Wednesday 1513 Hernando was in the Apostolic Palace for the sermon that began the Lenten season of austerity and repentance, noting in his printed copy that he had heard the Spanish preacher deliver a reminder of the dust from which the audience came and to which they would return. This somber note must still have been ringing in Roman ears when, a week later, Julius died. A satire that appeared shortly after his death, rumored to be by no less a figure than Erasmus, imagined Julius presenting himself at the gates of heaven, leading the army of vagabonds to whom he had promised blanket forgiveness of sins in return for fighting in his wars. St. Peter is unimpressed, to say the least.
You’ve brought twenty thousand men with you, but not one of the whole mob even looks like a Christian to me. They seem to be the worst dregs of humanity, all stinking of brothels, booze, and gunpowder. I’d say they were a gang of hired thugs, or rather goblins of Tartarus plucked from hell to make war on heaven. And the more closely I look at you yourself, the less I can see any trace of an apostle. . . . I’m ashamed to say, and sorry to see, that your whole body is disfigured by the marks of monstrous and abominable appetites, not to mention that even now you’re all belches and that you stink of boozing and hangovers and look as if you’ve just thrown up.
Julius’s boasts of the great wealth and power he has won for the Church fall on deaf ears, and even he admits people were growing tired of the Roman Curia, accusing them of being “tainted by a shameful obsession with money, by monstrous and unspeakable vices, sorcery, sacrilege, murder, and graft and simony.” If Julius’s terribilità was a major force driving the resurrection of classical glory and putting it at the disposal of the Church, for many this magnificence was a mark of the luxurious damnation into which Rome was sinking.17
The court of the Sacra Rota, along with most other institutions of the Roman Curia, stopped all proceedings upon the death of a pope. The churning wheels of power and patronage fell silent as the College of Cardinals met in conclave, and the furious horse-trading to decide the next pope commenced behind closed doors. Although there was now present need for it, soon Michelangelo’s work on the tomb that he and Julius had planned together also ground to a halt. Of this gargantuan work, which was to have over forty statues and to represent all the areas of human achievement that Julius stoked to unprecedented heights—the liberal arts, painting, sculpture, architecture—only a single sculpture remains. This statue, housed today in the church of the della Rovere family, San Pietro in Vincoli (St. Peter in Chains), is nevertheless a contender for the greatest artwork of an astonishing age and gives some sense of the crushing ambition of the project as conceived in its entirety. The giant figure sits enthroned and contemplative, the delicate folds of his robes and the wild tendrils of his flowing beard drawing attention to the massive solidity of his frame and his muscles. Under his arm he clasps a pair of tables, for all the world like an artist’s portfolio. This is Moses, who sets the history of the world and the peoples of Israel in order, telling of their genesis and exodus, compiling their genealogies and the tables of their law: Moses, the maker of lists.
VIII
The Architecture of Order
Periods of indolence such as the Lenten conclave of 1513 provided Hernando with an opportunity to indulge another passion that was fast growing into an obsession, one that would by his death make him the owner of the largest collection of printed images in the world—3,204 to be precise, as Hernando’s equally obsessive list making allows us to be. Printmaking had been around before Gutenberg’s movable type made printed books a reality, and religious images roughly cut into wooden blocks for stamping on paper and parchment had been bought as pilgrims’ souvenirs since at least 1400. But movable type had made print a
major industry and had revolutionized the techniques and markets for picture making as well, with images of ever-higher quality becoming more widely available. The channels through which these printed images circulated around Europe were still in their infancy, however, and while Hernando may have found a small selection of prints in the Spanish trade fairs of his youth, he would have found the market in Rome, where some of the greatest printmakers lived and worked, of infinitely greater variety and higher quality. The lines carved into the surface of the printing block had become ever finer, until the masters of the craft had almost made them disappear from sight, to be replaced by a sensation of depth, texture, and movement that was astonishing to behold. Printmakers delighted in the ability this gave them, to bring the suffering of contorted saints to life, to show the muscles of hunters and warriors as they rippled, to show the water slick off naked bodies fresh from bathing. This was an art whose realism rivaled that of the ancients, a standard the Renaissance was obsessed with reaching. The power of this realism was nicely captured in Pliny’s well-loved story of a classical painter (Parrhasius) and his triumph in a painting contest. Having applauded his opponent, whose still life of fruit was so real that birds had gathered to feast on it, Parrhasius invited the other painter to draw back the curtain on his own creation. The opponent had to concede defeat when he realized the curtain he was trying to draw back was part of Parrhasius’s painting. The extraordinary level of detail in these images allowed printmakers not only to bring human and animal bodies to life on paper, but also to create maps of towns and countries so intricate as to give the viewer the sensation of being present there, and perhaps showing them more of the place than would be seen with the naked eye.
Printed images would have been for sale in the same places as printed books—in the bookstores of the Parione district, and from the peddlers wandering the streets—but also directly from the workshops of the printmakers themselves, such as that of Giovanni Battista Palumba, a master of the craft who was present in Rome during Hernando’s time there and whose work Hernando seems to have collected carefully. Palumba’s prints, signed with his first initials and a pictograph of a dove (palomba in Italian), are a tour de force of the printmaker’s art, with richly forested or sharply craggy backgrounds falling away in deep perspective behind the classical figures of the foreground. In the Mars, Venus, and Vulcan, which Palumba produced from around 1505, the blacksmith’s powerful back turns toward us as his hammer reaches the top of its arc, while the delicately armored and amorous Mars puts his hand on naked Venus’s shoulder as she glances over it, touching one of the curves of her flesh that draws the eye around toward where they disappear from view.1
Although Hernando seems to have been drawn to those masters who specialized in printed images, in the same way as he preferred printed books to manuscript works, the Roman print market also allowed him to buy images drawn from the painters who were idolized in Renaissance Italy: the head of an ecclesiastic after a drawing by Leonardo, and engravings after Raphael by Marcantonio Raimondi and Ugo da Carpi, as well as the first engraving designed by the young Titian, a monumental Triumph of Christ on ten sheets of paper. There is even an exciting possibility that Hernando commissioned in this period the most famous portrait of his father, by Sebastiano del Piombo. There are no surviving depictions of Columbus from his lifetime, but del Piombo’s painting is one of the earliest and most credible of those from the generation after; he was working with many Spanish patrons in Rome at this time, including on a commission at San Pietro in Montorio where Hernando was based, and Hernando is surely the most likely patron of such a work (as well as perhaps the only person in Rome who could have provided a model—in words or drawings—of his father’s appearance).2
Hernando’s immense collection of images, such as this print, Mars, Venus, and Vulcan or Vulcan forging the arms of Achilles, by Giovanni Battista Palumba (opposite), required a revolutionary method of organization to prevent the admission of duplicates.
Hernando’s desire to collect pictures by these celebrated artists may have been increased by the fact that both Leonardo and Raphael were, soon after Julius’s death, at work in the Vatican. Those who may have hoped for a less extravagant, less worldly pontiff this time were to be sorely disappointed: on 11 March, less than three weeks after Julius’s death, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici was elected as Pope Leo X, and he was installed in a coronation ceremony of particular opulence a few days later, on the nineteenth. Though Leo had the good taste to delay the semipagan festival of Possesso—in which the pope took formal possession of the city of Rome—until the sobriety of Easter had passed, many might have wondered, when the ceremonies resumed in April, whether the party had ever really stopped. The Possesso made its stately, riotous way around Rome, with various ritual halts: Leo met with Rome’s Jewish community at Monte Giordano, where he was presented with a copy of the Torah (as a book containing the Jewish law), which he ceremonially let fall to the ground in condemnation of the Jews’ refusal to recognize Christ; he was enthroned in the sedes stercatoria, the “seat of shit,” in the Lateran, a performance of his humility that involved his throwing handfuls of golden coins to the assembled crowds. If anything, Leo’s habits of grandeur even outshone those of Julius and were less directed at church glory than at increasing the standing of the Medici family. In September of that year a festival (the Palila) celebrated the citizenship of Rome that the Conservatori, the city fathers, had granted to Leo’s brother as well as his nephew Giulio de’ Medici, who was one day (though perhaps not yet) to be a patron to Hernando. For the celebrations, overseen by none other than Tommaso “Fedra” Inghirami, a thousand-seat theater was constructed on the Capitoline Hill and tricked out in classical style, for entertainments culminating in a production of Plautus’s Poenulus. It is not clear whether the performance of the play in Latin, with an all-male cast, was intended to allay or accentuate the scandal of this comedy about North African sex slaves. It probably didn’t matter: the play was, after all, performed after a meal of ninety-six dishes, also served in the theater, whose surviving menu includes
prunes
figs confit in muscatel
roast warbler
roast quail
prairie oysters
roulades
Greek pies
cockerel’s testicles
kid’s head, green sauce
various salamis
jellies
calf head, lemon and gold
vermicelli tart
pear pie & peach
a pastry wolf, suckling twins
dove pie
roasted—
cockerels
hens
pheasants
peacocks
eagles
kids
venison
boar
calves
hares
falcons, chasing
cormorants
—all sewn back into their skins, to appear living
capons in white sauce
marzipan
quail pastels
pheasants in royal sauce
forest goat pie
various pies
veal with mustard
cockscombs
sugared capons, gilded
duck pie
blancmange
pies, green
suckling pig
veal in pomegranate
fowls in soup
perfumed toothpicks
In addition, there were gilded pastry balls—a gesture to the Medici arms, the palle—filled with live rabbits and live songbirds under the napkins.3
It was fitting, and perhaps inevitable, that the counterpart to this mayhem of excess was a yearning for order, for some way of arranging the world that kept it from overwhelming with its plenitude. At the Studium Urbis, Hernando would have heard Luca Pacioli lecture on his grand theory of proportionality, which suggested that not just mathematical shapes but in fact all the world and all human knowle
dge could be arranged according to ideas of proportion, from the symmetry of basic shapes to the most complex structures. Hernando may not, however, have been the most attentive student: the evidence of his books from this period suggests he was beginning to have ideas of his own about the world and how to order it. When his tutor Bartolomeo da Castro was leading him through Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars in the summer of 1515, the intention was presumably that Hernando should be learning from the example of ancient Rome’s most prominent men. Yet while Hernando’s volume of Suetonius contains only a few notes drawn from his instructor, it does preserve an extraordinary product of Hernando’s young mind: a twenty-page, three-column handwritten index, providing an alphabetical key to the book’s people, things, and concepts. The level of specificity is astonishing: to take the middle of the letter c as an example, Hernando has not only recorded instances of the words Corinth and creditors, but also cube and crepusculum (moonlight). This was not an isolated incident: he was to do the same with the copy of Lucretius glossed by another lecturer at the Studium Urbis, Giovanni Baptista Pio, compiling lists of three thousand terms mentioned in the magnificent De Rerum Natura, from lips to wagging tails. Subject indexes such as these were still at that point fairly rare: they had only come into their own with the birth of print, and at this time relatively few books featured such a device. During the age of manuscript, when no two copies of a text were exactly the same, any index compiled would be good for just a single copy. The index of a printed book, on the other hand, should hold true for every copy—at least of that edition; a map was provided to lead the reader quickly through the concepts of the book to the parts in which they are most interested. It is particularly touching that one of Hernando’s indexes provides just such a map to Lucretius: the Roman poet’s extraordinary scientific epic, which argued that the world was made of minuscule atoms colliding with one another in a universe abandoned by the gods, was helping to prompt a reexamining of the world that would strike at the very foundations of its religious beliefs. These materialist ideas, which held that even the soul itself was a physical thing and not immortal, were proving so popular that in 1513 the Church felt it necessary to direct professors of philosophy throughout Western Christendom to refute them. If the world Lucretius portrays might be chaotic, Hernando’s index at least manages to bring this revolutionary text under control.4
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 16