R. A. Scotti (12 page)

Julius loved Michelangelo, but he enjoyed the company of Bramante. Michelangelo was so young, half his age, and a hothead. Bramante was a contemporary. There was not even a year's difference between them. Both were impulsive, decisive, and uncluttered by the doubts that plagued Michelangelo. They shared a passion for the antiquities of Rome and the poetry of Dante. A touching letter written from Bologna in December 1510, when Julius was recovering from a serious illness, describes Bramante reciting Dante to him like an actor on a stage.

A sixteenth-century writer called Bramante “a man of great talent, a cosmographer, vernacular poet, and excellent painter.” A pupil described “my teacher, Bramante” as “an artist of the first order…familiar with the works of the Italian poets. Though he could not write, he had a wonderful memory and spoke with ease and eloquence.”
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Neither artist was an easy man. Even at the peak of his celebrity, lionized as the papal architect, with the ear of Pope Julius, Bramante remained essentially a loner. He may have been gay. He never married or fathered a child. Vasari refers to his “intimate friend” Giuliano Leno, who made himself wealthy overseeing the construction yard of St. Peter's. “Avoiding melancholy and boredom as far as possible, I have always nourished my soul on happiness and pleasure,” Bramante himself wrote. “What I am permitted to do, I also think I have the right to do.”

He was mercurial, unable to make a firm commitment, either personally or architecturally. “As time changes in a moment, / So my thought that follows it changes too,” he wrote in a sonnet. Still, he plunged into life, as he plunged into work, with gusto. He lived lavishly in an apartment in the Belvedere. “The pope made him rich and gave him gifts and offices,” a contemporary said. Asked once how he was doing, Bramante answered, “Excellently, for my ignorance pays my expenses.”

Michelangelo was a tortured soul. He once said, “I live as a happy man with an unhappy destiny.” He always tottered on the brink of ruin—or imagined he did. Although he had invested shrewdly in real estate in his native Tuscany, he lived poor, nickel-and-diming himself and his patrons. If he smelled rank, it probably meant he was working well. Michelangelo may have been the original unwashed artist. He didn't like to break his concentration by taking time to wash, eat, or change his clothes. Often, he fell asleep with his boots on.

Life and art were a ceaseless, often painful, struggle. In a sonnet on art, he wrote:

Faith was the fuse that fired his imagination. Bramante, in typical Renaissance style, rarely allowed religion to impinge on life, especially when it came to lining up a prize commission like the Basilica. Vasari writes: “He was not over-scrupulous although his ideas were clearly better than his rivals'.”

Bramante was brash, a man of keen enthusiasms and quick actions, often too quick. He was not a precise man, a dangerous failing in an architect, and certainly not a technocrat, and he gained a negative reputation as a structural engineer, even as he became acknowledged as the foremost architect in Rome. His weakness was his rush to build. Vasari notes the “extraordinary speed,” even fury, with which he produced his architecture. When it worked, he was called resilient and adaptable; when it failed, foolish, even dangerous.

To Michelangelo, who was consumed by every detail, Bramante's often haphazard, hasty construction was reckless, and his Basilica yard was corrupt. Because of his loose management, overseers enriched themselves, substituting shoddy materials. Michelangelo was appalled by the architect's cavalier building methods. According to Condivi, Bramante “feared the judgment of Michelangelo who revealed many of his errors.”

Memories were long, and rivalries enduring. In 1542, thirty-four years later, Michelangelo was still brooding over perceived slights and persecution. Bramante and Raphael “wanted to ruin me,” he wrote. “All the occasions for discord arising between Pope Julius and me, all of them resulted from the envy of Bramante and Raphael of Urbino; and this was the cause of his not continuing his tomb while he was still living, and was meant to ruin me. Raphael had good reason for this, for all his art he had from me.”

R
aphael's frescoes are painted stories as vivid as writings, and the dramas of Julius's pontificate unfold in them. Almost thirty years after Melozzo da Forlì painted the four nephews of Sixtus IV, Raphael painted the
Mass of Bolsena
in the Stanza di Heliodorus. Julius kneels on a prie-dieu. Behind him to the right is Raffaele Riario, and gathered below them are the Swiss Guards. Riario and the guards represent money and might, apt symbols for this redoubtable soldier-pope who charged into battle to subjugate errant states and charged into building, demolishing the most sacred shrine in Europe on a whim.

There is no trace of the young cardinals who attended their uncle in this later fresco. Riario appears portly, balding, and eminently self-possessed. Julius's physical presence is diminished. The hair is white. The shoulders, though still straight, are narrower now, compressed, the cheeks sunken. The once-handsome face is bearded, a symbol of mourning in the 1500s.

He is an old man, kneeling in prayer at the end of his life (he would die the next year), and although his hands are joined, his expression is not that of a humble man. No head bowed. No eyes lowered. He stares defiantly into the distance, weary, besieged but undefeated, and still determined. He doesn't look like a contrite sinner begging forgiveness, or even benediction. More likely, he is ordering God to annihilate his enemies with a thunderbolt and grant him another ten, twenty, one hundred years—however long it would take to complete his grand enterprise.

Next door, in his library, was
The School of Athens
. It was Raphael's first major fresco, and to help his young protégé, Bramante had sketched the setting. What Bramante did not build in stone, he drew for Raphael.
The School of Athens
is the closest approximation we have to the Basilica commissioned by Julius and conceived by Bramante.

Julius must have sat in his library in front of the fresco, only his banker or his architect for company, imagining the Basilica he would never enter. He was at the end of his pontificate. His health was declining, and his artists were sniping at one another. The great art he commissioned was composed in an atmosphere of jealousy and suspicion.

Bramante had finished the Basilica crossing. The piers were arched, and the vaults were being coffered with ornamental panels recessed into the ceiling. Julius would never see the dome raised or the Basilica finished. But in Raphael's fresco the arching vaults rise over an enormous space that seems itself a dramatic element of the architecture. Classical thinkers discourse beneath towering ceilings that converge from four arms to a central dome. There, where liturgical ceremonies should unfold, the luminaries of ancient Greece and the artists of the new papal Rome gather and become one.

Like guests at a masked ball, the Renaissance artists appear in the guise of classical Greek thinkers: Plato painted with the face of Leonardo, Euclid in the person of Bramante, the astronomer Ptolemy lecturing to the student, Raphael. In the foreground, Heraclitus, “the weeping philosopher,” sits alone. More muscular than the other figures, he slumps on the steps, apart from them and looking as if he doesn't want to be there. Heraclitus, who has the broad square forehead, flat squashed nose, and melancholy scowl of Michelangelo, came late to the fresco after Raphael's clandestine visit to the Sistina.

 

Knowing now that he would not live to witness the dome of the Pantheon rising over the Basilica, Julius wanted at least to see the Sistine ceiling finished in his lifetime. But after four years, Michelangelo was still barricaded in the chapel. He was never satisfied. A deeper shadow here, the finger crooked a fraction more there. He couldn't let the smallest detail go, and his slowness, his perfectionism, drove the old pope to tirades. Health and patience failing, Julius threatened to knock down the scaffolding if Michelangelo didn't finish and come down.

On All Hallows' Eve, October 31, 1512, one day shy of the last anniversary of his pontificate, Julius unveiled the ceiling to the marvel and amazement of all who beheld it. Locked in a monumental battle of wills, the twin Terribiles, irascible patron and painter, had wrenched out of misgiving and mistrust, fury and impatience, one of the sublime achievements of mankind.

If Bramante thought that he was marginalizing Michelangelo by relegating him to the Sistina, the aerial act did not turn out exactly as he had hoped. Michelangelo dumbfounded his rivals and made their jealousy seem like petty malice. It was sweet revenge.

The Sistina “placed Michelangelo beyond all envy.” He was without peer, and his greatest work, he believed, was ahead of him. Certainly now, Julius would allow him to return to the tomb. It was not to be.

 

On Christmas Eve, 1512, two months after unveiling the Sistine ceiling, the old warrior received the last sacrament. Julius had seen the Sistine ceiling and convened the Fifth Lateran Council, which presaged the coming reform of the Church. Now, in his final weeks, his mind was preoccupied with the grand enterprise he would not see—and the grand price tag it carried into the future.

The four arches of the dome were complete up to the pendentives, the curved, triangular sections that form a transition between arches and drum. “All four arches of the great chapel of St. Peter's are vaulted which is a lovely thing and admirably fine to see,” a visitor wrote in July 1511. Bramante was making preparations to raise the dome—but slowly, and only on paper.

The clearest way to gauge the pace of construction is to look at the annual expenditures. From a high of 27,200 ducats in 1507, Julius spent 14,300 ducats on the Basilica in 1508, 13,438 in 1509, and 14,391 in 1510. In the last two years, 1511–12, he tightened the purse strings so drastically that building slowed almost to a standstill, and no further entries were made in the
liber mandatorum
.

Julius did not want his grandest and most controversial enterprise to become a financial burden for the Church, but neither did he want it scuttled by future popes. He needed to generate an ongoing cash flow that would continue to underwrite St. Peter's after his death. With the future of the Basilica and the fiscal soundness of the Church weighing on his mind, he decided to implement the financing plan that Agostino Chigi had proposed.

In the final days of his life, Julius issued a papal bull granting an indulgence to all those who contributed to
la fabbrica di San Pietro
. It was the last and arguably the most momentous act in a momentous papacy. What seemed like a sound solution to the dying pope would have unimagined consequences for the Church. Building St. Peter's would become the costliest crusade that the Church ever undertook.

 

Giuliano della Rovere—Pope Julius Secondo, the Christian Caesar and
pontefice terribile
—died on February 21, 1513, after asking his closest aides to pray for his immortal soul. What regrets did he have at death? What sins did he confess? Bribery? Misuse of power? Warmongering?

According to Paris de Grassis, the pope's conscience was heavy in his last hours, “for he had sinned greatly and had not bestirred himself for the good of the Church as he should have done.”

Few popes provoked more vitriol in their lifetimes. Anti-Julius fury was pitiless. Scurrilous plays, cartoons, pasquinades, and diatribes of every sort condemned the della Rovere pope for his bellicosity, his wily politics, and his duplicitous power grabs.

To such critics as Erasmus, the Dutch satirist and armchair reformer, the Church was triumphant when it was most Christlike. The pope should be humble and penitent, concerned with saving the least among us, not strident and belligerent, hurling sacred weapons at any who dared to cross him. Erasmus abhorred Julius for his militancy and his arrogance:

But to Julius, the Church was triumphant when it was seen to be the supreme authority, when the kingdom, the power, and the glory were radiant and absolute. To that end, he envisioned a single Italian nation-state
*
under the auspices of the Church. With the battle cry, “
Fuori i barbari!
”—“Out with the foreigners!”—he drove intruders back across the Alps. His political alliances were expedient, because they served a larger ambition: to make the Church of Rome preeminent. He switched allegiance as it suited his ends, and if all else failed, he had no compunction in declaring an enemy state in schism. This is essentially what he did when the French retook Bologna and announced that they were convening a council to try the pope as an apostate. Retreating in mock submission, Julius retaliated by convening the Fifth Lateran Council.

In 1512, the pope's favorite orator, the Augustinian monk Egidio da Viterbo, opened the proceedings with a clarion call for reform and renewal. Few believed it was sincere. In an unpublished diary, a skeptical Venetian expressed the widespread sentiment: “In an authentic council every recent pope from Innocent VIII and Alexander VI to the present pope would have been condemned and dethroned.” Although generally dismissed as a sham, one more contemptible misuse of power by an unscrupulous pontiff, Lateran V proved to be a prelude to the genuinely reforming Council of Trent.

 

History has been kinder to Julius than his contemporaries were. The Renaissance scholar Jacob Burckhardt called him “the savior of the Papacy,” which had reached its nadir under the Borgias. Julius may have gambled the Church and risked his own eternal soul, as his critics charged, but his legacy is unmatched. He brought recalcitrant princes to heel, reclaimed papal territories (which would remain loyal to the Church until 1870), and ennobled the world with art. “It was through him that Rome became the Classical City of the World…and the Papacy the pioneer of civilization.”

Judged by his art and not his actions, Julius was an extraordinary civilizing force. He was certainly no saint, but in the context of the Renaissance, and compared with other popes, there were worse sinners. He didn't transgress as heedlessly as other Renaissance popes. He was not guilty of nepotism or simony
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except when absolutely necessary—as in the synod that elected him pope—and he seldom indulged in concupiscence, although he fathered three daughters: Felice, Clarissa, and Giulia. In the Renaissance Church a lapse in celibacy was not a detriment to career advancement.

He inherited a Church that was spiritually and financially bankrupt. When he died, the Lateran Council was in session and the Vatican treasury was full. In spite of his costly initiatives, he left the Church richer than any other pope. According to a contemporary account, there were more than 200,000 ducats in the cash box at his death, as well as tiaras and precious stones valued at 150,000 ducats and gold and silver plate valued at 50,000 ducats.

For all that wealth, Julius left the Church an incomparably greater gift—the gift of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bramante. Today, we look back at the artists he supported with the certitude of hindsight and history, and their talent seems obvious. But the best contemporary talent is not always clear, and in the heat of the moment, the truest are often passed over for the most facile.

Julius saw ability, even genius, where none was evidenced. Whether the intrigues ascribed to Bramante were real or imagined, in art as in everything, Julius made up his own mind. With extraordinary prescience, he coerced the best sculptor into painting, and the result is the Sistine ceiling. He commissioned an unproven twenty-five-year-old to paint over three rooms in the Vatican palace where more seasoned artists were at work, and the result is the Stanze di Raphael. And he appointed an over-the-hill artist with only a couple of buildings to his credit to build the first church of Christendom.

Like a sea surge or a mountain avalanche, Julius overwhelmed everything and everyone and wrested from history, from bickering monarchs and pleasure-loving prelates, from carping artists with superheated egos, from the ruins of an empire and the excesses of the Renaissance Church, a vision that became forever after the symbol of the kingdom of Christ on earth.

His ambition was inscribed on the medal struck to commemorate that cold April Sunday in 1506:
Non nobis, Domine, sed tuam gloriam
—“Not for ours, Lord, but for your glory.” And if he could not always distinguish clearly between the two, his patrimony is enduring.

 

After he died, a satirical dialogue entitled
Julius exclusus
became a sensation throughout Europe. The anonymous author imagined the pope arriving at the gates of heaven and confronting Peter:

 

JULIUS:
Why don't you cut out the nonsense and open the door, unless you would rather have it battered down? Do you see what a retinue I have?