R. A. Scotti (15 page)

A
fter Raphael's death, Antonio da Sangallo moved swiftly to advance himself. Whether it was a ploy to secure the coveted position of
capomaestro
or whether it was a sincere difference of artistic perception, Antonio wrote to the pope, roundly criticizing Raphael:

Antonio listed numerous technical and design faults in Raphael's scheme, including a long, dark nave that would make the Basilica feel like an alley; Doric columns that were too tall in proportion to their circumference; heavier piers in the nave than in the crossing; and an insufficient number of large chapels.

His attack was scathing, but it has to be considered in context.
Magister operae
was the most prestigious and sought-after job for an architect. Whoever was chosen was assured a prominent place in Roman society and lucrative additional contracts. Rivalry among artists was fierce. To advance his own cause, Antonio had to convince the pope that he was his own man, worthy to be more than second architect. Given the pope's affection for Raphael, Antonio's tactic seems ill-advised, yet it worked. Leo, apparently accepting his argument, named him chief architect in 1520. Peruzzi moved up to second architect.

Antonio Giamberti Picconi da Sangallo (1484–1546), known as Antonio the Younger to distinguish him from his uncle Antonio, first appeared in the Vatican record books ten years before. While his uncle Giuliano and Michelangelo seethed with anger and resentment, Antonio went to work for their nemesis, Bramante. Whether Julius hired the young artisan as a consolation for his old friend or whether Bramante was trying to divide the Florentine faction, Antonio the Younger joined the construction team as a carpenter. He was twenty-four, and building St. Peter's became his lifework. It brought him prominence and influence, and made him a wealthy man. For the next thirty-eight years, at least one, and often many, members of the Sangallo family were on the payroll of St. Peter's.

Because of his family connections, Bramante at first kept a close eye on the young Sangallo, but Antonio, who had a quick and practical mind, proved his worth. When Bramante was constructing the arches spanning the diagonal piers of the dome, Antonio built the centering, a temporary wooden frame to support the masonry until it set. Considering the vast height of the arches, it was no mean achievement, and Bramante was impressed.

Because the triangle is the only geometric form that can't be distorted unless the length of a leg is changed, it was the basic form in all centerings and scaffoldings. Antonio's frame for the main crossing arms was a series of braced triangles bound with iron straps. Two right triangles (A-B-C with B-C being the hypotenuse) stood on end, so that points B were on the ground at either end and points C came together in the middle of the centering. A-C C-A formed a single sturdy line that also became the base of an isosceles triangle rising above it. The three triangles were buttressed at strategic points by smaller triangles. The center of the arch rested on the apex of the upper isosceles triangle. Since the span of the arches was seventy-five feet, finding and hauling timber of a sufficient length and thickness was difficult if not impossible. Renaissance builders devised various ways to splice together lengths of wood and secure them with iron bands and brackets.

Bramante grew to trust and depend on the young Sangallo's practical skills. Antonio and Baldassare Peruzzi learned their trade working in Bramante & Co. According to a money order issued to pay their salaries, by April 1510, they were two of five subarchitects working under Bramante, and there is ample evidence that they drew many of his plans. Of the two, Peruzzi was the more original talent, but Antonio mastered the technical aspects. He became a skilled structural engineer and a shrewd businessman and lived in high style when Peruzzi was still struggling to make ends meet.

Antonio had never been a sculptor, painter, or designer of any kind. He was the first pure architect to become
capomaestro
—and that was both his strength and his weakness. In Benvenuto Cellini's disdainful words, Antonio was “a draftsman not an architect.” While it is true that he was a meticulous and prolific draftsman—the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe of the Uffizi Gallery holds more than one thousand of his drawings—Antonio had two essential qualities that most of the architects of St. Peter's lacked: common sense and a practical mind. His skill was not creation but implementation. The most brilliant design, unless it is well implemented, will fail.

In what remained of Leo X's disordered papacy, Antonio completed the barrel vaulting Bramante had begun. Spanning two walls like a continuous arch, a barrel vault is another brilliant Roman invention in cast concrete. All of Bramante's arches in St. Peter's are coffered barrel vaults, and Antonio continued the same vaulting in the southern apse.

 

Although the Chapel of the King of France was nearing completion when Antonio became
capomaestro,
without the furious spirit of Julius, his sharp, questioning intelligence, and his determination, the new St. Peter's had lost its impetus. The funds expended were out of all proportion to the progress achieved. The Basilica became a sinkhole into which money disappeared. There were few progress reports, fewer cost controls, and no restraints. Adding to the confusion, architectural control kept changing. In the eight years of Leo's pontificate, St. Peter's had six architects.

Money was squandered, mishandled, possibly stolen. Expenses were inflated, whether intentionally or by mismanagement and poor oversight. The payroll swelled. Artisans and suppliers became wealthy men on the construction of St. Peter's. None profited more than the Sangallos. Antonio's cousins, Giovan Francesco and Bastiano da Sangallo, had the concession for the lime furnaces, pozzuolana, and tufa. According to Vasari, it “brought them very large profits and in this way Bastiano lived for a time…having amassed a large amount of money.”

Leo X's fiscal policy consisted of extravagant spending matched by extravagant borrowing. The pattern was set from his consecration, when money flowed like wine, and Agostino Chigi picked up the check. To pay for the three-day carnival, Chigi had advanced Leo the lavish sum of seventy-five thousand ducats, enough to support a fair-sized town. Conveniently for the new pope, the banker's lease on the alum mines had just expired, and he was pleased when it was renewed for an additional thirteen years.

Through the confidence of Julius and the profligacy of Leo, Chigi had become the wealthiest man in Italy, and very possibly in all of Europe, hailed as Agostino il Magnifico for his financial wizardry. Twenty thousand men served in his employ, and one hundred ships sailed under his flag. Chigi's relation with each pontiff was unique. With Alexander, he was a banker; with Julius, a financier, adviser, friend, and confidant. With Leo, he was a reliable touch and lavish host.

The Rothschild of Rome, Chigi lived sumptuously in a pleasure dome that rivaled Kubla Khan's. It was outfitted with an ivory bedstead and solid silver bathroom fixtures. Built by Peruzzi, the riverside villa, now known as Palazzo Farnesina, was on Via della Lungara, just down the river from the Vatican. It was the poshest neighborhood in Rome. The suave powerbroker Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the future Pope Paul III, lived directly across the Tiber. Another neighbor across the river was the cardinal-chamberlain Raffaele Riario. Compared with his solidly imposing Palazzo Riario, Chigi's villa was a greenhouse.

Adapting the architectural idea that Bramante had pioneered in the Belvedere Court, Peruzzi had merged the building with its surroundings so that one flowed into the other—house to garden to riverbank. To extend the illusion, Raphael had frescoed the loggias with fruits and flowers.

A banker's wealth depended on the goodwill of the pope and the apostolic chamberlain. As long as he needed the Church to make him wealthy, Chigi had been careful never to outshine a cardinal or deny a pontiff. Now that he was a man of property, the circumspect banker turned flashy prince and flaunted his fabulous wealth even at the risk of offending the pope himself. His dinner parties were sumptuous, and one in particular that he gave for Leo became the talk of Rome.

 

Lofted in the air by brawny servants, Agostino Chigi's gold dinner plates sailed across the garden like discuses. Glowing for an instant in the torchlight, they hung over the river, then, one by one, began to drop into the black water, each one hitting with a flat thud.

Conversation stopped abruptly. A shocked gasp turned to awed whispers, all eyes fixed on the river. The wine had been flowing so freely that when the first plates floated over the Tiber, several cardinals wondered if the last goblet had been too much, and their eyes were deceiving them. But as they finished the nightingale pies and pheasant tongues, one dirty golden dish flew after another, until the night sky was raining Agostino il Magnifico's entire dinner service.

“Save the servants the work of cleaning up,” the host quipped. Wearing a Sphinx-like smile, he sauntered from table to table, enjoying the expressions of disbelief and awe on the faces of his illustrious guests. Long colorful tapestries hung from the rafters and swayed gently in the evening breeze. Chigi was a slender man of medium height, supremely confident but still careful not to be overbearing. His dress and grooming were impeccable, sure indications of his status. Renewed interest in classical Roman culture had brought bathing into vogue again, at least among the enlightened elite. Personal hygiene was much improved from the pungent Middle Ages, and the well-heeled were also the well scrubbed.

Pope Leo loved spectacles. Anything odd, exotic, or offbeat caught his fancy, and Agostino il Magnifico had obliged with his own singular display. This was entertainment for a pope who had everything, from dwarfs to entertain him with ribald antics to his own zoo.

Leo stared as plate after plate sank into the river, stunned by such nonchalant largesse. If his host was dumping his own gold dinner service, could the papal tiara be far behind? The coronation loan was only the first of many Agostino il Magnifico had advanced the pope. The tiara and papal jewels were locked in his countinghouse, held in escrow against the hefty outlays.

The river smoothed. The servants brought out platters of fruits and cakes. As conversation resumed, fixed on the sunken treasure, Chigi surprised his guests again. At his signal, the servants pulled down the tapestries, revealing rows of stalls. Agostino il Magnifico had been entertaining Pope Leo and a dozen cardinals in the stables that Raphael had designed shortly before he died. You know you've arrived when Raphael builds your stables and the pope wines and dines there.

Later that night, after the last guest had staggered home, the servants brought in the horses and retrieved the gold dinner service. Chigi had taken the precaution of spreading nets on the river bottom. He always secured his investments. Although the Church condemned usury and Chigi considered himself a devout Christian, he was profiting handsomely by acting as pawnbroker to Leo and his friends. His personal loans to the extravagant Medici were made at rates that can only be described as usurious. That Leo paid without complaint and Chigi cashed in without compunction reflects the mood of the time. He would never have imposed such an unconscionable interest rate on a loan to Julius—and
il pontefice terribile
would never have let himself be bilked.

Julius had left the Church not just solvent but flush. Leo had no hesitation in spending its wealth. The average cardinal had fewer than two hundred in his household, or
famiglia
. Leo's swelled to almost seven hundred. The Medici
*
were a banking family, yet Leo “could no more save a thousand ducats,” a friend of Machiavelli said, “than a stone could fly through the air,” and the papacy suffered as a consequence.

Careless of the damage that his extravagance was doing to the Church, Leo continued his spending spree, dispensing funds recklessly to beautify the city, reward his favorites, and pamper himself. Like his father, Lorenzo, he had an eye for beautiful objects but no head for business, and even less interest in it. He squandered fortunes with benevolence and emptied the Vatican treasury in two years. When the coffers were bare, he came up with ever more creative and corrosive ways to pay for his largesse. Leo sold more cardinal's hats. He also increased the number of venal offices by almost one thousand, bringing some six hundred thousand additional ducats to his treasury and prompting one critic to complain, “Everything is for sale—temples, priests, altars…prayers, heaven, and God.”

When Leo had exhausted the wealth of the Church, he hawked indulgences like tickets to paradise.

I
n the theology of the Church, only confession and contrition can bring about the forgiveness of sins. A contrite sinner admits his errors, receives absolution through the sacrament of penance, and is given prayers to say or a task to perform in reparation. An indulgence doesn't buy forgiveness. It only lessens the penance imposed.

The process is roughly analogous to a civil court proceeding. A person turns himself in, admits his crime, is granted a hearing, and receives a sentence or penalty. The judge can suspend the sentence or order community service in lieu of prison time. Granting an indulgence is comparable to commuting a sentence. From the Latin
indulgeo
—“to be kind or tender”—it derives from Roman law and from the Old Testament book of Isaiah (61:1). The prophet says, “The Lord hath anointed me…to heal the contrite of heart.”

Indulgences are a quid pro quo. A confessed sinner performs good works or makes a charitable offering in exchange for a reduced penance now, or a shortened purgatory in the next life. When motives are pure, both sides benefit. The Church raises revenue for its capital expenses. The contrite Christian feels good, because he has a direct route to heaven with no detour to purgatory, and he is helping his neighbor and supporting his Church.

As early as the eighth or ninth century, “redemptions” were given for good works: feeding the hungry, tending the sick, any of the corporal works of mercy. In the free-and-easy years before the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Church also dispensed redemptions for making a pilgrimage, giving alms, joining a crusade, or endowing a hospital—all eminently worthy causes, it was thought.

Even if the intention were as pure as a shriven soul, misuse was endemic. As always, the abuse came when money changed hands.
*
Julius had issued a redemption in 1513, offering an indulgence with a contribution to the Basilica fund. Leo renewed and expanded it. As his money troubles worsened through poor management and personal extravagance, the sale of indulgences became a way of keeping the papacy solvent.

Mass runs of indulgences rolled off ecclesiastical printing presses. The man behind the marketing blitz was the pope's friend and fellow Florentine Lorenzo Pucci—the same Pucci who would mishandle Henry VIII's divorce appeal and lose the English Church. Pucci's preachers crossed the Alps and spread throughout Europe. Many of them were as corrupt as Chaucer's Pardoner, and they peddled the indulgences like eternal annuities, speculations against the Day of Judgment. Absolution was bartered for building funds, and a wholesale fleecing of the faithful ensued.

To a young Augustinian monk in Saxony, the trafficking in indulgences to finance an enormous new Basilica was the tipping point. Martin Luther had been profoundly shaken by the decadent behavior he saw when he visited Rome in the summer of 1511. “If there is a hell, then Rome is built upon it,” he said. Now, six years later, he questioned the increasingly mercenary Church. From the perspective of a penurious friar, a Medici prince did not need the pennies of the working poor to finance an opulent new church.

“Why does the Pope not build this Basilica with his own funds instead of with the money of the poor faithful?” Luther asked.

Over several autumn nights, he wrote out a long list of grievances railing against the expense of the new St. Peter's and the spurious indulgences that were financing it. Among his theses:

All Hallows' Eve, October 31, 1517, five years to the day after Michelangelo unveiled the Sistine ceiling, Luther tacked his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.