R. A. Scotti (18 page)

With the Italian peninsula tranquil at last and revenue flowing from the restored Papal States, Pope Clement started the sorry business of salvaging what was left of the city and reaffirming the authority of the Church.

 

In the sixteenth century, art was such a cogent moral and political force that, in the abyss of devastation and desolation, the pope commissioned a painting that would serve as a warning to those who had defied the Church with the Reformation and destroyed the city. Clement turned to the one artist who, more powerfully than any other, could sear a message into the soul with his brush. In 1534, he called Michelangelo back from Florence to paint a Last Judgment scene on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel.

Michelangelo's relationship with Leo had been murky, but Clement was more
simpatico.
Condivi said, “Clement considered Michelangelo as something sacred, and he conversed with him on both light and serious matters with as much intimacy as he would have done with an equal.” The pope's own comment was wryer. “When Buonarroti comes to see me,” he remarked, “I always take a seat and bid him to be seated, feeling that he will do so without leave.”

 

The horses were gone, but the stink of the stable still clung to the stones of the new St. Peter's when Michelangelo, for whom the fires of hell were real and frightening, returned to Rome. He brought with him the first cartoons for the
Last Judgment,
and the continued hope that there would also be time to sculpt the tomb of Julius, long delayed but never abandoned. Once again, death intervened.

Two days after receiving Michelangelo, Clement VII died after accidentally eating poisonous mushrooms. Bitter Romans, blaming the hapless pope for the sack of the city, wiped the inscription
CLEMENS PONTIFEX MAXIMUS
off his tomb and, in their anger, wrote in its place,
INCLEMENS PONTIFEX MINIMUS
.

T
he Reformation was an alarm going off in the night, rousing the Church from somnolence. The call was clear: Reform or self-destruct.

To bring it through the most serious crisis of its fifteen-hundred-year history, the Church turned to the ultimate insider—His Eminence Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. A power player and leading
papabile
in every conclave, Cardinal Farnese knew everyone who was anyone. In 1534, following the disastrous Medici interregnum, he was elected pope without serious opposition and took the name Paul III.

Although Julius had appropriated Constantine's imperial title, Pontifex Maximus, Paul III personified it. He was the “supreme bridge-builder,” spanning the divide between the Roman Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation. Farnese was not only well connected, he was scandalously connected. His sister was “la Bella,” the legendary beauty Giulia Farnese who became Alexander VI's mistress. To please Giulia, the Borgia pope gave her brother a red hat, and Farnese gained the sobriquet “Cardinal Petticoat.”

Farnese was no saint. His personal history suggests that he should have been the quintessential Renaissance pope. Like the Borgias, he pursued a life so notably lacking in poverty, chastity, and obedience that he postponed ordination so that he could continue enjoying it. His behavior was conspicuous for the worldliness and loose morals railed against by reformers inside and outside the Church. A bon vivant and art patron, Farnese lived lavishly with a household of more than three hundred, a mistress who was a Roman noblewoman, and their four children. As pope, his one glaring weakness was his grandchildren. He couldn't refuse them anything.

A Renaissance pope by disposition, Paul III became the first Counter-Reformation pope by necessity. He was the most pivotal and paradoxical character in the Basilica story. Paul sponsored the monk Nicolaus Copernicus and his seminal work,
On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres,
which posited the revolution of the planets around the sun decades before Galileo. But he also reinstituted the Inquisition.

In the aftershock of the Sack and the furor roused by the Protestant reformers, the status quo was no longer acceptable. Patience with clerical malfeasance and moral decay had run out, and the air was rife with the perfume of the righteous. The one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church was no longer one and no longer holy in the opinion of much of the laity. Its catholicism was compromised, its apostolic authority challenged.

Paul moved decisively to stanch the wounds inflicted by Luther. Smooth, charming, and persuasive, with the silken manners of a diplomat, he put aside his more questionable habits and, over the course of fifteen years, the longest pontificate of the century, began a long-overdue reform. He appointed smart, moral cardinals like Reginald Pole of England and encouraged strict, intellectually rigorous new religious orders, particularly the Society of Jesus, which became known as the Jesuits. He established the Holy Office to safeguard orthodoxy and revived the Inquisition to root out heresy. Most consequential of all, he convened the Council of Trent to correct ecclesiastical abuses and promote reconciliation with the dissidents in the north.

To Paul, the Protestants were not souls lost to the Church, but sheep who had strayed and could be coaxed back to the flock, if the Church cleaned its own house. The Reformation had exposed a system rotted from within. The Council of Trent answered it. Although it took several years to get off the ground, it gave the Church a second chance.

Cardinal Pole defined the Council's mission as “the uprooting of heresies, the reform of ecclesiastical disciplines and of morals, and lastly the eternal peace of the whole Church. These we must see to, or rather, untiringly pray that by God's mercy they may be done.”

In time, Paul became convinced that the breach with the Protestants was beyond repair. There was some consolation. Magellan's round-the-world voyage showed that the earth was many times larger than anyone had suspected. This was welcome news to Rome. The number of souls lost to Protestantism was a drop in the oceans compared with the number of new souls ripe for conversion.

Moving decisively to cut his losses, Paul dispatched missionaries to the New World, and when England became a lost cause as well, he excommunicated Henry VIII. Then he began to clean house. All hope of reconciliation abandoned, the Council of Trent concentrated on internal reform. Familiar habits were forbidden, among them: appointing family members to high office regardless of merit (nepotism), carving dynastic family estates out of church lands (alienation), buying and selling offices (simony), drawing income from many offices and benefices (pluralism) without attending to the duties of any (absenteeism), and remitting the punishment of sin for a price (the sale of indulgences).

Protestant reformers in the north were insisting that the Church make a public confession, beg forgiveness, and accede to their demands. Paul refused to force the Church to conform to the colder, more reserved northern sensibility. The Catholic Church was the Church of Rome in more than name. However far the faith had spread, its soul was Latin, not Bavarian.

Reformers, both those who broke with the Church and those who stayed to fight from within, might have expected a penitent pope. Something comparable to a medieval-style scourging—Paul with a crown of thorns, cardinals in sackcloth, gold chalices and ciboria melted down, matchless art and precious manuscripts auctioned, and the wealth of the Church distributed to the poor. The reality was sharply different. Paul was persuasive when possible, ruthless when necessary, but he refused to grovel.

He had two remarkable answers to counter the Reformation and restore the moral authority of the Church, and he pursued them both with fervor. The first was the Council of Trent. The second was Michelangelo.

 

A cavalcade of carriages carried the new pope, a dozen cardinals, and several members of his household along Via della Lungara. They crossed the river at Ponte Sisto, just beyond Chigi's Palazzo, now owned by the pope's family and called Villa Farnesina. Across the river, on the east bank near Palazzo Riario, now renamed and bearing the Medici coat of arms, Antonio da Sangallo was planning a new palace for the new pope. If time permitted, Paul might stop on the way back to see the construction.

The cavalcade proceeded east over the Capitoline hill toward Trajan's Column. It was a humble neighborhood for a papal visit. The statue of the emperor that once crowned the one-hundred-thirty-one-foot-high column was long gone. In time, it would be replaced with a statue of St. Peter. For now, though, it wasn't the condition of an ancient relic that concerned the new pope, but the mood of the aging recluse who had taken a studio in Macel de'Corvi in the shadow of the column.

With his cardinals forming a train behind him, Paul approached a narrow door and knocked. He waited for several moments before an old man, dressed in the coarse black clothes of a servant, opened it a crack and peered out. Seeing the august visitors, he stepped back in some confusion. Paul recognized the man—there was no more faithful or long-suffering a servant than Francesco Urbino. He pushed open the door.

“We have come to see your master's drawings for the altarpiece,” he said.

Behind Francesco, a second man, scruffier and ill kempt, watched warily. No pope had come banging on his door since those heady, early days with Julius when everything seemed possible.

Michelangelo knelt and kissed Paul's hand. They hadn't seen each other in years—probably not since 1527, when the Medici lost Florence for the second time—and they had both aged noticeably.

Paul III was tall and slender, his shoulders stooped now. Titian painted him in midlife wearing his papal robes easily. He looks out on the world, watchful and reserved. His face is narrow and elongated, his eyes large and dark. His hair, side-whiskers, and heavy eyebrows are a steely gray in contrast with the white mustache and coarse square beard. What is most striking about the portrait is the hands, the fingers long and tapered like a pianist's.

Standing in the doorway of the sculptor's studio in his white robe and short, hooded velvet cape, Paul was the epitome of elegance. On his knees, in a soiled, wrinkled tunic and scuffed work boots, Michelangelo appeared uncouth. He was considerably smaller than the Farnese pope, wiry and disheveled, his hair white from years and marble dust. He looked as if he had slept in his clothes, and judging by his rankness, he probably had.

Many artists became wealthy men working for the popes. Bramante, Raphael, and Antonio da Sangallo enjoyed the good life. But Michelangelo always lived as if he were on the brink of ruin, a prisoner of the tomb and preyed on by his mercenary family. “I live like a poor man,” he would say to the faithful Francesco, “without retinues or velvet britches.”

Paul offered him an annual lifetime salary of 1,200 ducats if he would honor the commitment he had made to Pope Clement and paint the
Last Judgment
fresco—600 ducats paid directly from the Vatican treasury, and 600 in revenue from the Po River ferry. Since Michelangelo's father had lived to be ninety-two, it was a very generous offer.

But with Clement dead, Michelangelo finally felt free to return to the heroic sculpture he had dreamed as a naïf, untouched by intrigue, a pure concept to be purely chiseled. Through all the years, he had clung to the unfinished tomb of Julius. Like an escaping dream, it had seemed always just beyond his grasp.

Michelangelo had been thirty-one when he proposed the tomb to Julius. He was almost sixty now. He had outlived all his rivals, his old nemeses, and four popes. Now, another imperious, iron-willed old man sat in the chair of Peter. They had known each other for years. Paul knew the saga of the tomb.

The once-mighty mausoleum had been scaled down and diminished through the years, first by Julius himself, then by his executors and heirs, and again by the Medici popes. They had kept Michelangelo working in Florence, causing a conflict with the della Rovere heirs, who claimed Michelangelo had pocketed thousands of ducats with little or nothing to show for it. They charged, somewhat ludicrously given the disposition of the sculptor, that he was living “a life of pleasure” in Florence on money he had received to sculpt the tomb.

Believing that Julius's heirs were impugning his integrity, Michelangelo had responded furiously. The memorial became tangled in probate questions and acrimonious payment disputes. What Condivi called “the agony of the tomb” had eaten away the years, scathed Michelangelo's soul, and corroded his spirit, yet like a spurned lover he kept returning to it and being disappointed.

Although Paul handled the prickly artist with velvet gloves, he was determined to bring the agony to an end, finally. He insisted on seeing the statues that Michelangelo had carved, the cartoons he had drawn for the altarpiece, “and every other single thing.”

Michelangelo had made numerous preliminary drawings for the
Last Judgment,
and Francesco laid each cartoon on the studio floor for the pope to view. The cardinals fanned out around him to study the sketches. The terrors of Dante's
Inferno
seemed to leap from the floor and engulf them. When the images filled the huge space behind the altar in the Sistine Chapel, they would strike the fear of the Lord in all who viewed them.

Paul, overwhelmed by what he saw, ordered Clement's commission carried out. But Michelangelo, who did not suffer popes gladly, remained obdurate, insisting that he was under contract for the tomb. It had become his obsession and his bane—the grail just out of reach, the cross he refused to lay down.

“Where is this contract? I will tear it up,” Paul threatened. “I am quite set in having you in my service come what may. I have harbored this ambition for thirty years, and now that I am pope, I shall have it satisfied.”

Paul assured Michelangelo that he would reach an agreement with the heirs of Julius. “Paint and don't worry about anything else,” he advised. But negotiations took time. Michelangelo wrote despondently to the pope's nephew: “One paints with the head and not with the hands, and if he can't keep a clear head a man is lost…. I shall paint miserably and make miserable things.”

The tomb haunted, imprisoned, and embittered him. “I lost all my youth chained to this tomb,” he lamented. Even after so many years he could never accept that Bramante's Basilica had replaced it. Finally, in 1542, the confusions ironed out, Paul imposed a final contract on artist and heirs, in effect rolling back the stone of the tomb and allowing Michelangelo new life.

Reduced five times over the course of forty years, what Michelangelo dreamed as “the triumph of sculpture” ended as a modest memorial in San Pietro in Vincolo, distinguished only by the marble Moses, a commanding horned figure with the rugged visage of il Terribilis.

Julius II was never laid to rest beneath Michelangelo's Moses, and never given his own memorial in the Basilica he had conceived. After starting his pontificate with such a lofty plan, he ended up in its humblest grave. Interred without a sepulchre, he was stuffed into the same space with his uncle Sixtus. So many wasted years, so much anger and animosity, and nothing commensurate to show for the agony it had caused.

 

Julius and Paul were both patrons, popes, and dominant personalities, yet Michelangelo's relationship with the two men was very different. With Michelangelo and Julius, two supreme egos contended—one young, ambitious, and full of himself, the other old, ambitious, and absolute. Paul and Michelangelo were contemporaries. They had witnessed the defilement of the Church and city, and they found common ground.