R. A. Scotti (19 page)

There is a certain irony to the fact that, for his first assignment unshackled from the tomb, Michelangelo returned to the Sistina. This time, he felt no reluctance. It was a catharsis. The bondage of the tomb behind him, the savagery of the Sack before him, he went back to the Chapel where he had triumphed to paint the
Last Judgment.
In early spring 1535, preparations began in the Sistine Chapel according to Michelangelo's directives. Scaffolds went up and the altar wall was primed—windows blocked, earlier frescoes scraped away, and the wall itself sloped to prevent dust from gathering. The altar wall was an immense undertaking. The surface area—43 feet wide by 55 feet high, or 2,365 square feet—would make it the largest fresco in Rome. Michelangelo completed his cartoons in September and began painting the following spring when the weather had warmed.

Painting frescos was possible only in mild months, but each day that weather permitted, his assistants applied a ground of damp lime and mortar to the wall area that he would paint that day. By counting the applications, art historians extrapolate that Michelangelo worked 450 days over a span of six years. They say that up close you can see hairs from his brushes still stuck in the wall and the holes from the nails that held his cartoons in place.

Michelangelo's
Last Judgment
is not an orderly display, the scales of justice calmly calibrated and brought into perfect balance with acceptance and decorum. It is the
dies irae—
the day of wrath that will dissolve the world into burning coals when every evil and every wrong will be avenged.

His day of reckoning is chaotic humanity's final tumult. Time exhausted and hope extinguished, four hundred giant figures, some more than eight feet high, flail and tangle, ascending or falling as salvation and damnation become fixed for eternity. Some of the faces are familiar: Michelangelo's faithful servant Francesco; Vittoria Colonna and Tommaso de' Cavalieri, the two dearest to him; the charismatic preacher Savonarola, who had stirred his soul when he was an aspiring young artist in Florence; and Dante, whose
Divine Comedy
was a source of inspiration.

Michelangelo granted salvation to his friends and heroes, but he showed no mercy to his critics. When the pope's master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, dared to criticize the fresco, Michelangelo painted him as Minos, lord of the underworld, with the ears of an ass and a snake wrapped around him nibbling on his testicles. The irate Biagio went to Pope Paul demanding redress and was dismissed with the wry rebuff: “
Ibi nulla est redemptio
”—“From there, no one is redeemed.” If you were in purgatory I could intercede, Paul told him, but not even the pope can rescue a soul from hell.

Few works of art have provoked greater outrage or greater awe than the
Last Judgment
. When it was unveiled on Christmas Day, 1541, Vasari writes, all Rome was filled with “stupor and wonder” at the huge, disquieting fresco. Seeing the finished altar wall, Paul reportedly knelt and wept at the terror that awaits us all.

Artists were spellbound. Counter-Reformation zealots were apoplectic. Ironically, it was Aretino, the flamboyant swindler, plagiarist, and pornographer, who summed up the objections by declaring that the
Last Judgment
was more suitable for a public bath than for the Sistine Chapel.

After Paul died, the reactionaries gained greater influence within the Church. They denounced the fresco as prurient and obscene and called for the entire altar wall to be whitewashed. El Greco volunteered to paint over it. The controversy seethed for a decade, until Pope Paul IV ordered Michelangelo's nudes covered. Daniele da Volterra, the unfortunate artist chosen to clothe the naked, earned the nickname
il brachettone
—the pantaloon maker.

Dante's Inferno was not an abstraction to Michelangelo; the stakes were real and eternal—salvation or damnation. His art has no palliative vistas to soften the human condition. There is not a flower, a tree, or a landscape of any kind in his frescoes—only us, teeming, struggling, aspiring. His art is in motion, animated by the primordial struggle of spirit with flesh, of man with God, and with himself. And if, too often, he seemed to be losing the struggle, he was not an optimist by nature. “Let him who does not know what it is to live by anguish and by death join me in the fire that consumes me,” he said.

Single-minded, with a wild, consuming energy, he tortured himself with work. What he made was never as true as the picture in his mind, which is not to suggest that he was falsely modest. Michelangelo didn't think he was good. He knew he was great. Once a man sitting for a bust complained, “But it doesn't look like me.” The sculptor shrugged—“Who will know five hundred years from now?”—and went on working. Another time, overhearing someone else claiming to be the sculptor of his
Pietà,
he sneaked into the old St. Peter's at night and incised his name in the marble. It is his only signed work.

There was an unalloyed quality in Michelangelo's art, and it was mirrored in his personality, in his religious fervor, and in his dealings with others. He was—and maybe the greatest artists must be—a supreme egoist, so consumed by what he was creating that he could not understand how anything could be of greater importance. Harmony, so vaunted in the Renaissance, was alien to his character and his art.

His service was prized, yet he always worried that he was facing penury. Michelangelo was his family's pride and cash cow. He seemed to support them all—father, brothers, sisters-in-law, and nephews. He was a generous son and brother, but their incessant demands for money unnerved him. They were leeches bleeding him dry. “I will send you what you demand of me,” he wrote to his father on one occasion, “even if I have to sell myself as a slave.” In another letter written from Rome to his favorite younger brother, Buonarroto di Ludovico Simoni, he complained, “Let me tell you that I don't have a penny and that I am practically barefoot and naked.”

Michelangelo lived in anguish and created out of tension. In his old age, freed finally from the tomb, he turned increasingly to poetry and found some degree of solace in the friendship of the poet and radical reformer Vittoria Colonna and the companionship of a young Roman noble, Tommaso de' Cavalieri. Some believe that he and Tommaso were lovers. Although there is no way to prove or disprove the contention, Michelangelo's age, his deep religion, and his art weigh against it.

He poured his passion into his work, living as austerely as a monk, and Condivi says, as chastely. His art was his life, his life was his art. “I have only too much of a wife in my art,” he said, “and she has given me trouble enough. As to my children, they are the works that I shall leave and if they are not worth much, they will at least live for some time.”

W
hen Paul III came to the papacy, the Basilica that had begun so audaciously with the laying of the first stone—the intemperate Julius bellowing from the depth of the foundation pit—stood abandoned. The new St. Peter's had sparked the gravest crisis in Christianity since the crucifixion. If Julius could have foreseen what it would provoke—the damage to the Church and the chaos loosed upon the city—he might never have launched his grand enterprise.

In the aftermath of the Sack, the Basilica had seemed like an extravagance that the papacy could ill afford. The vital work of getting the city and the Church functioning again had taken precedence. Once amends were made between the pope and the emperor, the extensive, and lucrative, work of rebuilding and refortification began. Much of it went to Antonio da Sangallo.

When the Protestant troops came over the Alps, Antonio had been building a church in Loreto, east of the city. He returned to Rome when so many others were fleeing and stayed with Clement, the steadfast servant of the pope. Although he received many major commissions throughout the Papal States, there was enough reconstruction work to keep scores of architects employed, and Clement called Baldassare Peruzzi back to Rome.

Peruzzi had been captured by German soldiers as he tried to flee, accused of being a priest, and threatened with torture and death. To prove he was an artist, he drew a corpse for his captors. The drawing secured his release, but not the end of the dangers. Trying to leave Rome a second time, Peruzzi had been robbed and stripped of his possessions. Half-naked and terrified, though otherwise unharmed, he finally reached his home in Siena, where he sat out the debacle.

Six years passed before Peruzzi finally ventured back to Rome to answer the pope's call. He become coadjutor of the Basilica with Antonio once again. Since funding St. Peter's was the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation and the Sack of Rome, the free-spending days were gone. Nothing could be built unless the money to pay for it was in hand. The emphasis now was on keeping costs to a minimum, a slower pace, and a more modest design.

With these restraints in mind, both architects submitted new designs to Pope Clement. Antonio scaled back his so drastically that he eliminated the central dome entirely. Peruzzi proposed a significantly smaller Basilica, with each arm only three bays in length. It was a workable, cohesive solution in the wake of disaster, but Peruzzi, never a lucky man, died before the indecisive pope had made up his mind to proceed. According to the gossip in Rome, the probable cause of Peruzzi's death was poison, administered by a jealous rival.

Although some work was done on the main bay of the southern arm—Pope Leo's “Chapel of the King of France”—a visitor to Rome in 1514, returning twenty-five years later, would not have seen any notable difference in the rest of the Basilica. The northern arm and the east-west axis were virtually unchanged since Bramante's death, and no architect had attempted to raise his dome.

In the decade since the Sack, Romans had become accustomed to the sight of the unfinished Basilica like one more ill-conceived experiment—an apt symbol, some might have thought, for a Church that had lost its way, forgotten its purpose, and forsaken its mission.

Sketches drawn by the Flemish artist Maerten van Heemskerck around the time of Pope Clement's death show the husk of the Basilica like a failed dream. Bramante's towering piers loom solitary and neglected, new ruins to add to the old.

Clement had been wary of returning to any ostentatious building. Paul had no such compunction. When Charles V made a triumphal visit to Rome in 1536, nine years after his troops had ravished the city, Paul, taking a cue from his Medici predecessors, named the still unconstructed northern arm of the Basilica Cappella dell'lmperatore—“Chapel of the Emperor.”

Paul saw a new St. Peter's rising in glory as a metaphor for the city and the Church. Completing the Basilica in unparalleled splendor would be an affirmation as deliberate and unabashed as the Council of Trent.

Through the years, the clarity of Bramante's geometric cross had been lost in a proliferation of contending designs. Paul asked Antonio da Sangallo to draw a final, definitive plan and create a scale model of the Basilica. In a papal bull of 1540, he authorized the architects of St. Peter's to excavate for “materials” in the Roman Forum and Via Sacra. Over the next nine years, eighty-six loads of stone were carted from the Forum. Some of the plunder never made the full route to the Vatican. It was diverted to the new Palazzo Farnese that Antonio was building for the pope.

Although Paul was certainly a more patient pontiff than Julius, one year passed, and then a second, and still there was no Basilica model. The architect made excuses. He was busy with the pope's new palace and with repair work on Bramante's structures. Antonio was fortifying the Basilica, rebuilding the loggia of the Belvedere—a portion of the east wing had collapsed, almost killing Paul—and bolstering the façade of the papal palace, which was also in danger of collapsing.

Then, as now, there is real time and Roman time. Romans are famous procrastinators and laggards. If you're in a hurry to have something done, the Eternal City is not the place to be. “
Domani, sempre domani
”—“There is always tomorrow”—is the classic rejoinder to every delay. Three years passed, and still Paul waited. All the while, the money was disappearing, yet no model was forthcoming.

Finally, he sent his accountant Jacopo Meleghino to the architect with an ultimatum: “
Quoad architectos salaria mandarant non satisfieri nisi incepto modello
”—“No model, no pay.” In the summer of 1543, Antonio unveiled his Basilica to the pope.

 

Today on permanent display in a well-lit circular stone room in St. Peter's is the intricate model of Antonio da Sangallo's Basilica. Constructed of lime wood, on a scale of 1:29 and correct in every detail, it was twenty-three feet long by twenty feet high, five years in the making, and very expensive. Contemporary reports give the cost as anywhere from four thousand to six thousand ducats. Antonio could have built a conventional church for a comparable amount. In spite of the exorbitant price tag, the detailed model was precisely what the Basilica had been lacking since its conception: a definitive design, executed to scale, accepted in its entirety by the pope and ratified by the Fabbrica.

In Antonio's model, two giant bell towers dominate the exterior. Between them, the dome rises over two tiers of columns resembling a wedding cake, and a lantern with more columns crowns the cupola. A large atrium seems appended to the body of the church, which is encircled by ambulatories, or passageways. The only lighting comes from narrow windows shaped like
la bocca di lupo
—“a wolf's mouth.” All three orders of columns—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—are repeated in dizzying profusion. It is a gaudy, overelaborate, disjointed extravaganza that looks more like a Disney theme park than a sublime metaphor.

On architectural merit alone, Paul might have rejected Antonio's model, but there were extenuating circumstances. The model had taken so long to build and cost so much that if Paul asked for revisions, he might not have lived long enough to see them, and construction had been stalled for far too long. Then too, officials at the Fabbrica backed the design, and the pope must have had confidence in Antonio, since the architect was also building Palazzo Farnese. Finally, Paul was preoccupied with affairs of the Church. The Council of Trent was in session. He was brokering another peace between France and Spain, and the Inquisition was rooting out alleged heretics. Whatever his reasons, Paul accepted Antonio's model.

For the first time in the building of St. Peter's, the three essential elements were in place. There was a clear plan to follow. There was a skilled engineer to ensure that construction was sound. And there was money to finance it. Finally, it seemed as if there were no impediments to construction. The majestic project, mired so long in artistic confusion and fiscal mismanagement, would go forward. A new St. Peter's would rise, out of the agony of the Sack and the confusions of prior papacies—a new Basilica in a reborn city.

From 1529 to 1540, Clement and Paul had spent 17,600 ducats on the Basilica. Since the salary of Antonio and Peruzzi was 300 ducats a year, on average, less than 2,000 ducats per year had gone into building. Over the next six years, expenses increased more than 100 percent—a clear indication of Paul's commitment. Between 1540 and 1546, he poured 162,000 ducats into St. Peter's. A full half of that was the treasure of the Incas brought back to Spain by the conquistadores. Gold and silver were flowing across the Atlantic, and the Spanish monarchy was funneling the riches into the Vatican treasury.
*

Antonio spent a substantial percentage of the money on a single project. He raised the entire floor of the Basilica 12.5 feet. It was an ambitious engineering challenge, accomplished at great cost. It was also a radical aesthetic change that destroyed the interior perspective Bramante had ordained.

Antonio's motive is unclear. It may have been necessary to shore up Bramante's crumbling foundations. With a building as enormous as the Basilica, there is a real danger of the entire edifice sinking, and the ground beneath the Basilica was marshy. One hundred fifty years later, Carlo Fontana would complain that the nave was on shaky ground because new channels had not been dug to drain the water from the hillside into the river. And in fact, part of the construction would collapse. On the other hand, Constantine's church had stood firmly on the very same ground for more than a millennium.

To support the new floor, Antonio built a series of parallel walls almost three feet thick and some seventeen feet apart, connected by barrel vaults. “If this masterpiece of care and prudence were upon the earth, instead of being hidden as it is beneath it,” Vasari wrote, “the work would cause the boldest genius to stand amazed.”

The higher floor altered the vertical dimensions. Now the large niches that Bramante had cut into the piers appeared too close to the floor. Antonio filled them in and strengthened the piers, squaring them off and chamfering, or fluting, the side under the dome.

Each part of Bramante's piers and columns—base, shaft, and cornice—was colossal. His bases were ten feet of stepped travertine. Their overwhelming height, much taller than an average person, would have forced the eye up to the column shaft and conveyed the subliminal message of an infinite power. By lifting the floor, Antonio, in effect, cut off the bases, leaving the columns without pedestals and diminishing their effect.

There is no way to know if the aesthetic ramifications were inevitable or intentional—a necessary cost of buttressing a shaky construction, or an artistic choice. Around that same time, Sebastiano Serlio, whose views on architecture were highly regarded, was writing, “Columns whose bases rest on the floor of the building are far more beautiful than those which stand on a pedestal.” To an architect like Antonio, who always wanted to be in the forefront, Bramante's gigantic stepped bases may have seemed passé.

Raising the Basilica floor did have several unanticipated advantages. It provided space for the work yard to slake the lime needed for the new wall. It offered relief from the terrible humidity of Roman summers, and it created space for the crypt and grottoes underneath St. Peter's.

Once the floor was finished, Antonio built a dividing wall separating the construction site from what remained of the original church of Constantine, which was still being destroyed bit by bit. Pilgrims could now visit the hallowed shrine without maneuvering around scaffoldings or tripping over bags of sand. Work proceeded apace on the eastern ambulatory and the pendentives of the dome. Antonio was completing the barrel vaults of the south and east arms and coffering them with decorative recesses, when, not for the first time, it seemed as if Divine Providence intervened. He died suddenly in 1546.

Although the Basilica was saved from disaster, Sangallo's unexpected death left a void. The architect had controlled the building projects of the Vatican for more than a quarter century. He would be difficult to replace.

Fabbrica officials considered various artists. There was talk of Jacopo Sansovino, but he was content in Venice. Giulio Romano, who had been Raphael's student, was offered the position, but he was an old man retired in Mantua, and he died in November before he could take up the assignment. Fabbrica officials were still debating a successor when the pope made his own choice. Only one artist remained from the glory days of Julius, and he was bent with age and anguish. Paul summoned him to an audience.

Michelangelo's
Last Judgment
was a defiant response to the Protestants, affirming the authority of the Church. Now desiring a Basilica “clear and luminous” to proclaim its unity, Paul turned again to Michelangelo.

It is one of the intriguing what-ifs of history. What if Paul and Michelangelo had succeeded Julius and Bramante without the interruption—damaging for the city, divisive for the Church, costly for the Basilica—of the Medici interregnum? It is too much to suggest that northern Europe would not have broken with the Latin Church, because the moral decay was so pervasive. But the demands for reform might have been heeded, the rift healed, and the grand enterprise of the century progressed without corrupt indulgences, confused plans, or extravagant expense, in an unbroken line, Julius to Paul, Bramante to Michelangelo.