R. A. Scotti (4 page)

In the Holy Year of 1450, the acts of God and man were terrible, yet the Jubilee was a success for Rome. As the Vatican treasury filled, Nicholas imagined an urban renaissance. “He had two soaring ideas,” his secretary and biographer Giannozzo Manetti wrote, “the Renaissance of the world by learning and the turning of the eyes of Christendom to a Vatican which should outshine in magnificence the Palatine of the Emperors.”

Nicholas brought the Renaissance to Rome and sparked one of the most brilliant—and most libertine—epochs in its history. Out of the neglected city, which had shrunk to one tenth the size of imperial Rome, he envisioned the new Jerusalem of scripture—a papal Palatine
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rising on the Vatican hill. At “the ideal center” would stand a reborn Basilica of St. Peter, “a temple, so glorious and beautiful that it seemed rather a divine than a human creation.”

History overtook his plans. Political challengers conspired to assassinate him. Constantinople fell to the Turks, and the bishops of Byzantium sided against Rome. Nicholas V's papal Palatine remained just a paper city until Pope Julius II made it the defining event of the new century.

J
ulius II demands hyperbole. Everything about him—his personality, his ambitions, and his accomplishments, the art he commissioned and the Basilica he ordained—was outsized. He enters history in a fresco by Melozzo da Forlì, called
The Founding of the Vatican Library by Sixtus IV.
A more apt title might be
Secularism and Nepotism in the Renaissance Papacy.
The word
nepotism
comes from the Italian
nipote,
meaning “nephew,” and besides Pope Sixtus and his new librarian—the humanist and iconoclast Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina—there are four figures in the painting. All are papal nephews.

Dressed in cardinal red, Giuliano della Rovere stands in the center of the painting, facing his pontiff-uncle and in profile to us, respectful, but with a hint of sangfroid. The young cardinal who will become Julius II appears ruggedly handsome, worldly, and sophisticated. He is a big man, powerfully built, square-shouldered and square-jawed.

At the right hand of the pope, avoiding direct eye contact with his cousin, stands Raffaele Riario. Elevated to cardinal at the ripe age of sixteen, Riario looks like a young version of Sixtus—same aquiline nose, same profile. Lurking in the background, turned away from the pope and appearing somewhat sinister, are two other nephews: Giovanni della Rovere, whose son will rule the city-state of Urbino one day, and Girolamo Riario, who will implicate his uncle in a plot to unseat the Medici in Florence—the ill-conceived Pazzi conspiracy. The bad blood created between the della Rovere and the Medici families will infect the papacy and the future of the cardinal-nephews who are positioning themselves to lead the Church.

In Renaissance Rome, when many prelates owed their red hats to a papal connection, no cardinals were more colorful or more competitive than Giuliano della Rovere and Raffaele Riario. Cousins, rivals, and collaborators, passionate art collectors, shrewd gamblers, and extravagant builders, they were schooled in power by their uncle, a philosopher-friar who turned into a wily pontiff. Sixtus IV founded the Vatican Museum, built the Sistine Chapel that bears his name, and primed the ambitions of his cardinal-nephews.

The cousins chose complementary routes to power. Riario, a canny political operative, positioned himself to advance within the Curia. Della Rovere, more confrontational and charismatic, set his sights on the papacy. When Pope Sixtus died in 1484, della Rovere was poised to succeed his uncle, but another ambitious pretender, the charming, notoriously libertine Spaniard Rodrigo Borgia, a nephew of Calixtus III, challenged his claim. Deadlocked between the two contenders, the papal conclave settled on a compromise choice—the incompetent if amiable Innocent VIII.

By the next conclave in 1492, a nasty rivalry had developed between della Rovere and Borgia. Rather than trust in Divine Providence alone, the Spaniard secured the election by promising an influential fellow-cardinal a key position in the Curia and sweetening the offer with an ornate palace.

In 1492, Romans were not gossiping about the quixotic voyage of the Genoese sea captain Cristoforo Colombo, or the death of the Renaissance prince Lorenzo il Magnifico in Florence. The main topic of conversation was the stunning upset that put the amoral Borgia cardinal on the throne of Peter. The new pope took the name Alexander VI and moved his mistress and his brood of unscrupulous children into the papal palace.

With the loathed Borgia ruling the Church, della Rovere feared for his life. The new pope hatched assassination plots to eliminate his rival, and della Rovere retaliated by escaping to France, where he incited war against the papacy. In 1494, at his urging, the French king Charles VIII rode into Rome. Alexander retreated to Castel Sant'Angelo, once the emperor Hadrian's mausoleum, now a redoubtable fortress for beleaguered pontiffs.
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There, in a lavishly decorated suite, he lived as a virtual prisoner.

While della Rovere conspired in France, his cardinal-cousin Riario consorted with the enemy and accumulated power. He was apostolic chamberlain, the chief financial officer of the Church, a position he would hold for thirty-four years under six popes. He built a palace that was the talk of the city and an art collection that would have few rivals.

The years slipped by with della Rovere waiting impatiently in the wings and Alexander, the most licentious pope in history, leading the Church. Finally, in 1503, the long exile ended. The Borgia pope died, and Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere returned to Rome to claim the throne of Peter. He had left a vital man in the prime of life. He returned white-haired, but still with the energy of someone half his age. For the third time, he entered a conclave of cardinals, anticipating the papacy, and for the third time, he was denied.

A man of enormous passion for art and for the Church, della Rovere walked the streets of Rome furious to be passed over yet exhilarated to be back. After so many years, the city felt both familiar and fresh. Threading his way through the alleys of the Borgo Vaticano, each bend, the very paving stones beneath his feet, familiar, della Rovere approached Constantine's basilica, hemmed in now by pilgrims' hostels and convents. He crossed the square and approached the broad courtyard, avoiding the spray from the giant pinecone fountain that gushed in the center of the atrium and the hawkers peddling souvenirs and roasted
ceci
beans.

Inside the church, allowing a moment for his eyes to adjust, he saw in the crumbling vastness a serene white marble sculpture like a shaft of pure light. A young girl cradled her murdered son, a man now, larger than she, full grown and bearded. He is a dead weight in her arms. The years dissolve for her, and the reality is, as it always was, mother and child. The Virgin Mary, in her unutterable grief, holds her only son for the last time, with the resurrection three days away and unknown to her. The
Pietà
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translated into marble the words that Dante wrote in the
Paradiso,
“Mary, daughter of your son.” The sculpture was the work of the young Florentine Michelangelo Buonarroti, and della Rovere must have come out of the church determined to have the services of the man who could fashion stone into such serenity.

The cardinal's exile had ended and with it, he believed, his quest for the papacy, but in the blue clarity of late October, the sun hot but not scorching and the Mediterranean still warm enough to swim, he had discovered the artist who would assure his own greatness.

It was some consolation for his papal ambitions, thwarted for the third time by the shadow, if not the person, of his Borgia nemesis. After Alexander's decadent pontificate, the Church needed a clean-living leader, and the new pope Pius III was true to his name. A man of unquestioned piety but little luck, he died after twenty-eight days.

Inevitably, when a pope succumbs so quickly, there is talk of poison. No conclusive evidence turned up to confirm or quiet the gossip, and by prudence or advance knowledge, della Rovere entered his fourth conclave with his cardinals all in a row. There was no suspense this time. After three whisker-thin defeats, he had corrected the odds.

On November 1, All Saints' Day, Giuliano della Rovere was elected Julius II, supreme pontiff of the Church of Rome, in a single ballot. It had taken almost twenty years and involved bribery, war, assassination plots, and at least the suspicion of poisoning—all very much business as usual in the Renaissance Church.

 

When Constantine picked up the shovel in the Vatican field to build his shrine to Peter, he blurred the distinction between Caesar and God. In architecture, in art, even in liturgical ceremonies and spiritual symbols, pagan and Christian became jumbled. Classical myths and Christian themes became chapters in the same unending story. The confusion was incised on the bronze doors that Filarete made for Constantine's basilica. There, pagan nymphs played while Christian saints prayed.

The secular and the sacred borrowed so freely from each other that by the time the Renaissance reached Rome, the two were as inseparable as body and soul. Christ's dictum “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's” was moot. Caesar and God—or his human proxy, the Vicar of Christ—were now one and the same.

The Renaissance papacy became a government more than a religion, led by statesmen and sometimes warriors who could rarely afford to be saints. More princes than pastors, they played one covetous state against another to maintain a balance of power.

There was no single road to the papacy, no character requirements or moral litmus test, and for the most part, the popes who followed Nicholas were worldly, pragmatic men concerned with consolidating temporal power. Behavior that had called for punishment and purification in the medieval Church was accepted with occasional concern but no censure.

The Renaissance popes were not distant spiritual figures. They were fighters in the center of the fray, sometimes captured, imprisoned, exiled, or poisoned. Within their ranks were pure souls and rascals, brilliant minds and bureaucrats, and this one indomitable warrior-patron.

 

Julius II was the most momentous of pontiffs. In personality, a colossus. “All knew him to be a true Roman pontiff—full of fury and extravagant conceptions,” a contemporary remarked. He dominated his age as he dominates the fresco by da Forlì. His goal was greatness—for the papacy, for the Church, and for the city. He expected it of himself, and he tolerated nothing less from others.

Modesty has never been a Roman virtue. If everything in moderation was the Socratic ideal, everything in excess was the Roman counterpoint. Pagan Rome was immoderate in its ambitions (its emperors were imperialists par excellence), immoderate in its treacheries (think of the bloodbaths of Nero and Caligula), and immoderate in its architecture (the Basilica of Maxentius covered half a city block.)

The papacy of Julius II aspired to the same imperial dimensions. From the ashes of empire would arise the glory of Christendom. Under Julius, Christian Rome would become more magnificent and mighty than the city of the Caesars. Although he shared Nicholas V's aspirations for the city and the Church, Julius was no philosopher-king. It was said that he sat as easily in a saddle as he did in the Sedia di San Pietro. A battering ram of a man, he possessed a short temper, a powerful mind, and boundless ambition; he was irascible, irreverent, intractable.

Although it was Cosimo de' Medici who said, “We cannot govern a state with paternosters,” the sentiment is pure Julius. He had no time for contemplation or the finer points of spirituality. He had waited twenty years for the papacy and he seized it absolutely, driving himself into battles and fighting them all—military, political, personal, and artistic—with ferocity.

The state of the Church was ambiguous at best. Upstart princes had usurped its temporal powers and dissolute clergy had made a mockery of its moral authority. Julius wanted no ambivalence in Christendom. His goals were sure and bold: to assert the authority of the Church by regaining control of the Papal States, lost during the sojourn in Avignon, and to display its power and prestige through art and architecture. To that end, he led an army of brawny Swiss mountaineers against recalcitrant princes and summoned an army of artists to create works that surpassed all other constructions.

His arsenal included unconventional weapons: papal bulls,
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encyclicals, writs of excommunication, and indulgences. He rattled them as threats, and if his opponents resisted, he hurled them like javelins. When, for example, Bologna did not capitulate immediately to his will, Julius excommunicated the entire city, all who lived in it and their children, their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren. He threatened the same against Venice, placing La Serenissima under interdict and excommunicating the full Venetian Senate.

The contemporary historian Francesco Guicciardini described him as “a grand, indeed vast spirit, impatient, precipitous, open, liberal.” And Guicciardini was a relentless critic. The Christian Caesar became the most formidable force in Europe—the preeminent power player and art patron.

There is no need to follow the twists and turns by which the papacy gradually reestablished its dominion. The treaties, battles, and plots are transitory beside the art and architecture that Julius commissioned. Like the Medici in the previous century, he was a one-man MoMA, underwriting the best contemporary artists. With charm, threats, bribes, and flattery, he wheedled work from them that they had never shown themselves capable of before. The art that he commissioned became the masterpieces of Western civilization. Although his papacy spanned only a decade, they were ten tumultuous years.