PART TWO
ELEVEN
Less than ten years after the Sack of Rome, the city prepared to welcome the Emperor under whose banners the plunderers had invaded it. Charles V, now revered in Rome for his crusade against the Ottoman admiral Barbarossa, and crowned in 1520 as Holy Roman Emperor, was to enter Rome through the Porta S. Sebastiano which was to be extravagantly decorated with frescos and stucco work. He was to be escorted past the Baths of Caracalla and the Septizonium, under the Arch of Titus and across the Forum by a specially constructed road to the Arch of Septimius Severus, then down the Via di Marforio to the Piazza di S. Marco and over the river to the Piazza of St Peter's. All buildings which stood in the way of the Emperor's path were to be demolished: there was to be no impediment to the progress of the five hundred horsemen, the four thousand foot-soldiers marching seven abreast, and the fifty young men from Rome's leading families, all clad in violet silk, who, with cardinals, dignitaries and resplendent bodyguards, were to accompany the Emperor through the city. François Rabelais, who was then living in Rome as physician to Cardinal Jean du Bellay, calculated that over two hundred houses had been pulled down as well as three or four churches. The while route was decorated under the supervision of Antonio da Sangallo the younger, assisted by Battista Franco, Raffaelo da Montelupo and Maerten van Heemskerck.
The pope responsible for this grand display was Alexander Farnese whose coronation as Paul III in 1534 had been celebrated by tournaments and pageants as if to assure the people that the sad days which had followed the Sack of Rome were now at last over. Soon afterwards the Pope had revived the Roman Carnival and had subsequently attended the traditional spectacle in which a herd of swine were driven with oxen off the summit of Monte Testaccio and were stabbed to death by mounted men with lances as they thudded to the ground.
Shrewd, clever and cunning, Pope Paul was also amiable and courteous. He spoke quietly, slowly and at length. Yet there was a sharp gleam in his small eyes, a hint of impatient combativeness that made men wary in his presence. He was feared as well as liked. His grandfather, a highly successful condottiere, had extended the already considerable possessions of his family around Lake Bolsena; his father had married an heiress of the powerful Caetani family; his beautiful sister, Giulia, had married an Orsini and had become the mistress of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI. With the help of this useful connection, Alexander Farnese had prospered in the Church. As a cardinal, he had become its Treasurer, and he had much enlarged
35. Titian's portrait of Allesandro Farnese (1468–1549), Pope Paul III, with his grandsons, Alessandro and Octaviano. Pope Paul helped to restore Rome after its devastation in 1527.
his fortune by the acquisition of numerous benefices. He had become rich enough to begin the building of that most splendid of High Renaissance palaces, the Palazzo Farnese,1 which cost so much that even his resources were for a time exhausted by it and work had to cease, a misfortune advertised to passers-by in the Via Giulia by a placard inscribed with the words, ‘Alms for the building of the Farnese.’
In those days Alexander Farnese had been renowned for his worldly ways. He had four illegitimate children and was as unscrupulous in promoting their interests as any of his predecessors had been in promoting theirs: two of his grandchildren were created cardinals while still in their teens. But, although he never lost his faith in astrologers, consulting them before embarking upon any transaction or journey and rewarding them liberally when their prognostications proved well founded, he abandoned his most questionable secular habits before becoming Pope. As Pope, he displayed a real concern for Church reform, supporting new religious orders, confirming the militant Jesuit Order, founded by Ignatius Loyola, and calling the Council of Trent, thus encouraging the Counter-Reformation which the Sack of Rome had made imperative.
In Rome he was often to be seen walking about the streets inspecting the building projects which were at last beginning to make the city whole again after its devastation. Although his finances were sometimes so strained that he had to resort to a renewed sale of indulgences and even to appropriate money contributed by Spain for a crusade against the Turks, he kept Antonio da Sangallo and numerous other architects and craftsmen busy in reconstructing the Belvedere and the buildings on the Capitoline hill, in renewing the city's fortifications, in forming the Sala Regia2 and the Cappella Paolina3 in the Vatican, and in resumed work upon St Peter's. He restored the University of Rome and increased the subsidies of the Vatican Library. He had himself painted three times by Titian and, determined to enlist the services of Michelangelo, he set out with ten cardinals for the great man's house on the Macel' de' Corvi.
Michelangelo had returned to Rome, aged fifty-nine, at the request of Clement VII who had asked him to decorate the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. He had not wanted to accept this commission, since he was desperately anxious to get back to work on Julius II's tomb. And in the time of the ill and weary Pope Clement he had been able to work on the tomb in secret while progressing slowly with cartoons for the Sistine Chapel wall. With the forceful Pope Paul III, however, Michelangelo could not prevaricate. The Pope was determined to have Michelangelo working for himself alone. ‘I have harboured this ambition for thirty years,’ he is reported to have said to Michelangelo. ‘And now that I am Pope I shall have it satisfied. I shall tear the tomb contract up. I am quite set upon having you in my service, come what may.’ One of the attendant cardinals, looking around the sculptor's studio, observed that the statue of Moses was alone worthy to do honour to the memory of Pope Julius. Another suggested that the remaining statues could be made by assistants from Michelangelo's models. The Pope, having seen the cartoons for the Sistine Chapel wall, became more insistent than ever. So Michelangelo gave
36. A detail from the ‘Last Judgement’ in the Sistine Chapel, which Michelangelo completed in 1541.
way. He was appointed Chief Architect, Sculptor and Painter to the Vatican and began work on The Last Judgement in 1535.
When the fresco was revealed on All Hallows' Eve 1541, ‘it was seen’, so Vasari said, ‘that Michelangelo had not only excelled the masters who had worked in the chapel previously but had also striven to excel even the vaulting that he had made so famous. ForThe Last Judgement was by far the finer since Michelangelo imagined to himself all the terror of those fearful days.’4
The Pope himself was evidently so overwhelmed with emotion that he fell to his knees, crying ‘Lord, charge me not with my sins when thou shalt come on the Day of Judgement.’ So enthralled was he, indeed, by Michelangelo's genius that he would give him no respite from his labours, instructing him to start work now on frescos for the Cappella Paolina. Already he had interrupted his work on The Last Judgement by asking him to consider the problem of there being in Rome no impressive central square in which so great a state visitor as Charles V could be received. The Capitol was the natural place for such a square; and Michelangelo was required to construct one on the summit of the hill, and to design a suitable grand approach to it, the Cordonata.
Michelangelo began by designing a new base for the statue of Marcus Aurelius which the Pope decided should be the centre of the new piazza, the Piazza del Campidoglio. He then proposed that an oval shape, decorated with a complicated geometric design, should be inscribed around it. Opposite the Cordonata, beyond the statue and its oval surround, was to be a restored Palazzo del Senatore; on either side of this, opposite each other at a slightly canted angle, were to be a reconstructed Palazzo dei Conservatori and a new palace, the Palazzo Nuovo, now the Capitoline Museum. The whole design was not to be realized until the middle of the next century, but successive architects were careful to follow the master's plans.5
As it was with the Capitol, so it was with the Palazzo Farnese which, left unfinished at the time of Antonio da Sangallo's death, was completed by Giacomo della Porta who incorporated in it Michelangelo's designs for the cornice and the upper storey of the courtyard. So it was also with the Porta Pia which, designed by Michelangelo in 1561, was not finished until 1565, the year after he died. And so it was with St Peter's upon which, as capomaestro in unwilling succession to Antonio da Sangallo, Michelangelo spent his last unhappy years.
Still vigorous in old age, he could work almost as concentratedly as he had when carving one of St Peter's most treasured possessions, the Pietà.6 Even now he continued his labours far into the night, a heavy paper cap of his own devising serving as a holder for a candle. ‘He can hammer more chips out of very hard marble in fifteen minutes than three young stonecarvers can do in three or four hours,’ a French visitor to Rome recorded. ‘It has to be seen to be believed. He went at it with such fury and impetuosity that I thought the whole work would be knocked to pieces. He struck off with one blow chips three or four inches thick, so close to the mark that, if he had gone just a fraction beyond, he would have ruined the entire work.’
But these bursts of almost frenzied activity were now succeeded by bouts of illness, of cantankerous depression, of moods of bitterness in which he felt that the work on St Peter's had been imposed upon him as a penance by God. There were differences with the members of the Congregazione della Fabbrica di San Pietro, the works committee, whom the Pope's high regard allowed him to dominate. There were quarrels, too, with the assistants and followers of Sangallo who had hoped to carry on their master's plan. Michelangelo disapproved of this plan. He had never liked Bramante, but he conceded in a letter to a member of the Fabbrica that he was ‘as skilful in architecture as anyone from the time of the ancients up to now’, and he condemned Sangallo's plan on the grounds that it deprived Bramante's
37. Michelangelo's Coronata, leading up to his Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitol; and on the left, the steeper slope of 122 steps to S. Maria d'Aracoeli.
design ‘of all light’. ‘And that's not all,’ he added in a passage that illustrates the hazards of life in sixteenth-century Rome. ‘It has no light of its own. And its numerous hiding-places, above and below, all dark, lend themselves to innumerable knaveries, such as providing shelter for bandits, for coining money, ravishing nuns, and other rascalities, so that in the evening when the church is to be closed, it would take twenty-five men to seek out those who are hiding inside, and because of its peculiar construction, they would be hard to find.’
Michelangelo put forward a new design, closer in spirit to Bramante's, though proposing a dome of a different shape and dispensing with the corner towers. A wooden model of this design was offered to the Pope in 1547 and was eagerly accepted. So the work proceeded under Michelangelo's directions. But it proceeded slowly. Money was short, the members of the Fabbrica were hostile; in 1549 Paul III died and was succeeded by Julius III who was sympathetic towards the capomaestro yet less willing to support him unreservedly. Michelangelo himself was growing very old and was often ill, suffering from stone which made it difficult for him to urinate, gave him intense pain in his back and side and prevented him from going to St Peter's as often as he should have done. TheFabbrica, increasingly dissatisfied with him, appointed one of his leading critics,
38. The view from the Palatine over the Forum. According to Livy, it was on the Palatine that the first Roman settlement was built by Romulus.
Nanni di Baccio Bigio, as Superintendent of the Basilica. This indifferent artist was dismissed by the Pope, who disposed also of another rival, Pirro Ligorio, by giving him the post of Palace Architect, in which capacity he created the delightful Casino di Pio IV in the Vatican Gardens.7 But Michelangelo, approaching ninety, was now too aged to cope with the multiple difficulties and frustrations that daily beset him. He was rumoured to be in his dotage, and he confirmed the stories himself. ‘I've lost my brains and my memory,’ he told Vasari; and to his nephew, Lionardo, he wrote, ‘I am so ill in body so often that I cannot climb the stairs and the worst is that I am filled with pains… I did not acknowledge the trebbiano [white wine]… Writing, being old as I am, is very irksome to me… But thank you… It's the best you've ever sent me… I'm sorry, though, you put yourself to this expense, particularly as I've no longer anyone to give it to, since all my friends are dead.’
Michelangelo himself died on 18 February 1564. He was followed to the tomb, in Vasari's words, by a great concourse of artists and ‘was buried in the Church of SS. Apostoli in the presence of all Rome’.8 Florence claimed his remains, however, and his body was ‘smuggled out of Rome by some merchants, concealed in a bale, so that there should be no tumult’.
The final months of his long life had been clouded by disappointment that the last of the popes he had served, Paul IV, had had no real sympathy for Renaissance art and had been so disgusted by the nudes in Michelangelo's The Last Judgement that he was with difficulty dissuaded from having the whole fresco destroyed. His predecessor, Julius III, on the other hand, while also a dedicated reformer who reopened the Council of Trent and supported the Jesuits, was much more enlightened and far more responsive to beauty. He built the enchanting Villa Giulia,9 whose gardens, planted with nearly forty thousand trees – cypress, pomegranates, myrtles and bays - contained a beautiful fountain by Bartolommeo Ammanati. He bought the so-called ‘statue of Pompey’,10 against which Caesar was supposed to have been murdered and which was discovered in the 1550s in the Via dei Leutari, and he arranged for it to be placed in the Palazzo Spada,11 then the home of Cardinal Capodiferro. And he appointed the greatest of Italian Renaissance composers, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, director of the Cappella Giulia in St Peter's.
Pope Paul IV, in striking contrast, declined to concern himself with such activities. Austere, uncompromising and rigidly orthodox, he was a member of the noble Neapolitan Carafa family and an unquestioning supporter of the Roman Inquisition. Preoccupied with Church discipline and international affairs, with the detested Spanish monarchy, with the excommunication of Elizabeth of England, the threat from the Muslims and the suppression of the heretics of the Netherlands, he insisted that virtue, not beauty, should be the concern of popes. He had the statuary taken out of the Villa Giulia and would have removed it also from the Cortile del Belvedere had he not been persuaded to content himself with stripping the reliefs from the walls and closing it to the public.
Paul IV would, indeed, have liked to destroy all the ancient monuments in the city on the grounds that they were the work of pagans. During his reign, sexual misconduct was punished with the most savage ferocity and sodomites were burned alive. Jews, confined in the ghetto, were made to wear an identifying badge and excluded from many occupations and all honourable positions. The Pope made himself so detested in Rome that upon his death the head of his statue upon the Capitol was struck off, dragged through the streets and thrown into the Tiber, while the monastery of the Dominicans, blamed for the excesses of the Inquisition, was stormed by a furious mob.
The former Dominican friar who became Pope Pius V in 1566 was quite as austere and ascetic a man and as severe a reformer as Paul IV. The son of poor parents and a shepherd himself until he was fourteen, he had achieved high office in the Inquisition, even though he had displayed such excessive zeal in pursuing and punishing the unfaithful during his first appointment in Como that he had been recalled. He had been promoted Commissary General of the Roman Inquisition and afterwards Grand Inquisitor. After his election as Pope, the Curia, the Church and the city were alike subject to disciplines which satisfied all but the most rigorous proponents of the Counter-Reformation. Members of religious orders were subjected to far stricter rules; bishops were required to spend much longer periods in their sees; nepotism was suppressed and the granting of indulgences and dispensations restricted. The powers of the Inquisition were increased and its scope widened so that none was safe from its grasp. The Congregation of the Index drew up a list of prohibited books, and obliged several printers to flee from Rome. Prostitutes were driven out of the city or required to live in restricted areas. Jews, expelled from the Papal States, were permitted to remain in Rome only in conditions even more humiliating than those to which they had been subjected in the days of Paul IV. Their traditional race during the Carnival was no longer allowed to take place along the course between S. Lucia12 and St Peter's which it had followed for many years, but was moved to the Corso ‘out of respect for the Apostles’.
Pius V's two successors, Gregory XIII and Sixtus V, both continued the process of reform which had followed upon the Sack of Rome, and both on occasions appeared excessive in their zeal: Gregory, who was responsible for the Gregorian Calendar in 1582 and for promoting the world-wide missionary activity of the Church, went so far as to celebrate the massacre of the Huguenots in France on St Bartholomew's Day with a Te Deum, while Sixtus, who reformed the Curia and limited the number of members of the Sacred College to seventy, had had to be recalled from Venice because of his extreme severity there as Inquisitor General. But both these popes were also dedicated builders and both enriched Rome. Pope Gregory founded the Collegio Romano13 and gave large sums of money to the Jesuit Church, the Gesù,14 as well as to S. Maria in Vallicella.15 This last was the church of the Oratorians, the congregation founded by St Philip Neri, whose stress on beauty in worship, especially on good music, and whose advocacy of visual imagery as an aid to devotion helped to make them not only one of the greatest religious orders of the Counter-Reformation but also a pervasive influence on the artistic life of Rome. Their patron, Gregory XIII, also built the conduits from which the Via Condotti takes its name and had fountains constructed throughout the city such as those in Piazza Nicosia and Piazza Colonna.16 He founded the Accademia di S. Luca;17 and in 1574, as a summer residence for the popes, he began the Quirinal Palace.18
It was the strong-willed Sixtus V, however, who left his mark upon Rome more indelibly than any other pope of the Counter-Reformation. An ambitious, not to say ruthless, town-planner, he achieved so much in his short reign from 1585 to 1590 that men supposed him to have been considering the transformation of the city long before his election. Certainly it seems that, although he was the son of the poorest parents and had spent his early years as a swineherd in the bleak mountains of the Marche, he had for long believed that he, Felice Peretti, would one day rise to supreme authority in the Church. Sixty-four at the time of his election, in poor health and suffering from persistent insomnia, he undertook the task he had set himself as though he had no time to lose. He first restored the city's water supply, mending Alexander Severus's aqueduct, the Acqua Alessandrina – renamed after himself the Acqua Felice – as well as the underground pipes which led from Palestrina, thus providing an ample source for the houses and gardens and the twenty-seven fountains of Rome. He then turned his attention to the
39. Sixtus V, Pope from 1585 to 1590, the austere reformer of the Curia.
building of new bridges across the Tiber, and to the construction, widening and rerouting of streets, determined to extend Rome beyond the congested older parts of the city, northwards and eastwards up to and beyond S. Maria Maggiore and Trinità dei Monti, these two churches themselves being connected by a new street, the Via Sistina. Other streets were planned to radiate from S. Maria Maggiore to link together the major basilicas. Obelisks were re-erected at important crossings, such as the obelisk which was brought from Heliopolis by Augustus and, formerly standing in the Circus Maximus, was placed in 1589 in the centre of the Piazza del Popolo.19 ‘In three years’ wrote the Venetian ambassador admiringly, ‘all this area will be inhabited.’
Praiseworthy as this town-planning was deemed to be, the Pope's treatment of ancient buildings horrified many Romans. It was considered perfectly acceptable to place statues of Saints Peter and Paul on the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius; but his demolition of the remains of the Septizonium and his intention, unrealized, to turn the Colosseum into a wool factory aroused widespread condemnation. So did the destruction of large parts of the Lateran Palace which he ruthlessly carried out, insisting that, in time, he would deal with other ‘ugly antiquities’ in the same way. He did not live long enough to execute his threat, even had he meant it to be taken seriously. But, before he died, additions to the Lateran, the Vatican and the Quirinal Palaces had all been begun or completed. Pius V's library had been extended across the Court of the Pine-cone20 at the Vatican, while the Court of St Damasus21 had been completed by adding on to the papal apartments. The Sistine Loggia22 had been built at St John Lateran and the Cappella Sistina23 in S. Maria Maggiore. Most gratifying of all, the work on St Peter's dome was almost finished at last.
For some years after the death of Michelangelo, little progress had been made at St Peter's. His successor as Chief Architect, Pirro Ligorio, had been dismissed in favour of Vignola who in 1573 had been succeeded by Giacomo della Porta. This Capomaestro had completed the Cappella Gregoriana24 for his patron Gregory XIII; but it was not until the advent of Sixtus V that he was provided with the steadfast encouragement and, above all, with the funds, to press on with the dome as fast as he could. Financial reforms and traditional malpractices provided the money for over eight hundred workmen to be kept constantly employed not only by day but also at night so that the Pope might live to see the dome, as designed by Michelangelo, though modified into an ovoid rather than hemispherical shape by della Porta, soar triumphantly above the church.
At the same time, the Pope was determined to realize an ambition which others had set aside as too daunting – the removal to a more commanding setting of the great Egyptian obelisk,25 for ages a major landmark of Rome, which was believed to have stood in the circus where the Christian martyrs were slaughtered in the days of Nero. It now rose to the south of the basilica, adjoining the chapel of St Andrew.26 The Pope wanted it moved to the middle of the piazza in front of St Peter's and, having had erected there a wooden replica to see how the original
40. A tournament in the Court of the Belvedere in 1565.
would look, he advertised for a Leonardo da Vinci to undertake an operation that Michelangelo had said was impossible. Hundreds of plans were submitted from all over Europe, from mathematicians and engineers, from natural scientists and master masons, from philosophers and necromancers and, so it was said, from more than five hundred architects. Some were ludicrous, others ingenious, but none seemed practicable as a means of moving a solid stone monument eighty feet high and weighing five hundred tons through a densely built-up area. Bartolommeo Ammanati said that he could not at the moment think of a solution but that if the Pope would wait a year he was sure he would come up with the answer by then, a suggestion calculated to try His Holiness's limited patience to the utmost. Then, assuming a confidence he was far from feeling, Domenico Fontana, assistant Capomaestro at St Peter's, claimed that he could undertake the task and produced a little wooden model which lifted a leaden obelisk without difficulty. The Pope watched the operation approvingly and told Fontana to go ahead immediately and waste no further time.
As the days went by, Fontana became increasingly apprehensive. He was a small, self-satisfied man, loquacious, didactic, opinionated and pedantic. Several of his colleagues found him so irritating that they could not help hoping that his career would end in disaster. As he looked down into the huge hole which had been dug around the base of the obelisk, whose weight over the centuries had sunk it deep below the surface of the ground, he had forebodings of disaster himself. He thought it as well to order a relay of post-horses to be held in readiness in case he had to fly from the Pope's fury. But though an uninspired architect, Fontana was a most meticulous and methodical engineer. He had made all his calculations with the utmost care.
At two o'clock on 30 April 1586 the operation began. Every window and rooftop from which it could be observed was crammed with expectant faces. Below them the 800-strong St Peter's work-force, who had heard Mass at dawn, stood waiting by the ropes and windlasses for Fontana, standing on a raised platform, to give the signal for the obelisk to be raised from its pit. Protected by straw mats and by planks encircled with iron bands, it stood motionless and, so some of the crowd declared, immovable in its pyramidal scaffolding of stout poles and cross-beams.
41. The Piazza di S. Pietro during a papal blessing in 1567, showing the drum of the dome completed.
And then as Fontana lifted up his hand, as trumpets blared and the workmen and 140 cart-horses pulled with all their strength upon the ropes, the windlasses creaked into motion and, to the cheers of the spectators, to the thunder of the guns of Castel Sant' Angelo and the pealing of bells, the immense monolith rose slowly out of the earth. It was later laid horizontally to the ground upon rollers.
An even larger crowd than had witnessed the raising of the obelisk gathered in the piazza of St Peter's to watch its re-erection on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. They did so, however, in breathless silence, for the Pope had ordained that anyone uttering the slightest sound that might endanger the operation would be instantly executed: a gallows was erected in the piazza to lend fearsome authority to his order. Even so, as the obelisk was raised and for a moment seemed in danger of thudding back to the ground, a man's loud voice called out in Genoese dialect, ‘Aigua ae corde!’, ‘Water on the ropes!’ It was a sailor from Bordighera who had seen that they were about to burn and split with the heat of friction. His brave disobedience to the Pope's demand was rewarded by his being asked to name a favour he would like His Holiness to grant. He is said to have asked that his home town should be allowed to supply palms for St Peter's on Palm Sunday every year thereafter. The request was willingly granted and for centuries observed.
That night, as the obelisk stood firmly in position, resting on the backs of the four satisfied-looking bronze lions which still support it today, there were happy rejoicings in Rome, banquets, fireworks and dancing. The golden ball on the summit of the needle, long supposed to contain the ashes of Julius Caesar, was removed and found to be solid. It was replaced with a bronze cross, in one of whose arms was later placed a piece of the Holy Cross; and on the base of the obelisk were inscribed the words, ‘Ecce Crux Domini Fugite Partes Adversae’, the challenge of the Counter-Reformation.
Other pieces of the Holy Cross, contained in a lead casket, were placed within the crowning cross raised above the dome of St Peter's, which was finally completed on 21 May 1590. Together with these fragments were inserted relics of St Andrew, of St James the Great, of Popes St Clement I, Calixtus I and Sixtus III and seven Agni Dei – medallions of the Lamb of God, made of wax from paschal candles and dust from the bones of martyrs and blessed by the Pope in the first year of his pontificate and every seventh year afterwards.
Pope Sixtus V had lived to see the dome completed; but it was left to the pious Florentine, Pope Clement VIII, to have it covered with lead and to see the cross installed above the lantern. In 1594 Pope Clement celebrated his first Mass at the new high altar in St Peter's where della Porta had built for him the Cappella Clementina27 opposite the Cappella Gregoriana by the entrance to the crypt. Soon afterwards, della Porta died and Fontana's nephew, Carlo Maderno, was appointed to succeed him. The age of the Baroque had begun.