EIGHT
Sitting in the loggia of his new palace overlooking the Via Lata the Pope watched the races that were one of the highlights of the Roman carnival. From the palace to the Arch of Domitian, first Jews raced against each other, then there were races between young Christians, between middle-aged men, old men, asses and buffaloes, and at last the eagerly awaited contest of the barberi, the riderless Arab horses, tightly swaddled in white cloth and with nail-encrusted saddles to make them run ‘like mad creatures’. They came thundering past to be halted in mid-gallop by an immense white sheet hung across the street. The crowds, dressed in all manner of fantastic costumes as nymphs and gods, heroes and fairies, paraded up and down beneath the decorated buildings from which foliage and garlands, ribbons and flowers dropped down towards the rows of benches and daises. At the end of the day, the Pope entertained the citizens at tables spread with delicious food in front of his palace, and then from his windows cast handfuls of money to the crowds who were permitted to finish the remains of the banquet.
The palace stood next to the Basilica di San Marco,1 which the Pope had carefully restored. Known in his day as the Palazzo San Marco, some of its windows can still be seen in the façade of the Palazzo Venezia into which the smaller palace eventually developed.2 Having moved into the palace in 1466, the Pope had decided that the carnival should be held near by in the Via Lata instead of on the Capitol or Monte Testaccio; and so Rome's principal thoroughfare, the Corso, which takes its name from the carnival races or corse, came into being.
The Pope, who had assumed the title of Paul II on his election as Pius II's successor in 1464, was a charming and open-handed Venetian, vain and sensual. Devoted to pleasure and to spectacle, he was also possessed of a strong and resolute will. He revised the statutes of Rome and took forceful action against the brigosi, those who fought in the merciless family vendettas which were still the scourge of Rome as of so many other Italian cities, depriving them of civil rights and even pulling their houses down. And although widely blamed by the stricter clergy for imparting a pagan nature to the festivities of the carnival, he acted firmly against the Roman Academy, a semi-secret society founded to revive classical ideals and the celebration of old Roman rites, and to promote antiquarian and archaeological pursuits. He had its members, including its founder, Julius Pomponius Laetus, arrested on various charges and one of their number, Bartolomeo Platina, was put to the torture.
Yet Paul II, himself a Christian humanist, was a patron of scholars as well as an insatiable collector of objects of art, of jewels, intaglios, cameos, vases, cups inlaid with precious stones, of gold and silver plate and those tapestries and brocades with which the Palazzo San Marco was filled. His extravagance, harshly condemned by some of his contemporaries, was later to be seen as a relatively harmless foible when compared with the nepotism of his successor, Sixtus IV, who, in his efforts to promote the interests of his family, embroiled the papacy in the tangles of Italian politics.
A large, ambitious, gruff and toothless man with a huge head, a flattened nose and intimidating expression, Francesco della Rovere had been born into an impoverished fishing community in Liguria. He had been unremitting in granting offices, money and profitable lordships in the Papal States ever since it had been in his power to do so. Six of his young relations, nephews or illegitimate sons, were made cardinals. These included Pietro Riario, who, having been appointed Bishop of Treviso, Patriarch of Constantinople and Archbishop of both Florence and Seville as well as Mende, died before he was thirty, worn out by excess and heavily in debt, having squandered 200,000 gold florins in his short life as cardinal. His cousin, Giuliano della Rovere, the 28-year-old Bishop of Carpentras, was also appointed a cardinal, as was the son of the Pope's niece, Raffaele Riario, though he was only seventeen. Giuliano's nephew, Lionardo della Rovere, was made Prefect of Rome, while Pietro Riario's brother, the fat, noisy and vulgar Girolamo Riario, was granted the lordship of Imola, a small town between Bologna and Forli, for the purchase of which a loan was requested from the Medici bank.
This request led to a serious quarrel with the Medici, since the head of the bank and of the Florentine state, Lorenzo de' Medici, was anxious himself to purchase the strategically placed town of Imola and determined at all costs to keep it out of the hands of the Pope. He accordingly made excuses for not granting the loan; so the Pope turned to the Medici's leading rivals as Florentine bankers in Rome, the Pazzi, who eagerly took the opportunity of obtaining the valuable Curial account. Encouraged by this coup, Francesco de' Pazzi, the young manager of his family's bank in Rome, conceived a plan for taking over from the Medici as rulers in Florence. In this he sought the help of Girolamo Riario, whose ambitions were far from satisfied by the lordship of Imola, and of a condottiere, Gian Battista Montesecco, who had worked for the papacy in the past. Montesecco promised help, provided he could be assured by the Pope himself that the enterprise had papal blessing. It was agreed, therefore, that he should be granted an audience. He was accompanied to the Vatican by Girolamo Riario and by Francesco Salviati, the disgruntled Archbishop of Pisa who had been denied access to Tuscany, being unacceptable to Lorenzo de' Medici.
‘This matter, Holy Father, may turn out ill without the death of Lorenzo and [his brother] Giuliano, and perhaps of others,’ Montesecco said, according to his own account of the subsequent conversation.
‘I do not wish the death of anyone on any account, since it does not accord with our office to consent to such a thing. Though Lorenzo is a villain, and behaves ill towards us, yet we do not on any account desire his death, but only a change in the government.’
‘All that we can do shall be done to see that Lorenzo does not die,’ Girolamo said. ‘But should he die, will Your Holiness pardon him who did it?’
‘You are an oaf. I tell you I do not want anyone killed, just a change in the government. And I repeat to you, Gian Battista, that I strongly desire this change and that Lorenzo, who is a villain and a furfante [scoundrel], does not esteem us. Once he is out of Florence we could do whatever we like with the Republic and that would be very pleasing to us.’
‘Your Holiness speaks true. Be content, therefore, to let us do everything possible to bring this about.’
‘Go, and do what seems best to you, provided there be no killing.’
‘Holy Father, are you content that we steer this ship? And that we will steer it well?’ Salviati asked.
‘I am content.’
The Pope rose, assured them of ‘every assistance by way of men-at-arms or otherwise as might be necessary’, then dismissed them.
The three men left the room, convinced as they had been when they entered it that they would have to kill both Lorenzo and Giuliano if their plan was to succeed, and that the Pope, despite all that he had said to the contrary, would condone murder if murder were necessary.
Murder, indeed, was committed, though not condoned by the Pope. The assassination took place on Sunday 26 April 1478 during Mass in the Cathedral in Florence. Giuliano de' Medici was slashed to death before the High Altar, but his brother, Lorenzo, escaped with a wound in the neck. The Florentine people, rallying to the family's help, sought out the murderers and, having stripped Francesco de' Pazzi naked, hanged him at the end of a long rope from the machicolation of the Palazzo della Signoria.
The Florentines' fierce reprisals after the failure of the conspiracy aroused intense anger in Rome where Girolamo Riario, at the head of three hundred halberdiers, stormed off to arrest the Florentine ambassador and would have cast him into the dungeons of Sant' Angelo had not the Venetian and Milanese ambassadors protested against this violation of diplomatic immunity. Riario's uncle, the Pope, ordered the arrest of all Florentine bankers and merchants in Rome, though he felt obliged to release them when reminded that his great-nephew, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, a student at the University of Pisa, was then on a visit to Florence where, though not involved in the plot, he had been thrown into prison and threatened with hanging.
Having excommunicated ‘that son of iniquity and foster-child of perdition, Lorenzo de' Medici, and those other citizens of Florence, his accomplices and abettors', the Pope declared war upon them and persuaded the King of Naples as well as Siena and Lucca to do the same. On this occasion conflict was averted by Lorenzo de' Medici's astute diplomacy. But the Pope's attempts to involve Italy in quarrels that might be turned to the advantage of his greedy family later did result in wars; and Count Riario's quarrel with the Colonna and his involvement with the Orsini led once more to fighting in Rome between these two rumbustious families.
Yet, for all his persistent nepotism and its expensive and bloody consequences, Sixtus IV was a great benefactor to Rome and to the Roman people to whom in 1471 he ‘restored’ the ancient bronzes which had stood outside the Lateran for generations and are now in the Capitoline Museum. Indirectly, the Pope could also take credit for that most splendidly majestic of all Rome's palaces, the Palazzo della Cancelleria, which was built by his nephew, Raffaele Riario, with the vast profits of a single night's gambling.3Largely by means of the heavy taxation of foreign churches and the sale of ecclesiastical offices, Pope Sixtus himself was able to carry out numerous public works. Streets were paved and widened, including the Via Papalis, the Via dei Coronari and the Via dei Pellegrini. More churches were rebuilt, notably SS. Nereo e Achilleo,4 S. Maria del Popolo5 and S. Maria della Pace;6 a foundling hospital was established; and in preparation for the Holy Year, 1475, the Pope laid the foundation stone of the Ponte Sisto,7 standing up in a boat as he dropped some gold coins into the water. Pope Sixtus's finest bequest to Rome, however, is the Sistine Chapel which was built for him by Giovannino de’ Dolci and decorated by some of the most gifted artists of his time, including Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, Pinturicchio, Signorelli and Perugino.8
Patron of letters as well as of art and architecture, Pope Sixtus reformed the University of Rome, the Sapienza.9 A ‘Universal School’ for the study of law and the liberal arts had been founded by Charles of Anjou in 1265, and Thomas Aquinas, summoned to Rome by Urban IV, had taught here for a time. But he, like others before and after him, had found that the Romans – men of a legal turn of mind and of practical inclinations – were not drawn to scholasticism and the abstractions of philosophy. He had felt more at home in Paris, as the medieval theologian, St Bonaventure had also done. Rome's ‘Universal School’, accordingly, had not thrived; and the Sapienza, founded by Boniface VIII in 1303, had fared little better. The university, as re-established by Eugenius IV and reformed by Sixtus IV, proved more lasting, however, although on more than one occasion the professors' pay was stopped when the demands of the Pope's soldiers seemed more pressing. One of these professors was Julius Pomponius Laetus, founder of the Roman Academy and now restored to papal favour, who continued with his work in collecting ancient Roman inscriptions.
Meanwhile, the Pope himself was collecting books and manuscripts to add to the Vatican Library. He constructed a new building in which these books could be housed and studied by scholars, and, from Melozzo da Forli, he commissioned a picture of himself in it with his librarian, Bartolomeo Platina, the member of the Roman Academy who had been tortured in the time of Paul II. Also in the picture, almost it seems as a matter of course, are three of his nephews, Girolamo Riario and Giovanni and Giuliano della Rovere.
The Pope was still obsessed by the fortunes of these young men in whose interests he had quarrelled with several Italian states other than Florence. In 1483 he had gone so far as to place Venice under interdict; and when he heard that the
26. The creator of the Sistine Chapel, Pope Sixtus IV, who laid the foundation stone of the Ponte Sisto in preparation for the Holy Year 1475. Melozzo da Forlí's fresco shows him at the inauguration of the Vatican Library with three of his nephews and his librarian, Bartolomeo Platina.
Venetians had done well out of the war which he had hoped would profit his family he was so angry that at first he could not speak. Then he burst out furiously that he would never countenance such terms. The next day he collapsed and within a few hours was dead.
The Romans' immediate reaction was one of rejoicing that the power of the Pope's avaricious relations was at an end. The mob ransacked the Riario palace10 and, for good measure, plundered the granaries and broke into the banks of the Genoese money-lenders. Girolamo Riario marched south to salvage the possessions and authority of the family. But the Colonna mustered their forces to prevent him, and Florence and Siena both offered the Colonna their support. As barricades were erected in the streets and the citizens were mustered on the Capitol, civil war appeared inevitable. The speedy election of a new Pope, the genial, easy-going and unexceptionable Innocent VIII, delayed the outbreak of violence but could not prevent it. One of Lorenzo de' Medici's agents referred to Innocent as ‘the Rabbit’ and there was something undeniably conigliese about the slant of his doleful eyes and his unassertive manner. Strongly supported in the election by the late Pope's nephew, Giuliano della Rovere, under whose influence he remained, he was also said to be the tool of Lorenso de' Medici whose daughter, Maddalena, was married to one of the several sons of the Pope, who complacently acknowledged them as his own.
Whether or not prompted by advisers, Innocent's policies, often unscrupulous, were almost invariably unsuccessful; and during his pontificate Rome relapsed into the kind of anarchy that had been all too familiar a century before. Armed gangs roamed through the city at night, and in the mornings the bodies of men who had been stabbed lay dead and dying in the streets; pilgrims and even ambassadors were robbed outside the gates; the palaces of rival cardinals became fortified strongholds with crossbowmen and even artillery at the windows and on the castellated roofs. Justice became a commodity to sell like any other. A man who had murdered his two daughters was permitted to buy his liberty for 800 ducats. Other murderers purchased pardons from the Curia and safe conducts which allowed them to walk the streets with armed guards to protect themselves from avengers. The Vice-Chamberlain, when asked why malefactors were not punished, answered with a smile in the hearing of the historian, Infessura, ‘Rather than the death of a sinner, God wills that he should live – and pay.’
As Innocent lay dying, unable to take any nourishment other than women's milk, the Sacred College discussed the choice of a suitable successor. No scholar was needed now, still less a saint, but a man who could bring order to Rome, who could protect the Papal States against their rivals and enemies, who was, in short, a capable administrator and diplomat, a man of strong personality rather than of moral worth. And, at a cost, such a man was found. In the early morning of 11 August 1492 the window of the Hall of Conclave was opened, the Cross appeared from it and the election of Rodrigo Borgia of Valencia as Pope Alexander VI was announced.
27. The Borgia Pope, Alexander VI (1431–1503), depicted praying to the Risen Christ, a detail of Pinturiccio's ‘Resurrection’, in the Borgia Apartment of the Vatican.
28. In this detail from his ‘The Disputation of St Catherine of Alexandria’, in the Hall of the Saints in the Borgia Apartment, Pinturiccio probably used Pope Alexander's beloved daughter, Lucrezia, as a model.
Pope Alexander had lived in Rome for several years in the palace now known as the Palazzo Sforza-Cesarini11 where, to celebrate the arrival in Rome of the skull of St Andrew, tapestries had been draped from the windows and objects of art from the Borgia collections had been displayed in the loggia. It was known that Rodrigo Borgia was extremely rich, having inherited fortunes from both his brother and his uncle, Pope Calixtus III, and having acquired the revenues of various convents in Spain and Italy as well as those of three bishoprics. It was also known that he had numerous mistresses and at least six illegitimate sons, three of them by Vanozza Cattanei who was also the mother of his beloved daughter, Lucrezia, and by now a respected and respectable woman. Yet Pope Alexander was not considered particularly corrupt or vicious in an age in which, as the Florentine statesman, Francesco Guicciardini, put it, ‘the goodness of a pontiff [was] commended when it [did] not surpass the wickedness of other men’. Charming, energetic, unabashedly enthusiastic in his pursuit of pleasure, he soon induced women to overlook the plainness of his features and the ungainliness of his corpulent body. Women and men alike were impressed by his intellect. ‘He is of aspiring mind,’ a contemporary wrote of him, ‘of ready and vigorous speech, of crafty nature but above all of admirable intellect where action is concerned.’
Certainly the Roman people greeted his election with enthusiasm, believing his tastes and the joviality of his nature augured well for them. He was borne through the streets to the sound of cheers and trumpets to the Lateran where, the excitement proving too much for him, he fell fainting into the arms of Cardinal Riario. At first the enthusiasm seemed justified: the Pope was not as generous with his money as the Romans had hoped, but flagrant abuses in the administration of justice were ended, prices in the markets became more reasonable and stable and the streets, in which murders had been commonplace, were no longer splashed night with blood. Yet men looking to the future had cause to fear that the Pope's passionate devotion to his children and, in particular, his determination to advance the interests of his son, the sinisterly beguiling Cesare, might have dreadful consequences.
On the day of his father's coronation Cesare, then aged twenty-seven, was appointed Archbishop of Valencia. Soon afterwards, though his interests were exclusively secular, he became a cardinal. Thus was launched a notorious career which was to take Cesare, through bribery, aggression and murder, to the Dukedom of the Romagna and the command of the armies of the Church. Pope Alexander's ambitions for his son, however, were threatened in the early stages of this career by the equally insistent aspirations of the unprepossessing but romantic and adventurous King Charles VIII of France. In 1494 Charles announced his claim to the Kingdom of Naples as inheritor of the rights of the House of Anjou, and in September led his huge and lumbering army across the Alps and down into Lombardy.
As the French approached Rome, having occupied Florence, the Pope was forced to realize that his refusal to allow them free passage through papal territory would
29. A view of Castel Sant’ Angelo by Piranesi.
be ignored. For the first time in his life he seemed utterly irresolute. He called in Neapolitan troops only to dismiss them; he brought his valuables, together with arms and ammunition, to Castel Sant' Angelo, yet at the same time considered flight. He repeated his refusal to allow the French free passage, then rescinded it.
The vanguard of King Charles's army entered Rome at about three o'clock in the afternoon of the last day of December 1494. The last troops did not pass through the Porta del Popolo until long after darkness had fallen. By flickering torchlight and the gleam of lanterns, the men and horses marched through the narrow streets, Swiss and German infantry in brightly coloured uniforms, carrying broadswords and long lances, Gascon archers, French knights, artillerymen with bronze cannon and culverins, and, surrounded by his bodyguard, the King himself, a short, ugly young man with a huge hooked nose and thick fleshy lips, constantly open. He dismounted at the Palazzo S. Marco from which Lorenzo Cibò, Archbishop of Benevento, hurried forth to meet him and to conduct him inside. He entered the dining-room and sat by the fire in his slippers while a servant combed his hair and the wispy, scattered strands of his reddish beard. Food was placed upon a table; a chamberlain tasted every dish before the King ate, the remains being thrown into a silver ewer; four physicians likewise tested the wine into which the chamberlain dangled a unicorn's horn on a golden chain before His Majesty raised it to his lips.
During the next few days, while the King visited the churches of Rome, while the Pope took shelter in Castel Sant' Angelo, and while three of his cardinals entered into negotiations with a French delegation, the occupying forces wreaked havoc in the city. Houses were occupied; banks attacked; palaces, including that of Vanozza Cattanei in the Piazza Branca, were ransacked. At length a treaty was concluded, and on 28 January 1495 Charles left Rome, having recognized Alexander as Pope but established himself for the moment as master of the Pope's domains. He was soon master, too, of Naples; and although a Holy League of Italian states was formed to expel him from the peninsula, when the mercenary troops of the League engaged him in battle on his homeward journey by the banks of the River Taro, they were unable to prevent his withdrawal with his plunder to France. Since he was left in possession of the field and had captured the French baggage train – which included a piece of the Holy Cross, a sacred thorn, a limb of St Denis, the Blessed Virgin's vest and a book depicting naked women ‘painted at various times and places… sketches of intercourse and lasciviousness in each city’ the Italian commander, the Marquis of Mantua, claimed the victory. But the French army, though battered and weary, was still a powerful force. Accompanied by mules – one to every two men – loaded with treasure, it moved north towards the Alps and reached France in safety. The Italians were shocked by the realization that for all their virtues, talents, wealth, past glory and experience, they had been unable to withstand the ruthless men from the north, just as Pope Alexander, so proud of his stamina and prone to comparing his strength to that of the bull in his family's coat of arms, had been unable to withstand the shock of meeting the French King. Recognizing the power of France in the little, short-sighted figure who limped towards him, his head and hands twitching, Alexander had fallen fainting to the ground.
As though to exacerbate the humiliations which the city and Italy had undergone, the Roman people had now to contend with other adversities. Syphilis, probably brought to Europe in 1494 either from Africa or the West Indies, or from America by Christopher Columbus's sailors, was spreading fast. French soldiers had contracted it in Naples, and called it the Neapolitan disease; Italians referred to it as the morbo gallico. In Rome it was so virulent that seventeen members of the Pope' family and court, including Cesare Borgia, had to be treated for it within a period of two months. With venereal disease came the worst inundation that the city had known for many years. In December 1495 the waters of the Tiber gushed through the streets, surging into churches and swirling round the walls of palaces that collapsed into the flood. A number of people were drowned, including the prisoners in the Tor di Nona.12 The cost of the damage was incalculable.
The disaster was ascribed to the hand of God and interpreted as a punishment for the follies and corruption against which the ascetic and fervent Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola, was preaching so vehemently in Florence. Warning of even worse disasters to come, he condemned the Church as a satanic institution for the promotion of whoredom and vice, speaking of visions of plague and tempests, famine and catastrophe, and of a black cross, rising from Rome, inscribed with the words, ‘The Cross of God's Anger’. The Pope forbade Savonarola to preach, then, when he persisted, offered him a cardinal's hat, which was refused with the words that another sort of red hat would suit him better, ‘one red with blood’. Finally the Pope excommunicated him. But the attacks continued until the Florentines themselves took action against the inconvenient fanatic and had him tortured, hanged and burned.
Thereafter, the corruption of the Pope and of most of the cardinals, who owed their elevation to him, became more outrageous than ever. ‘The Pope is seventy years old,’ wrote Paolo Capello in September 1500. ‘He grows younger every day; his cares do not last a night; he is of cheerful temperament and does only what he likes; his sole thought is for the aggrandizement of his children; he troubles about nothing else.’ His adored daughter, Lucrezia, who was married to Alfonso of the proud house of Este, was entrusted with the care of the Vatican Palace and with papal affairs and correspondence while her father was absent. His son, Cesare, was indulged in every whim, granted titles and immense sums of money which were raised by the sale of offices, including cardinalates, to his relations and to such intimate friends as Adriano Castellesi da Corneto who built the fine palace in the Borgo later to be called the Palazzo Giraud-Torlonia.13 No favour was denied Cesare whose word became law in Rome: those who stood in his way were strangled, poisoned, thrown into the Tiber or into the dungeons of Castel Sant' Angelo, or, as in the case of a daring lampoonist, punished by the loss of a hand and his tongue, which were nailed together.
When Cesare's brother, Giovanni, who had been created Duke of Gandia, Prince of Tricario, Count of Claromonte Lauria and Carinola, and Duke of Benevento, disappeared in Rome, Cesare was immediately suspected of having killed him. A charcoal-dealer who lived beside the Ripetta14 was seized and questioned.
About one o'clock [he said], I saw two men come from the street on the left of the Slavonian Hospital to the Tiber, close to the fountain where people throw rubbish into the river. They looked round and then returned. Soon after two more appeared, looked round likewise and made a sign. Then came a man on a white horse, a dead body behind him, whose head and arms hung on one side, his feet on the other. He rode to the spot indicated, when his attendants with all their might threw the corpse into the river. The horseman asked: ‘Have you thrown him well in?’ They replied, ‘Yes, sir.’ He looked into the river, and the attendants, seeing the cloak of the dead floating on the surface, threw stones to make it sink.
Questioned as to why he had not informed the authorities, the charcoal-dealer replied, ‘In my time I have probably seen a hundred corpses thrown into the river at night and no one has ever troubled about them.’
The river was dragged by scores of fishermen and the body pulled ashore. The wrists were tied together and there was a deep wound in the neck as well as others in the head and thighs. The Pope was overwhelmed with grief. ‘I know the murderer,’ he declared, weeping in his room. ‘Had I seven papacies, I would relinquish them all for the life of my son.’ Announcing that he would henceforth think only of the reform of the Church, he appointed a commission of six cardinals to make recommendations towards that end. But when they did so, the Pope decided that nothing could be done which might diminish papal authority, and the inquiries into the murder were soon quietly dropped. The Duke of Gandia's precious furniture and jewels were consigned to Cesare's trust for the dead man's little heir.
Cesare Borgia may or may not have murdered his brother, but he certainly killed his brother-in-law, the Duke of Bisceglie, second husband of his sister, Lucrezia, for whom he had a more profitable marriage in mind. The Duke was stabbed on the steps of St Peter's on his way home from the Vatican, then strangled in his bed where he lay recovering from the wound. This was in September 1500, another Holy Year.
The pilgrims who came to Rome that year had no need to be told the stories with which this murder was embellished, nor those that surrounded the death of the Duke of Gandia and the stabbing by Cesare Borgia of the Pope's chamberlain whose blood was spattered in his master's face, to realize how right Savonarola had been to call Rome the ‘sink of iniquity’. Everywhere the evidence was there for them to see. Cardinals flaunted their riches in the piazza as openly as in their palaces, where banquets were held of a richness that would have been regarded extraordinary even on the tables of Lucullus. The Pope's daughter, gorgeously dressed and surrounded by scores of other women as flamboyant as herself, rode her bejewelled horse through the streets to the Vatican. The Pope's son, on the festival of S. Giovanni, sat on horseback on the steps of St Peter's, hurling lances at bulls, which had been collected for the purpose within a wooden enclosure, before advancing to one of the animals whose head he severed at a single stroke. The corpse of the physician to the Hospital of the Lateran – whose practice it had long been to shoot passers-by with arrows at dawn before robbing them, and to poison rich patients whose wealth had become known to the hospital's confessor – swung from a gallows on the battlements of Sant' Angelo next to the bodies of other hanged men.
Yet the pilgrims still offered money at the sacred shrines; indulgences were still bought with faith and hope; and the crowds still knelt in front of St Peter's – an estimated 200,000 on Easter Sunday – to receive the blessing of the Pope. And while there was much to condemn in Alexander, there were grounds, too, for gratitude. Andrea Bregno's splendid altar, now in the sacristy of S. Maria del Popolo, was commissioned by him; the area around Castel Sant' Angelo was transformed by him; the piazza in front of it was enlarged and paved; a street, the Via Alexandrina, now the Borgo Nuovo, was built to lead from it to the Vatican; the fortress itself was reconstructed inside and given a far more imposing external appearance. The Vatican Palace was also enhanced for all future generations by the work Pope Alexander commissioned for his new Borgia Tower, the decorations by Bernardino Pinturicchio and his assistants of the rooms, among them the Sala del Credo and the Sala delle Sibille, in the Borgia Apartment.15
A year before this work was finished in 1495, an artist of genius came to live in Rome. Although he was over fifty and had already executed several distinguished designs in Milan where he had collaborated with Leonardo da Vinci, his first four years in the city where he was to spend the rest of his life were passed in tireless study, examining and measuring the classical monuments of the city, preparing himself for the days when he should make himself known to the world as Donato Bramante, innovator and master of the High Renaissance style of architecture which was to spread from Rome throughout Europe.