NINE
Three years after the body of Pope Alexander VI, already decomposing in the August heat, had been carried out of the Vatican, Giuliano della Rovere, who had detested his predecessor, that ‘Spaniard of accursed memory’, led a procession to St Peter's basilica as Pope Julius II. Accompanied by cardinals, prelates and dignitaries of the Curia, he walked behind the Cross to a wide hole, twenty-five feet deep, to lay the white marble foundation stone of the new building which was to rise above the crumbling structure of the old. He climbed down into the hole, around the edges of which the spectators crowded, kicking earth over his mitre so that he called out crossly to them to move back. There he was handed an earthenware vase containing gold and bronze medals on one side of which was stamped his own likeness and on the other a representation of the intended church with domes and towers and portico. The vase was placed in a small cavity beneath the stone on which was inscribed: ‘Pope Julius II of Liguria in the year 1506 restored this basilica which had fallen into decay.’ The Pope then scrambled out hastily, leaving the stone slightly askew, evidently concerned that the sides of the hole might collapse before he had reached the safety of the pavement.
It was a rare display of anxiety. The Pope was a tall, thin, good-looking man, rough and irascible, talkative, restless and overbearing. He had a fiercely commanding expression and a very quick temper. He always carried a stick with which he would strike irritating subordinates, and he would hurl anything at hand, including his spectacles, at messengers who brought him unwelcome news. He had had many mistresses in the past, from one of whom he had contracted syphilis, and as a cardinal had fathered three daughters. But his sensual appetites had since then been concentrated on Greek and Corsican wine and on good food, in particular caviar, prawns and sucking pig. ‘No one has any influence over him, and he consults few or none,’ the Venetian ambassador reported. ‘Anything that he has been thinking about during the night has to be carried out immediately… It is almost impossible to describe how strong and violent and difficult to manage he is… Everything about him is on a magnificent scale, both his undertakings and his passions.’
The grandson of a poor fisherman, he often spoke of the poverty of his childhood and was proud to claim that he was ‘no schoolman’. He sometimes said that he ought to have been a soldier; and certainly when he personally led his armies out of Rome to compel the obedience of rebel cities in the Papal States and to recover
30. Donato Bramante, who came to Rome in 1499 and was later principal architect to Julius II, who laid the foundation stone of the new St Peter's in 1506.
lost territories for the Church, he displayed a taste for hard campaigning that dismayed the less robust cardinals whom he obliged to accompany him. Unwilling to rely upon capricious and often irresolute mercenaries, he decided to form a professional papal army; and this decision led in 1506 to the creation of the Swiss Guards who remained a fighting force until 1825 when they became a smaller domestic bodyguard, though still retaining their old uniform of slashed doublets, striped hose and rakish berrette as well as their pikes and halberds.
Strong-willed, purposeful and resolute, Pope Julius was as determined to recreate in Rome a monument worthy of the everlasting glory of the Church as he was to re-establish the Church's rule in the Papal States and to restore the temporal power of the papacy which he believed to be essential to its authority. This monument to papal prestige was to be the new Church of St Peter's whose foundation stone he had laid on that Low Sunday in the spring of 1506.
His immediate predecessors had merely tinkered with the old basilica. Nicholas V, after restoring much of the decaying fabric, parts of which, so he was warned by Leon Battista Alberti, were in danger of collapsing, had come to realize that it was really past repair. He commissioned designs for a new building fro m the Florentine sculptor, Bernardo Rossellino, who was probably advised by Alberti. But work had not progressed far by the time of Nicholas's death; and it had not seriously been resumed by Calixtus III, who was more concerned with the Turkish menace than the arts of the Renaissance. Patching and minor improvements, rather than complete rebuilding, had been the policy of Pius II and Paul II as well as of Sixtus IV, all of whom recoiled from the momentous undertaking that so much appealed to Pope Julius's taste for the grand, irrevocable gesture.
His decision was regarded in Rome with deep misgiving by cardinals and citizens alike. It was tantamount to sacrilege, they protested, to destroy a sacred basilica, more than a thousand years old, a holy place venerated, generation after generation, since the very dawn of Christianity. Around the pedestal of the antique and mutilated statue of Menelaus known as Pasquino1 were displayed innumerable protests about the Pope's decision. But Julius was undeterred. He had made up his mind, and nothing would alter it. He considered Rossellino's design, and rejected it as too old-fashioned; he considered, with more sympathy, another plan proposed by Giuliano da Sangallo, but this too he thought insufficiently ambitious. And so, for an edifice which, as he put it, would ‘embody the greatness of the present and the future’, he turned to Bramante who had already displayed his exceptional gifts in the design of the enchanting Tempietto in the cloister of S. Pietro in Montorio.2
Encouraged by the Pope, Bramante set to work with a will, directing hundreds of workmen in demolishing the decaying walls of Constantine's basilica and discarding everything inside it for which he had no use, statues and mosaics, candelabra and icons, tombs and altars, earning himself the title of ‘il ruinante’. Load after load of Carrara marble and that volcanic ash known as pozzolana were carted on to the site, together with travertine from Tivoli and lime from Montecelio. One day the Pope came to watch the work in progress and remarked proudly to a foreign envoy to whom he introduced his architect, ‘Bramante tells me he has 2,500 men on this job. One could hold a review of such an army.’
The cost mounted month by month. By the beginning of 1513 well over 70,000 gold ducats had been spent. But money was not an acute problem, even though the municipality of Rome had to be supported, the poor of the city cared for, the military forces of the papacy paid and its architectural heritage constantly sustained. The papacy was receiving a good share of the riches being derived from the discovery of America; numerous indulgences were being granted; loans were being raised from, among others, the astonishingly rich banker, Agostino Chigi, who retained as security the papal tiara which he kept in his counting-house behind the Arco dei Banchi3 in the Via del Banco di S. Spirito;4 and gifts were
31. Michelangelo's patron, Pope Julius II (1447–1513), depicted at prayer not long before his death, in a detail of Raphael's ‘Mass of Bolsena' fresco, in the Vatican's Stanza d'Eliodoro.
being solicited from all over Europe. The King of England sent tin for the roof and was rewarded with wine and Parmesan cheese.
Money was needed not only for St Peter's. Pope Julius had spent and continued to spend huge sums on the Vatican Palace where an extensive and lovely garden, the first great Roman pleasure-garden since the time of the Caesars, was laid out beneath its walls, and where the Cortile del Belvedere was formed between the Vatican offices and the formerly isolated Palazzetto del Belvedere which was itself converted into a sculpture gallery.5 To this gallery were carried the Pope's two masterpieces of classical sculpture, the Apollo del Belvedere6 which had formerly stood in the garden of his cardinalate mansion beside the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli, and the Laocon which had been discovered in January 1506 by a man digging in his vineyard near the Baths of Trajan.7 The Pope had immediately sent Giuliano da Sangallo to inspect this. And as Giuliano's son, then nine years old, had recorded, ‘We set off together, I on my father's shoulders. As soon as my father saw the statue, he exclaimed, “This is the Laocon mentioned by Pliny.” The opening had to be enlarged to get the statue out.’ There were, of course, many rich collectors anxious to acquire it. But Julius managed to obtain it by promising the finder and his son a large annuity. The statue was carried through streets bedecked with flowers to the peal of church bells and the singing of the choir of the Cappella Giulia which the Pope himself, a lover of music as well as of sculpture, had founded.
While money was being lavished upon the Vatican Palace and St Peter's, work was continuing on the widening and restoring of Rome's streets. The Via delle Botteghe Oscure, the Street of the Dark Shops, the Via S. Celso, the Lungara and the Judaeorum were all transformed, as was the Via Magistralis which became, and remains, the Via Giulia, one of Rome's most handsome thoroughfares. The Pope also expended immense sums on the church of S. Maria del Popolo which was decorated by several of those artists whom his largesse drew to Rome and in which Julius placed the magnificent tombs of Cardinals Girolamo Basso della Rovere and Ascanio Sforza, designed for him by Andrea Sansovino.8
The erection of a fine marble tomb for himself had long been one of the Pope's most cherished ambitions. As a first step in its realization he sent for a young sculptor from Florence, Michelangelo Buonarroti. The son of a poor Tuscan magistrate of aristocratic stock, Michelangelo was a gloomy, laconic young man of twenty-nine, self-absorbed, quarrelsome and quickly offended. The Pope found him an infinitely more difficult artist to deal with than the amenable Bramante and the sweet-natured, charmingly polite and unobtrusive Raffaello Sanzio who was also working for him in the Vatican on the rooms to be known as the Raphael Stanze.9 But Michelangelo was already recognized as a genius of astounding power and versatility, and it was inconceivable that the Pope, one of the most enlightened and discriminating patrons that Rome had ever known, should not wish to employ him.
At first all went well. Michelangelo was paid a hundred crowns for the expenses of his journey to Rome where the Pope was delighted with the designs that were shown to him. He asked the sculptor to go to the quarries in the mountains of Carrara; and here Michelangelo spent eight months choosing and helping to excavate the blocks of marble, weighing in all over a hundred tons, for a monument which promised to surpass ‘every ancient or imperial tomb ever made’.
After he had chosen all the marble that was wanted [so his fellow-Tuscan and contemporary, Giorgio Vasari, recorded], he had it loaded on board ship and taken to Rome, where the blocks filled half the square of St Peter's… In the castle [Castel Sant’ Angelo] Michelangelo had prepared his room for executing the figures and the rest of the tomb; and so that he could come and see him at work without any bother the Pope had ordered a drawbridge to be built from the corridor to the room. This led to great intimacy between them, although in time the favours Michelangelo was shown… stirred up much envy among his fellow craftsmen.
The easy intimacy between the Pope and Michelangelo did not last long, however. The sculptor did not like being watched at work, normally choosing to have his studio locked; nor did he like being asked questions about his probable rate of progress. Touchy and irritable, he began to resent what he took to be his patron's bossy interference, and was then offended by the casually offhand manner in which his request for interviews and money were refused by the papal officials. After one such rebuff, Michelangelo lost his temper, told his servants to sell all the contents of his studio and rode out of the city to Florence. He was eventually persuaded to return to the Pope's service, but not to work on the tomb as he had hoped. First of all, though he protested it was ‘not his kind of art’, he was required to make a monumental bronze statue of Julius fourteen feet high, which was to be erected on the façade of the Church of S. Petronio in Bologna and, after a revolution some years later, was melted down for a cannon by the Pope's enemy, the Duke of Ferrara. He was then asked to undertake a task for which he felt even more ill qualified, the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. ‘He tried in every possible way to shake the burden off his shoulders,’ Vasari said. ‘But the more he refused, the more determined he made the Pope, who was a wilful man by nature… Finally, being the hot-tempered man he was, he was all ready to fly into a rage. However, seeing His Holiness was so persevering Michelangelo resigned himself to doing what he was asked.’ He was given an advance payment of 500 ducats and began work on 10 May 1508.
Immediately he regretted that he had given way. There was trouble over the scaffolding which Bramante constructed for him: initially it hung down from the ceiling on ropes but Michelangelo wanted it supported by props from the floor. There was trouble with his assistants whom he had sent for from Florence and whom he considered so incompetent that he scraped off everything they had done and decided to paint the whole area, all ten thousand square feet of it, himself. He locked the chapel door, refusing admittance to his fellow-artists and to everyone else, thus provoking another quarrel with the Pope who was himself told to go away. And then there was trouble with a salty mould which, when the north wind blew, appeared on many areas of the ceiling and so discouraged Michelangelo that he despaired of the whole undertaking and was reluctant to go on until Giuliano da Sangallo showed him how to deal with it.
The labour was physically as well as emotionally exhausting. He had to paint standing, looking upwards for such long periods that his neck became stiff and swollen; he could not straighten it when he climbed down from the scaffold and had to read letters holding them up with his head bent backwards. In hot weather it was stiflingly hot and the plaster dust irritated his skin; in all weathers the paint dripped down upon his face, his hair and his beard. ‘The place is wrong, and no
32. An engraving after a self-portrait of Michelangelo, who began work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in 1508.
painter I,’ he lamented in a sonnet he wrote describing his exhausting work. ‘My painting all the day doth drop a rich mosaic on my face.’ ‘I live in great toil and weariness of body,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘I have no friends… and don't want any, and haven't the time to eat what I need.’
He was plagued by his patron who insisted upon being let into the chapel to see what he was paying for. The Pope kept asking when it would be finished, as he clambered up the scaffold with his stick, impatient to have the chapel opened before he died. ‘How much longer will it take?’
‘When it satisfies me as an artist,’ Michelangelo replied on one occasion, eliciting from Julius the angry reply, ‘And we want you to satisfy us, and finish it soon.’
Later Michelangelo refused to commit himself further than to say he would finish it when he could. ‘When I can! When I can!’ the Pope, infuriated, shouted back at him. ‘What do you mean? When I can. I'll soon make you finish it!’ He hit him with his stick, then threatened to hurl him off the scaffold if he did not get on more quickly. After these outbursts came apologies. The Pope's chamberlain would call at Michelangelo's house with presents of money, with excuses and apologies, ‘explaining that such treatment was meant as a favour and a mark of affection’.
At last, after nearly four years' work, the scaffolding was removed. But the artist was still not satisfied; there were touches that he wanted to add, backgrounds and draperies he wanted to enliven with ultramarine, details to enrich with gold. But the Pope would wait no longer. Even before the dust had settled after the dismantling of the scaffolding, he rushed into the chapel to look at the astonishing achievement of more than three hundred figures, many of them painted three and even four times life-size. On the morning of 31 October 1512 he celebrated Mass inside the chapel and afterwards, in Vasari's words, the whole of Rome ‘came running to see what Michelangelo had done; and certainly it was such as to make everyone speechless with astonishment’.
Now over seventy and in the last year of his life, the Pope thought once more of his uncompleted tomb to which Michelangelo returned ‘most eagerly’. And, although the tomb never was finished as originally intended, out of its grand conception came one masterpiece that can still be seen in Rome, the vibrant statue of Moses in S. Pietro in Vincoli.10
News of the death of Pope Julius II on 20 February 1513 was received in Rome with the utmost sorrow. Women were seen weeping in the streets as they waited their turn to kiss the pontifical feet which were left protruding from the grille of the mortuary chapel; men told each other that they would not live to see another pope who was at once so staunch a patriot and so munificent a patron. The city was thronged with mourning crowds so numerous that the dead man's Master of Ceremonies had never known the like in forty years’ residence in the city. ‘All knew him to be a true Roman pontiff,’ declared the Florentine statesman and historian, Francesco Guicciardini. ‘Although full of fury and extravagant conceptions, he was lamented above all his predecessors and… held in illustrious remembrance’.
Yet sorrowful as the Romans were that winter, the election of Giovanni de' Medici, son of the great Lorenzo, as Pope Leo X, was greeted with an enthusiasm as extravagant as their recent grief. Delighting in pageantry, the new Pope took pains to ensure that theSacro Possesso, the formal entry into the Vatican, was as splendid an occasion as money and the ingenuity of the Master of Ceremonies could provide. Every house on the route of the procession was bedecked with wreaths of laurel and ilex, with rich brocades and velvet draperies; the streets were strewn with box and myrtle; ornate inscriptions in Latin welcomed and glorified the new Pope, son of a Roman mother, Clarice Orsini, greeting him as the ‘Paragon of the Church’ and ‘Ambassador of Heaven’. Altars had been set up at several corners; heraldic devices and Medici and Orsini emblems were displayed on rooftops and over doorways; fountains ran with wine instead of water. Triumphal arches, erected by rich merchants and bankers seeming to vie with one another in opulence and inventiveness, spanned the streets and contained in their niches effigies of Christian martyrs in close proximity to antique statues of pagan gods; and, in the arch erected by Agostino Chigi, there were real people dressed as gods.
The procession left the piazza in front of the Vatican, led by men-at-arms. There followed scarlet-clad members of the cardinals’ households and of the prelates of the papal court; standard bearers; mounted captains of the rioni; milk white mules from the Papal States; equerries in red robes fringed with ermine, bearing papal crowns and jewelled mitres; Roman noblemen with escorts of liveried attendants, among them the heads of the Orsini and Colonna families walking side by side and hand in hand; merchant princes of Florence, several of them related to the Pope; foreign ambassadors and their suites; pages with silver wands, escorting a palfrey on which was carried the Holy Sacrament beneath a canopy of cloth of gold; priests, clerks, lawyers in black and violet; bishops and cardinals on horses with trailing white draperies; and, last of all, men of the Swiss Guard in their parti-coloured uniforms, armed with halberds, marching before His Holiness who, astride a white Arab stallion, was shaded from the sun by a baldacchino of embroidered silk carried by eight Roman citizens of patrician rank.
The figure of the Pope was scarcely equal to the magnificence of his escort. Excessively fat and flabby, he looked much older than his thirty-seven years. His mouth hung open; his face was almost purple in the heat; the sweat ran down his short neck and the folds of his chin. He appeared to be sinking under the weight of his jewelled cope and his triple tiara as he rode along, unconcernedly breaking wind. Yet he found the energy to smile with benign satisfaction upon the people who lined the way, to nod complacently when an attendant read out some flattering inscription which his own purblind eyes could not discern; to raise his plump hands, encased in perfumed gloves sewn with pearls, to bestow the papal benediction. He murmured a few words of pleasant encouragement when his chamberlains threw out handfuls of silver coins from their capacious money-bags. Indeed, his geniality and obvious enjoyment of the spectacle, his pride and exalted contentment were disarming. The people renewed their shouts of welcome: ‘Leone! Leone! Leone!’
33. Raphael's portrait of Leo X (1475–1521), in which the Medici Pope is shown with his cousin Giulio, the future Pope Clement VII, on his right and Cardinal Luigi de' Rossi standing behind the chair.
At the Ponte Sant’ Angelo the Jews, as custom required, were assembled to request permission to continue living in Rome and, in the person of the Rabbi, to offer a copy of their Law. The Pope allowed the volume to fall to the ground as he uttered the prescribed words rejecting their faith, but it was noticed that as he confirmed their privileges there was only the slightest diminution of his graciousness.
Having traversed the Via Papale and reached the statue of Marcus Aurelius which then still stood outside the Lateran, the Pope dismounted and entered the hall of the palace, exhausted but evidently well prepared to do justice to an ample and delicious banquet.
‘In thinking over all the pomp and lofty magnificence I had just witnessed,’ mused a Florentine physician who recorded every detail of that splendid Possesso, ‘I experienced so violent a desire to become Pope myself that I was unable to obtain a wink of sleep or any repose all that night. No longer do I marvel at these prelates desiring so ardently to procure this dignity. I really believe that everyone would rather be made a Pope than a Prince.’
Inside the Lateran the Pope was relishing his meal with all the enthusiasm, though less of the gross appetite, that he had displayed for good food and drink ever since, at his father's urgent insistence, he had been created a cardinal at the age of sixteen. He is reported to have murmured to his brother Giuliano soon after his election, ‘God has given us the papacy. Let us enjoy it.’
Enjoy it he certainly did, and at prodigious cost. It was estimated that within a single year, despite his creation of no less than 1,200 offices for sale, his disposal of bishoprics and abbeys and his lavish creation of expensive cardinalates, he had spent not only all the savings of his predecessor but also the entire revenues of himself and his successor. ‘He could no more save a thousand ducats,’ so Macchiavelli's friend, Francesco Vettori, thought, ‘than a stone could fly through the air.’ Although soon deeply in debt to almost every banking-house in Rome, some of which charged him interest at 40 per cent, he made not the slightest attempt to economize in any way, raising the number of the papal household to 683, continuing to bestow purses of gold upon guests who sang with him and to squander money at the gaming-table where he would cheerfully pay his losses at the simple game of primiero without demur and throw the winnings over his shoulder. He paid enormous sums for French hounds and Icelandic falcons and for the preservation of whole districts of the Campagna where he abandoned himself to the pleasures of hawking and hunting, to the slaughter of penned animals, some of which, entangled in nets, Leo himself would kill, holding a spear in his right hand and a glass to his weak left eye, complacently acknowledging the congratulations of his attendants.
Wagonloads of carcasses were brought back to Rome where scores of chefs prepared them for the Pope's tables to accompany the delicacies and surprises, the peacocks' tongues and lampreys cooked in cloves and nuts in a Cretan wine sauce, the pies of nightingales. And the bankers and merchants, the prelates and nobles of Rome rivalled the Pope and each other in the sumptuousness of their banquets.
The meal was exquisite [wrote the Venetian ambassador of a characteristic dinner at the palace of Cardinal Cornaro]. There was an endless succession of dishes, for we had sixty-five courses, each course consisting of three different dishes, all of which were placed on the table with marvellous speed. Scarcely had we finished one delicacy than a fresh plate was set before us, and yet everything was served on the finest of silver of which his Eminence has an abundant supply. At the end of the meal we rose from the table both gorged with rich food and deafened by the continual concert, carried on both within and without the hall and proceeding from every instrument that Rome could produce – fifes, harpsichords and four-stringed lutes as well as the voices of a choir.
Banquets at the riverside palace of Agostino Chigi, whose bathroom fittings were all of silver and gold, were even more pretentious. This inordinately rich banker was said to have had his servants cast the silver dishes upon which each course of dinner had been served into the Tiber in a gesture indicative of his indifference to such trifles, though it was also said that he had taken the precaution of having a net placed beneath the surface of the water so that they could be dragged out again at night. He had also given a dinner at which the food was served on plates engraved with the armorial bearings of his guests, and at which the walls of the banqueting hall were covered with the finest tapestries. At the end of the meal the Pope, as honoured guest, congratulated his host on the excellence of the food and the magnificence of the setting. Chigi then gave a signal for the cords supporting the arras to be released. The tapestries fell to the floor, revealing empty stalls and mangers. ‘Your Holiness!’ he said, ‘this is not my banqueting hall. It is merely my stable.’
The Pope's own table was renowned for its entertainments, for the antics of jesters, of dwarfs and buffoons, of the vulgarly witty Dominican friar, Fra Mariano Fetti, who could eat forty eggs or twenty chickens at a sitting and pretended to enjoy ravens complete with feathers and beaks, of half-starved morons who gobbled up carrion covered with strong sauce in the fancy that they were being privileged to consume a papal delicacy.
The most successful of all Pope Leo's practical jokes was deemed to be that played upon one Baraballo, an old priest who was persuaded to believe that his absurd attempts at verse demanded comparison with the great poems of Petrarch and that he, too, was worthy of being crowned with laurel on the Capitol to which he would be granted the honour of riding on a white elephant which had recently been presented to the Pope by the King of Portugal and was now housed in the Belvedere. On the appointed day the windows of the Vatican were crowded with smiling faces as the poor, deluded priest walked forth in scarlet toga fringed with gold to be lifted into an ornately decorated howdah. ‘I could never have believed in such an incident if I had not seen it myself and actually laughed at it,’ wrote Paolo Giovio, the Pope's biographer: ‘the spectacle of an old man of sixty bearing an honoured name, stately and venerable in appearance, hoary-headed, riding upon an elephant to the sound of trumpets.’
Yet the Pope who took such pleasure in this kind of farce, who enjoyed bullfights and who would sit for hours myopically watching cardinals and their ladies dancing at masked balls, was by no means entirely occupied with trivialities. Certainly he preferred broad comedies and more or less indecent farces to the more serious dramatic performances which were also staged in his palace; and certainly he was indiscriminate in his literary and musical patronage, being as inclined to reward the most frivolous poetaster or satirist as he was to grant his patronage to such leading writers as Ariosto and Guicciardini, while virtually disregarding the claims of Erasmus. ‘It is difficult to judge,’ remarked Pietro Aretino who had cause to be grateful for the Pope's open-handedness, ‘whether the merits of the learned or the tricks of fools afforded most delight to His Holiness.’ But, even though his own tastes were questionable, the Pope was an estimable patron all the same. He brought the most accomplished European choristers to the Sistine Chapel; he conferred considerable benefits upon the Sapienza, increasing the number of professors and the range of faculties; he granted his protection to the Roman Academy and positively encouraged the study of Latin and Greek, offering his friendship to Marco Girolamo Vida as well as Ariosto, bringing Giano Ascaris to Rome and suggesting that he should edit the Greek manuscripts in his possession, and inviting Markos Musuros to come to the city with at least ten young men to teach Italians the Greek language. He also brought his extensive and valuable family library from Florence to Rome where, until it was returned by his cousin for the Biblioteca Laurenziana, it was made freely available to those scholars and writers who were offered numerous inducements to come to Rome to fulfil the Pope's ambition of making it the most cultured city in the western world.
Pope Leo was anxious to play his part in making it a most beautiful city, too. He commissioned Sansovino to design the church of S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini11 in the Piazza dell' Oro, then the centre of the Florentine colony in Rome. He built the Via Ripetta to provide a new way out of the congested old town towards the Piazza del Popolo.12 He restored the church of S. Maria in Domnica, providing it with its splendid porticoed façade which is attributed to Baldassare Peruzzi. He found money to continue the reconstruction of St Peter's and the decoration by Raphael of the Vatican Palace, commissioning from Raphael cartoons for ten tapestries to hang on the walls of the Sistine Chapel.
He could not, however, bring himself to tolerate the disturbing presence of Michelangelo. He claimed to have the deepest affection for him and would even tearfully tell stories of their childhood together in the Medici Palace in Florence where, as Vasari said, the young Michelangelo, whose gifts had been recognized by the Pope's father, had lived as one of the household. But the Pope, while recognizing his genius, did not really get on with Michelangelo. ‘He is an alarming man,’ he said, ‘and there is no getting on with him.’ He persuaded him to turn to architecture and to go back to Florence where a new façade was required for Brunelleschi's Church of S. Lorenzo.
Michelangelo was kept at work in Florence by Pope Leo's cousin, Giulio de' Medici, who succeeded to the papal throne after the short and uneventful intervening reign of the obscure and parsimonious ascetic, the Flemish Adrian VI, who spent more time in prayer and private study than on the problems of the Church. As a young, rich cardinal, the new Pope, who took the title Clement VII, had lived in Rome in the Palazzo della Cancelleria which had been confiscated from Cardinal Raffaele Riario because of his involvement in a plot against Pope Leo X. Tall and handsome with black hair, sallow complexion and deep brown eyes, one of which had a slight squint, Giulio de' Medici bore no resemblance to his cousin. Nor did his manner cold, aloof and dismissive give grounds for hope that he would be as generous and hospitable. In an unflattering, though not unjust sketch of his character, Francesco Guicciardini described him as ‘rather morose and disagreeable than of a pleasant and affable temper; by no means trustworthy and naturally disinclined to do a kindness; very grave and cautious in all his actions; perfectly self-controlled and of great capacity, if timidity did not sometimes warp his better judgement’. Yet, saturnine as he appeared and reserved as he undoubtedly was, he had proved himself a most bountiful as well as discriminating patron of artists and musicians. He was a liberal contributor to all kinds of charitable causes, as his cousin had been, and a generous, though not ostentatious host. By nature disinclined to be either gregarious or open-handed, he was well aware of the advantages of hospitality and munificence; and when he became Pope, after the exchange of numerous bribes during the longest conclave in human memory, he continued to lavish invitations upon the influential and commissions upon the talented. He brought to a successful conclusion an ambitious scheme for cleaning and improving the streets of Rome, taking a particular interest in the Via Trionfale, the Flamina, the Via Lata which led from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza Venezia and the streets around Piazza Navona.13 And he continued to employ Raphael in Rome and asked him to design a villa, later to be known as the Villa Madama, on the cypress-covered slopes of Monte Mario above the bend of the Tiber at the Ponte Molle.14He brought Raphael's favourite pupils, Giulio Romano and Gian Francesco Penni, to work in the Vatican. He encouraged the Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Koppernigk, known as Copernicus, in his controversial researches, attending his lectures when he came to Rome and requesting him to publish his findings. And he bought several works of art from the vain and cantankerous Benvenuto Cellini.
But the Pope had little time to spare for the contemplation of the works he commissioned or, indeed, for the musical evenings and the theological and philosophical discussions that he had enjoyed as a cardinal, since foreign affairs and the growing schism in the Church preoccupied his waking hours. His cousin had tried to dismiss from his mind all thoughts of German demands for reform in the Church, hoping that the problems would eventually resolve themselves in the pettifogging arguments of German monks. But there was one tiresome Augustinian friar in particular who would not be satisfied.