9

THE UNHOLY CITY

IT WOULD HAVE been easy for Galeazzo Maria Sforza to miss the last, and most important, of the figures in Gozzoli’s Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem. Hidden deep in the crowd of faces behind Cosimo de’ Medici, he was almost lost in the hubbub of the procession. But there, way back in the third row, was a dour-faced cardinal in an embroidered red coif peeking out from behind the portraits of Plethon and Gozzoli. His head slightly bowed and his features scrunched up into a look of discomfort, he seems to be doing his best to escape the viewer’s gaze. Yet it would have been impossible to mistake the inimitable, pudgy features of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini.

When Cosimo de’ Medici had commissioned Gozzoli to paint the frescoes in his family chapel, there had been good cause for him to have insisted on the inclusion of Aeneas’s portrait. An affable and generous-minded cardinal, he richly deserved a place among the galaxy of influential scholars and artists depicted in the Magi’s procession. He was one of the Church’s rising stars. A trained humanist, he was a master of Latin composition and, having been crowned poet laureate in 1442, was already the author of a raft of works that covered every genre, from geography and pedagogy to history and drama. A connoisseur and patron of the arts, he was dazzlingly clever, fashionably well-read, and up to date with all the latest trends in visual and literary culture. In terms of sheer ability, he towered over his colleagues in the Curia. He was just the sort of intellectual superstar that Cosimo wanted to be seen to know, and although not exactly flattering, the portrait was still a delicate, well-intentioned compliment.

Recent events had, however, transformed the fresco into something more. On August 19, 1458, the portly, middle-aged Aeneas had been elected pope and had taken the name Pius II to signal his sense of Christian devotion. Gozzoli’s portrait had unexpectedly become not only an affirmation of the new pope’s enlightened sophistication but also a subtle acknowledgment of the cultural might of the Renaissance papacy.

Just eight days after Galeazzo Maria Sforza would have been welcomed into the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, on April 25, 1459, Pius II arrived in Florence for a short stopover on his way to Mantua. When he saw the pontiff in the flesh, however, the young Milanese count would have encountered a very different personality from that suggested by Gozzoli’s portrait.

Far from being an upright, saintly figure, Pius was an arrogant mountain of human flesh. Massively overweight and crippled by gout, he was borne aloft on an enormous golden throne, surrounded by the very worst kinds of mercenaries Italy had to offer. His behavior was far from godly. Stopping briefly at the San Gallo gate, Pius forced the “noble lords and princes of the Romagna”—including Galeazzo Maria (who had to stand on tiptoes even to reach the papal chair)—to carry him into the city on their shoulders. Struggling under the weight, they grumbled resentfully the whole way. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, in particular, was furious. “See how we lords of cities have sunk!” he muttered under his breath.

Things were no better after Pius had been hoisted into the city. Although Cosimo de’ Medici would have been hoping to solidify his bank’s well-established relationship with the papacy, the main purpose of the pontiff’s visit was to heal a long-standing rift between Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, King Ferrante of Sicily, and Federico da Montefeltro. But while it would have been the perfect opportunity for the new pope to show off his credentials as a Christian peacemaker, he displayed none of the meekness or mildness that might have been expected of a servant of God. Instead, even Pius’s own memoirs reveal him to have acted as a hotheaded, self-obsessed power broker. At the key meeting, he shouted everyone down, insulted Sigismondo, and washed his hands of the whole affair, before announcing he alone was capable of serving God’s will and the people’s best interests.

Pius was no better behaved at the cultural events that had been laid on for his entertainment. Although he appreciated the artistic spectacles for which Florence was famous and enjoyed conversing with some of its most learned citizens, he was more interested in the city’s more earthly pleasures. Leering lecherously at the dances and banquets held in his honor, he passed numerous lascivious remarks about the beauty of Florence’s womenfolk and gave himself wholeheartedly to the festivities. He delighted in a joust held in the Piazza Santa Croce at which “much more wine was drunk than blood spilled,” and was impressed that Florence’s lions had been brought out to tear some other animals to pieces for his amusement. But he showed not a trace of gratitude. Even though some 14,000 florins had been lavished on entertaining the pontiff, he complained bitterly that not enough had been spent and criticized the Florentines for their “tightfistedness.” It was no surprise that Cosimo de’ Medici decided to stay at home rather than risk the pope’s dissatisfaction.

Paradoxical though it may seem, both Gozzoli’s portrait and the overbearing personality of Pope Pius II are a potent reflection of the hidden character of the papacy’s involvement with the arts. In the personality and career of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini was captured the essence not only of the Renaissance papacy but also of the papal court’s role as one of the powerhouses of Renaissance patronage. As the details of Aeneas’s life are unpacked, what initially seems to be a tension between faith, cultural sophistication, and worldly excess resolves itself into a clear and coherent whole. But as this most remarkable of churchmen shows, the twisted and unexpected story of the papal court’s contribution to the painting, sculpture, and architecture of the period was underpinned less by a disinterested and holy interest in learning than by a world of towering personal ambition, lusty passions, and aggressive power politics.

ABSENT PATRONS

Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini was born on October 18, 1405, into an impoverished but respectable family of exiled Sienese nobles. Growing up in the little village of Corsignano in the Val d’Orcia, he lived in a world bounded by religion. Every Sunday, the family would attend Mass in the little church of San Francesco and listen attentively to the priest explaining the rudiments of the faith from the pulpit, and they dutifully offered up prayers for the pope’s well-being. It was also a world in which religion, learning, and culture went hand in hand. Like his father and grandfather before him, Aeneas learned the rudiments of Latin grammar alongside his prayers, and while he was still playing in the hay, he was made aware that the classics were to be read as a vital aid to the pursuit of Christian morality. Later, while studying law at the University of Siena and perfecting his humanistic learning in Florence, he found the teachings of Christ glorified in the writings of men like Coluccio Salutati and celebrated in the artistic achievements of the age. Offering his devotions in the churches of these two great cities, he looked up to see the faith he cherished immortalized by artists such as Giotto and Duccio, Ghiberti and Masaccio, and nurtured by patrons such as the Medici, the Brancacci, and the Strozzi.

But while the young Aeneas would have appreciated the close bond between religion, art, and humanistic learning, he would have been aware that something was missing. New churches were, of course, springing up all over Italy; donations and bequests to ecclesiastical foundations ensured that worshippers were surrounded by frescoes and altarpieces of unparalleled beauty; and the tombs of bishops, cardinals, and pontiffs gave material form to the institution of the Church itself. But curiously enough, there was very little to suggest that the popes and cardinals engaged actively in artistic patronage. In Rome, this was even more pronounced. There was almost nothing that would have revealed the papal court’s connection with painting, sculpture, and architecture. Indeed, a visitor to the Eternal City during this period of Aeneas’s life would scarcely have realized that the papacy had any involvement in the arts at all.

There was a void at the heart of artistic patronage in early Renaissance Italy. Whereas everyone else was eagerly seizing the opportunity to buy into the culture business, the papal court seemed to be allowing the juggernaut of Renaissance culture to pass it by. In a sense, this was not altogether surprising. The papacy’s apparent disinterest in Italian art stemmed from the fact that for much of the early Renaissance it was either absent or consumed by chaos.

Since 1309, the popes had resided not at Rome but in Avignon, in southern France. It was only meant to be a temporary move, but having established itself in the city, the papacy found it couldn’t leave. Quite apart from the French crown’s increasing influence over the papal court and the violent conflict between the popes and the Holy Roman Empire, Rome itself had become too hot to handle. Dominated by belligerent aristocratic families like the Orsini and the Colonna, the city was given over to street battles and Mafia-like intimidation. It was a frightful state of affairs. As an anonymous Roman chronicler observed in the middle of the century,

The city of Rome was in agony … men fought every day; robbers were everywhere; nuns were insulted; there was no refuge; little girls were assaulted and led away to dishonour; wives were taken from their husbands in their very beds; farmhands going out to work were robbed; … pilgrims who had come to the holy churches for the good of their souls were not protected, but were murdered and robbed … No justice, no law; there was no longer any escape; everyone was dying; the man who was strongest with the sword was most in the right.

Even had it been possible for them to free themselves from the domination of the French crown and resolve their differences with the Empire, Rome was simply too dangerous for the popes to contemplate leaving their “Babylonian Captivity” in Avignon.

After more than six decades in exile, however, Pope Gregory XI at last decided to return the Curia to Rome in 1376. But this only made things worse. After Gregory’s death in 1378, the College of Cardinals was under pressure to elect an Italian successor. Fearing the anger of the mob that had gathered outside the Vatican and unable to agree on a candidate drawn from their own ranks, they chose an obscure Neapolitan archbishop as Pope Urban VI. A quiet, ascetic man, he seemed an ideal choice. But Urban turned out to suffer from a dangerously crazy persecution complex. Driven by an almost pathological hatred, he accused the cardinals who had elected him of corruption, moral degeneracy, and treachery. Six of them were locked up in the dungeons of Nocera, where they were tortured mercilessly. Urban even developed a fondness for sitting outside the cells so that he could listen to their screams of agony as he read his breviary.

The surviving cardinals had had enough. Unable to tolerate Urban’s behavior any longer, they left for Avignon, electing a rival pope as they went. Urban had split the Church in two. It would remain bitterly divided for the next forty years.

Aeneas was brought up as a member of a Church consumed by chaos and disorder. With two (and, for a brief time, even three) popes vying for supremacy, Christendom as a whole seemed to be at war with itself. With popes and antipopes competing for control of the Church, all of Europe divided into different “obediences,” each owing its allegiance to a different pontiff. Each side stubbornly defended its own legitimacy, and no one was prepared to back down.

What was to become known as the Great Schism was ended only by a series of general councils of the Church. But even this caused massive problems. In the wake of the Schism, a group of churchmen known as conciliarists had come to believe that it was simply too dangerous to give the pope too much power. Instead, they wanted a kind of ecclesiastical parliament, convened at regular intervals, to have the final say in matters of great importance. The problem was that this was the exact opposite of what the popes wanted. After the Schism had been healed in 1417, Martin V and his successors wanted to take up the reins of power without any interference, least of all from a council filled with rustic clerics from all over Europe. Mutual loathing between the two camps threw the papacy into yet another bout of internecine warfare.

The implications for the cultural life of the papal court were significant. It would, of course, be wrong to think that the papacy existed in a cultural vacuum during the years of exile and chaos between the Babylonian Captivity and the ascendancy of conciliarism. The popes were not insensitive to the radical changes occurring in early Renaissance art and thought. The papal court continued to attract prominent humanists eager for employment and preferment, and a number of Italian artists also found a place in the pontifical household. Petrarch, for example, spent the greater part of his life in or around Avignon and received several lucrative benefices, while, later, Leonardo Bruni served as a papal secretary for almost ten continuous years between 1405 and 1415. So, too, Simone Martini was an important presence in Avignon, and artists such as Matteo Giovanetti gave the flamboyant frescoes of the papal palace a distinctly “Italian” feel.

The papal court was nevertheless unable to exert anything more than a minimal and indirect impact on art in Italy at the time. It had neither the resources nor the inclination to engage in the sort of patronage practiced by merchant bankers and signori. Costly wars, cash-flow problems, exile, and division had left the papacy incapable of spending large sums of money beautifying churches or palaces that were either too distant to visit or in the hands of rival claimants.

Rome, in particular, was allowed to fall into disrepair. By the third decade of the fifteenth century—at which point the conciliar movement seemed to be enjoying its greatest triumphs—the city was in a pitiable condition, and humanistically minded visitors were horrified by the neglect they observed. The Florentine Cristoforo Landino pictured the ghost of Augustus weeping at the sight of the city he had built sunk to the level of a cesspit. His compatriot Vespasiano da Bisticci was horrified to see that the Forum had been given over to pasturing cows, and that the great monuments of the past were crumbling into unrecognizable ruins. Even those buildings that were central to the identity of the medieval papacy had degenerated. During this period, the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran—the pope’s official seat in Rome—burned down twice (in 1307 and 1361) and was allowed to fall into a state of complete disrepair for the first time since antiquity. Far from seeing the city as a rival to Florence, Milan, or Venice, the diarist Stefano Infessura saw Rome as a hotbed of theft and murder in which the arts had long since decayed.

OUT OF THE WILDERNESS

Although the papal court had spent more than a century in the cultural wilderness, things were about to change by the time Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini began to make his mark as one of the Church’s rising stars.

Before even taking holy orders, Aeneas had first made a name for himself as one of the leading conciliar theorists at the Council of Basel. But despite these inauspicious beginnings, his youthful opposition to papal authority was greatly outweighed by the obvious value of his literary talents. Before long, he was drawn inextricably into the papacy’s orbit. After a brief period in the service of Pope Eugenius IV, he saw his fortunes take a turn for the better with the election of his old friend Tommaso Parentucelli da Sarzana asPope Nicholas V in 1447. Appointed bishop of Trieste in the same year, Aeneas was transferred to the diocese of Siena in 1451 and entrusted with no end of important missions. He was given a cardinal’s hat in 1456.

Aeneas’s rapid ascent up the ecclesiastical ladder coincided with the reinvigoration of the papal court. In political, geographical, and financial terms, the papacy was finally ascending to a position of greater stability and strength. Despite some lingering difficulties, Eugenius IV had succeeded in stamping out the remaining vestiges of the conciliar movement, and the pope was at last reestablished as the unchallenged head of the Church. This success had allowed Eugenius to restore the Curia to Rome in 1445, and the fact that the papacy was once again resident in the Eternal City allowed the pontiffs to make good some of the damage that had been done to the nuts and bolts of papal governance. Unhindered by the disputes and divisions of the past and firmly established in Rome, Nicholas V and his successors were able to take active control of their lands in central Italy, and could set the recently refined papal bureaucracy to the task of regularizing papal incomes for the first time since 1308.

As he spent more and more time in Rome as a result of his rising status, Aeneas would have noted that these shifts in the papacy’s condition were having a profound effect on the Curia’s relationship both with the urban environment and with the arts. Rome was, in fact, a city in the grip of transformation. Well-known for “his learning and intellectual gifts,” Nicholas V was acutely conscious that the years of chaos and exile had badly damaged the Church’s reputation and might even have dented the piety of ordinary believers. Although the end of the Schism and the collapse of conciliarism had left the papacy in a stronger position than for almost a century and a half, it was clear that if the Church was to make up for the damage that had been done, something more would be required. As it stood, the pitiable state of early-fifteenth-century Rome was hardly well suited to restoring public confidence in the faith. The narrow, dirty streets and tumbledown churches seemed a painful reminder of the bitter rivalries and ungodly squabbles that had marred the Church in the past. They seemed to radiate a sense of dejection and defeat. All that had to change. As the seat of the papacy and the epicenter of the Catholic world, Rome, Nicholas believed, should be a glittering emblem of everything the universal Church stood for, capable of instilling a fervent belief in the tenets of the Christian religion and a powerful respect for the Holy See. As he was reputed to have said on his deathbed,

Only the learned who have studied the origin and development of the authority of the Roman Church can really understand its greatness. Thus, to create solid and stable convictions in the minds of the uncultured masses, there must be something which appeals to the eye; a popular faith, sustained only on doctrines, will never be anything but feeble and vacillating. But if the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God himself, belief would grow and strengthen from one generation to another, and all the world would accept and revere it. Noble edifices combining taste and beauty with imposing proportions would immensely conduce to the exaltation of the chair of St. Peter.

The truth of Christian teaching and the goodness of Christ’s earthly vicar were to be encapsulated in beauty. Literature, music, and, above all, painting, sculpture, and architecture were to be visible illustrations of all that was meritorious about the Church and its head. The papacy’s newfound wealth was to be invested in the patronage of the arts.

Some tentative steps in the right direction had already been taken by Nicholas’s predecessors. In 1427, Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello had been commissioned to adorn the nave of Saint John Lateran with scenes depicting the life of Saint John the Baptist, and in the following year Masaccio and Masolino completed an altarpiece for Santa Maria Maggiore for the family of Pope Martin V. At around the same time, Cardinal Giordano Orsini had become the focal point for a circle of humanists whose members includedLorenzo Valla, Leonardo Bruni, and Poggio Bracciolini, and had built an indoor theater (the first of its kind) in his palace decorated with frescoes of famous men by Masolino and Paolo Uccello. A little later, Eugenius IV even contracted Filarete to cast a set of new bronze doors for Saint Peter’s Basilica. But while this was all very well in its way, it had been very piecemeal and uncertain. Something much more dramatic was needed, and now that the papacy could draw on the resources of the Papal States, it could set its sights a little higher.

Nicholas set about transforming the crumbling ruins of Rome into towering monuments of papal splendor. The epicenter of the Christian world was to be turned into a capital worthy of its vision of Christ the King himself. Taking up residence on the Vatican hill, he completely remodeled the Apostolic Palace. A vast new wing was added to the old, medieval structure to accommodate the rapidly expanding papal household and to provide a suitably grand set of apartments in which to receive ambassadors and potentates. A massive new tower (the remains of which are still standing) was added just east of the papal apartments. Fra Angelico—widely renowned as both a brilliant artist and a devout priest—was summoned from Florence to decorate the pope’s private chapel with a magnificent cycle of frescoes depicting the lives of Saints Stephen and Lawrence. The basis of the Vatican Library was laid down. And, perhaps most important, the architect Bernardo Rossellino was commissioned to draw up plans for the reconstruction of Saint Peter’s Basilica.

But Nicholas’s ambitions extended well beyond the Vatican. He aimed at nothing less than the wholesale renovation of the entire city. Although Aeneas noted that he began more projects than he lived to see completed, Vasari rightly observed that he was positively “turning the city upside down with all his building.” The ancient Acqua Virgine aqueduct was restored to its original glory, bringing much-needed freshwater into the heart of the city and running out into a beautiful new basin in the Piazza dei Crociferi designed by Nicholas’s principal architectural adviser, Leon Battista Alberti. So, too, the Borgo, running adjacent to the Vatican, was earmarked for massive renovation. Everywhere Aeneas turned, tumbledown buildings were being demolished, and fresh, imposing structures were springing up under papal patronage.

This new flurry of artistic activity was not limited to the pope himself. Where Nicholas led, his cardinals followed. As Paolo Cortesi later argued in his De cardinalatu, those whose function it was to serve as Christ’s standard-bearers had an obligation to be magnificent. As princes of the Church, they were expected to shine like stars in the ecclesiastical sky, mimicking the sun-like splendor of the papacy and adding luster to the culture of the Eternal City. A palace was, of course, essential. Many cardinals from older curial families—like the Colonna and the Orsini—or from established ruling dynasties already had at least one spacious palace in the center of Rome and gladly threw themselves into embellishing their already palatial homes with the latest artistic fashions. But even newer cardinals, like Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, were compelled to rent, borrow, or build a property commensurate with their status and to decorate it in a fashion that would inspire a suitable degree of awe and respect. Huge, imposing palaces began to spring up all over the city, with each cardinal doing his best to outdo the others in taste and grandeur. Already, Cardinal Pietro Barbo—who would later rise to the papacy as Paul II, and who was the nephew of Eugenius IV—had enlarged and enhanced the palazzo that bears his name, possibly employing Alberti for the task. Within forty years of Nicholas V’s election, dozens more would follow: Cardinal Raffaele Riario would commence the construction of what is today known as the Palazzo della Cancelleria—often said to be the first “true” Renaissance palace—Cardinal Adriano Castellesi da Corneto would commission Andrea Bregno to design the imposing Palazzo Torlonia, and Cardinal Domenico della Rovere would start work on a huge palazzo close to the Vatican itself. Every one was stacked full of classical statuary and, more important, the very latest in Renaissance art. Artists were summoned from every corner of Italy to serve cardinals hungry for their work.

The Renaissance had well and truly arrived. Despite—or rather, because of—the years of exile and chaos that had gone before, the reign of Nicholas V marked the beginning of the papacy’s emergence as a powerhouse of artistic patronage. Nicholas had set the tone for all of his successors. Almost without exception, they bought into his vision of a “new Rome” and followed his lead, often on an even more ambitious scale. Determined to glorify the Church and exalt the majesty of the papacy, the popes not only added ever more extensively to the Vatican complex but also continued reshaping the face of Rome. After Aeneas’s death, Sixtus IV sponsored the construction of the chapel now named in his honor (the Sistine Chapel), oversaw the completion of a new bridge across the Tiber, massively enlarged the Vatican Library, and began a new papal tradition of collecting ancient statuary. His successor, Innocent VIII, commissioned Antonio Pollaiuolo to build the Belvedere villa, while Alexander VI was to employ nearly every well-known artist of the day in beautifying the papal apartments. Most impressively of all, Sixtus IV’s nephew Julius II employed Michelangelo to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, ordered Bramante to design two huge loggias linking the Belvedere with the Apostolic Palace, and took up Nicholas V’s great dream of remodeling Saint Peter’s Basilica, a project that all but bankrupted his successor, Leo X.

Whereas in previous years artists had been inclined to view Rome as a cultural backwater that was best avoided, the papacy’s outlook on its return to the Eternal City turned the papal court into a magnet for artistic talent. Seduced by the promise of lavish payments and attracted by the prospect of working alongside some of the leading lights of the day, painters, sculptors, and architects began flocking to Rome in droves in the hope of picking up commissions that, they hoped, would make their careers. Before long, in fact, popes and cardinals were frantically competing for their services and making increasingly forceful demands in their bid to make the city the jewel in Christendom’s crown. Everyone in the Curia was desperate to have the best artists’ most brilliant works, and they would do anything to guarantee their services. In the midst of completing the Sistine Chapel ceiling, for example, Michelangelo once asked the pope’s permission to go back to Florence for the feast of Saint John (always the highlight of the city’s year) and experienced an encounter that encapsulated the papal court’s infatuation with the arts:

“Well, what about this chapel? When will it be finished?” [asked the pope].

“When I can, Holy Father,” said Michelangelo.

Then the pope struck Michelangelo with a staff he was holding and repeated:

“When I can! When I can! What do you mean? I will soon make you finish it.”

However, after Michelangelo had gone back to his house to prepare for the journey to Florence, the pope immediately sent his chamberlain, Cursio, with five hundred crowns to calm him down … and the chamberlain made excuses for his holiness, explaining that such treatment was meant as a favour and a mark of affection. Then Michelangelo, because he understood the pope’s nature and, after all, loved him dearly, laughed it off, seeing that everything redounded to his profit and advantage and that the pope would do anything to keep his friendship.

BEYOND BELIEF

In the space of a few short years, Rome had been put on the fast track to becoming a dazzling city of culture, packed with churches and palaces that advertised the learning, sophistication, and confidence of a rejuvenated papal court. Walking around the streets of Rome and gazing up at the buildings, frescoes, and altarpieces that were taking shape around him, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini would have felt himself in the presence of a fitting monument to the faith he cherished. Rivaling the artistic wonders of Florence, Milan, and Venice, Rome had finally begun to radiate a sense of the Church’s worthiness and of the godliness of its servants.

Yet while the new Rome taking shape around Aeneas was intended to display the strength and vigor of the newly rejuvenated Church, the massive growth of artistic patronage at the papal court wasn’t just about faith. Beneath the surface of every fresco and behind the facade of every palace lurked an altogether different side to the papacy’s interest in the arts.

Although Nicholas V’s deathbed statement presented the pope as the spiritual head of the Christian faith, the reality was quite different: the pontiff was also a political leader. For centuries, the papacy had laid claim to sovereignty over huge tracts of land in the middle of the Italian peninsula that were collectively known as the Patrimony of St. Peter (or the Papal States for short) and had long asserted its supremacy over the Holy Roman Emperor himself. During the Babylonian Captivity and the Schism, these claims had existed only in the realm of theory. Impeded either by a distance of several hundred miles or by the existence of a number of rival claimants, the popes had been unable to actualize their right to govern the Papal States. Now that the wounds of the past had been healed and the papacy was firmly reestablished in Rome, however, things were different. The popes were determined to take up the reins of temporal power once again. No longer “merely” God’s vicegerent on earth, the pontiff became a potentate of immense stature, a ruler whose word was law, and a sovereign lord to whom cities and signori owed allegiance. What was more, as the master of one of the largest territorial states in Italy, the pope also became a major player on the European political scene. Determined to protect the borders of the Papal States and maintain the delicate balance of power on which their security depended, the papacy came to be an arbiter of war and peace, a keen practitioner of international diplomacy, and the leader of Italy’s largest armies.

While the damage wrought by the Babylonian Captivity and the Schism had given the popes an acute awareness of the need for spiritual regeneration, the Curia’s return to Rome had also transformed it into a much more “secular” institution. The equal of kings and princes, the papal court became dominated by worldly concerns. At least until the advent of the Reformation, it was not devotional practices and liturgical reform that came uppermost in the minds of popes and cardinals but taxes, accounts, property rights, diplomacy, military campaigns, and territorial expansion. Though dressed up in terms of conserving the earthly health of the Holy Mother Church, these were matters of hard-nosed politics of the most brutal kind.

This gave a different character to the papal court. Every aspect of life at the Curia was affected. The way popes and cardinals lived, worked, and played shifted to take account of the Church’s temporal aspirations. The priorities, methods, and ambitions of the College of Cardinals lurched radically toward the ways of the world, and the proclivities of the most senior members of the ecclesiastical government drew ever closer to those of their secular counterparts. Indeed, the notoriously porous boundary between the “secular” and the “religious” all but broke down, with individuals and families moving freely between the two, with schemes, plots, and projects feeding from one to the other and back again. Seedy, unpleasant, and altogether un-priestly practices began to dominate the papal court as the papacy’s vision of its role in the world metamorphosed into an almost unrecognizable form.

In turn, this transformed the manner in which the papal court engaged with the arts after its return to Rome. It was not that Nicholas V’s desire to reinvigorate the faith of ordinary believers through art was in any way insincere, or that the churches, frescoes, and altarpieces commissioned in their hundreds were lacking in Christian devotion. But the religious “surface” of papal patronage coexisted with other, darker, and more sinister goals that had grown out of the worldly character of the Renaissance papacy. Just as merchant bankers and condottieri could use religious imagery or devotional bequests to craft an image that responded to the grim realities of their existence, so the papal court employed patronage for purposes that addressed the wholly unchristian objectives that had become part and parcel of curial life.

Despite their appearance, delicate paintings of saintly figures, fine statues of the Virgin Mary, and elegant buildings dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Christ himself were masks for materialistic ambition, rampant self-obsession, endemic corruption, lust, violence, and bloodshed. But just how dark and ugly were the hearts and minds of the men who fueled the “papal Renaissance” only becomes clear when the deep and unpleasant changes wrought by the papacy’s return to Rome are excavated a little more.

COURTLY VICES

In taking up the reins of power in the Patrimony of St. Peter once again, the papacy assumed the burdens of government that were familiar to Italy’s kingdoms, city-states, and signorie. This was, however, much more than a matter of bureaucracy, administration, and diplomacy. Authority was as much about creating a culture of power as anything else. If the papacy wanted to keep a firm grip on the Papal States and to deal with its counterparts from a position of strength, it had to project an image of solid rulership that its dependents and rivals could appreciate in their own terms.

A Renaissance state was nothing without courtly life. The court was a meeting place for the powerful, an arena for the resolution of disputes, and the threshing floor of ambitions; but most important, it was the setting for the display of temporal might. Kings, princes, signori, and even some communes took care to maintain magnificent courts as a manifestation of their power; and the papal court—comprising both the household of the pope himself and the satellite courts of his cardinals—had to operate just like its secular equivalents, only bigger and better. As courtly theorists such as Pietro Aretino and Paolo Cortesi argued, popes and cardinals had to live like lords if they wanted to be taken seriously, and to live like lords, they had to be every bit as magnificent as lords.

Taking up residence in the Eternal City as a new cardinal, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini would have been sucked into the very heart of the rejuvenated papal court. In the corridors of ecclesiastical power, in the reception rooms of the Vatican Palace, and in the palazzi of his colleagues in the Sacred College, he would have been surrounded by grandeur and magnificence.

Everything about the Roman court was enormous—almost overpoweringly so. The Vatican Palace was “probably the most splendid of any government in Europe,” and the cardinals’ residences were hardly less impressive. Vast suites of reception rooms and great courtyards were essential to awe visiting diplomats, while facades and entrances needed to be both big and fashionably designed. And since no man of power could possibly be seen to eat, sleep, or converse in shabby little hallways, even “private” apartments (which were, naturally, anything but private) had to be on a grand scale. Every surface shimmered with frescoes and paintings; every niche revealed ancient statues or carvings in the latest style; every window was expertly set in the most elegant of frames.

The court buzzed with the hum of hordes of people. It was not just that the Curia was continually playing host to foreign potentates. The courtly life demanded that a palace throng with life and that its owner be at the center of a never-ending whirl of activity. The households of every one of its members were packed with dependents, as befitted the lifestyle of any great prince of the age. Shortly after the death of Callixtus III, the pontiff’s household comprised no fewer than 150 “lords” and “ministers,” together with 80 ancillary servants, whose activities were regulated with almost military precision. By the same token, no self-respecting cardinal would make do without a famiglia comprising at least 100–120 attendants and hangers-on, a sizable number of whom would ride out with him whenever he ventured forth into the city. If this weren’t enough, it was also expected that each cardinal would throw his house open to all and sundry in a conspicuous display of munificence. As a sixteenth-century papal bull put it, “The dwelling of a cardinal should be an open house, a harbor and a refuge especially for upright and learned men, and for poor nobles and honest persons.” At the upper end of the scale, dozens of petitioners seeking grants, benefices, or favors flocked through the doors of his palace each day from morning to night, in the hope that the great man would put in a good word or welcome them into his household. But at the lower end of the scale, there were crowds of poor, down-at-heel men and women gathered around the gates, begging for food or money, and a good cardinal had to provide for as many as possible.

Perhaps most impressive of all was the scale of the entertainments that the papal court laid on. The palace was ultimately a place of bacchanalian revelry. The Belvedere Courtyard in the Vatican Palace played host to enormous tournaments and bullfights throughout the Renaissance, the papal gardens housed great collections of exotic animals (including Hanno, the white elephant), and glamorously staged plays were a regular occurrence. More dramatically, popes and cardinals were all but obliged to hold bewilderingly regular banquets of colossal richness. There were dozens of rich courses, countless barrels of the finest wines, scores of musicians, and every opportunity for making merry until dawn. In June 1473, for example, Cardinal Pietro Riario held a vast banquet with more than forty different dishes, including (inexplicably) gilded bread and a roast bear.

Magnificent as it all may have been, however, the cultivation of courtly grandeur came at a price. However much the Curia tried to justify its opulent lifestyle by appealing to the respect and honor due to the Chair of Saint Peter, it simply wasn’t possible to indulge the splendor of courtly life without also falling prey to the vices of secular courts. In Rome, the moral standards of the Curia degenerated at the same rate as the grandeur of the papacy increased.

Money was the greatest concern and the source of the greatest sin. There was, of course, no escaping the fact that cultivating an image of power cost a great deal of cash. Cardinals were not short of a penny or two. Although there was a good deal of variation, it has been estimated that the incomes of the twenty-five to thirty cardinals who lived in Rome at the beginning of the next century generally fell between 3,000 and 20,000 ducats (where a ducat was roughly equivalent in value to a florin). Yet even these enormous sums paled in comparison to the day-to-day running costs of courtly life. In the 1540s, the humanist Francesco Priscianese estimated that Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi spent at least 6,500 scudi (the scudo was worth approximately the same as the ducat and the florin) each year on maintaining a household of one hundred retainers in a fitting style. This, however, only accounted for the bare necessities. Buying, renting, building, or maintaining a palace could cost thousands of ducats, while the pressure to commission artists to decorate a cardinal’s apartments imposed a colossal additional burden. As time went on and competition between the cardinals increased, the financial pressure only mounted. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga reckoned that it was nearly impossible for him to maintain his dignity in Rome on an annual income of less than 36,000 scudi, and protested that he would have to leave the city if he couldn’t be sure of having the money to hand. As this rather late example suggests, almost from the moment of the papacy’s return to Rome, cardinals—and, it must be said, popes—were perpetually short of cash. Despite the occasional subsidies provided to those who could not hope to draw on dynastic reserves, they often struggled to make ends meet. As the Venetian ambassador Girolamo Soranzo noted in 1563, “There [are] some who are very poor who lack many of the things needed to maintain [their] rank.”

This pressure to keep up appearances led cardinals to become inordinately preoccupied with increasing their incomes by fair means or foul. Greed swiftly became endemic at the papal court, and each of the princes of the Church became obsessed with accumulating ever more benefices, no matter how small or trifling the money they brought in. In his memoirs, Aeneas highlighted Pietro Barbo as the very archetype of the moneygrubbing cardinal. Having denounced the grotesquely fat Pietro as “an expert seeker of worldly preferment,” Aeneas went on to describe how he demanded the relatively small church of Santa Maria in Impruneta after the death of its rector, and kicked up a tremendous row when he was turned down by the pope. In the same vein, in 1484, the Florentine humanist Bartolomeo della Fonte (Bartolomeo Fonzio) lamented the fact that at the papal court “faith in Christ flourishes no longer, nor love, piety, or charity; virtue, probity, and learning now have no place.” “Need I mention,” he asked Lorenzo il Magnifico, “the robberies that go unpunished, the honor in which greed and extravagance are held?” Writing to Bernardo Rucellai on the same day, he pointed to the “whirlpool of vice” that consumed the Curia, and observed that the cardinals, “in the guise of shepherds of vice … destroy the flocks committed to their care” since “their greed … can never be satisfied.”

The Curia’s other sins were even worse. Given the luxury and splendor of Renaissance courts, there was always a serious danger of overindulgence and excess. The more potentates endeavored to cultivate magnificence, the more tempting it was to give in to the pleasures of the body. As Castiglione observed in The Book of the Courtier, “Nowadays rulers are so corrupted by evil living … and it is so difficult to give them an insight into the truth and lead them to virtue.” And what was true of secular courts was even more true of the papal court, which exceeded all others in opulence.

Gluttony was, as Bartolomeo della Fonte observed, all but universal. A typical example was that of Cardinal Jean Jouffroy, the bishop of Arras, of whom Aeneas provided a vivid portrait in his memoirs. Although Jouffroy “wished to seem devout,” he was a“heedless, pernicious fellow” who could not resist the pleasures available at the tables of the papal court, but who was badly affected by the massive amounts he consumed:

When he was dining, he would be angered at the least offence and throw silver dishes and bread at the servants and sometimes, even though distinguished guests were present, in his rage he would hurl to the ground the table itself with all the dishes. For he was a glutton and an immoderate drinker and when heated with wine had no control of himself.

Although all were not quite so outrageous, drunkenness and overeating were quite normal faults for a Renaissance cardinal. Indeed, even after his election to the papacy, Alexander VI made it a regular practice to get horribly drunk. As Benvenuto Cellini noted, “It was his custom, once a week to indulge in a violent debauch, after which he would vomit.” Similarly, Paul II ate and drank so much that even the most flattering portraits show him as a grotesquely overweight blob.

Lust, however, was the most prevalent of all the vices at the papal court. Admittedly, it was nothing new. During the Babylonian Captivity, Petrarch complained bitterly about the extent to which cardinals would give themselves over to sexual abandon. Condemning a personified Avignon as the paradigmatic example of sinfulness, he observed that “through your chambers young girls and old men go frisking and Beelzebub in the middle with bellows and fire and mirrors.” But now that the papacy was back in Rome, things had got even worse. Palaces thronged with courtesans, and vows of chastity were regarded with amused disdain. In this regard, it is telling that one of Aeneas’s most well-read works was actually an erotic novella, and he also penned a wild sexual comedy called Chrysis. It was quite normal for cardinals to keep mistresses openly, and the gossip that inevitably spread was more like that seen in modern soap operas than what might be expected of the Church. Aeneas himself had fathered at least two children before taking holy orders, but even he could not help recording a few little tidbits about the sexual habits of the notorious Cardinal Jouffroy, which provide a nice illustration of courtly norms:

He was fond of women and often passed days and nights among courtesans. When the Roman matrons saw him go by—tall, broad-chested, with a ruddy face and hairy limbs—they called him Venus’ Achilles. A courtesan of Tivoli who had slept with him said she had lain with a wineskin. A Florentine woman who had been his mistress, the daughter of a countryman, angry with him for some unknown reasons, waited for the time when the cardinal on his way from the Curia should pass her house and then, as he was going by, she spat out on his hat saliva that she had held for a long time in her mouth and mixed with phlegm, marking him as an adulterer by that vilest of brands.

The popes were particularly renowned for their affairs. Julius II, for example, was the father of numerous children and did not trouble to hide the fact too carefully. Rather more famously, Alexander VI slept with virtually anything that moved, and is unique in having been suspected of having had sex with his mistress (Vannozza dei Cattanei), the daughter she bore him (Lucrezia), and her mother while making a virtue of siring several offspring.

Homosexual liaisons were as common as—if not more common than—heterosexual relationships. So endemic was sodomy at the papal court that the rumored homosexuality of various popes became a stock feature of satirical pasquinades. Of Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici), Guicciardini remarked, “At the beginning of his pontificate, most people deemed him very chaste; however, he was afterwards discovered to be exceedingly devoted—and every day with less and less shame—to that kind of pleasure that for honour’s sake may not be named.” The unmentionable pleasure was reputedly a particular taste for young boys, a taste that was apparently shared by Julius II. Others took it to a different level. Sixtus IV was reputed to have given his cardinals special dispensation to commit sodomy during the summer months, perhaps to permit him to indulge his favorite predilections without fear of criticism. Worse still was Paul II, who was not only lampooned for wearing rouge in public but also rumored to have died while being sodomized by a page boy.

In the early days of Aeneas’s cardinalate, the papal court thronged with rich, powerful churchmen who were utterly devoted to greed, gluttony, and lust. The magnificent halls of their palaces buzzed with every variety of sin, giving the Curia a very bad name, especially among humanists like Bartolomeo della Fonte who came to Rome to pursue their art. Vicious invectives were launched against the lifestyle of Renaissance cardinals by various learned litterateurs. Even among the ordinary people of the city, the court earned a rotten reputation, and despite the magnificence of curial palaces the very word “cardinal” became a term of abuse, as a dialogue from an anonymous pasquinade (a characteristically Roman satirical poem that took its name from the damaged remains of a statue unearthed in the fifteenth century and commonly known as Pasquino) shows:

MARFORIO: Why, Pasquino, you’re armed to the teeth!

PASQUINO: Because I’ve got the devil on my back

With an insult that has placed me on the rack,

And got my deadly knife out from its sheath.

MARFORIO: But who insulted you, Pasquino, what runt?

PASQUINO: He’s a cunt!

MARFORIO: Then what was it?

PASQUINO: You stupid heel:

I’d rather have been broken on the wheel

Than ever be called by such a name.

MARFORIO: He called you liar: what a shame!

PASQUINO: Worse than that!

MARFORIO: Thief?

PASQUINO: Worse!

MARFORIO: Cuckold?

PASQUINO: Men of the world shrug off such sobriquets,

You simpleton, and just go on their way.

MARFORIO: Well, what then? Coiner? Simonist ’gainst God?

Or did you get a little girl in pod?

PASQUINO: Marforio, you’re a babe who needs a nurse:

Of all things evil there is nothing worse

To call a man than—“Cardinal”! But he

Who abused me so won’t ’scape death, e’en if he flee.

But however shameful contemporaries may have thought the habits of the papal court, it is important to underscore the fact that they put a very different complexion on the Curia’s patronage of the arts. Although grand, richly decorated palaces, antique statuary, and fine frescoes were essential to creating an appropriate setting for a Renaissance court, the intentions and daily lives of the patrons who commissioned these works went far beyond both the strict demands of the courtly life and the artistic vision set out by Nicholas V.

The magnificence of the papal court was, therefore, deceptive. The magnitude of the Apostolic Palace and its satellites concealed a court that was not only perennially short of cash, but that was also driven on by burning ambition and relentless greed, while the saints and angels depicted on the walls of curial residences looked down on men who willingly devoted themselves to wild sex and debauchery. In this regard it is telling that Raphael’s School of Athens—perhaps the most striking affirmation of the papacy’s ostentatious endeavor to establish itself as the focus of humanistic learning and to encourage a harmonious union between ancient philosophy and patristic theology—was commissioned by Julius II, an amorous, possibly homosexual pontiff whose rise to power had been fueled by greed. Indeed, it is arguable that the further the mores of the papal court degenerated, the more intense its need for such an unrealistic public image became.

The artistic tastes of popes and cardinals were, however, neither as one-dimensional as it might initially appear nor as clearly defined as Nicholas V’s deathbed statement might suggest. Although courtly status and the well-being of the faith continued to provide a powerful reason for the preservation of a carefully designed public image, it was simply impossible for so worldly a group of people not to let their true feelings shine through once in a while.

As at secular courts elsewhere in Italy, the side effects of “courtly” behavior often crept out from behind the shadows to be celebrated and enjoyed for their own sake. Greed, gluttony, and lust found their way into decorative schemes that otherwise glossed over the sinfulness of life at the papal court. In decorating the bathroom of Cardinal Bibbiena in the Vatican Palace, for example, Raphael was requested to paint frescoes depicting episodes from classical mythology that were definitely not reflective of a celibate mind.Although now lost, one scene showed a voluptuous Venus lifting her leg in a highly provocative manner while extracting a thorn from her foot. Another showed Pan preparing to rape Syrinx. So, too, Michelangelo carved his Bacchus—a masterpiece of drunken revelry—for Cardinal Raffaele Riario. Even more revealing were the decorations on the vault of the entrance loggia to the Palazzo Farnese executed by Giulio Romano, Giovanni da Udine, and others after a design by Raphael. In this case, the subject chosen was the erotic story of Cupid and Psyche, and the ceiling of this most elegant of rooms is divided up into panels depicting different scenes from the tale, each of which provides a hint of the daily life of the cardinals who lived in the palace. In The Council of the Gods, for example, the wine flows freely as gods recline in the company of bare-chested goddesses or canoodle under flowered canopies, while alluring maidens dance with desire in their eyes (Fig. 30). In the corner of another scene, just above Mercury’s raised hand, there is a yet more outrageous statement of curial tastes. Among the fruit and foliage of the border is hidden an obvious and totally uninhibited sexual parody: here, an unmistakably phallic vegetable plunges into a fig that has been split in half to present a plainly vaginal appearance. Subtle it was not, but—when they were left to their own devices away from the public gaze—that was what Renaissance popes and cardinals such as Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini liked.

FAMILY MATTERS

Aeneas would have had the opportunity to see the moral degeneracy of the papal court firsthand in his early years in Rome, but the debt, drunkenness, and debauchery he would have encountered in the grand palaces of popes and cardinals told only part of the dark story behind the papacy’s patronage of the arts. In addition to causing a sudden and dramatic increase in the level of greed, gluttony, and lust in the Curia, the papacy’s resumption of power in the Papal States had prompted a much more insidious transformation in the way in which the popes used their power and—by extension—in the way in which ambition shaped the character of the papal court.

It was not long before Aeneas caught his first glimpse of this even uglier side of the Renaissance papacy. Only two years after Aeneas was made a cardinal, Callixtus III died, and he was called upon to take part in the conclave summoned to elect the new pope. It was at this most important of Church gatherings that the internal politics of the Curia began to become clear.

Convened in accordance with the dignified traditions of the Church, it looked like a very solemn occasion. As soon as the funeral was over, the College of Cardinals—dressed in their finest vestments—processed into a small suite of rooms in the Vatican Palace, where they would remain in secretive isolation until the election had been concluded. As the doors were locked behind them, all eighteen swore themselves to secrecy and obedience (the eight other living members of the College were unable to attend) and, after praying for divine guidance, began their deliberations in earnest. In Pinturicchio’s later depiction of the proceedings for the Piccolomini Library in Siena, everything is presented as having been conducted with high-minded decorum, and although several cardinals were papabili, Aeneas himself seems to have regarded the whole affair as a foregone conclusion.

The conclave was anything but decorous, and it only took one round of voting for things to turn nasty. Given that none of the candidates had secured a clear majority, a victor would emerge only as a result of negotiation. But rather than considering the piety and holiness of the papabili, the cardinals threw themselves into a bout of un-priestly horse-trading. No sooner had the inconclusive results been announced than

the richer and more influential members of the College summoned others to their presence. Seeking the papacy for themselves or their friends, they begged, made promises, even tried threats. Some threw all decency aside, spared no blushes, and pleaded their own cases, claiming the papacy as their right.

Meeting secretly in the latrines, Cardinal d’Estouteville—the most fiercely ambitious member of the Sacred College—did his utmost to cajole others with threats and bribes. He promised to distribute a whole host of lucrative benefices to anyone who would vote for him, and made it clear that, if elected, he would dismiss those who did not support him from any Church offices they might hold. Even the redoubtable Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia—the vice-chancellor of the Church—was momentarily scared into offering his backing.

Despite d’Estouteville’s efforts, however, the second round of voting only produced another deadlock. He received only six votes, while Aeneas—whose own techniques of “persuasion” are shrouded in mystery—garnered nine. It was clear that another vote would only drag things out, and since neither candidate had the requisite two-thirds majority (twelve votes), the College decided to give the process of “accession” a try. This method allowed the cardinals to change their votes and “accede” to a different candidate. Rather than helping things run more smoothly, however, this only served to push the standard of behavior even lower still.

Sensing that d’Estouteville was unlikely to succeed, Rodrigo Borgia was the first to stand up and switch his support to Aeneas. Cardinal Giacomo Tebaldi followed suit. Aeneas now only needed one vote to take the throne. But at this point, the conclave descended into farce:

Cardinal Prospero Colonna decided to seize for himself the honor of acclaiming the next pontiff. He rose and was about to pronounce his vote … when the cardinals of Nicaea and Rouen [Bessarion and d’Estouteville] suddenly laid hands on him and rebuked him sharply for wanting to accede to Aeneas. When he persisted, they tried to get him out of the room by force, one seizing his right arm and the other his left … so determined were they to snatch the papacy from Aeneas.

Prospero was, however, determined. As he was being dragged out of the chapel by two of the most august personages in the whole of Christendom, he shouted his support for Aeneas. With the faint thud of ecclesiastical punches being thrown and d’Estouteville’s cries of despair ringing in his ears, Aeneas found himself the new pope.

It was not an auspicious beginning for a papal reign. Far from being a model of Christian decorum, the conclave had been a violent, corrupt, and angry brawl that would shame even a modern rugby club. But it was certainly not anything out of the ordinary. Tempers at conclaves throughout the Renaissance always ran high, and shouts and punches were not unusual. What was more, bribery—or “simony,” to give it its proper name—was quite normal. Baldassare Cossa had, after all, borrowed 10,000 florins fromGiovanni di Bicci de’ Medici in 1410 to ensure that he could become an antipope. After the reunification of the Church, things got worse, despite repeated attempts to stamp out simony at conclaves. D’Estouteville’s attempts at bribery were, in fact, to pale by comparison to the simony practiced in 1492 by Rodrigo Borgia, when the successful Spanish cardinal was reputed to have offered four mule loads of silver and benefices worth over 10,000 ducats a year to Ascanio Sforza alone. By the standards of other conclaves, Pius II’s election had actually gone fairly smoothly.

But it was not merely as a consequence of the papacy’s spiritual prestige that Renaissance conclaves were so habitually fierce and crooked. The papal throne had become a prize of almost incalculable material and political value.

After the papacy’s return to Rome, it was in a position to have a dramatic impact on the balance of power in Italy. As a matter of course, the pope was a major player in international politics, and his influence overshadowed the calculations of every other state. Any alliances into which he entered or any campaigns he undertook could threaten the stability of communes, kingdoms, and signorie throughout the peninsula. But the pope could also have a serious effect on the internal politics of individual states by directly interfering in the fortunes of individual families. He could make or break a family’s hold on its territory by appointing a particular potentate to the vicariate of a particular city or by dismissing him from his post. He could confer titles of nobility on whomever he wished. And he could dramatically increase or decrease a family’s revenues depending on the manner in which he distributed benefices or Church incomes.

This wouldn’t have mattered all that much if the Curia had been an institution insulated from national and familial concerns or if the cardinals themselves were decent and upright men devoted to the spiritual well-being of the Church. But it wasn’t, and they weren’t. The popes not only clung to the interests of their native lands but were also very definitely “family” men, regardless of whether they hailed from established ruling dynasties or sprang from up-and-coming new clans. No sooner had they been crowned than they began using the immense authority that had been entrusted to them to favor the fortunes of their country, to fill their family’s coffers (which often went hand in hand with “national” interests), and to build up networks of personal power.

Naturally, anyone who had a shred of ambition did his utmost to curry favor with the popes in the hope of receiving some of the crumbs that fell from the papal table, and the kings of France, England, Spain, and Hungary—as well as Italy’s leading signorial families—all tried to have “their” men appointed cardinals. But perhaps the most obvious sign of the papacy’s role as a rather shady source of money and power was the far more corrupt practice of nepotism. Although popes had made a habit of appointing relatives to the College of Cardinals since the Middle Ages, the Renaissance papacy took it to new extremes, and the creation of “cardinal-nephews” reached epidemic proportions. Martin V, for example, not only gave his nephew Prospero Colonna a red hat but also used his influence to make sure his family had a stranglehold on Rome itself. Eugenius IV (who had been made a cardinal by his uncle Gregory XII) elevated two of his nephews to the Sacred College. Callixtus III had followed suit with such shamelessness that one of his protégés, Bernardo Roverio, was to condemn him as an “iniquitous pope” who had “befouled the Church of Rome with corruption.” Even the redoubtable Nicholas V had raised his half brother to the cardinalate. In later centuries, things got even worse. Since he was absolutely determined to make the comparatively obscure della Rovere one of Italy’s foremost noble families, Sixtus IV’s propensity for elevating his relatives to the Sacred College surpassed that of even his most nepotistic predecessors. As Machiavelli recorded, he was “a man of very base and vile condition … the first to show how much a pontiff could do and how many things formerly called errors could be hidden under pontifical authority.” No fewer than six direct kinsmen were elevated in the space of just under seven years and accounted for almost a quarter of the cardinals present at the conclave after his death. Similarly, Paul III did the same for two of his natural grandsons, one of whom—Ranuccio—was only fifteen at the time. Even worse, Alexander VI—who was himself a cardinal-nephew of Callixtus III—raised a grand total of ten of his kinsmen to the College, including his son (Cesare Borgia) and two grandnephews. Between 1447 and 1534, six out of ten popes had previously been made cardinals by one of their relatives.

Every cardinal-nephew was loaded with lucrative benefices and grants of land, and this did much to enhance the power and prestige of the families from which they sprang. It was no coincidence that the della Rovere family owed its prominence in the later Renaissance entirely to the riches lavished on cardinal-nephews, and it is telling that Pietro Riario—who had received his cardinal’s hat from Sixtus IV— was one of the wealthiest men in Rome.

But this was not all. Quite apart from their willingness to pack the College of Cardinals with their relatives, popes who harbored strong family ambitions were more than prepared to give substantial support to kinsmen outside the Church, too. Not long after the Schism had ended, Martin V set the tone for the rest of the Renaissance by giving his Colonna relatives a free hand in Rome and by securing vast estates for them in the kingdom of Naples. So extreme did this become that even Machiavelli was appalled by the secular nepotism of Sixtus IV. Later, Julius II (a nephew of Sixtus IV’s) secured the duchy of Urbino for his nephew Francesco Maria della Rovere in 1508; Clement VII made his illegitimate son, Alessandro de’ Medici, duke of Florence; and Paul III made his bastard child, the condottiere Pier Luigi Farnese, duke of Parma. Most notorious of all, however, was Alexander VI. As Guicciardini observed, he possessed

neither sincerity nor shame nor truth nor faith nor religion, [but] insatiable avarice, immoderate ambition, … and a burning desire to advance his many children in any possible way.

Going well beyond the already excessive ambitions of his predecessors, Alexander aimed at nothing less than the creation of a Borgia empire in northern Italy. He made his second son, Juan, captain general of the Church and persuaded the king of Spain to create him duke of Gandia; on Juan’s death, Cesare was permitted to leave the College of Cardinals to become duke of Valentinois and to conquer the Romagna. Even Alexander’s daughter Lucrezia was used as a pawn and was married off three times to leading Italian families.

Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini was no exception to the rule. Despite his protestations of piety and humility, he was every bit as devoted to nepotism as every other pontiff of the period. He, too, wanted to ensure that his family would profit from the papacy’s growing wealth. Some of his earliest actions as pope, in fact, concerned his own kinsmen. After elevating Siena to the status of an archdiocese, for example, he made Antonio d’Andrea da Modanella-Piccolomini its first archbishop, and on Antonio’s death Pius named his sister’s son, Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini, as his successor. The new pope then went on to make Francesco a cardinal, alongside Niccolò Forteguerri (a relative on his mother’s side) and Jacopo Ammannati Piccolomini (an adopted member of a cadet branch of the family), whom he had previously made the bishops of Teano and Pavia, respectively. If this were not enough, he made his cousin Gregorio Lolli one of his most trusted secretaries and appointed his nephew Niccolò d’Andrea Piccolomini commander of the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. To cap it all, Pius even sent Niccolò Forteguerri to Naples on a secret mission to arrange the betrothal of yet another nephew, Antonio Todeschini Piccolomini, to the daughter of King Ferrante.

Given the enormous opportunities for familial enrichment, it is not difficult to see why competition for the papacy was so ferocious after the papal court returned to Rome. It was a prize worth fighting for, and since so much was at stake, simony and even violence were regular features of conclaves. It was a rare cardinal who did not aspire to the papacy, and it was almost unheard of for a cardinal with a good chance of election not to offer bribes to his colleagues. And while there is no direct evidence to suggest that Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini actually offered any financial inducements to his fellow cardinals in 1458, his subsequent nepotism makes it hard to believe he did not sneak the odd bribe to well-placed individuals to improve his chances of acceding to the papal throne and reviving the Piccolomini’s flagging fortunes.

If the papacy’s resumption of power in the Papal States led to the abuse of papal power and the corruption of papal elections, these insidious changes had the collective effect of transforming the papacy itself into the plaything of Italy’s great noble families. Despite the massive expansion of the College of Cardinals during the Renaissance (it would increase in size from twenty-six in 1458 to thirty-two in 1513 and fifty-four in 1549) and the continuing influx of cardinals appointed at the request of European monarchs, it was dominated by a relatively small number of Italian clans determined to use the Church—and the papacy—to further their own interests. The della Rovere, the Borgias, the Medici, the Farnese, and, thanks to Pius II, the Piccolomini accounted for a dizzying number of red hats and sucked millions of florins out of the Church’s coffers as a result. And the more they jockeyed for money, power, and influence, the more they each conspired to keep the papacy “in the family.” Of the eighteen popes who reigned between 1431 and 1565, twelve were drawn from just five families, and no fewer than four pontiffs (Innocent VIII, Leo X, Clement VII, and Pius IV) were either direct members of or indirectly related to the Medici family alone. Pius II’s election was merely the beginning of yet another attempt to make the elective monarchy that was the papacy into as hereditary an institution as possible.

All of this had a dramatic—and highly visible—impact on the papal court’s patronage of the arts. As the devastating criticisms leveled against the papacy by Savonarola and, later, by Calvin and Luther were to demonstrate, it was important to project an impression of good taste and Christian virtue, even if the reality was quite different. Working in parallel with this, a desire also emerged to consolidate familial gains by visual means. The more powerful and ambitious the families who dominated the Curia became, the more they longed to legitimate their position both in Rome and in their own lands by cultivating an image of justified authority. This entailed not only a propensity for lavishness and grandeur but also a willingness to highlight family ties in an almost dynastic fashion.

The most imposing manifestation of this was architectural. For the Curia’s wealthiest cardinals, palaces were as much an expression of family prestige as they were settings for courtly revelry, and it was thus imperative that people viewing a palazzo know who was responsible for its studied magnificence. The owner of every palace took care to have his family coat of arms (or at least a suitably imposing inscription) displayed in as prominent a position as possible. Thus, when Cardinal Raffaele Riario built a new palace—today known as the Palazzo della Cancelleria—in 1496, he not only made sure it was far larger than anything else in Rome but also had a dedicatory epigraph included on an upper cornice to ensure that everyone would know that it was his palace and that he had been raised to his august position by his relative Pope Sixtus IV. So, too, in commissioning Antonio da Sangallo to design a suitable palace in 1515, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (later Pope Paul III) instructed that the facade of the vast new structure—which is today the French embassy—be dominated by the family coat of arms placed above the main doorway.

Although they officially resided in the Apostolic Palace, and hence had slightly different needs, the popes took this tendency to an even higher level. Obsessed with putting his family’s stamp on the Vatican itself, each pontiff strove to enlarge the complex with yet another addition, and endeavored to emphasize the splendor of his family by having its coat of arms emblazoned in a prominent location, as in the Sala Regia, where Pope Paul III had the Farnese crest placed high above the doorway. Indeed, later, when the new Saint Peter’s Basilica was completed, Sixtus V had an inscription claiming the edifice as his own inscribed around the base of the lantern, while Paul V tried to take credit for the whole project by having both his regnal name and his family name written on the facade.

Yet identification often went much further than such crude signposting and was at once subtle and intense. The Borgia Apartments, which were decorated with an iconographically rich series of frescoes by Pinturicchio that even included a portrait of Alexander VI’s mistress Giulia Farnese in the guise of the Virgin Mary, were, for example, so heavily associated with the pontiff’s notorious family that they were subsequently abandoned for many years. But perhaps the best example is the Sistine Chapel, which—despite the addition of certain features by other popes—has a good claim to be regarded as a temple to the della Rovere. While Sixtus IV (Francesco della Rovere) ordered the construction of the chapel and had its walls decorated with frescoes by Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, andPerugino, it was his ambitious nephew Julius II (Giuliano della Rovere) who commissioned Michelangelo to paint its ceiling as a continuation of the programmatic glorification of the della Rovere’s achievements.

Particularly when popes hailed from families that aspired to improve a previously limited role in their native region, architectural and decorative projects on a grand scale could also be instigated outside Rome. As part of his broader scheme to establish a Piccolomini “dynasty,” for example, Pius II employed Bernardo Rossellino to remodel completely his hometown of Corsignano. Employing the very latest techniques in urban design, Rossellino transformed Corsignano (renamed Pienza) into an ideal Renaissance town to which Pius II could retire when he wanted to get away from Rome. Not only was his family’s coat of arms emblazoned on almost every major building (even including the well in the piazza outside the Palazzo Comunale), but the new town was also dominated by a massive palace intended to serve as a residence for the Piccolomini family.

A more direct means of emphasizing “dynastic” power within the Curia was, however, the sophisticated use of portraiture and pictorial commemoration. On the one hand, second- and third-generation popes used the achievements of their pontifical ancestors to bolster the perceived strength of their “descent.” Pope Pius III, for example, commissioned Pinturicchio to paint a magnificent hagiographical fresco cycle depicting the life and career of Pius II in the library of Siena Cathedral (today known as the Piccolomini Library) and underscored his ties to the alleged virtues of the first Piccolomini pontiff in a dedicatory inscription that made clear the family relationship between the two men. But on the other hand, popes of all stripes were fond of having portraits painted that showed them surrounded by other members of their family, particularly when they were also cardinals. The viewer was left in absolutely no doubt about the dynastic ambitions of the sitters. In 1477, for example, Melozzo da Forlì was commissioned to paint a fresco depicting Sixtus IV nominating Bartolomeo Platina as the first prefect of the Vatican Library (Fig. 31). Now housed in the Pinacoteca Vaticana, this painting not only shows the scholarly Platina kneeling before the pontiff but also includes portraits of four of the pope’s nephews (Cardinals Pietro Riario and Giuliano della Rovere on the right, and Girolamo Riario, the lord of Imola and Forlì, and the condottiere Giovanni della Rovere on the left). Later, Raphael famously painted a portrait of the fat, shortsighted Leo X with his cousins Cardinals Giulio di Giuliano de’ Medici (later Clement VII) and Luigi de’ Rossi (Fig. 32), and Titian completed a rather more sinister-looking depiction of the decrepit Paul III in the company of his grandsons Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and the fawning Ottavio Farnese, duke of Parma, Piacenza, and Castro.

Just as gluttony, greed, and lust transformed the palaces of Rome into houses of pleasure and ill repute, so equally unpleasant (and unchristian) sentiments underpinned some of the most impressive examples of patronage at the papal court. Far from being reflections of high-minded ideals or deep-seated faith, some of the most iconic works of Renaissance art—the Sistine Chapel, the Borgia Apartments, even Saint Peter’s itself—were testaments to the overpowering sense of ambition that drove popes and cardinals to annex the power of the Church to their own family interests and to fill their pockets with the tithes of ordinary believers. Beautiful though the palaces, churches, and chapels of the papal court may have been, this side of the Renaissance papacy was—as Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini knew from the violence and simony that accompanied his own election—dark, devious, and utterly corrupt.

SECRETS, LIES, AND BLOODSHED

As Pius II would have realized shortly after his coronation, however, being pope entailed more than wanton revelry and family aggrandizement. Far from being a locus for introspective navel-gazing, cut off from the outside world by its pleasure-seeking ways, the Roman court was one of the epicenters of Italian politics, and it was not long before Pius was compelled to engage with the challenges of international affairs.

The new pope was confronted with two major crises. On the one hand, there was the problem of Sicily. Shortly before Pius’s election, a furious row had blown up between Callixtus III and King Alfonso. For reasons best known to himself, Alfonso had haughtily demanded not only that the pope confirm him as the rightful king of Sicily but also that the Church hand over the march of Ancona and a number of other ecclesiastical fiefdoms. Callixtus, of course, refused point-blank and, after Alfonso’s untimely death on June 27, 1458, claimed that the island had reverted to the papacy on the grounds that the kingdom had long been a papal fief. Only Callixtus’s death had prevented a full-scale papal invasion. Now that Pius was pope, he had to deal with the fallout. While Alfonso’s son, Ferrante, wanted the pope to consent to his rule, the pope himself needed to safeguard the Church’s possessions and calm the dogs of war.

On the other hand, there was the problem of the Papal States themselves. While the conclave had been going on, the condottiere Jacopo Piccinino had taken advantage of the momentary lack of leadership to invade the Church’s lands in central Italy. In a lightning campaign, he had captured Assisi, Gualdo, and Nocera, and had terrorized the whole of Umbria. As a matter of urgency, Pius needed to drive Piccinino out of the Church’s heartlands.

They were really two sides of the same coin, and the only way forward was to address both at once. In order to set the Papal States on a secure footing, Pius decided to strike a deal with Ferrante. Not only did this sort out the problem of Sicily, but it also set aside all of the dangers threatened by Alfonso. What was more, Ferrante promised to give Pius his help in getting Piccinino out of Umbria. The only remaining difficulty was that in return Pius agreed to sort out Ferrante’s bitter feud with Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta and to stabilize affairs in the North. It was to deal with this particularly tricky piece of business that the pope stopped off in Florence en route to Mantua in the spring of 1459.

Now that he was pope, Pius had to keep a lot of political and diplomatic plates spinning at once, and everything was linked together. If one plate fell, the whole lot would come tumbling down. But Pius’s difficulties were merely an expression of the concerns that exercised the papacy throughout the Renaissance. Since the popes’ return to Rome and resumption of power in the Papal States, they had been unable to avoid being swept along by the shifting currents of Italian political affairs. Indeed, the familial ambitions and drunken debauchery to which the papal court had become accustomed depended on the papacy’s active involvement in the difficult and dangerous business of international relations. The Papal States were the key to everything. They provided the greater part of the income on which the papal court depended, and they needed to be protected, preserved, and—where possible—enlarged. Although it was obviously rather different in character, this naturally obliged the pope to conduct himself like the head of any other state in Italy and to take a keen interest in matters of diplomacy, defense, and property rights. The only problem was that the politicking involved was a very far cry from Nicholas V’s vision of the Renaissance Church as a bastion of true faith and a paragon of unworldly virtue. If the daily life of the papal court was riddled with vice, corruption, and immorality, the practices on which everything depended were the most sinister of all that were found in Rome. And, like anything else in the Eternal City, the papacy lost no time in using the patronage of the arts either to mask or to celebrate its darkest and ugliest face.

Living a Lie

Underlying the crises that confronted Pius II in 1458–59 was the thorny problem of authority. Even though some—like Marsilius of Padua—occasionally called it into question, the foundation of the popes’ claims to spiritual supremacy was firmly established within the Church during the Renaissance. On the assumption that there was a direct line of succession between the first among the apostles and the pope himself, Christ’s own words were inscribed in huge letters around the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.” But if the popes were able to justify their primacy in religious matters by appealing to Scripture, things were not quite so simple when it came to their claims to temporal authority. As the Spiritual Franciscans had been quick to point out in earlier centuries, there was absolutely nothing in the Bible to say that Christ had wanted his Church to possess anything at all, least of all several million acres of land in central Italy. In fact, several passages in the Gospels could be interpreted as affirmations of the need for absolute evangelical poverty.

Biblical exegesis being what it is, there were a host of cunning scriptural arguments on which the popes could—and did—draw to support their wealth and power. Given the ambiguity of the Gospels, the words of Christ could, after all, be used to justify almost anything. But even if they could show that it was legitimate for the Church to own property and even to wield temporal power in the abstract, nothing in the Bible suggested that God had endowed the popes with any actual title to such a colossal amount of land. To shore up its position, the papacy had to turn to something else entirely.

History provided the solution. There were lots of episodes from the past—such as Pope Leo I’s repulse of Attila and the coronation of Charlemagne—that could be read as proof positive of the papacy’s right to rule central Italy and of its superiority to all other forms of worldly authority. But one piece of “evidence” stood out. Throughout the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, the popes based their claims to temporal power on a document known as the Donation of Constantine. Purportedly written in the early fourth century, the text affirmed that in gratitude for having been cured of leprosy after being baptized and confirmed, the emperor Constantine had handed over the entire Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I. After this point, it was thought, successive popes had retained sovereign rights over the Empire and had merely entrusted emperors down to the present day with custodianship of its territories, excepting—in later years—the territories that were to become known as the Papal States.

The snag was that the Donation was a forgery that had been written at some point in the early eleventh century. The Renaissance popes weren’t ignorant of this fact. Even before the Schism had ended, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa had questioned the document’s veracity, and in 1439–40 Lorenzo Valla had used his philological expertise to prove its inauthenticity beyond all doubt. Before his election as Pius II, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini himself had even written a tract on the invalidity of the text.

But the Donation of Constantine was too useful for the forgery to be acknowledged openly. Dismissing Valla’s treatise and overlooking Aeneas’s own work on the subject, Renaissance popes continued to behave as if the document were completely genuine, and even if papal bulls largely ceased to refer to it after the pontificate of Nicholas V, the papacy was relentless in its attempts to provide visual affirmations of the Donation’s veracity. Art could give life to the claims embodied in the fraudulent text in a way that legal and philological arguments simply could not.

The most dramatic example is found in the so-called Sala di Costantino in the private apartments of the Apostolic Palace. Commissioned from Raphael’s workshop by Pope Julius II, the frescoes in this chamber (the largest of those constructed) were intended to provide a very clear indication that—despite being a forgery—the Donation of Constantine remained the basis of papal policy. In the hands of the artists Giulio Romano, Raffaellino del Colle, and Gianfrancesco Penni, the story of Constantine’s life became a celebration of the rightful supremacy of the Church in temporal matters, and especially in Italy. After Constantine’s vision of the cross and subsequent victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the emperor’s baptism and supposed donation of the Empire are depicted in two massive and dramatic scenes. Although some of the figures are attired in historically accurate costumes, Pope Sylvester and his clerical attendants are all painted in early-sixteenth-century vestments, as if to underscore the legal continuity linking the fourth-century pontiff and Julius II.

The message was pointedly emphasized in another room in the new papal apartments, the Stanza d’Eliodoro. Painted by Raphael himself, the fresco cycle in this room extends the sense of the Donation of Constantine by illustrating the virtues and strength of the temporal power of the papacy through other historical and pseudo-historical episodes. In the Expulsion of Heliodorus and the Repulse of Attila, Julius II and Leo X are respectively cast as the enemies of godless tyrants and the protectors of Rome, while the Mass at Bolsena shows the second della Rovere pontiff witnessing a thirteenth-century miracle that was thought to evidence the supreme truth of the faith defended by the papacy. The final fresco—the Deliverance of Saint Peter—tops everything off by showing the “prince of the apostles” freed from prison by a merciful angel, an illustration of “the futility of the force used against the first Vicar of Christ.”

Living by the Sword

However impressive their territorial claims may have been, the popes still had to back up their pretensions with something a little more tangible. There were dangers everywhere. The Papal States were threatened on all sides by powerful and aggressive states, and the popes were continually afraid of Neapolitan or French invasions; the Church’s vassals in central Italy—cities and signori alike—were so troublesome and restive that their loyalty could never be counted upon; and the peninsula was full of avaricious condottieri like Jacopo Piccinino who were always on the lookout for an opportunity to ravage or seize the papacy’s possessions. If the popes were going to continue enjoying—and abusing—the Patrimony of St. Peter, they had to do something to maintain their control.

Diplomacy offered one solution. Recognizing that a stable balance of power represented the best (and most economical) means of protecting the Papal States, the popes initially sought to achieve the security they desired by acting as peacemakers. Perhaps motivated by a vestigial sense of Christian duty, Nicholas V did his utmost to broker a stable and lasting peace among the warring states of Italy, and dispatched the young Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini to calm tempers in Milan and Naples on a number of occasions. The resulting Peace of Lodi, agreed in the spring of 1454, was something of a triumph. Not only did it bring an end to the long and violent wars in Lombardy that had worried so many of Nicholas’s predecessors, but it also seemed to offer hope that the Patrimony of St. Peter would remain secure for the foreseeable future.

The papacy’s commitment to peace was, however, every bit as cynical as its use of the Donation of Constantine. The Peace of Lodi was only valuable insofar as it served the popes’ interests, and even while the fragile truce held, Nicholas and his successors gladly donned armor to make sure the cash kept flowing from the Papal States. It was not merely that pontiffs had to maintain an army to fend off attacks from condottieri, as when Callixtus III sent Giovanni Ventimiglia to repel an invasion by Jacopo Piccinino. The popes were quite prepared to treat any hint of restiveness among their own subjects with the utmost brutality. Mercenary generals were hired with alarming regularity, and cardinals themselves—many of whom had inherited the martial interests of their noble forebears—began to take the field. Pius II sent his own nephew, Cardinal Niccolò Forteguerri, to lead the papal forces alongside Federico da Montefeltro against Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the papal vicar of Rimini, and the campaign appears to have been fearfully savage. Continuing in the same vein, Sixtus IV ordered the rebellious town of Spoleto to be sacked as a brutal warning to any other cities that might think about breaking free from their papal overlords.

But as they strengthened their position in the Papal States, the popes inadvertently left themselves vulnerable to a more insidious form of violence. Destabilizing alliances began to form behind the scenes. Increasingly on the receiving end of papal brutality,signori from the Papal States began conspiring with those farther afield whom Rome’s bellicosity had begun to alarm. Plots abounded, and even so well regarded a pontiff as Pius II was not immune from danger. Having quarreled with the pontiff over the lordship of Vico, Everso degli Anguillara plotted with the condottiere Jacopo Piccinino and the Florentine merchant Piero de’ Pazzi to assassinate Pius in 1461. Although it ultimately came to nothing, Piccinino’s chancellor claimed he had discovered “a poison such that if a very little were rubbed on the pope’s chair, it would kill him when he sat down.”

Despite being bound by the terms of the Peace, the popes had to respond in kind. They became past masters in the art of conspiracy and had no hesitation in plotting coups and assassinations wherever they felt it might serve their interests. Although Pius II seems to have been comparatively restrained in this regard, Sixtus IV threw himself into plotting with unaccustomed zeal. Acting as a lightning rod for opposition to the Medici, Sixtus was ultimately behind the brutal Pazzi conspiracy in 1478.

After purchasing the border city of Imola and appointing his nephew Girolamo Riario as its new governor, Sixtus began scheming to remove the Medici from power in Florence with the Pazzi family, who had lent him the money to buy Imola, and Francesco Salviati, whom he had made archbishop of Pisa and who came from a family of papal bankers. Sixtus also secretly secured the backing of Federico da Montefeltro, who promised to contribute six hundred soldiers to the plot. Although Sixtus took care to distance himself from the details, he knew the Medici could never be ousted except by murderous means. Set into motion on April 26, the plan was devilishly simple. It began with death. In the middle of High Mass in the Duomo, Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bernardo Bandi stabbed Giuliano de’ Medici to death in front of hundreds of worshippers. They had intended to kill his brother, Lorenzo, too, but only succeeded in wounding him. Meanwhile, Francesco Salviati and his family were massing on the Palazzo Vecchio in the hope of seizing the heart of Florence’s government and establishing a new regime at knifepoint. It was, in fact, only by the narrowest of margins—thanks to some swift action by Lorenzo de’ Medici and his associates—that the plot failed. Even though Jacopo de’ Pazzi was thrown from a window and Francesco Salviati was hanged from the walls of the Palazzo Vecchio, Sixtus and his successors were not deterred.

After the collapse of the Peace of Lodi, the papacy hurled itself into a series of relentless military campaigns that formed a part of what are now known as the Italian Wars, and that ultimately led the popes to become the greatest source of instability in peninsular affairs. Kicking off more than sixty years of warfare, Alexander VI allied with Naples against the armies of Milan and France (whose king, Charles VIII, wished to claim the kingdom of Naples for himself) and—through cataclysmic mismanagement—plunged thePapal States into near anarchy. Only a few years later, the aggressively warlike Julius II set his eyes on conquering Venice’s possessions in the Romagna and agreed a pact with the Holy Roman Emperor, the king of France, and the king of Naples. The bloody Battle of Agnadello (1509) was a triumph for papal ambitions but only complicated the situation further and brought Julius into conflict with France, alongside Venice, his erstwhile enemy, a largely unnecessary development that was excoriated by Desiderius Erasmus in his satirical dialogue Julius exclusus de caelis (Julius excluded from heaven). Despite the hideous complexity of the conflict, Julius’s Medici successors Leo X and Clement VII took up the baton with remarkable energy, broadening the scope of the Italian Wars and generating even more bloodshed, albeit with less military skill than earlier popes. Indeed, so terrible did things become that in 1527 the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V felt compelled to sack Rome itself and to imprison the terrified Clement.

Inflamed by the swirling confusion of almost constant military campaigns, the ambitions of the popes inclined them ever more strongly toward underhanded conspiracies. None, however, was fonder of nefarious schemes than Alexander VI, whom Machiavelli described in terms that were harsh even by his standards. In The Prince, he contended that the pontiff

never did anything, or thought of anything, other than deceiving men; and he always found victims for his deceptions. There never was a man capable of such convincing asseverations, or so ready to swear to the truth of something, who would honour his word less. None the less his deceptions always had the result he intended, because he was a past master in the art.

Indeed, Machiavelli observed that Alexander only managed to add anything to the papacy’s temporal power by ruining the descendants of those whom the Church had previously supported. It was, however, for his supposed mastery of the dark arts of poisoning and assassination that Alexander VI was most infamous. Although it is difficult to come by any conclusive proof, the pope’s final days provide perhaps the strongest testimony to his reputed fondness for such methods. On August 10, 1503, Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia attended a sumptuous luncheon given by the fabulously wealthy Cardinal Adriano Castellesi da Corneto. The cardinal had, however, heard a rumor that the pope was planning to have him killed using a poisoned jam, and to seize his money and possessions. Attempting to forestall the papal plot, Castellesi bribed the man who had been paid to administer the poison to give the deadly jam to Alexander and Cesare instead. Within two days, the pope was found to be mortally ill, and Cesare, too, fell sick. But something had gone horribly wrong. While Alexander was fighting for his life (he eventually died on August 18), Castellesi discovered he had inadvertently ingested some of the poison as well and suffered grievously for many days.

From the moment of its return to Rome, therefore, the papacy had become a fundamentally militaristic institution and had found itself obliged to indulge in the conspiracies and bloodshed that were an integral part of Renaissance warfare. But while this reflected a decidedly unchristian dimension to the Renaissance papacy, the popes displayed a remarkable absence of shame. If anything, they actually showed a certain pride in their violent ways. Just as they were willing to use patronage to endow the fraudulent Donation of Constantine with a veneer of respectability, so they used the visual arts to celebrate, glorify, and legitimate their military and conspiratorial excesses.

The pattern was set at an early stage. In the frescoes commemorating the life of Pius II in the Piccolomini Library in Siena, for example, Pinturicchio devoted an entire scene to showing Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini urging Pope Callixtus III to muster his armies for war. Similarly, Sixtus IV—who seems to have shown no desire whatsoever to atone either for his aggression or for his cultivation of violent conspiracies—began a papal trend for linking pontifical authority with the military achievements of the Roman emperors by commissioning commemorative medals conceived in imitation of ancient coins.

During the reign of Julius II, the exaltation of militarism and violence began to reach its zenith. Reveling in his reputation as the warrior pope, Julius never missed an opportunity to have himself portrayed as something of a soldierly superman. Vasari relates that once, when Michelangelo was completing a clay statue of the pope intended for display in Bologna, the two men struck up a conversation that revealed the true character of the pontiff’s self-image:

When [Julius] saw the right hand raised in an imperious gesture, he asked whether it was meant to be giving a blessing or a curse. Michelangelo replied that the figure was admonishing the people of Bologna to behave sensibly. Then he asked the pope whether he should place a book in the left hand, and to this his holiness replied: “Put a sword there. I know nothing about reading.”

The same sense of pride in all things military was evident in Julius’s efforts to use art to draw visual parallels between his pontificate and the rule of Julius Caesar. Following the lead of his kinsman Sixtus IV, Julius commissioned Giancristoforo Romano andCristoforo Caradosso to cast medals that explicitly identified him not only with the building of Saint Peter’s Basilica, but also with the construction of fortifications at Civitavecchia and the “protection” of Church lands in central Italy.

In a similar vein, Julius’s successors habitually commissioned depictions of historical victories as a means of celebrating or justifying their own actions or plans. One of the more striking examples is provided by the Battle of Ostia, one of the scenes painted byRaphael’s workshop in the Stanza dell’Incendio del Borgo in the Vatican. Commemorating the victory of Leo IV over Sicilian Saracens in 849, this scene is remarkable for the fact that Leo X had himself depicted in the role of his eponymous forebear. This associated the first Medici pope with a triumph from the distant past and served to provide a striking visual justification for Leo X’s military actions.

However brutal and savage the popes were after their return from Rome, and however many lives their ambitions claimed, their careful manipulation of artistic patronage glossed over their sins and claimed violence, murder, and conspiracy as laudable necessities for the greater glory of the Church. A patent lie, of course, but in a sense, that was what the papal Renaissance was all about.