Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (10 page)

Despite his advanced age — he was sixty years old when he became pope — Julius II was a man of enormous energy. He was determined not only to redraw the map of political power in Italy, but also to transform the physical fabric of the Holy City. Despite its elevated status as the capital of western Christendom, early sixteenth-century Rome was little more than a series of linked villages clustered around the banks of the Tiber. The fabled seven hills of the city of the Caesars had become grassy wooded slopes, where sheep and cattle grazed amongst the overgrown ruins of temple, forum and amphitheatre. The gap-toothed hulk of the Colosseum towered over all, memorial to an empire long since extinct.

The city was derelict because of the decline that it had suffered during the Middle Ages. When Julius was elected to the papacy, Rome had only been home to the popes for a little more than eighty years. Martin V, whose election in 1417 had ended the Great Schism, had returned there in 1420. According to Platina, the fifteenth-century author of
The Lives of the Popes
, ‘he found it so dilapidated that it bore hardly any resemblance to a city’.
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Intervening popes had done what they could to build and rebuild the city’s fortifications, streets, squares and fountains. Julius II’s own uncle, Sixtus IV, whose pontificate began in 1471 and ended in 1484, had established the Vatican Library and rebuilt the old Palatine Chapel of Nicholas III – which henceforth, in Sixtus’s memory, would be called the Sistine Chapel. Before that, a coherent vision of what the city might one day become had been set forth in a speech delivered in 1455 from his deathbed by Pope Nicholas V to his cardinals: ‘to create solid and stable convictions in the minds of the uncultured masses, there must be something that appeals to the eye: a popular faith, sustained only in 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 like a tradition from one generation to another, and all the world would accept and revere it.’
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Julius II did more than any other Renaissance pope to turn this dream, a blueprint for the future magnificence of papal Rome, into reality. During his pontificate, the Vatican Palace was renovated and its new apartments decorated by Raphael with paintings that simultaneously celebrated the progress of human learning and the enlightened teachings of the Church. The Cortile del Belvedere was begun. New palaces were built, streets were widened and improved. Julius founded the Vatican museum and established Rome’s most significant collection of the art of antiquity. He laid the foundation stone for the new St Peter’s. He commanded his principal architect, Bramante, to improve access to the city for pilgrims by straightening the Via Lungara and building a parallel street on the other side of the Tiber — the Via Giulia, the longest straight road since Roman times.

He did all this, but at a cost. It was partly to raise the revenues for his many grand projects in Rome that Julius went to war so often. The territories he conquered became an important source of income, but the funds at his disposal could never match the scale of his ambition, so he resorted to other methods too. Simony and the traffic in indulgences — papally sanctioned pardons for sin, hawked across Europe by the agents of Rome — thrived under his pontificate. In the eyes of the pope and his advisers, the ends justified the means. Giles of Viterbo, favourite of Julius II and vicar-general of the Augustinian order, had a messianic vision of Rome becoming the new Jerusalem as the end of the world approached. Giles enthusiastically endorsed the sale of indulgences, never imagining the scale of the rebellion against the Church that this would soon inspire in Germany.
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In 1517, only four years after Julius II’s death, Martin Luther composed his ninety-five theses objecting to the sale of indulgences, precipitating the Reformation.

Julius II made some reforms to the monastic orders and dispatched missionaries to America, India, Ethiopia and the Congo. But he was destined to be remembered as a pope whose temporal policy had eclipsed his spiritual office. His pontificate culminated in a tragic paradox. In trying to realise the most grandiose dream of the post-Schismatic papacy, he had only helped to shatter it for ever. Although he had striven with all his might to consolidate the papal states and assert the immutable authority of the one true Church, his unscrupulous methods had fanned the embers of the Reformation that would sunder the Church and transform the very landscape of European Christianity into a war zone.
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In 1523, looking back at the pope’s achievements from a post-Reformation perspective, Erasmus published a bitterly comic satire entitled
Julius Exclusus
. It tells the story of Julius meeting St Peter at the entrance to heaven and finding the gate locked against him. The pope protests, listing his military victories and citing the magnificence he has brought to Rome, but the saint remains adamant that he will not enter: ‘You are a great builder: build yourself a new paradise.’
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From the moment of his election, it had been inevitable that the ‘great builder’ would call on the services of Michelangelo. Rome already contained an impressive advertisement of the artist’s skills, in the shape of the
Pietà
, and stories about the marble colossus that he had created in Florence must soon have reached the pope’s ears. Here, plainly, was an artist who could work on the scale demanded by Julius II’s own enormous ambition.

The call came in the spring of 1505, when the pope summoned Michelangelo to Rome. Well aware that papal patronage would open a new world of opportunities for him, the artist was happy to obey. According to Condivi, the pope spent several months wondering how to make use of Michelangelo’s gifts before finally conceiving the idea of commissioning him to create his own tomb.

Michelangelo proposed a design of stunning scale and complexity, which Condivi describes in considerable detail: ‘to give some idea of it, I will say briefly that this tomb was to have had four faces: two were to have been eighteen
braccia
long to serve as the sides, and two of twelve
braccia
as head and foot, so that it came to a square and a half. All around the exterior there were niches for statues . . .’
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There were to be more than forty of these statues. Some were to depict the liberal arts as slaves, indicating that with the death of Julius painting, architecture and sculpture and ‘all the artistic virtues’ had been reduced to a state of feeble passivity. Others were to represent angels, both sad and happy, to lament the passing of Julius and to rejoice at his entry into heaven. There was even to be a second monument within the monument, a great tomb resembling a temple to house the sarcophagus containing the pope’s remains.

So began what Michelangelo would, in later life, call ‘the tragedy of the tomb’. It was a project on which he embarked with the highest hopes, but that was destined to be beset by a thousand interruptions and delays — one that would preoccupy him not only for years, but for decades of his life, and that would only be realised, belatedly and long after Julius II’s death, in a much reduced form. It is hard, however, to share Michelangelo’s belief that the failure of the project, in the form that he first planned it, amounted to a tragedy.

The Louvre in Paris contains certain figures of the slaves, which the artist brought to varying states of completion, of an undeniable pathos and beauty. But the fact remains that the artist’s initial proposal was a megalomaniac fantasy, an obscene monument to ego, pride and power. The oppressive object described by Condivi would have been no mere tomb, but a self-sufficient building, combining the functions of chapel and sarcophagus. It would have towered fifty feet in the air and would have occupied an area of eight hundred square feet. Its exterior would have been decorated with a multitude of niches, each containing a life-size statue, while, as Condivi says, four more statues, each one a giant, would have crowned its marble summit. One of these was actually carved by Michelangelo, the frowning figure of
Moses
that dominates the much reduced memorial that was eventually erected in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. It is a statue that still evokes the chilling grandeur of Michelangelo’s first idea for the tomb. Sigmund Freud was both fascinated and repelled by the work, and when he lived in Rome returned to it again and again, revelling masochistically in what he described as its grandiose repudiation of his merely mortal condition.

At a conservative estimate it would have taken Michelangelo between forty and fifty years to carve the monument’s statues alone. Yet such was the pope’s instant enthusiasm for the proposal that he allowed himself to be carried away by the artist’s Herculean confidence in his own abilities. Michelangelo was dispatched straight away to Carrara, with an advance of a thousand papal ducats, to quarry the immense amount of marble required for the project. Condivi records that he stayed in the mountains for more than eight months, with only two helpers and a horse for company. He also tells a story that vividly conveys Michelangelo’s frenetic state of mind at the time: ‘One day while there, he was looking at the landscape, and he was seized with a wish to carve, out of a mountain overlooking the sea, a colossus which would be visible from afar to seafarers.’
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Once the quarrying was finished, Michelangelo returned to Rome, having arranged for the marble to be transported there by boat. It was unloaded at the port of Ripa Grande, then taken to the Piazza San Pietro, behind the church of Santa Caterina, near the artist’s own lodgings. ‘So great was the quantity of the blocks of marble,’ says Condivi, ‘that, when they were spread out in the piazza, they made other people marvel and rejoiced the pope, who conferred such great and boundless favours on Michelangelo that, when he had begun to work, he would go more and more often all the way to his house to see him, conversing with him there about the tomb and other matters no differently than he would have done with his own brother.’
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The brotherly relationship soon turned sour. In the spring of 1506 Julius II cancelled the commission for the tomb. His reasons for doing so are impossible to establish with absolute certainty. Perhaps he simply thought better of it. Even a man of his pride and ambition may have baulked, on sober reflection, at the idea of such an immense and permanent magnification of his own hubris. But other priorities had also come to the fore. He was involved in costly military campaigns and he had committed himself to a huge new architectural project, the rebuilding of St Peter’s itself.

Michelangelo always believed that Bramante, Julius II’s favourite architect, had played a devious part in the whole affair. In Michelangelo’s version of the story, it was Bramante who had manipulated the pope into redirecting his energies towards the new St Peter’s; and it was Bramante, acting out of naked selfinterest, who had persuaded the pope that his money would be better spent on architecture than on the myriad sculptures of his multi-storied tomb. At his most paranoid, Michelangelo even believed that Bramante seeded the idea that he would be best employed painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling — part of a dastardly plot to make a fool of him by exposing his inadequacies as a painter of frescoes.

The truth is that Michelangelo himself may have been indirectly responsible for the pope’s change of heart. The tomb that he had designed for Julius II was intended, from the outset, to be housed in the old basilica of St Peter’s. But the plan for the monument was so grandiose that it could never have been accommodated within the relatively modest dimensions of that building. The pope may well have decided to enlarge St Peter’s, in the first place, to make room for his own memorial — and then have grown so absorbed by Bramante’s plan for the new building, and so aware of the enormous costs that it would involve, that he decided to shelve the tomb indefinitely.

Michelangelo only discovered what was going on by eavesdropping on one of the pope’s conversations at mealtime. He told the story in a letter to his friend, the Florentine architect Giuliano da Sangallo. ‘At table on Holy Saturday,’ he wrote, ‘I heard the pope say to a jeweller and to the master of ceremonies, to whom he was talking, that he did not wish to spend one
baiocco
more either on small stones or large ones.’
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Michelangelo was alarmed at the remark, which he correctly took to imply that Julius II was no longer prepared to spend large sums on the marble for his tomb. He was also anxious because he had just parted with a considerable amount of his own money to pay off some of the workmen who had brought the marble from Carrara, in the expectation that he would be promptly reimbursed by the papal treasury. During the next few days, his worst fears were confirmed. Time after time he requested an audience with Julius II to settle the matter of his expenses, but on each occasion he was refused entry by the papal equerry. Again and again came the same answer: ‘Forgive me, but I have orders not to admit you.’ Finally, concluding that all was lost — that he would never get his money, that he had wasted eight months in the mountains of Carrara, that the project to which he had hoped to devote his life had been summarily terminated — the artist flew into a rage.