lam vos revisam, iam iuvabit arbores
manu paterna consitas
videre, iam libebit in cubiculo
molles inire somnudos51—
“Now I shall see you again; now it will delight me to behold the trees planted by my father’s hand; and I shall rejoice to woo a little quiet sleep in my little room.” He complained of being a prisoner in the tumult of Rome, and envied a friend whom he pictured as hiding in a village retreat, reading “Socratic books,” and “giving no thought to the shallow honors conferred by the vulgar crowd.”52 He dreamt of strolling in green valleys with the Georgics of Virgil and the idyls of Theocritus as his companions. His most touching lines were written to his dying father:
Vixisti, genitor, bene ac beate,
nec pauper, neque dives, eruditus
satis, et satis eloquens, valente
semper corpore, mente sana, amicis
iucundus, pietate singulari.
Nunc lustris bene sexdecism peractis
ad divum proficisceris beatas
oras; i, genitor, tuumque natum
olympi cito siste tecum in arce.53
“You have lived, father, well and happily, neither poor nor rich, learned enough, eloquent enough, always of strong body and healthy mind; genial, and of unrivaled piety. Now, having completed eighty years, you move on to the blessed shores of the gods. Go, father, and soon take your son with you to the high seat of heaven.”
Marco Girolamo Vida proved a more pliable poet for Leo’s purposes. Born in Cremona, well schooled in Latin, he became so skilled in that language that he could write it gracefully even in didactic poems De arte poetica, or on the growth of silkworms, or on the game of chess. Leo was so pleased with this Sacchiae ludus that he sent for Vida, loaded him with emoluments, and begged him to crown the literature of the age with a Latin epic on the life of Christ. So Vida began his Christiad, which happy Leo died too soon to see. Clement VII continued Leo’s patronage of Vida, giving him a bishopric to feed on, but Clement too died before the publication of the epic (1535). Though a monk when he began it, and a bishop when he finished it, Vida could not refrain from those classical mythological allusions that were in the very air of Leo’s time, but may appear incongruous to those who are forgetting the mythology of Greece and Rome and are making Christianity a literary mythology in its turn. Vida speaks of God the Father as Superum Pater nimbipotens— “the cloud-compelling Father of the gods”—and as Regnator Olympi— “Ruler of Olympus”; he regularly describes Jesus as heros; he brings in gorgons, harpies, centaurs, and hydras to demand the death of Christ. So noble a theme deserved its own congenial poetic form rather than an adaptation of the Aeneid. The finest lines in Vida are addressed not to Christ in the Christiad but to Virgil in the De arte poetica:
O decus Italiae! lux o clarissima vatum!
te colimus, tibi serta damus, tibi thura, tibi aras;
et tibi rite sacrum semper dicemus honorem
carminibus memores. Salve, sanctissime vates!
Laudibus augeri tua gloria nil potis ultra,
et nostrae nil vocis eget; nos aspice praesens,
pectoribusque tuos castis infunde calores
adveniens, pater, atque animis tete insere nostris.54
Which may be hastily rendered:
O glory of Italy! O brightest light
Among the bards! We worship thee with wreaths,
And give thee frankincense and shrines. To thee
Of right we chant forever sacred paeans,
Recalling you with hymns. Hail, holiest bard!
Thy glory gains no increase from our praise,
Nor needs our voice. Come, look upon thy sons,
Pour thy warm spirit into our chaste hearts;
Come, father, place thine own self in our souls.
V. THE RECOVERY OF CLASSIC ART
The pagan spirit of the age was enhanced by the presence and salvaging of classic art. Poggio, Biondo, Pius II, and others had denounced the demolition of classic structures, but it persisted nevertheless, and probably increased as the influx of money enabled Rome to build new and larger edifices with the ruins of the old. Builders continued to throw ancient marbles into furnaces to produce lime. Paul II used the stone wall of the Colosseum for the palace of San Marco; Sixtus IV pulled down the temple of Hercules, and turned a Tiber bridge into cannon balls. The temple of the Sun provided the material for a chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore, for two public fountains, and for a papal palace in the Quirinal. Artists themselves were unconscious vandals; Michelangelo used one of the columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux to form a pedestal for the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, and Raphael took part of another column from the same temple to make a statue of Jonah. The material for the Sistine Chapel was quarried from the mausoleum of Hadrian. Practically all the marble used in raising St. Peter’s was taken from classic buildings; and to the same new shrine went the podium, steps, and pediment of the temple of Antoninus and Faustina, the triumphal arches of Fabius Maximus and Augustus, and the temple of Romulus, son of Maxentius. In just four years, 1546–9, the new builders destroyed or dismantled the temples of Castor and Pollux, Julius Caesar, and Augustus.55 The destroyers argued that there were enough pagan monuments left; that the neglected ruins took up valuable space and interfered with the orderly rebuilding of the city; and that the appropriated materials were in most cases used to erect Christian churches just as beautiful as the ruins, and presumably more pleasing to God. Meanwhile the imperceptible inhumations of time had buried the Forum and other historic sites under successive layers of dust, debris, and vegetation, so that the Forum was at places forty-three feet below the level of the surrounding city; it was largely abandoned to pasturage, and was called Campo Vaccino—the cow field. Time is the greatest vandal of them all.
The influx of artists and humanists retarded the rate of demolition, and generated movements for the preservation of the old monuments. Popes collected pagan sculpture and architectural fragments into the Vatican and Capitoline Museums. Poggio, the Medici, Pomponius Laetus, bankers, cardinals gathered into private collections whatever of worth they could acquire of the ancient remains. Many classic sculptures found their way into private palaces and gardens, and stayed there till the nineteenth century; hence such names as the Barberini Faun, the Ludovisi Throne, the Farnese Hercules.
All Rome was thrilled when excavators unearthed (1506), near the Baths of Titus, a new and complex sculptural group. Julius II sent Giuliano da Sangallo to examine it, and Michelangelo went along. As soon as Giuliano saw the statue he cried out, “This is the Laocoön mentioned by Pliny.” Julius bought it for the Belvedere Palace, paying the finder and his son a lifetime annuity of 600 ducats ($7,500?); so precious had classic sculptures become. Such rewards encouraged art prospectors. A year later one of these found another ancient group, Hercules with the Infant Telephus; soon afterward the Sleeping Ariadne was unearthed. The enthusiasm for recovering ancient manuscripts was now equaled by the eagerness to recover lost works of ancient art. Both of these sentiments were strong in Leo. It was in his pontificate that excavators found the so-called Antinoüs, and the statues of the Nile and the Tiber; and these were placed in the Vatican Museum. Leo bought back, whenever he could, the gems, cameos, and other dispersed works of art once possessed by the Medici, and placed these too in the Vatican. Supported by his patronage, and starting with the previous work of Fra Giocondo and others, Iacopo Mazochi and Francesco Albertini copied, through four years, all the inscriptions they could find on Roman remains, and published them as Epigrammata antiquae urbis Romae (1521)—an event in classical archeology.
In 1515 Leo appointed Raphael superintendent of antiquities. Helped by Mazochi, Andrea Fulvio, Fabio Calvo, Castiglione, and others, the young painter formed an ambitious archeological plan. In 1518 he addressed to Leo a letter adjuring the Pontiff to use the authority of the Church for the preservation of all classical remains. The words may be Castiglione’s, the passion has the ri
ng of Raphael:
When we reflect upon the divinity of those antique souls,… when we see the corpse of this noble city, mother and queen of the world, so miserably mangled,… how many pontiffs have permitted the ruin and defacement of the ancient temples, statues, arches and other buildings, the glory of their founders!… I dare say that all this new Rome that we now behold, however grand it is and beautiful and adorned with palaces, churches, and other edifices, has been cemented with lime made from the ancient marbles.…
The letter recalls how much destruction has taken place even during Raphael’s ten years in Rome. It surveys the history of architecture, denounces the crude barbarism of the Romanesque and Gothic styles (here called the Gothic and the Teutonic), and exalts the Greco-Roman orders as models of perfection and taste. Finally it proposes that a corps of experts should be formed, that Rome should be divided into the fourteen regions anciently designated by Augustus, and that in each of these regions a careful survey and record should be made of all classic remains. Raphael’s early death, soon followed by Leo’s, delayed for a long time this majestic enterprise.
The influence of the recovered relics was felt in every branch of art and thought. That influence worked on Brunellesco, Alberti, Bramante; now it became supreme, until in Palladio it completely and almost servilely copied ancient forms. Ghiberti and Donatello had tried to model classically. Michelangelo achieved the classic manner perfectly in his Brutus, but for the rest he remained his passionate and unclassic self. Literature transformed Christian theology into pagan mythology, and replaced paradise with Olympus. In painting the classic influence took the form of pagan subjects and—even in Christian themes—pagan nudes; Raphael himself, darling of the popes, painted Psyches, Venuses, and Cupids on palace walls; and classic designs and arabesques mounted the pillars and ran along the cornices and friezes of a thousand buildings in Rome.
The classical triumph expressed itself most clearly in the new St. Peter’s. Leo kept Bramante as “master of the works” there as long as possible; but the old architect was crippled with gout, and Fra Giocondo was commissioned to help him design; however, Fra Giocondo was ten years older than Bramante, who was seventy. In January, 1514, Leo appointed Giuliano da Sangallo, also seventy, to direct the operations. Bramante, on his deathbed, urged the Pope to confide the enterprise to a younger man, specifically, Raphael. Leo compromised; in August, 1514, he made the young Raphael and the old Fra Giocondo comasters of the work. For a time Raphael worked enthusiastically in his uncongenial function as an architect; henceforth, he said, he would live nowhere but in Rome, and this “from love for the building of St. Peter’s… the greatest building that man has ever yet seen.” He continues, with characteristic modesty:
The cost will amount to a million gold ducats; the Pope has ordered 60,000 for the works. He thinks of nothing else. He has associated me with an experienced monk who has passed his eightieth year. The Pope sees that the monk cannot live much longer, and His Holiness has therefore determined that I should benefit by the instructions of this distinguished craftsman, and attain to greater proficiency in the art of architecture, of the beauties of which the monk has recondite knowledge…. The Pope gives us audience every day, and keeps us long in conversation on the subject of the building.56
Fra Giocondo died July 1, 1515; and on the same day Giuliano da Sangallo withdrew from the group of designers. Raphael, left supreme, undertook to replace Bramante’s ground plan with a Latin cross, of unequal arms, and sketched a cupola that Antonio da Sangallo (nephew of Giuliano) proved too heavy for its supporting pillars. In 1517 Antonio was appointed coarchitect with Raphael. Disputes arose now at every step, and Raphael, burdened with pictorial engagements, lost interest in the undertaking. Meanwhile Leo ran short of funds, tried to raise more by issuing indulgences, and as a result found a German Reformation on his hands (1517). St. Peter’s made no substantial progress until Michelangelo was put in charge of it in 1546.
VI. MICHELANGELO AND LEO X
Julius II had left funds to his executors for the completion, on a smaller scale, of the tomb that Michelangelo had designed for him. The artist worked at this task through the first three years of Leo’s pontificate, and received from the executors, in those years, 6100 ducats ($76,250?). Most of what remains of the monument was probably produced in this period, along with the Christ Risen of Santa Maria sopra Minerva—a handsome naked athlete whom later taste clothed in a loincloth of bronze. A letter written by Michelangelo in May, 1518, tells how Signorelli came to his studio and borrowed eighty giulii ($800?), which he never returned, and adds: “He found me working on a marble statue four cubits in height, which has the hands bound behind the back.”57 This was presumably one of the Prigioni or Captivi intended to represent the cities or arts made captive by the warrior Pope. A statue in the Louvre fits the description: a muscular figure wearing only a loincloth, and with arms so tightly bound at the back that the cords eat into the flesh. Near it is a finer Captive, naked except for a narrow band about the breast; here the musculature is not exaggerated; the body is a symphony of health and beauty; this is Greek perfection. Four unfinished Schiavi or Slaves in the Florence Academy were apparently intended as caryatids to support the superstructure of the tomb. The aborted tomb is now in Julius’ church of San Pietro in Vincoli: a magnificent massive throne, pillars elegantly carved, and a seated Moses —an ill-proportioned monster of beard and horns and wrathful brow, holding the Tables of the Law. If we choose to believe an improbable story in Vasari, Jews could be seen on any Saturday entering the Christian church “to worship this figure, not as a work of the human hand, but as something divine.”58 On Moses’ left is a Leah, on his right a splendid Rachel— statues that Michael called “the Active and the Contemplative Life.” The remaining figures of the tomb were indifferently carved by his aides: above the Moses a Madonna, and at her feet the half-recumbent effigy of Julius II, crowned with the papal tiara. The whole monument is a torso, the painfully interrupted work of scattered years from 1506 to 1545, confused, enormous, incongruous, and absurd.
While these figures were being chiseled out, Leo—perhaps during a stay in Florence—conceived the idea of finishing the church of San Lorenzo there. This was the shrine of the Medici, containing the tombs of Cosimo, Lorenzo, and many other members of the family. Brunellesco had built the church, but had left the façade unfinished. Leo asked Raphael, Giuliano da Sangallo, Baccio d’Agnolo, Andrea and Iacopo Sansovino to submit plans for completing the front. Michelangelo, apparently of his own accord, sent in a plan of his own, which Leo accepted as the best; hence the Pope cannot be blamed, as so many have blamed him, for diverting Michael from Julius’ tomb. Leo sent him to Florence, whence he went to Carrara to quarry tons of marble. Back in Florence, he hired assistants for the work, quarreled with them, sent them packing, and brooded inactively in his uncongenial role as architect. Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, Leo’s cousin, appropriated some of the idle marble for work on the cathedral; Michael fumed, but still dallied. At last (1520) Leo freed him from the contract, and required no accounting of the funds that had been advanced to the artist. When Sebastiano del Piombo asked the Pope to give Angelo further assignments, Leo excused himself. He recognized Michelangelo’s supremacy in art, but, he said, “he is an alarming man, as you yourself see, and there is no getting on with him.” Sebastiano reported the conversation to his friend, adding: “I told His Holiness that your alarming ways did no man any harm, and that it was only your devotion to the great work to which you have given yourself that made you seem terrible to others.”59
What was this famous terribilità? It was, first of all, energy, a wild consuming force that tortured Michelangelo’s body, but sustained it, for eighty-nine years; and second, a power of will that kept that energy harnessed and directed to one purpose—art—ignoring almost everything else. Now energy directed by a unifying will is almost the definition of genius. The energy that looked upon formless stone as a challenge, and clawed and hammered an
d chiseled it con furia till it took on a revealing significance, was the same force that swept angrily over the distracting trivialities of life, took no thought of clothing or cleanliness or superficial courtesies, and advanced to its end, if not blindly yet with blinders, over broken promises, broken friendships, broken health, at last over a broken spirit, leaving the body and mind shattered, but the work done—the greatest painting, the greatest sculpture, and some of the greatest architecture, of the time. “If God assist me,” he said, “I shall produce the finest thing that Italy has ever seen.”60
He was the least prepossessing figure in an age brilliant with proud beauty of person and splendor of dress. Middle height, broad shoulders, slim frame, large head, high brow, ears protruding beyond the cheeks, temples bulging out beyond the ears, drawn and somber face, crushed nose, sharp, small eyes, grizzly hair and beard—this was Michelangelo in his prime. He wore old clothing, and clung to it till it became almost part of his flesh; and he seems to have obeyed half of his father’s advice: “See that you do not wash. Have yourself rubbed down, but do not wash.”61 Though rich, he lived like a poor man, not only frugally but penuriously. He ate whatever he found at hand, sometimes dining on a crust of bread. At Bologna he and his three workmen occupied one room, slept in one bed. “While he was in full vigor,” says Condivi, “he usually went to bed with his clothes on, even to the tall boots, which he has always worn because of a chronic tendency to cramp.… At certain seasons he has kept these boots on for such a length of time that when he drew them off, the skin came away together with the leather.”62 As Vasari puts it, “he had no mind to undress merely that he might have to dress again.”63