The Renaissance
Alessandro de’ Medici became Duke of Florence, and disgraced his family by his rapacity and cruelty. Hundreds of those who had fought for the Republic were tortured, exiled, or slain. Fra Benedetto was sent to Clement, who ordered him imprisoned in Sant’ Angelo; there, said an uncertain report, the monk was starved to death.52 The Signory was disbanded; the Palazzo della Signoria now began to be called Palazzo Vecchio; and the great eleven-ton bell, La Vacca—the Cow—that had from the lovely tower called so many generations to parlamento, was taken down and broken to pieces, “in order,” said a contemporary diarist, “that we should no more hear the sweet sound of liberty.”53
IX. CLEMENT VII AND THE ARTS
The Pope’s treatment of Florence confirmed the degeneration of the Medici; his efforts to restore Rome revealed a spark of the administrative genius and esthetic appreciation that had made the family great. Sebastiano del Piombo, who had portrayed him in maturity, painted him now as an old man, somber, deep-eyed, white-bearded, giving benediction; apparently suffering had chastened and in some measure strengthened him. He took vigorous action to protect Italy from the Turkish fleets that now commanded the Eastern Mediterranean; he fortified Ancona, Ascoli, and Fano, and paid the costs by persuading the consistory of June 21, 1532—over the opposition of the cardinals—to impose a levy of fifty per cent upon the incomes of the Italian clergy, including the cardinals.54 Partly by selling ecclesiastical offices, he raised funds to rebuild the property of the Church, to restore the University of Rome, and to resume the patronage of scholarship and art. He took measures to ensure a proper supply of grain despite the raids of Barbary pirates upon shipping near Sicily. In a remarkably short time Rome was functioning again as the capital of the Western world.
The city was still rich in artists. Caradosso had come from Milan, Cellini from Florence, to raise the art of the goldsmith to its Renaissance zenith; they and many more were kept busy making gold roses and swords of honor as papal gifts, vessels for the altars, silver staffs for Church authorities and processions, seals for cardinals, tiaras and rings for the popes. Valerio Belli of Vicenza made for Clement a magnificent casket of rock crystal, engraved with scenes from the life of Christ. This, now one of the most precious objects in the Pitti Palace, was presented to Francis I at the marriage of his son to Catherine de’ Medici.
The decoration of the Vatican stanze had been resumed in 1526. The greatest painting of Clement’s pontificate was done in the Hall of Constantine: there Giulio Romano pictured The Apparition of the Cross and The Battle of the Milvian Bridge; Francesco Penni painted The Baptism of Constantine, and Raffaello del Colle portrayed Rome Presented to Pope Sylvester by Constantine.
After Michelangelo—and now that Giulio Romano had migrated to Mantua—the ablest painter in Rome was Sebastiano Luciano, who acquired his sobriquet del Piombo when he was appointed keeper and designer of the papal seals (1531). Born in Venice (c. 1485), he had the luck to be taught by Gian Bellini, Giorgione, and Cima. One of his earliest and finest pictures—The Three Ages of Ages—shows him as a delectable youth between two famous foreign composers then in Venice—Jacob Obrecht and Philippe Verdelot. For the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo he painted —or finished for Giorgione—a vivid representation of that saint in the fever of composition; and about the same time (1510) he copied Giorgione’s most voluptuous manner in a Venus and Adonis whose generous women seem to belong to a golden age before the birth of sin. Probably in Venice also Sebastiano painted his renowned Portrait of a Lady, long ascribed to Raphael as La Fornarina.
In 1511 Agostino Chigi invited Sebastiano to come to Rome and help adorn the Villa Chigi. There the young artist met Raphael, and for a time imitated his style of pagan ornament; in return he taught Raphael the Venetian secrets of warm coloring. Soon Sebastian became a devoted friend of Michelangelo, imbibed the Titan’s muscular conception of man, and announced the aim of wedding Venetian color to Michelangelesque design. He had a chance to do this when Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici asked him for a picture. Sebastiano chose as his subject The Raising of Lazarus, in deliberate competition with the Transfiguration that Raphael was painting at the time (1518). Critics did not unanimously contradict his judgment that he had equaled Leo’s favorite.
He might have progressed further had he not been too readily content with his excellence. A passion for leisure kept him this side of genius. He was a jovial fellow who could not see why one should wear himself out either for superfluous gold or for such a will-o’-the-wisp as posthumous fame. After he had received his sinecure in the Vatican from his patron made pope, he confined himself for the most part to portraits, in which few painters have surpassed him.
Baldassare Peruzzi was more ambitious, and made his sonorous name ring for a generation across the mountains of Italy. He was the son of a weaver. (Artists are mostly of lowly stock: the middle classes seek utility first, hoping to have time for beauty in their senility; aristocrats, though they nourish art, prefer the art of life to the life of art.) Born in Siena (1481), Baldassare learned painting under Sodoma and Pinturicchio, and soon went off to Rome. Apparently it was he who painted the ceiling of the Stanza d’Eliodoro in the Vatican, and Raphael thought the work good enough to leave much of it unchanged. Meanwhile, like Bramante, he fell in love with the classic ruins, measured the ground plans of the ancient temples and palaces, and studied the diverse forms and arrangements of columns and capitals. He became a specialist in the application of perspective to architecture.
When Agostino Chigi decided to build the Villa Chigi, Peruzzi was invited to design it (1508). The banker was pleased with the result—the stately crowning of a Renaissance façade with classic moldings and cornices; and finding that Peruzzi could also paint, he gave the young artist freedom to decorate several rooms of the interior in competition with Sebastiano del Piombo and Raphael. In the entrance hall and the loggia Baldassare pictured Venus combing her hair, Leda and her swan, Europa and her bull, Danaë and her golden shower, Ganymede and his eagle, and other scenes calculated to raise the tired moneylender from the prose of his days to the poetry of his dreams. Peruzzi set off his frescoes with borders painted in such tricks of perspective that Titian thought them to be veritable reliefs in stone.55 In the hall of the upper floor Baldassare made illusory architecture with his brush: cornices sustained by pictured caryatids, friezes supported by pictured pilasters, mimic windows opening upon pictured fields. Peruzzi had fallen in love with architecture, and made painting its handmaid, obeying all the builder’s rules, but spiritless. Let us make an exception here for the Biblical scenes that he painted in a semidome of Santa Maria della Pace (1517), where Raphael had painted sibyls three years before. Baldassare’s frescoes stood the comparison well, for these are his finest paintings, while Raphael’s there were not his best.
Leo X must have been impressed by Peruzzi’s versatility, for he appointed him to succeed Raphael as chief architect at St. Peter’s (1520), and engaged him to paint the scenery for Bibbiena’s comedy, La Calandra (1521). All that remains of Peruzzi’s work on San Pietro is the ground plan that he drew; Symonds pronounced it “by far the most beautiful and interesting of those laid down for St. Peter’s.”56 Leo’s death, and the accession of a pope allergic to art, drove Peruzzi back to Siena, then to Bologna. There he designed the lovely Palazzo Albergati, and made a model for the never finished façade of San Petronio. He hurried back to Rome when Clement VII reopened the paradise of the arts, and resumed his work at St. Peter’s. He was still there when the imperial mob sacked Rome. He suffered special tribulations, says Vasari, because “he was grave and noble of aspect, and they thought him some great prelate in disguise.” They held him for a lordly ransom; but when he proved his lowly status by painting a masterly portrait, they contented themselves with taking from him all but the shirt on his back, and let him go. He made his way to Siena, and arrived there almost naked. The Sienese government, proud to recapture its prodigal son, engaged him to design fortifications; and the church of
Fontegiusta commissioned him to paint a mural which was acclaimed by generous critics as his chef-d’oeuvre—a Sibyl announcing to a frightened Augustus the coming birth of Christ.
But Peruzzi’s greatest success was the Palazzo Massimi delle Colonne, which he designed on his return to Rome (1530). The Massimi claimed descent, and derived their name, from Fabius Maximus, who had earned immortality by idling; they took their surname from the columned porch of their previous dwelling, which had been destroyed in the sack. It was Peruzzi’s good fortune that the curved irregularity of the site forbade the usual dreary rectangular plan. He chose an oval form, with a Renaissance façade and a Doric portico; and while keeping the exterior simple, he gave the interior all the ornament and splendor of a Roman palace of Imperial days, with Greek refinements of proportion and decoration.
Despite his multiform ability Peruzzi died poor, not having had the heart to haggle with popes, cardinals, and bankers for fees commensurate with his skill. When Pope Paul III heard that he was dying he bethought himself that only Peruzzi and Michelangelo remained to raise St. Peter’s from walls to dome. He sent the artist a hundred crowns ($1250?). Baldassare thanked him, and died nevertheless, at the age of fifty-four (1535). Vasari, after suggesting that a rival had poisoned him, relates that “all the painters, sculptors, and architects in Rome followed his body to the grave.”
X. MICHELANGELO AND CLEMENT VII: 1520–34
It is one of the credits in Clement’s account that through all his own misfortunes he bore with kindly patience the moods and revolts of Michelangelo, plied him with commissions, and accorded him all the privileges of genius. “When Buonarroti comes to see me,” he said, “I always take a seat and bid him be seated, feeling sure that he will do so without leave.”57 Even before becoming pope he proposed (1519) what proved to be the artist’s culminating sculptural assignment: to add to the church of San Lorenzo in Florence a “New Sacristy” as a mausoleum for famous Medici, to design their tombs, and to adorn these with appropriate statuary. Confident in the Titan’s versatility, Clement also asked him to draw up architectural plans for the Laurentian Library, strong and spacious enough to safely house the literary collections of the Medici family. The stately stairway and pillared vestibule of this Biblioteca Laurenziana were completed (1526–7) under Angelo’s supervision; the remainder of the building was later put up by Vasari and others from Buonarroti’s designs.
The Nuova Sagrestia was hardly an architectural masterpiece. It was planned as a simple quadrangle, divided with pilasters and surmounted by a modest dome; its prime function was to receive statuary in the recesses left in the walls. This “Medici Chapel” was finished in 1524; and in 1525 Angelo began work on the tombs. Clement wrote to him in the latter year a gently impatient letter:
Thou knowest that popes have no long life; and we cannot yearn more than we do to behold the chapel with the tombs of our kinsmen, or at any rate to hear that it is finished. And likewise as regards the Library. Wherefore we recommend both to thy diligence. Meanwhile we will betake us (in accord with your words) to a wholesome patience, praying God that He may put it into thy heart to push the whole enterprise forward together. Fear not that either commissions or rewards shall fail thee while we live. Farewell, with God’s blessing and ours.—Giulio.58
There were to be six tombs: for Lorenzo the Magnificent, his assassinated brother Giuliano, Leo X, Clement VII, the younger Giuliano “too good to govern a state” (d. 1516), and the younger Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino (d. 1519). Only the tombs of the last two were completed, and even these not quite. Nevertheless they are the apogee of Renaissance sculpture, as the Sistine Chapel is the summit of Renaissance painting, and St. Peter’s dome is the architectural pinnacle of the Renaissance. The tombs show the dead men in the prime of life, with no attempt to reproduce their real forms or features: Giuliano in the garb of a Roman commander, Lorenzo as il Penseroso the thinker. When some incautious observer remarked this lack of realism, Michelangelo answered with words that revealed his sublime confidence in his artistic immortality: “Who will care, a thousand years hence, whether these are their features or not?”59 Reclining on the sarcophagus of Giuliano are two nude figures: at the right a man allegedly symbolizing Day, at the left a woman supposedly representing Night. Similar recumbent figures on the tomb of Lorenzo have been named Twilight and Dawn. These interpretations are hypothetical, perhaps fanciful; probably the sculptor’s aim was merely to carve again his secret fetish, the human body, in all the splendor of male strength and all the comely contours of the female form. As usual, he succeeded better with the male; the unfinished figure of Twilight, slowly surrendering an active and exhausting day to night, matches the noblest gods of the Parthenon.
War intervened upon art. When Rome fell to the Landsknechte (1527), Clement could no longer play patron, and Michelangelo’s papal pension of fifty crowns ($625) a month ceased. Meanwhile Florence enjoyed two years of republican liberty. When Clement made up with Charles, and a German-Spanish army was despatched to overthrow the republic and reinstall the Medici, Florence appointed Angelo (April 6, 1529) to a Committee of Nine—Nove di Milizia—for the defense of the city. The Medicean artist became, by the hazard of circumstance, the anti-Medicean engineer feverishly engaged in designing and building forts and walls.
But as these works proceeded, Michelangelo became more and more convinced that the city could not be successfully defended. What single town, divided as Florence then was in heart and loyalties, could withstand the artillery and excommunications of Empire and papacy combined? On September 21, 1529, in a mood of panic, he fled from Florence, hoping to escape to France and its amiable King. Finding his way blocked by German-held terrain, he took temporary refuge in Ferrara, then in Venice. Thence he sent a message to his friend Battista della Palla, art agent of Francis I in Florence: Would he join Angelo in flight to France?60 Battista refused to leave the post that had been assigned to him in the defense of the city; instead he wrote to Angelo a stirring appeal to return to his duty, warning him that otherwise the government would confiscate his property, leaving his impecunious relatives destitute. About November 20 the artist was back at his work on the Florentine fortifications.
According to Vasari he found time, even in those excited months, to continue work secretly on the tombs of the Medici, and also to paint, for Alfonso of Ferrara, the least characteristic of his works, Leda and the Swan. It was a strange product for a man so slightly sexual and so generally puritan; and perhaps it came from a temporarily disordered mind. It showed the swan copulating with Leda. Alfonso was something of a lecher between wars, but apparently he had not chosen the subject. The messenger whom he sent to secure the promised work expressed disappointment when he saw it, saying, “This is a mere trifle,” and made no effort to secure it for the Duke. Angelo gave the picture to his servant Antonio Mini, who took it with him to France, where it passed into the collection of the omnivorous Francis I. It remained at Fontainebleau until the reign of Louis XIII, when a high official ordered it destroyed because of its indecency. How far this order was carried out, and what was the later history of this original, is unknown. A copy remains in the vaults of the London National Gallery.61
When Florence fell to the returning Medici, Battista della Palla and other republican leaders were put to death. Michelangelo hid himself for two months in the house of a friend, expecting at any moment a like fate. But Clement thought him worth more alive than dead. The Pope wrote to his ruling relatives in Florence bidding them seek out the artist, treat him with courtesy, and offer him the renewal of his pension if he would resume work on the tombs. Michael agreed. But again, as with the mausoleum of Julius, the mind of pontiff and artist had conceived more than the hand could execute, and the Pope could not live long enough to see the enterprise through. When Clement died (1534) Michelangelo, fearful that Alessandro de’ Medici would do him harm now that his protector was gone, took the first opportunity to slip off to Rome.
A profound and sombe
r sadness marks the tombs, and the solemn Madonna de’ Medici that Angelo also carved for the Sacristy. Historians fond of democracy (and exaggerating its scope in Florence) have generally assumed that the recumbent figures symbolize a city mourning its forced surrender to tyranny. But this interpretation is probably fanciful: after all, they had been designed while the Medici ruled Florence reasonably well; they had been carved for a Medici Pope unfailingly kind to Angelo, and by an artist indebted to Medici from his youth; it is not clear that he intended to condemn the family whose tombs he was preparing; and his representations of Giuliano and Lorenzo have nothing derogatory about them. No, these figures express something deeper than the love of liberty by the rich few to rule the poor unhindered by a Medici house usually popular with the people. They express rather Michelangelo’s weariness with life, the fatigue of a man all nerves and titanic uncompassable dreams, who found himself buffeted by a thousand tribulations, harassed in almost every enterprise by the dull recalcitrance of matter, the obtuseness of power, and the called-in loans of borrowed time. Angelo had enjoyed but few of life’s delights: he had no friends on a par with his mind; woman seemed to him only a smooth anatomy threatening peace; and even his most majestic triumphs were the issue of exhausting toil and pain, the unfinishable symphonies of melancholy meditation and inescapable defeat.