The Flowering of the Renaissance

This, however, was not the only grievance to arise from Julius’s temporal and spiritual roles. Shortly after the Pope’s capture of Mirandola five of his cardinals—two Spaniards and three Frenchmen—rode away to join the French king. The fruits of their defection appeared on 28 May 1511, when Julius found a summons affixed to the door of the church of S. Francesco, near his lodgings in Rimini. Delegates of the German Emperor and the most Christian King summoned a Council of the Church, to be held on 1 September, an action which had become necessary, they said, in order to comply with the decree Frequens published by the Council of Constance in 1417, and neglected by the Pope, who had also failed to keep the solemn promise made in conclave.

The decree Frequens had indeed laid down that a Council should be held every ten years; there had been none since 1439. And Julius had indeed sworn to hold a Council by 1505; it was now 1511. Why had none been held? Why did the summons plunge Julius into gloom? Why was a Council anathema to him, as it had been to all Popes for seventy years? The answer lay in another decree, Sacrosancta, passed by that same Council of Constance, to the effect that the General Council, representing as it did all Christendom, derived its authority directly from Christ, hence everyone, the Pope included, was bound to obey it in all that concerns the faith.

This decree had given rise to two conflicting interpretations, both with honourable antecedents as far back as the twelfth century. One held that a Council was ‘above’ a Pope, while the other—the Curia’s view—argued that Sacrosancta had possessed merely an interim validity, from 1415 to 1417, when there had been either a doubtful Pope or no Pope at all.

The first interpretation was held by many men of goodwill who genuinely wished to reform the Church and believed that such reform could be achieved only by limiting the Pope’s absolute power. Unfortunately for the reformers, the same interpretation was also upheld by any and every prince at odds or at war with Rome, and their lawyers used it as ammunition to bombard the Popes politically. The political conciliarists outnumbered the genuine conciliarists and had, by their unscrupulousness, ruined the latter’s case with Rome. Indeed, while French lawyers were even now evolving a view of the Church little short of Gallicanism, the Papacy, in self-defence, had been hardening interpretation of Sacrosancta to the point where Pius II had actually excommunicated in advance anyone who dared to call a Council.

For two months Julius pondered how to deal with the summons. He thought of declaring the throne of France vacant and transferring it to Henry VIII of England, but this plan never went beyond the draft stage. Finally he decided on a much more effective measure. He himself summoned a Council, one he believed he could control, to assemble the following spring in Rome.

The pro-French cardinals duly met in November, at Pisa, supported by a special issue of French coins inscribed Perdam Babylonis nomen and, as expected, they declared Julius suspended. But their assembly was now no more than an ‘anti-Council’, and when Emperor Maximilian withdrew his support from it, no one took its activities seriously, since it was obviously just an instrument of French policy.

Julius’s Council, which assembled in the Lateran in April 1512, was attended mainly by Italian bishops, others being deterred by the war in north Italy. This strengthened Julius’s already strong hand still further. Indeed, like the Roman Emperors, he now had a personal bodyguard consisting of 200 Swiss soldiers, the Swiss being recognized as the best fighting men of the day. Julius completely controlled the Fifth Lateran Council to a degree hitherto unknown. Foreign ambassadors might address the bishops only with the Pope’s permission, and the Council was forbidden to issue decrees in its own name. All decrees took the form of papal bulls, signed by Julius.

To Julius himself and to the Curia this kind of Council seemed a victory, but like his victories on the battlefield, this too had a dark side. By his very strength Julius defrauded the Council of its rightful and necessary role. Instead of acting as a restraining influence on the Pope and voicing the anxieties of Christendom, it merely acted as the Pope’s instrument. This was to anger genuine conciliarists, notably in Germany. Furthermore, Julius left in abeyance the burning question of how Sacrosancta should be interpreted, so that in France, Germany and England many continued to believe that a Council was the Church’s final court of appeal. As late as 1534 Sir Thomas More, no mean scholar, could write to Thomas Cromwell that, while firmly believing the primacy of Rome to have been instituted by God, ‘yet never thought I the Pope above the general council.’

Julius was a successful soldier and a successful politician. But he was not only these things. At heart he seems to have been a man of peace, a member of the Order of St Francis of Assisi whom circumstances obliged to wage war. It is significant that his favourite pastimes were fishing and sailing, and that he liked gardens. Behind the Vatican he laid out the first considerable Roman garden since ancient times, in which aviaries and ponds were shaded by laurels and orange and pomegranate trees. He liked Dante and, lying ill in Bologna, listened to his architect friend Bramante read the Comedy aloud. He was very fond also of classical sculpture, his purchases including the Apollo Belvedere, the Tiber and the Torso del Belvedere. When the Laocoön was discovered on 14 January 1506 by a man digging in his vineyard near the Baths of Trajan, Julius bought it for 4140 ducats and had it conveyed on a cart to the Vatican along flower-strewn roads to the pealing of church bells.

Julius’s patronage of the arts has left a lasting mark on our civilization. It is intimately linked to his political activity, not only because his political successes kept Rome independent and provided money for the arts but because both express the Pope’s determination to assert his authority as an essential condition for preserving and proclaiming Christ’s message.

When he had been Pope for barely eighteen months and all his successes lay in the future, Julius conceived the idea of ordering his own tomb. It would be no ordinary resting-place but a colossal marble edifice decorated with many statues as fine as those in his own collection, a statement in contemporary terms of papal authority. But was there an artist to realize a work so grandiose? Julius, who had seen the Pietà in St Peter’s and certainly heard about the David, called on Michelangelo.

The former protégé of Lorenzo de’ Medici was then aged twenty-nine. Stocky, with a broken nose and curly hair, he was a man who spoke little, worked much and lived simply. He was generous to the poor and needy, and possessed of a strong trust in Providence: ‘God did not create us to abandon us.’ But towards his fellow-men he showed less trust. He was secretive and liked to work in a locked room. His sturdy Florentine independence tended to defiance, so that some found him ‘frightening’ and ‘impossible to deal with’.

Michelangelo at once answered the Pope’s summons. He possessed the largeness of vision to enter into Julius’s idea of a vast tomb, and drew a sketch of a free-standing rectangular monument, some 30 feet long and 20 wide, adorned with statues and rising in three zones to a catafalque. Julius liked the sketch, gave Michelangelo a contract at a salary of 100 ducats a month and sent him off to Carrara to obtain 100 tons of snow-white marble.

After eight months’ gruelling labour in the Carrara quarries Michelangelo set up a workshop in front of St Peter’s and prepared to begin the tomb. Julius however had meanwhile conceived an even more ambitious plan—the rebuilding of St Peter’s—and his passion for the tomb had cooled. In April he told a goldsmith and his master of ceremonies that he would not give another penny for stones, whether large or small. Michelangelo, worried, asked several times for an audience, but Julius, who was preparing to lay the foundation stone of the new St Peter’s, was too busy to see him. Finally, on 17 April 1506, Michelangelo was turned out of the palace.

This rebuff both angered and alarmed him. He sensed secret enemies: ‘I believed, if I stayed, that the city would be my own tomb before it was the Pope’s.’ In 1494 at the time of the French invasion he had fled Florence, and now once again he took flight, selling his scanty possessions and galloping full speed for Florence, pursued by five of the Pope’s horsemen. Once safe on Florentine soil, he wrote to Julius: ‘Since your Holiness no longer requires the monument, I am freed from my contract, and I will not sign a new one.’

In November 1506 Julius entered Bologna in triumph and, not for the first time, invited Michelangelo to re-enter his service. Persuaded by the Florentine Government that it would be patriotic to do so, Michelangelo swallowed his pride and rode to the brown-brick papal city. No sooner had he pulled off his riding-boots than he was escorted to the Palace of the Sixteen, a rope round his neck as a symbol of repentance. Here Julius eyed him sternly. ‘It was your business to come to seek us, whereas you have waited till we came to seek you,’ alluding to his march north.

Michelangelo fell on his knees. He had left Rome, he said, in a fit of rage, and how asked pardon. Julius made no answer, but sat with his head down, frowning. Finally the grim silence was broken by a courtier-bishop.

‘Your Holiness should not be so hard on this fault of Michelangelo; he is a man who has never been taught good manners. These artists do not know how to behave, they understand nothing but their art.’

In a fury Julius turned on the bishop. ‘You venture,’ he roared, ‘to say to this man things that I should never have dreamed of saying. It is you who have no manners. Get out of my sight, you miserable, ignorant clown.’ He struck the bishop with the stick he always carried, and to Michelangelo reached out his hand in forgiveness.

Julius then explained that he wanted a statue of himself in bronze: no ordinary statue, but one 14 feet high—twice the height of the David in Florence. How much would it cost?

‘I think the mould could be made for 1000 ducats, but foundry is not my trade, and therefore I cannot bind myself.’

‘Set to work at once,’ said Julius.

Michelangelo lodged in a poor room, where he slept in the same bed with three helpers for casting the statue. At the end of June they began the bronze-pouring. Technically so large a work presented many problems, and only the bust came out, the lower part sticking to the wax mould. Michelangelo started again and in February 1508 succeeded in delivering a perfect statue weighing six tons. It depicted Julius in full pontificals, the tiara on his head, the keys in one hand, the other raised in blessing. The huge bronze admirably typified the more-than-lifesize Pope, but its dimensions are probably to be explained by Julius’s interest in the Emperors, so many of whom had erected colossal statues of themselves: Nero’s had been 150 feet high. Doubtless Michelangelo was struck by the difference between Julius’s concept of a ruler and that of his former patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, always shunning the limelight and insisting that he was merely one citizen among many; yet both concepts came from classical antiquity.

The statue caused wonder among the people of Bologna. One man asked Michelangelo which he thought was bigger, the statue or a pair of oxen, to which the sculptor, who did not suffer fools gladly, replied: ‘It depends on the oxen. You see, an ox from Florence isn’t as big as one from Bologna.’ Set in position above the door of the church of S. Petronio, the statue of Julius did not remain there long. During a revolution in December 1511 it was toppled down, broken amid gibes and, save for the head, recast as a culverin by Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, who called it La Giulia. So the statue intended to honour Julius ended up as a gun pointed against him.

A friendship was ripening between the Pope and Michelangelo. Though the Pope was twice the sculptor’s age, both were virile, serious, energetic and possessed of breadth of vision. Back in Rome at the beginning of 1508, Julius conceived the plan of getting Michelangelo to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with designs, and the lunettes with large figures: at present the ceiling was painted blue with gold stars. Michelangelo protested that he was a sculptor, not a painter, and would prefer to start carving the Pope’s tomb. But finally he consented.

Michelangelo found himself to some extent limited by the existing decoration. The side walls depicted scenes from the life of Moses facing comparable scenes in the life of Christ: the history of man under the Law, then under Grace. Michelangelo’s first idea was to take man’s history a stage further by painting the Apostles in the lunettes. After making several sketches, he decided that this decoration would be ‘poor’. ‘Why poor?’ asked Julius. ‘Because the apostles were very poor.’ Evidently Michelangelo meant austere and humble, whereas his own particular gift, as he knew by now, was for celebrating the power and beauty of the human body.

Julius and Michelangelo then looked for another subject. Now Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle in Florence had claimed that there exists an underlying harmony between Hebrew, pagan and Christian thought, and this view was widely held by humanist scholars in Rome. Julius was sympathetic to it, and Michelangelo had been brought up in it. According to this view, the world of Greece and Rome which was being rediscovered in all its splendour was not a rival but an ally of truth. Just as the Prophets of Israel and the Sibyls from pagan darkness could speak of the true God, so did the nudes of Polyclitus make an authentic statement about beauty, therefore about God. Michelangelo had already hinted at such an approach in his Doni Holy Family, where the Christ-child is portrayed against a background of nude youths in the classical style, thus suggesting that Christianity fulfils the beauty and promise of antiquity. This was evidently the thinking that led Julius and Michelangelo to agree on a new subject: Scenes from Genesis, that is, the history of man before the giving of the Law; treated, however, prophetically. The Scenes would look forward, through Prophets, Sibyls, the ancestors of Mary and nude figures in the classical style symbolizing natural man, to the Incarnation of Christ. But instead of confining these scenes to the lunettes and painting the ceiling with ‘the usual adornments’, Michelangelo offered to paint the whole surface with figures, more than 10,000 square feet.

This was seven times the area Giotto had painted in the Scrovegni Chapel and it was, as contemporaries recognized, a superhuman task. But here precisely lay its appeal for Julius, who delighted in campaigns that daunted his closest advisers, and for Michelangelo, who had learned from Ficino’s neo-Platonism that an artist receives guidance from God to organize and complete His universe. That summer Julius gave Michelangelo a contract for the ceiling at a fee of 6000 ducats, all paints chargeable to the artist.

Now Michelangelo had never painted a fresco in his life. So while completing the first cartoons and supervising the erection of wooden scaffolding, he sent to Florence for his young studio assistants, hoping that their technical knowledge would help him. But their designs failed to satisfy him. One morning he made up his mind to scrap everything they had done. He shut himself up in the chapel and refused to let them in again.

He was alone with the immense bare vault. Climbing the ladders to the top of the scaffolding, he began work on the first scene, The Flood. He smeared the ceiling above him with a fine layer of intonaco—a plaster composed of two parts volcanic tufa and one part lime, stirred together with a little water. He chose tufa instead of the usual beach sand because it gave a rougher, less white surface. On this layer of intonaco he placed the appropriate piece of the cartoon, smoothing it quite flat and fastening it with small nails. He then dusted powdered charcoal over it. The charcoal passed through holes in the cartoon pricked beforehand and adhered to the moist intonaco, leaving the outlines of the figures. Later he was to omit the charcoal dusting and prick the outlines directly on to the plaster with an awl. He then unfastened the cartoon and began to paint. He had to be quick, especially in summer, when plaster dried in a couple of hours, and accurate too, because mistakes could not be rectified.

In summer the air immediately under the vault was suffocating and the plaster dust irritated his skin. Watercolours dripped on to his face and even into his eyes. He worked standing, looking upwards. In a burlesque sonnet illustrated with a sketch he says that the skin on his throat became so distended it looked like a bird’s crop. The strain was such that after a day’s work he could not read a letter unless he held it above him and tilted his head backwards.

When he had finished The Flood, Michelangelo dismantled that part of the scaffolding and looked at it: from below. He saw that the figures were too small and determined to continue on a broader scale, converting the form, mass and stresses of the vault into artistic values. But would he be able to continue? ‘It has been a year since I got a penny from this Pope,’ he wrote on 27 January 1509, ‘and I don’t ask him for any, because my work isn’t going ahead well enough for me to feel I deserve it. That’s the trouble—also that painting is not my profession.’

Payments however did begin, and when Julius left on his Ferrara campaign again abruptly stopped. At the end of September 1510 Michelangelo found he had no money to buy pigments, so laying his brushes aside he rode the 250 miles to Bologna and persuaded Julius to resume payments. In October he was paid 500 ducats in Rome. But presently money again dried up, and with it his paints. Michelangelo rode a second time to Bologna, and again a hard-pressed Julius decided that the ceiling must come before everything else. In January 1511 Michelangelo had been paid and was back on his scaffolding.

When Julius returned to Rome he naturally wanted to see how work was progressing. Several times he climbed up, with Michelangelo’s strong hand supporting him on the highest ladder, to study the latest scenes, and each time he would ask, ‘When will you finish?’ Michelangelo would reply, ‘When I can.’ He had become more assured now and was painting figures in the lunettes without any cartoon. But when Julius received that answer for the third time, in autumn 1512, he exploded into one of his furies. ‘Do you want me to have you thrown off the scaffolding?’ Though he would have liked to add some touches of gold and ultramarine, Michelangelo saw that the Pope would not wait any longer. So he signed the work, but instead of putting his name he painted the Greek letters Alpha and Omega near the prophet Jeremiah, thus attributing any merit in the ceiling to God, through whose assistance it had been begun and ended. Evidently Michelangelo saw himself in Platonic terms, like the Sibyls and Prophets, as an instrument through whom God made manifest His beauty.

The scaffolding was dismantled and without even waiting for the dust to settle Julius hurried to gaze on the finished whole. The expectations of three and a half years were not disappointed. Julius liked the ceiling very much indeed, as Michelangelo wrote to his father, and ordered it to be shown to the public on 31 October 1512, the Vigil of All Saints, the feast which celebrates the human race glorified in heaven. All Rome flocked to see it, says Vasari, and one can imagine the effect on them of so vast a work, containing 343 figures, some of them as much as eighteen feet high, in its pristine colours of rose, lilac, green and grey.

At a literal level the ceiling is straightforward enough. Five scenes of Creation are followed by the Fall and Expulsion, the Sacrifice of Noah, the Flood, and Noah’s Drunkenness, that darkening of the spirit which was later to be righted when God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses: since that event was already depicted on the wall below, the ceiling dovetailed into the rest of the chapel. Below the Scenes from Genesis are twelve Prophets and Sibyls, who by their utterances look forward to the Incarnation; while in the spandrels and lunettes are the ancestors of Christ.

In depicting these events, Michelangelo makes man the hero. In the centre of the ceiling and dominating the whole is the figure of Adam. Medieval mosaicists had shown God bending over him and breathing into his body a soul, either as rays or as a little Psyche with butterfly wings, psyche being Greek for both soul and butterfly. Breaking with these and other traditions, in an image of genius Michelangelo shows God imparting life through his own and Adam’s outstretched fingers. And this Adam is an image of the God who is creating him, a perfect being unflawed by sin. His body is beautiful and unblemished. It is just such a body as Christ will assume, and which we shall have in heaven. Even after the Fall, it is the most perfect of created things. It is also the most versatile. In the rest of the ceiling Michelangelo celebrates the power and beauty of the human body in a wide variety of actions. He depicts titanic, muscular figures engaged in tasks that test them to the limit. He shows them exercising not faith, hope and charity which have not yet arrived in the world, but classical virtus, virility. They impose their will on events through bodies that drive like tornados, torrents or avalanches. Even as Prophets and Sibyls they are not passive, they strain and twist and writhe in order to glimpse the hidden mystery, then to express it. As the ancestors of Mary, they struggle to protect their children, that long stream of expectant humanity flowing from Adam to Christ.

Michelangelo’s titanic grand design is enriched by innumerable perceptive details. The Ignudi, the nude male figures who represent man in classical times, carry festoons of oak leaves and acorns, as a sign of the golden age in which they lived, and also in allusion to Julius whose family blazon was the oak tree and who was hailed by many as a restorer of the golden age. Again, the Brazen Serpent erected by Moses to heal the people of Israel harks back ironically to the serpent coiled round the Tree of Life. Classical borrowings too add to the theme of harmony between pagan and Christian thought. In the Expulsion, for example, Adam raises his hands in a gesture of defence from the chastising angel and this is a mirror image of Orestes pursued by the Furies in an antique bas-relief. These and many other details give the ceiling an incomparable imaginative richness.

When the Sistine ceiling was finished, Julius, who the previous year had suffered an almost fatal illness, began to take a renewed interest in his tomb. Michelangelo’s design called for three tiers, the lowest where Julius’s body would lie, a middle part decorated with seated figures of Moses and St Paul, and an uppermost part on which two angels would support a figure of the Pope sleeping. Julius now set Michelangelo to work on the statue of Moses, whom the Popes considered a prototype of themselves.

Michelangelo’s Moses is close to the Sistine figures both in time and spirit. He is an incarnation of man’s driving will, and since his own will was immensely powerful so must be his body. Whereas in the David Michelangelo had exaggerated the size of the head, to signify that the young warrior’s triumph had not been one of mere strength, here he exaggerates the size of the arms, boldly marking their veins and sinews. The bearded prophet holds the tablets of the Law in his muscular hands and his gaze, defiant and terrible, was perhaps suggested by Julius in anger. The two horns on his head are explained by the Vulgate’s mistranslation of a passage from Exodus: ‘his brow became horned while he spoke to God’, whereas the Hebrew has ‘radiant’. The horns were a traditional way of designating Moses in art and even in mystery plays. A last curious point is that in the beard Michelangelo has carved small portraits of Julius and himself in profile, evidently to commemorate their collaboration in the tomb.