Sudden Death

The Second Burning of Rome

A portrait that does Pius IV justice would have to be taken at table — a painting of light and shadow in which he presides over a grand Baroque dinner. After all, his papacy was the amuse-bouche of all the pyres of modernity.

In this ideal portrait of Pius IV, he sits with a glass of white wine in one hand and a fistful of almonds in the other. His royal purple soutane is tacky with salt, his beard greasy from the thick slices of wild boar sausage he has eaten. By his side is a small table, upon which rests a china plate with strips of tuna. The pope, food, wine. But there is more: The table is set on a patio. It is nighttime, there are torches; there is an army of servants swaddled in velvet, attentive to the wishes of His Holiness. In the portrait, Pius IV is up in the heights, watching Rome burn — the pyre and modernity, the pyre of modernity making room for itself — and then all Europe, the flames, his face alight. Europe had overheated with the discovery and occupation of the Caribbean, the conquest of Mexico and the subjugation of Peru, the rebellions of the reformist bishops. He, a practical man with no agenda, only contributed the spark that started the blaze when he signed the accords of the Council of Trent into law.

Let’s not leave him alone as the inferno licks at his silk slippers. With him, naturally, is Carlo Borromeo, the ideologue and publicist par excellence of the Counter-Reformation, and Montalto, the inquisitor who executed it in blood and fire.

Montalto would rise to the papacy as Sixtus V — a backward name, which is perhaps why he was granted a nickname for the ages: the Iron Pope. Borromeo didn’t have the imperial gravitas of his interlocutors, but he was the éminence grise behind Pius IV and Gregory XIII. He died young and was raised to sainthood immediately upon his death. His body is buried under the presbytery of the cathedral of Milan in what is today the Scurolo di San Carlo, in a sarcophagus of rock crystal like Snow White’s. His creepy mummified body — a little black masked thing, covered in gems and robes — can still be seen for the price of two euros.

In order for the three cardinals to be gathered in an ideal portrait of Pius IV watching the blaze, a reason must be concocted here. The pope, for example, knowing that Borromeo was away from Milan on a business trip to the Vatican, might have invited him to report on how the city was recovering from the plague. Montalto, attending to practical matters with the pope, might have stayed for dinner with them.

Or it might be Borromeo who had invited the pontiff and the inquisitor to a private conclave at the loggia of the Palazzo Colonna, the official residence of the Milanese nobility in the papal city. A secret, breakaway conclave of three men who, though on different courses, had found common cause at Trent when they articulated the shape of the Baroque century to come. They were brothers-in-arms.

If the meeting were to happen in 1565—when Spain took possession of the Philippines and the world at last became round as a tennis ball — Pius IV, the oldest of the three, would be feeling the call of death in his bones, his Lombard eyes fading from their customary placid blue to the transparent color that allows the passage of visions. This, then, would be the last private meeting of the three men. The pope is sixty-six, his beard white, his breathing labored from the excess weight visited on him by the satisfaction of his wants. Carlo Borromeo is twenty-seven: gaunt, wiry, with the long, poorly shaven face of an El Greco model. Cardinal Montalto, all-powerful inquisitor with too many scores pending, is at the brutal crossroads of forty-five: too old for everything, too young for everything. During the meeting he’ll learn that when Pius dies he’ll be left out in the cold because he’s been working so hard to hang, draw, and quarter half of Europe that he hasn’t developed the political relationships in the Roman Curia to survive the papal change of guard.

In this ideal portrait of Pius IV looking out over the conflagration with his brothers-in-arms, the three are in good humor, in a mood to render judgment. They sit on the slope of the Esquiline Hill, in the loggia of the garden of the Palazzo Colonna, watching Rome from the spot where in the sixteenth century the ruins of a Roman temple still stood, the temple from which Nero watched the city burn. The three men are on the terrace, spellbound by the dancing of the flames; servants and guards among the toppled ivy-covered columns, the vegetation exuding its oils in something like a futile last stand against the blaze of the Counter-Reformation, which in the end will lay waste to everything.