Sudden Death

Regarding Most Popes’ Utter Lack of a Sense of Humor

In the print collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art there is a lithograph by an anonymous Flemish artist dating from about 1550. On the front it reads “Palazzo Colonna,” and on the back “La Loggia dei colonnesi con la Torre Mesa edificate tra le rovine del Tempio di Serapide.” The Colonnas had long been an all-powerful family, and the museum in the Italian capital that still bears their name gives a clear idea of the power and wealth they accumulated.

But Rome wasn’t always Rome. Or rather: The Rome of Pius IV wasn’t the grandiloquent city that Cardinal Montalto rebuilt when he became pope. The Rome of the sixteenth century, village-like and scattered, is best described by Montaigne, who found it so timid and empty that his disappointment became a cliché of Baroque disenchantment. The city was clotted with old and new ruins, among which animals strolled more freely than people. Said the French poet Joachim du Bellay about mid-sixteenth-century Rome:

You seek Rome in Rome, o pilgrim!

and in Rome itself you cannot find Rome.

In the year 1565, when Borromeo, Montalto, and Pius IV might have been drinking a glass of wine as fire rained down on the navel of Catholicism, the Palazzo Colonna wasn’t the meringue-trimmed palace it later became. The loggia was a house of red brick, constructed from the remains of the Tempio di Serapide, of which a stretch of frontispiece still stood. It had two floors, five windows, two doors, and a tile-roofed terrace. Behind it, the ruins: the loggia literally leaned against the ancient temple, and around it shrubs, palms, and a group of gladelike trees grew up from the ground and also the walls.

It would be on this cool, modest brick terrace that the cardinals would be sitting as if in a box at the theater.

Watching the whole world go up in flames, Pius wouldn’t sing of the sack of Troy, as Nero did. He would be silent, listening with eyes shut to a snatch of music — the last bit of melody from a time before the universal conflagration that today we casually call “the Baroque”—rocking slightly from side to side, his eyes closed, the hand holding the almonds marking time for an orchestra.

During a pause in the music, he would open his eyes and say to Cardinal Montalto: I have a gift for you. There are other things he could say — for example, what the Argentine writer Leónidas Lamborghini says about the era dawning before the arbiters of Trent: “We have bought Torture instead of Compassion. Fear instead of Mercy. Hate instead of Love. Death instead of Life.” Or he could say what he had confessed a few years earlier to his friend Tolomeo Gallio, in a letter in which he reported how troubled he was by the Curia’s harassment of Michelangelo and how it had paralyzed him for some time: “I’m terrified to admit it, but I love his Last Judgment. It’s a mortal sin, and I’m the Pope!”

Pius IV had watered the little pot in which he planned for Borromeo to blossom, and instead of a plant, a wild boar had grown.

This has to be seen as a film. The pope cuts another slice of sausage and closes his eyes. He opens them and eats.

PIUS IV:

(still chewing)

I have a gift for you, Montalto. It’s a modest gift.

The pope waves one hand in the air, the sleeves of the papal robes like a flag. His chamber attendant approaches with a little wooden box trimmed with silver.

MONTALTO:

(smiling)

I’m not a man for jewels.

PIUS IV:

I’m sixty-six years old, no one thought I’d make it to pope but I did; I met Michelangelo and Raphael, Charles V and Francis I were my friends; I invented Carlo Borromeo, here present.

He indicates him with a nod and a raising of eyebrows, part ironic and part grateful.

PIUS IV (CONT.):

Do you think that at this final meeting, our last banquet, I’d give you a mere jewelry box?

The servant brings the gift to the cardinal, who opens it.

MONTALTO:

(taking something out of the chest)

A tennis ball.

He looks at it, holds it up so Borromeo can see it.

MONTALTO (CONT.):

A bit unraveled.

PIUS IV:

That’s because it was made from the hair of Anne Boleyn.

MONTALTO:

Who?

PIUS IV:

One of the wives of Henry VIII of England. You missed that particular scandal.

MONTALTO:

Indeed.

PIUS IV:

Put it to good use.

MONTALTO:

The scandal?

PIUS IV:

The ball.

MONTALTO:

I don’t play pallacorda.

PIUS IV:

Play it. When King Charles and I die, there will be no one to curb France. If you stick your neck out, you’ll be stripped of your privileges or skinned alive and quartered, depending on who is left as inquisitor.

The pope looks at Borromeo.

PIUS IV (CONT.):

Or am I mistaken, Carlo?

BORROMEO:

Your Holiness has never been mistaken in politics.

Cardinal Montalto ignores him and looks the pope in the eye.

MONTALTO:

Are you giving me an order?

PIUS IV:

I’m giving you a piece of advice.

There is a silence that both of them fill by turning to look at Borromeo. Though the bishop of Milan is almost twenty years younger than Montalto, the rigors of a life genuinely spent in imitation of Christ’s darkest hours have left traces of the rasp of hunger and sleeplessness, and also small tics that make him look like a piece of unedited footage. His cheek twitches, his head jerks, he squeezes the hands that he keeps clasped in his lap, as if to prevent them from escaping in search of something that might prove tasty.

Borromeo gives the pope and the inquisitor-general an affected sidelong glance, his left eyelid blinking shut every so often.

BORROMEO:

(to Montalto)

Let’s see, toss me the ball.

He catches the ball thrown by Montalto, his eyes on the pope.

BORROMEO (CONT.):

It’s good advice.

PIUS IV:

Will you protect Montalto from the wolves?

BORROMEO:

I’ll protect him so long as he protects himself.

He smells the ball.

BORROMEO (CONT.):

So long as he learns to wait while playing tennis at his palace.

Cardinal Montalto spent nineteen years and two popes in retreat from public life, busily going through the fortune he had amassed by bleeding the enemies of the Counter-Reformation. In his spare time, as if somehow compelled by the passions unleashed in him by architecture, Montalto also spent those years planning how the city would look if it really was the center of the world — a plan he executed with violence and perfectionism once he was named Pope Sixtus V. He invented urbanism, though his name wasn’t Urban. It goes without saying that he never played pallacorda. The fact that no subsequent pope was called Sixtus after Montalto, who was the fifth, is proof that the Catholic Church is an institution without a sense of humor. But this isn’t part of the film. Back to the script.

Borromeo tosses back the ball. Montalto puts it away in its box and the pope beckons again.

PIUS IV:

I have a present for you too, Carlo.

A servant approaches with a brightly colored headpiece.

BORROMEO:

A miter?

PIUS IV:

It’s Mexican.

The cardinal furrows his brow.

PIUS IV (CONT.):

It was sent to me by a bishop there. It isn’t painted, it’s made of feathers: look, it’s a little masterpiece.

The servant holds it out to the cardinal and he takes it, disdainfully.

BORROMEO:

(ironically)

Such intricate handiwork, Your Holiness.

He sets it on his knees.

PIUS IV:

May it help you to remember that France isn’t the whole world, that there are many lands and many souls.

The cardinal sits watching him, making a show of patience.

PIUS IV (CONT.):

Look at it! If you hold it up to the light in just the right way, it glows.

Borromeo tilts his head, turns the thing.

PIUS IV (CONT.):

Lift it a little.

When it’s just above his head, the colored feathers of the miter blaze as if struck by a bolt of lightning. Borromeo drops it, and it falls into his lap. The pope laughs.

PIUS IV (CONT.):

What did I tell you?

BORROMEO:

Mexico: the Devil’s haunt.

PIUS IV:

It’s the work of Christian Indians.

BORROMEO:

What am I supposed to do with it?

PIUS IV:

Say Easter mass in it.

BORROMEO:

Why?

PIUS IV:

Because after the dark always comes the light.

BORROMEO:

I know that.

PIUS IV:

No one would guess it.

The pope cut another slice of sausage and closed his eyes as he chewed, thinking that even when Nero burned Rome the fuel ran out eventually, and the two-thirds of the city left waste was rebuilt magnificently. He could almost smell the blanket of ashes that Trent would leave at his feet. He could see how, in the end, once everything was over, a new tree would spring up from the field of ashes, embryonic and amber-hued; a tree of sinew and muscle, its first limb reaching up through the earth; a tree that — once the smoke from the blaze had cleared — would spread its fingers in the sun like a butterfly of flesh. The butterfly’s fingernails would be dirty.