The Renaissance

No other man ever brought so many artists to Rome. It was he, for example, who invited Guillaume de Marcillat from France to set up the fine stained-glass windows of Santa Maria del Popolo. It was characteristic of his vast conceptions that he should try to reconcile Christianity and paganism in art as Nicholas V had done in letters; for what are the stanze of Raphael but a pre-established harmony of classic mythology and philosophy, Hebrew theology and poetry, Christian sentiment and faith? And what could better represent the union of pagan and Christian art and feeling than the portico and dome, the interior columns, statuary, paintings, and tombs of St. Peter’s? Prelates and nobles, bankers and merchants, now crowding into an enriched Rome, followed the Pope’s lead, and built palaces with almost imperial splendor in opulent rivalry. Broad avenues were cut through or from the chaos of the medieval city; hundreds of new streets were opened; one of them still bears the great Pope’s name. Ancient Rome rose out of its ruins, and became again the home of a Caesar.

St. Peter’s aside, it was, in Rome, an age of palaces rather than of churches. Exteriors were uniform and plain: a vast rectangular façade of brick or stone or stucco, a portal of stone usually carved in some decorative design; on each floor uniform rows of windows, topped with triangular or elliptical pediments; and almost always a crowning cornice whose elegant configuration was a special test and care of the architect. Behind this unpretentious front the millionaires concealed a luxury of ornament and display seldom revealed to the jealous popular eye: a central well, usually surrounded or divided by a broad staircase of marble; on the ground floor, simple rooms for transacting business or storing goods; on the first (our second) floor, the piano nobile, the spacious halls for reception and entertainment, and galleries of art, with pavements of marble or sturdy colored tile; the furniture, carpets, and textiles of exquisite material and form; the walls strengthened with marble pilasters, the ceilings coffered in circles, triangles, diamonds, or squares; and on walls and ceilings paintings by famous artists, usually of pagan themes—for fashion now decreed that Christian gentlemen, even of the cloth, should live amid scenes from classical mythology; and on the upper floors the private chambers for lords and ladies, for liveried lackeys, for children and nurses, tutors and governesses and maids. Many men were rich enough to have, besides their palaces, rural villas as refuges from the city’s din or summer heat; and these villas too might conceal sybaritic glories of ornament and comfort, and mural masterpieces by Raphael, Peruzzi, Giulio Romano, Sebastiano del Piombo…. This palace and villa architecture was in many ways a selfish art, in which the wealth drawn from unseen and countless laborers and distant lands vaunted itself in gaudy decoration for a few; in this respect ancient Greece and medieval Europe had shown a finer spirit, devoting their wealth not to private luxury but to the temples and cathedrals that were the possession, pride, and inspiration of all, the home of the people as well as the house of God.

Of the architects outstanding at Rome in the pontificates of Alexander VI and Julius II two were brothers, and a third was their nephew. Giuliano da Sangallo began as a military engineer in the Florentine army; passed to the service of Ferrante of Naples; and became a friend of Giuliano della Rovere in the early days of the latter’s cardinalate. For Giuliano, the cardinal, Giuliano the architect turned the abbey of Grottaferrata into a castle-fortress; probably at Alexander’s behest he designed the great coffered ceiling of Santa Maria Maggiore, and gilded it with the first gold brought from America. He accompanied Cardinal della Rovere into exile, built a palace for him in Savona, went with him to France, and returned to Rome when his patron at last became pope. Julius invited him to submit plans for the new St. Peter’s; when those of Bramante were preferred the old architect reproached the new Pope, but Julius knew what he wanted. Sangallo outlived both Bramante and Julius, and was later appointed administer et coadiutor to Raphael in the building of St. Peter’s; but he died two years later. Meanwhile his younger brother Antonio da Sangallo had also come from Florence, as architect and military engineer for Alexander VI, and had built the imposing church of Santa Maria di Loreto for Julius; and a nephew, Antonio Picconi da Sangallo, had begun (1512) the most magnificent of the Renaissance palaces of Rome—the Palazzo Farnese.

The greatest name in the architecture of this age was that of Donato Bramante. He was already fifty-six when he came from Milan to Rome (1499), but his study of the Roman ruins fired him with youthful zeal to apply classical forms to Renaissance building. In the court of a Franciscan convent near San Pietro in Montorio he designed a circular Tempietto, or Little Temple, with columns and cupola so classical in form that architects studied and measured it as if it had been a newly discovered masterpiece of ancient art. From that beginning Bramante passed through a succession of chefs-d’oeuvre: the cloister of Santa Maria della Pace, the elegant cortile of San Damaso… Julius overwhelmed him with assignments, both as architect and as military engineer. Bramante laid out the Via Giulia, finished the Belvedere, began the Loggie of the Vatican, and designed a new St. Peter’s. He was so interested in his work that he cared little for money, and Julius had to command him to accept appointments whose revenue would maintain him;¹⁷ some rivals, however, accused him of embezzling papal funds and using shoddy materials in his buildings.¹⁸ Others described him as a jovial and generous soul, whose home became a favorite resort of Perugino, Signorelli, Pinturicchio, Raphael, and other artists in Rome.

The Belvedere was a summer palace built for Innocent VIII, and situated on a hill some hundred yards away from the rest of the Vatican. It took its name from the beautiful view (bel vedere) that extended before it; and it gave its name to various sculptures that were housed in it or its court. Julius had long been a collector of ancient art; his prize possession was an Apollo discovered during the pontificate of Innocent VIII; when he became Pope he placed it in the cortile of the Belvedere, and the Apollo Belvedere became one of the famous statues of the world. Bramante gave the palace a new façade and garden court, and planned to connect it with the Vatican proper by a series of picturesque structures and gardens, but both he and Julius died before the plan could be carried out.

If we attribute the Reformation proximately to the sale of indulgences for the building of St. Peter’s, the most momentous event in the pontificate of Julius was the demolition of the old St. Peter’s and the beginning of the new. According to the received tradition the old church had been built by Pope Sylvester I (326) over the grave of the Apostle Peter near the Circus of Nero. In that church many emperors, from Charlemagne onward, had been crowned, and many popes. Repeatedly enlarged, it was, in the fifteenth century, a spacious basilica with nave and double aisles, flanked with smaller churches, chapels, and convents. But by the time of Nicholas V it showed the wear of eleven centuries; cracks veined its walls, and men feared that it might at any moment collapse, perhaps upon a congregation. So in 1452 Bernardo Rossellino and Leon Battista Alberti were commissioned to strengthen the edifice with new walls. The work had hardly begun when Nicholas died; and succeeding popes, needing funds for crusades, suspended it. In 1505, after considering and rejecting various other plans, Julius II determined to tear down the old church, and build an entirely new shrine over what was said to be St. Peter’s grave. He invited several architects to submit designs. Bramante won with a proposal to rear a new basilica on the plan of a Greek cross (with arms of equal length), and to crown its transept crossing with a vast dome; in the famous phrase ascribed to him, he would raise the dome of the Pantheon upon the basilica of Constantine. In Bramante’s intent the new majestic edifice would cover 28,900 square yards—11,600 more than the area covered by St. Peter’s today. Excavation was begun in April, 1506. On April 11 Julius, aged sixty-three, descended a long and trembling rope ladder to a great depth to lay the foundation stone. The work progressed slowly as Julius and his funds were more and more absorbed in war. In 1514 Bramante died, happily not knowing that his design would never be carried out.

Many good Christians were shocked at the thought of destroying the venerable old cathedral. Most of the cardinals were strongly opposed, and many artists complained that Bramante had recklessly shattered the fine columns and capitals of the ancient nave when with better care he might have taken them down intact. A satire published three years after the architect’s death told how Bramante, on reaching St. Peter’s gate, had been severely rebuked by the Apostle, and had been refused admittance to Paradise. But, said the satirist, Bramante did not like the arrangement of Paradise anyway, nor the steep approach to it from the earth. “I will build a new, broad, and commodious road, so that old and feeble souls may travel on horseback. And then I will make a new Paradise, with delightful residences for the blessed.” When Peter rejected this proposal Bramante offered to go down to hell and build a new and better inferno, since the old one must by this time be almost burned out. But Peter returned to the question: “Tell me, seriously, what made you destroy my church?” Bramante tried to comfort him: “Pope Leo will build you a new one.” “Well, then,” said the Apostle, “you must wait at the gate of Paradise until it is finished.”¹⁹

It was finished in 1626.

III. THE YOUNG RAPHAEL

1. Development: 1483–1508

After Bramante’s death Leo X named to succeed him, as architectural director of the work at the new St. Peter’s, a young painter thirty-one years old, too young to bear on his shoulders the weight of Bramante’s dome, but the happiest, most successful, and best-loved artist in history.

His good fortune began when he was born to Giovanni de’ Santi, then the leading painter at Urbino. Some pictures survive from Giovanni’s brush; they suggest an indifferent talent; but they show that Raphael-named after the fairest of the archangels—was brought up in the odor of painting. Visiting artists like Piero della Francesca often stayed at Giovanni’s home; and Giovanni was sufficiently familiar with the art of his time to write intelligently of a dozen Italian, and some Flemish, painters and sculptors in his Rhymed Chronicle of Urbino. Giovanni died when Raphael was only eleven, but apparently the father had already begun to transmit the art to his son. Probably Timoteo Viti, who returned to Urbino from Bologna in 1495 after studying with Francia, continued the instruction, and brought to Raphael what he had learned from Francia, Tura, and Costa. Meanwhile the boy grew up in circles that had access to the court; and that refined society that Castiglione was to describe in The Courtier was beginning to spread among the lettered classes of Urbino the graces of character, manners, and speech that Raphael would illuminate with his art and his life. The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford has a remarkable drawing attributed to Raphael in the period between 1497 and 1500, and traditionally supposed to be a self-portrait. The face almost of a girl, the soft eyes of a poet: these are the features that we shall meet again, darker and a little wistful, in the engaging self-portrait (c. 1506) in the Pitti Gallery.

Picture the youth of the earlier portrait passing at sixteen from quiet and orderly Urbino to a Perugia where despotism and violence were the order of the day. But Perugino was there, whose fame was filling Italy; Raffaello’s guardian uncles felt that the boy’s manifest talent deserved instruction from the best painters in Italy. They could have sent him to Leonardo at Florence, where he might have imbibed some deepening strain of that master’s esoteric lore; but there was something peculiar about the great Florentine, something a bit left-handed—literally sinister—in his loves, which disturbed all good uncles. Perugia was closer to Urbino, and Perugino was returning to Perugia (1499) with presumably all the technical tricks of Florentine painters at the tips of his brushes. So for three years the handsome lad worked for Pietro Vannucci, helped him to decorate the Cambio, mastered his secrets, and learned how to paint virgins as blue and devout as Perugino’s own. The Umbrian hills—above all around the Assisi that Raphael could sight from the Perugian plateau—gave teacher and pupil a full supply of such simple and devoted mothers, fair with the forms of youth, yet molded to a trustful piety by the Franciscan air that they breathed.

When Perugino went again to Florence (1502) Raphael remained in Perugia, and fell heir to the demand that his master had developed for religious pictures. In 1503 he painted for the church of St. Francis a Coronation of the Virgin, now in the Vatican: the Apostles and Magdalen, standing around an empty sarcophagus, gaze upward to where, on a pavement of clouds, Christ places a crown upon Mary’s head, while graceful angels celebrate her with the music of lute and tambourines. There are many signs of immaturity in the picture: heads insufficiently individualized, faces inexpressive, hands ill formed, fingers rigid, and Christ Himself, obviously older than His pretty mother, moving as awkwardly as a commencement graduate. But in the angel musicians—the grace of their motion, the flow of their draperies, the soft contour of their features—Raphael gives a pledge of his future.

The picture was apparently successful, for in the following year another church of San Francesco, in Città di Castello, some thirty miles from Perugia, ordered from him a similar picture—a Sposalizio or Marriage of the Virgin (Brera). It repeats some figures from the earlier painting, and copies the form of a similar picture by Perugino. But the Virgin herself has now the peculiar mark and grace of Raphael’s women—the head modestly inclined, the oval face tender and demure, the smooth curve of shoulder and arm and raiment; behind her is a woman more buxom and alive, blonde and lovely; to the right a youth in tight garb shows that Raphael has studied the human form sedulously; and now all the hands are well drawn, and some are beautiful.

About this time Pinturicchio, who had made Raphael’s acquaintance in Perugia, invited him to Siena as assistant. There Raphael made sketches and cartoons for some of the brilliant frescoes with which Pinturicchio, in the library of the cathedral, told such portions of Aeneas Sylvius’ story as befitted a pope. In that library Raphael was struck by an antique statuary group, The Three Graces, that Cardinal Piccolomini had brought from Rome to Siena; the young artist made a hasty drawing of it, apparently to help his memory. He seems to have recognized in these three nudes a different world and morality than those that had been impressed upon him in Urbino and Perugia—a world in which woman was a joyful goddess of beauty rather than the sorrowful Mother of God, and in which the worship of beauty was considered as legitimate as the exaltation of purity and innocence. The pagan side of Raphael, which would later paint rosy nudes in the bathroom of a cardinal, and place Greek philosophers beside Christian saints in the chambers of the Vatican, developed now in quiet company with that aspect of his nature and his art which would produce The Mass of Bolsena and The Sistine Madonna. In Raphael, more than in any other hero of the Renaissance, the Christian faith and the pagan rebirth would live in harmonious peace.

Shortly before or after his visit to Siena he returned briefly to Urbino. There he painted for Guidobaldo two pictures that probably symbolized the Duke’s triumph over Caesar Borgia: a St. Michael and a St. George, both now in the Louvre. Never before, so far as we know, had the artist succeeded so well in representing action; the figure of St. George drawing his sword back to strike, while his horse rears up in terror and the dragon claws at the knight’s leg, is startling in its vigor and yet pleasing in its grace. Raphael the draftsman was coming into his own.

And now Florence called him, as it had called Perugino and a hundred other young painters. He seemed to feel that unless he could live for a while in that stimulating hive of competition and criticism, and learn at first hand the latest developments in line and composition and color, in fresco and tempera and oil, he would never be more than a provincial painter, talented but limited, and fated at last for obscure domesticity in the town of his birth. Late in 1504 he set out for Florence.

He behaved there with his usual modesty; studied the ancient sculptures and architectural fragments that had been gathered into the city; went to the Carmine and copied Masaccio; sought out and pored over the famous cartoons that Leonardo and Michelangelo had made for paintings in the Hall of Council in the Palazzo Vecchio. Perhaps he met Leonardo; certainly for a time he yielded to that elusive master’s influence. It seemed to him now that beside Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi, Mona Lisa, and The Virgin, Child, and St. Anne, the paintings of the Ferrara, Bologna, Siena, Urbino schools were struck with the rigor of death, and even the Madonnas of Perugino were pretty puppets, immature young women of the countryside suddenly endowed with an uncongenial divinity. How had Leonardo acquired such grace of line, such subtlety of countenance, such shades of coloring? In a portrait of Maddalena Doni (Pitti) Raphael obviously imitated the Mona Lisa; he omitted the smile, for Madonna Doni apparently had none; but he pictured well the robust form of a Florentine matron, the soft, plump, ringed hands of moneyed ease, and the rich weave and color of the garments that dignified her form. About the same time he painted her husband, Angelo Doni, dark, alert, and stern.

From Leonardo he passed to Fra Bartolommeo, visited him in his cell at San Marco, wondered at the tender expression, the warm feeling, the soft contours, the harmonious composition, the deep, full colors, of the melancholy friar’s art. Fra Bartolommeo would visit Raphael in Rome in 1514, and wonder in his turn at the swift ascent of the modest artist to the pinnacle of fame in the capital of the Christian world. Raphael became great partly because he could steal with the innocence of Shakespeare, could try one method and manner after another, take from each its precious element, and blend these gleanings, in the fever of creation, into a style unmistakably his own. Bit by bit he absorbed the rich tradition of Italian painting; soon he would bring it to fulfillment.

Already in this Florentine period (1504–5, 1506–7) he was painting pictures now famous throughout Christendom and beyond. The Budapest Museum has a Portrait of a Young Man, perhaps a self-portrait, with the same beret and side glance of the eyes as in the autoritratto of the Pitti Gallery. When Raphael was but twenty-three he painted the lovely Madonna del Granduca (Pitti), whose perfectly oval face, and silken hair, and small mouth, and Leonardesque eyelids lowered in pensive affection, were framed in a warm contrast of green veil and red robe; Ferdinand II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, found such pleasure in contemplating this picture that he took it with him on his travels—whence its name. Quite as beautiful is the Madonna del Cardellino—of the Goldfinch (Uffizi); the Infant Jesus is no masterpiece of conception of design, but the playful St. John, arriving triumphantly with the captured bird, is a delight to mind and eye, and the face of the Virgin is an unforgettable representation of a young mother’s tolerant tenderness. Raphael gave this painting as a wedding present to Lorenzo Nasi; in 1547 an earthquake crushed Nasi’s mansion and broke the picture into fragments; the pieces were so cleverly reunited that only a Berenson, seeing it in the Uffizi, could surmise its vicissitudes. The Madonna in the Meadow (Vienna) is a less successful variant; here, however, Raphael gives us a remarkable landscape, bathed in the soft blue light of an evening falling quietly upon green fields, unruffled stream, towered town, and far-off hills. La Belle Jardinière (Louvre) hardly deserves to be the most famous of the Florentine Madonnas; it almost duplicates the Madonna of the Meadow, makes the Baptist absurd from nose to foot, and only redeems itself with an ideal Infant standing with chubby feet upon the Virgin’s bare foot, and looking up at her with loving confidence. The last and most ambitious of them in this period was the Madonna del Baldacchino (Pitti)—the Virgin Mother enthroned under a canopy (baldacchino), with two angels parting its folds, two saints at each side, two angels singing at her feet; all in all a conventional performance, famous only because it is Raphael’s.

In 1505 he interrupted his stay in Florence to visit Perugia and execute two commissions there. For the nuns of St. Anthony he painted an altar-piece which is now one of the most precious pictures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Within a frame beautifully carved, the Virgin sits on a throne, looking like Wordsworth’s “nun breathless with adoration”; in her lap the Child raises a hand to bless the infant St. John; two exquisite female figures—St. Cecilia and St. Catherine of Alexandria-flank the Virgin; in the foreground St. Peter frowns and St. Paul reads; and above, in a lunette, God the Father, surrounded by angels, blesses the Mother of His Son, and with one hand upholds the world. In one panel of the predella Christ prays on the Mount of Olives while the Apostles sleep; and in another Mary supports the dead Christ while Magdalen kisses His pierced feet. The perfect composition of the ensemble, the appealing figures of the female saints, meditative and wistful, the powerful conception of the passionate Peter, and the unique vision of Christ on the Mount, make this “Colonna” Madonna the first indubitable masterpiece of Raphael. In that same year 1506 he painted a less imposing picture, a Madonna (National Gallery, London) for the Ansidei family: the Virgin, straitly enthroned, teaches the Child how to read; at her left St. Nicholas of Bari, gorgeous in his episcopal robes, is also studious; at her right the Baptist, suddenly thirty while his playmate is still an infant, points the traditional finger of the Forerunner at the Son of God.

From Perugia Raphael seems to have gone again to Urbino (1506). Now he painted for Guidobaldo a second St. George (Leningrad), this time with a lance; a handsome young knight sheathed in armor whose gleaming blue displays another phase of Raphael’s skill. Probably on the same visit he painted for his friends the most familiar of his self-portraits (Pitti): black beret over long black locks; face still youthful, and with no trace yet of beard; long nose, small mouth, soft eyes; altogether a haunting face, that might have been Keats’s—revealing a spirit clean and fresh, and sensitive to every beauty in the world.

Late in 1506 he returned to Florence. There he painted some of his less renowned pictures—St. Catherine of Alexandria (London), and the “Niccolini Cowper” Madonna and Child (Washington). About 1780 the third Earl Cowper smuggled this out of Florence in the lining of his carriage; it is not one of Raphael’s finest, but Andrew Mellon paid $850,000 to add it to his collection (1928).²⁰ A far greater picture was begun by Raphael at Florence in 1507: The Entombment of Christ (Borghese Gallery). It was ordered for the church of San Francesco in Perugia by Atalanta Baglioni, who, seven years before, had knelt in the street over her own dying son; perhaps through Mary’s grief she expressed her own. Taking Perugino’s Deposition as his model, Raphael grouped his figures in a masterly composition, almost with the power of Mantegna: the emaciated dead Christ, borne in a sheet by a virile and muscular youth and a bearded straining man; a splendid head of Joseph of Arimathea; a lovely Magdalen leaning in horror over the corpse; Mary fainting into the arms of attendant women; every body in a different attitude, yet all rendered with anatomical verity and Correggian grace; a somber symphony of reds, blues, browns, and greens mingling in a luminous unity, with a Giorgionesque landscape showing the three crosses of Golgotha under an evening sky.

In 1508 Raphael received at Florence a call that changed the current of his life. The new Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria della Rovere, was a nephew of Julius II; Bramante, a distant relative of Raphael, was now a favorite with the Pope; apparently both the Duke and the architect recommended Raphael to Julius; soon an invitation was sent the young painter to come to Rome. He was glad to go, for Rome, not Florence was now the exciting and stimulating center of the Renaissance world. Julius, who had lived for four years in the Borgia apartment, had tired of seeing Giulia Farnese playing Virgin on the wall; he wished to move into the four chambers once used by the admirable Nicholas V; and he wanted these stanze or rooms to be decorated with paintings congenial to his heroic stature and aims. In the summer of 1508 Raphael went to Rome.

2. Raphael and Julius II: 1508–13

Rarely since Pheidias had so many great artists gathered in one city and year. Michelango was carving figures for Julius’ gigantic tomb, and was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling; Bramante was designing the new St. Peter’s; Fra Giovanni of Verona, master woodworker, was carving doors and chairs and bosses for the stanze; Perugino, Signorelli, Peruzzi, Sodoma, Lotto, Pinturicchio had already painted some of the walls; and Ambrogio Foppa, called Caradosso, the Cellini of his age, was making gold in every way.

Julius assigned to Raphael the Stanza della Segnatura, so called because usually in this room the Pope heard appeals and signed pardons. He was so pleased with the youth’s first paintings here, and saw in him so excellent and pliable an agent to execute the grand conceptions that seethed in the papal brain, that he dismissed Perugino, Signorelli, and Sodoma, ordered their paintings whitewashed, and offered to Raphael the opportunity to paint all the walls of the four rooms. Raphael persuaded the Pope to retain some of the work done by the earlier artists; most of it, however, was covered over, so that the major paintings might have the unity of one mind and hand. For each room Raphael received 1200 ducats ($15,000?); and on the two rooms that he did for Julius he spent four and a half years. He was now twenty-six.

The plan for the Stanza della Segnatura was lordly and sublime: the paintings were to represent the union of religion and philosophy, of classic culture and Christianity, of Church and state, of literature and law, in the civilization of the Renaissance. Probably the Pope conceived the general plan, and chose the subjects in consultation with Raphael and the scholars of his court—Inghirami and Sadoleto, later Bembo and Bibbiena. In the great semicircle formed by one side wall Raphael pictured religion in the persons of the Trinity and the saints, and theology in the form of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church discussing the nature of the Christian faith as centered in the doctrine of the Eucharist. How carefully he prepared himself for this first test of his ability to paint on a monumental scale may be seen from the thirty preliminary studies that he made for this Disputa del Sacramento. He recalled Fra Bartolommeo’s Last Judgment in Santa Maria Nuova at Florence, and his own Adoration of the Trinity in San Severo at Perugia; and on them he modeled his design.

The result was a panorama so majestic as almost to convert the most obdurate skeptic to the mysteries of the faith. At the top of the arch, radial lines, converging upward, make the uppermost figures seem to bend forward; at the bottom the converging lines of a marble pavement give the picture depth. At the summit God the Father—a solemn, kindly Abraham —holds up the globe with one hand, and with the other blesses the scene; below Him the Son sits, naked to the waist, as in a shell; on His right Mary in humble adoration, on His left the Baptist still carrying his shepherd’s staff crowned with a cross; beneath Him a dove represents the Holy Spirit, third person of the Trinity; everything is here. Seated on a fluffy cloud around the Saviour are twelve magnificent figures of Old Testament or Christian history: Adam, a bearded Michelangelesque athlete, almost nude; Abraham; a stately Moses holding the tables of the Law; David, Judas Maccabaeus, Peter and Paul, St. John writing his evangel, St. James the Greater, St. Stephen, St. Lawrence, and two others of debated identity; among them, and in the clouds—everywhere except in the beards—cherubim and seraphim dart in and out, and angels weave through the air on the wings of song. Dividing and uniting this celestial assembly from an earthly throng below are two cherubim holding the Gospel, and a monstrance displaying the Host. Around this a varied assemblage of theologians gathers to consider the problems of theology: St. Jerome with his Vulgate and his lion; St. Augustine dictating The City of God; St. Ambrose in his episcopal robes; Popes Anacletus and Innocent III; the philosophers Aquinas, Bonaventura, and Duns Scotus; the dour Dante crowned as if with thorns; the gentle Fra Angelico; the angry Savonarola (another Julian revenge on Alexander VI); and finally, in a corner, bald and ugly, Raphael’s protecting friend Bramante. In all these human figures the young artist has achieved an astonishing degree of individualization, making each face a credible biography; and in many of them a degree of superhuman dignity ennobles the whole picture and theme. Probably never before had painting so successfully conveyed the epic sublimity of the Christian creed.

But could the same youth, now twenty-eight, represent with equal force and grandeur the role of science and philosophy among men? We have no evidence that Raphael had ever done much reading; he spoke with his brush and listened with his eyes; he lived in a world of form and color in which words were trivial things unless they issued in the significant actions of men and women. He must have prepared himself by hurried study, by dipping into Plato and Diogenes Laërtius and Marsilio Ficino, and by humble conversation with learned men, to rise now to his supreme conception, The School of Athens—half a hundred figures summing up rich centuries of Greek thought, and all gathered in an immortal moment under the coffered arch of a massive pagan portico. There, on the wall directly facing the apotheosis of theology in the Disputa, is the glorification of philosophy: Plato of the Jovelike brow, deep eyes, flowing white hair and beard, with a finger pointing upward to his perfect state; Aristotle walking quietly beside him, thirty years younger, handsome and cheerful, holding out his hand with downward palm, as if to bring his master’s soaring idealism back to earth and the possible; Socrates counting off his arguments on his fingers, with armed Alcibiades listening to him lovingly; Pythagoras trying to imprison in harmonic tables the music of the spheres; a fair lady who might be Aspasia; Heraclitus writing Ephesian riddles; Diogenes lying carelessly disrobed on the marble steps; Archimedes drawing geometries on a slate for four absorbed youths; Ptolemy and Zoroaster bandying globes; a boy at the left running up eagerly with books, surely seeking an autograph; an assiduous lad seated in a corner taking notes; peeking out at the left, little Federigo of Mantua, Isabella’s son and Julius’ pet; Bramante again; and hiding modestly, almost unseen, Raphael himself, now sprouting a mustache. There are many more, about whose identity we shall let leisurely pundits dispute; all in all, such a parliament of wisdom had never been painted, perhaps never been conceived, before. And not a word about heresy, no philosophers burned at the stake; here, under the protection of a Pope too great to fuss about the difference between one error and another, the young Christian has suddenly brought all these pagans together, painted them in their own character and with remarkable understanding and sympathy, and placed them where the theologians could see them and exchange fallibilities, and where the Pope, between one document and another, might contemplate the co-operative process and creation of human thought. This painting and the Disputa are the ideal of the Renaissance—pagan antiquity and Christian faith living together in one room and harmony. These rival panels, in the sum of their conception, composition, and technique, are the apex of European painting, to which no man has ever risen again.

A third wall remained, smaller than the other two, and so broken by a casement window that unity of pictorial subject seemed impossible there. It was a brilliant choice to let that surface picture poetry and music; so a chamber heavily laden with theology and philosophy was made light and bright with the world of harmonious imagination, and gentle melodies could sing silently through the centuries across that room where unappealable decisions gave life or death. In this fresco of Parnassus, Apollo, seated under some laurel trees atop the sacred mount, draws from his viol “ditties of no tone”; and at his right a Muse reclines in graceful ease, baring a lovely breast to the saints and sages on the adjacent walls; and Homer recites his hexameters in blind ecstasy, and Dante looks with unreconciled severity even at this goodly company of graces and bards; and Sappho, too beautiful to be Lesbian, strums her cithara: and Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, and other singers chosen by time mingle with Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Sannazaro, and lesser voices of more recent Italy. So the young artist suggested that “life without music would be a mistake,”²¹ and that the strains and visions of poetry might lift men to heights as lofty as the myopia of wisdom and the impudence of theology.

On the fourth wall, also pierced by a window, Raphael honored the place of law in civilization. In the lunette he painted figures of Prudence, Force, and Moderation; on one side of the casement he represented civil law in the form of The Emperor Justinian Promulgating the Pandects, and on the other, canon law in the person of Pope Gregory IX Promulgating the Decretals. Here, to flatter his irascible master, he pictured Julius as Gregory, and achieved another powerful portrait. In the circles, hexagons, and rectangles of the ornate ceiling he painted little masterpieces like The Judgment of Solomon, and symbolic figures of theology, philosophy, jurisprudence, astronomy, and poetry. With these and similar cameos, and some medallions left by Sodoma, the great Stanza della Segnatura was complete.

Raphael had exhausted himself there, and never attained to such colossal excellence again. By 1511, when he began the next room—now called the Stanza d’Eliodoro from its central picture—the conceptual inspiration of Pope and artist seemed to lose force and fire. Julius could hardly be expected to dedicate his entire apartment to a glorification of a union between classic culture and Christianity; it was natural now that he should devote a few walls to commemorating scenes in Scriptural and Christian story. Perhaps to symbolize his expected expulsion of the French from Italy, he chose for one side of the chamber the vivid description, in the Second Book of Maccabees, of how Heliodorus and his pagan cohorts, attempting to abscond with the treasury of the Jerusalem Temple (186 B.C.), were overwhelmed by three angel warriors. Against an architectural background of great pillars and receding arches the high priest Onias, kneeling at the altar, begs divine aid. On the right a mounted angel, with irresistible wrath, tramples down the robber general, while two other heavenly rescuers advance to attack the fallen infidel, whose stolen coins spill out upon the pavement. On the left, with sublime disdain of chronology, Julius II sits enthroned in calm majesty, watching the expulsion of the invaders; at his feet a crowd of Jewish women mingle incongruously with Raphael (now bearded and solemn) and his friends Marcantonio Raimondi the engraver and Giovanni di Foliari, a member of the papal secretariat. It is hardly as exalting a fresco as the Disputa or The School of Athens; it is too visibly devoted, at the cost of compositional unity, to the celebration of one pontiff and a passing theme; but it is still a masterpiece, vibrating with action, stately with architecture, and almost rivaling Michelangelo in the display of angry and muscular anatomies.

On another wall Raphael painted The Mass of Bolsena. About 1263 a Bohemian priest of Bolsena (near Orvieto), who had doubted that the sacramental wafer was really transformed into the body and blood of Christ, was amazed to see drops of blood ooze from the Host that he had just consecrated in the Mass. In commemoration of this miracle Pope Urban IV ordered the erection of a cathedral at Orvieto, and the annual celebration of the Corpus Christi feast. Raphael painted the scene with brilliance and mastery. The priestly skeptic gazes at the bleeding Host, while the acolytes behind him start at the sight; women and children at one side, Swiss guards at the other, unable to see the miracle, are visibly unmoved; Cardinals Riario and Schinner and other ecclesiastics stare at the scene in mingled astonishment and terror; across from the altar, kneeling on a prie-dieu carved with grotesques, Julius II looks on in quiet dignity, as if he had known all along that the Host would bleed. Technically this is one of the best of the stanze frescoes: Raphael has distributed his figures skillfully around and above the window that mounts into the wall; he has designed them with firmness of line and careful execution; and he has brought to flesh and drapery a new depth and warmth of coloring. The figure of the kneeling Julius is a revealing portrait of the Pope in his final year. Still the warrior strong and stern, still the proud King of Kings, he is a man worn with his toils and combats, clearly marked for death.

During these major labors (1508–13) Raphael produced several memorable Madonnas. The Virgin with the Diadem (Louvre) reverts to the Umbrian style of modest piety. The Madonna della Casa Alba— literally “the Lady of the White House”—is a graceful study in pink and green and gold, with the large and flowing lines of Michelangelo’s sibyls; Andrew Mellon contributed $1,166,400 to the Soviet Government in exchange for this picture (1936). The Madonna di Foligno (Vatican) shows a lovely Virgin and Child in the clouds, a ghastly Baptist pointing to her, a stout St. Jerome presenting to her the donor of the picture, Sigismondo de’ Conti of Foligno and Rome; here Raphael, under the influence of the Venetian Sebastiano del Piombo, achieves a new splendor of luminous color. The Madonna della Pesce (Prado) is altogether beautiful: in the face and mood of the Virgin; in the Child—never surpassed by Raphael; in the youthful Tobit presenting to Mary the fish whose liver has restored his father’s sight; in the robe of the angel who guides him; in the patriarchal head of St. Jerome. In composition, color, and light this painting can bear comparison with the Sistine Madonna itself.

Finally Raphael in this period raised portrait painting to a height that only Titian would reach again. The portrait was a characteristic product of the Renaissance, and corresponds to the proud liberation of the individual in that flamboyant age. Raphael’s portraits are not numerous, but they all stand on the highest level of the art. One of the finest is Bindo Altoviti. Who could surmise that this gentle but alert youth, healthy and cleareyed, and as pretty as a girl, was no poet but a banker, and a generous patron of artists from Raphael to Cellini? He was twenty-two when so portrayed; in 1556 he died at Rome after a noble but disastrous and exhausting effort to save the independence of Siena from Florence. And of course to this period belongs the greatest of all portraits, the Julius II of the Uffizi Gallery (c. 1512). We cannot say that this is the original that first came from Raphael’s hand; possibly it is a studio replica; and the marvelous copy in the Pitti Palace was made by none other than that rival portraitist, Titian. The fate of the original is unknown.

Julius himself died before the Stanza d’Eliodoro was finished, and Raphael wondered whether the great plan of the four stanze would be carried out. But how could a pope like Leo X, wedded to art and poetry almost as deeply as to religion, hesitate? The young man from Urbino was to find in Leo his most loyal friend; the living genius of happiness was to know under a happy pope his happiest years.

IV. MICHELANGELO

1. Youth: 1475–1505

We have left to the last Julius’ favorite painter and sculptor, a man rivaling him in temper and terribilità, in power and depth of spirit—the greatest and saddest artist in the records of mankind.

Michelangelo’s father was Lodovico di Lionardo Buonarroti Simoni, podesta or mayor of the little town of Caprese, on the road from Florence to Arezzo. Lodovico claimed distant kinship with the counts of Canossa, one of whom was pleased to acknowledge the relation; Michael always prided himself on having a liter or two of noble blood; but ruthless research has proved him mistaken.²²

Born at Caprese on March 6, 1475, and named, like Raphael, after an archangel, Michelangelo was the second of four brothers. He was put out to nurse near a marble quarry at Settignano, so that he breathed the dust of sculpture from his birth; he remarked later that he had sucked in chisels and hammers with his nurse’s milk.²³ When he was six months old the family moved to Florence. He received some schooling there, enough to enable him, in after years, to write good Italian verse. He learned no Latin, and never fell so completely under the hypnosis of antiquity as did many artists of the time; he was Hebraic not classic, Protestant in spirit rather than Catholic.

He preferred drawing to writing—which is a corruption of drawing. His father mourned the preference, but finally yielded to it, and apprenticed Michael, aged thirteen, to Domenico Ghirlandaio, then the most popular painter in Florence. The contract bound the youth to stay with Domenico three years “to learn the art of painting”; he was to receive six florins the first year, eight the second, ten the third, and presumably shelter and food. The boy supplemented Ghirlandaio’s instruction by keeping his eyes open as he wandered through Florence, seeing in everything some object for art. “Thus,” reports his friend Condivi, “he used to frequent the fish market and study the shape and hues of fishes’ fins, the color of their eyes, and so for every part belonging to them; all which details he reproduced with the utmost diligence in his painting.”²⁴

He had been with Ghirlandaio hardly a year when a combination of nature and chance turned him to sculpture. Like many other art students he had free access to the gardens in which the Medici had disposed their collections of antique statuary and architecture. He must have copied some of these marbles with especial interest and skill, for when Lorenzo, wishing to develop a school of sculpture in Florence, asked Ghirlandaio to send him some students of promise in that direction, Domenico gave him Francesco Granacci and Michelangelo Buonarroti. The boy’s father hesitated to let him make the change from one art to the other; he feared that his son would be put to cutting stone; and indeed Michael was so used for a time, blocking out marble for the Laurentian Library. But soon the boy was carving statues. All the world knows the story of Michael’s marble faun: how he chiseled a stray piece into the figure of an old faun; how Lorenzo, passing, remarked that so old a faun would hardly have so complete a set of teeth; and how Michael remedied the fault at one blow by knocking a tooth out of the upper jaw. Pleased with the boy’s product and aptitude, Lorenzo took him into his home and treated him as his son. For two years (1490–2) the young artist lived in the Palazzo Medici, regularly ate at the same table with Lorenzo, Politian, Pico, Ficino, and Pulci, heard the most enlightened talk about politics, literature, philosophy and art. Lorenzo assigned him a good room, and allowed him five ducats ($62.50?) a month for his personal expenses. Whatever works of art Michael might produce remained his own, to dispose of as he wished.

These years in the Medici Palace might have been a period of pleasant growth had it not been for Pietro Torrigiano. Pietro one day took offense at Michael’s banter, and (so he told Cellini), “clenching my fist, I gave him such a blow on the nose that I felt bone and cartilage go down like biscuit beneath my knuckles; and this mark of mine he will carry to the grave.”²⁵ It was so: Michelangelo for the next seventy-four years showed a nose broken at the bridge. It did not sweeten his temper.

In those same years Savonarola was preaching his fiery gospel of puritan reform. Michael went often to hear him, and never forgot those sermons, or the cold thrill that ran through his youthful blood as the prior’s angry cry, announcing the doom of corrupt Italy, pierced the stillness of the crowded cathedral. When Savonarola died, something of his spirit lingered in Michelangelo: a horror of the moral decay about him, a fierce resentment of despotism, a somber presentiment of doom. Those memories and fears shared in forming his character, in guiding his chisel and his brush; lying on his back under the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he remembered Savonarola; painting The Last Judgment, he resurrected him, and hurled the friar’s fulminations down the centuries.

In 1492 Lorenzo died, and Michael returned to his father’s house. He continued his sculpture and painting, and now added a strange experience to his education. The prior of the hospital of Santo Spirito allowed him, in a private room, to dissect corpses. Michael performed so many dissections that his stomach revolted, and for a time he could hardly hold any food or drink. But he learned anatomy. He had an absurd chance to show his knowledge when Piero de’ Medici asked him to mold a gigantic snow man in the court of the palace. Michael complied, and Piero persuaded him to live again in the Casa Medici (January, 1494).

Late in 1494 Michelangelo, in one of his many hectic moves, fled through the winter snow of the Apennines to Bologna. One story says that he was warned of Piero’s coming fall by the dream of a friend; perhaps his own judgment predicted that event; in any case Florence might not then be safe for one so favored by the Medici. At Bologna he studied carefully the reliefs by Iacopo della Quercia on the façade of San Petronio. He was engaged to finish the tomb of St. Dominic, and carved for it a graceful Kneeling Angel; then the organized sculptors of Bologna sent him warning that if he, a foreigner and interloper, continued to take work out of their hands, they would dispose of him by one or another of the many devices open to Renaissance initiative. Meanwhile Savonarola had taken charge of Florence, and virtue was in the air. Michael returned (1495).

He found a patron in Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, of the collateral branch of the Medici. For him he carved a Sleeping Cupid, which had a strange history. Lorenzo suggested that he treat the surface to make it look like an antique; Michael complied; Lorenzo sent it to Rome, where it was sold for thirty ducats to a dealer who sold it for two hundred to Raffaello Riario, Cardinal di San Giorgio. The Cardinal discovered the cheat, sent back the Cupid, recovered his ducats. It was later sold to Caesar Borgia, who gave it to Guidobaldo of Urbino; Caesar reclaimed it on taking that city, and sent it to Isabella d’Este, who described it as “without a peer among the works of modern times.”²⁶ Its later history is unknown.

With all his versatile ability Michael found it hard to earn a living by art in a city where there were almost as many artists as citizens. An agent of Riario invited him to Rome, assuring him that the Cardinal would give him employment, and that Rome was full of wealthy patrons. So in 1496 Michelangelo moved hopefully to the capital, and received a place in the household of the Cardinal. Riario did not prove generous; but Iacopo Gallo, a banker, commissioned Michael to carve a Bacchus and a Cupid. One is in the Bargello at Florence, the other in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The Bacchus is an unpleasant representation of the young god of wine in a state of bibbling intoxication; the head is too small for the body, as may be fitting in a toper; but the body is well designed, and smooth with an androgynous softness of texture. The Cupid is a crouching youth, more like an athlete than a god of love; possibly Michelangelo did not name it so incongruously; as sculpture it is excellent. Here, almost at the outset, the artist distinguished his work by showing the figure in a moment and attitude of action. The Greek preference for repose in art was alien to him, except in the Pietà; so—with the same exception—was the Greek flair for universality—for depicting general types; Michelangelo chose rather to portray an individual imaginary in conception, realistic in detail. He did not imitate the antique, except in costumes; his work was characteristically his own, no renaissance, but a unique creation.

The greatest product of this first stay in Rome was the Pietà that is now one of the glories of St. Peter’s. The contract for it was signed by Cardinal Jean de Villiers, French ambassador at the papal court (1498); the fee was to be 450 ducats ($5,625?); the time allowed, one year; and Michael’s banker friend added his own generous guarantees:

I, Iacopo Gallo, pledge my word to his most reverend Lordship that the said Michelangelo will finish the said work within one year, and that it shall be the finest work in marble which Rome today can show, and that no master of our day shall be able to produce a better. And in like manner… I pledge my word to the said Michelangelo that the most reverend Cardinal will disburse the payments according to the articles above engrossed.²⁷

There are some blemishes in this glorious group of the Virgin Mother holding her dead Son in her lap: the drapery seems excessive, the Virgin’s head is small for her body, her left hand is extended in an inappropriate gesture; her face is that of a young woman clearly younger than her Son. To this last complaint Michelangelo, as reported by Condivi, made answer:

Do you not know that chaste women maintain their freshness far longer than the unchaste? How much more would this be the case with a virgin into whose breast there never crept the least lascivious desire which would affect the body! Nay, I will go further, and hazard the belief that this unsullied bloom of youth, besides being maintained in her by natural causes, may have been miraculously wrought to convince the world of the virginity and perpetual purity of the Mother.²⁸

It is a pleasant and forgivable fancy. The spectator is soon reconciled to that gentle face, untorn by agony, calm in her grief and love, the bereaved mother resigned to the will of God, and consoled by holding for some final moments the dear body here cleansed of its wounds, freed from its indignities, resting in the lap of the woman that bore it, and beautiful even in death. All the essence and tragedy and redemption of life are in this simple group: the stream of births by which woman carries on the race; the certainty of death as the penalty for every birth; and the love that ennobles our mortality with kindness, and challenges every death with new birth. Francis I was right when he pronounced this the finest achievement of Michelangelo.²⁹ In all the history of sculpture no man has ever surpassed it, except, perhaps, the unknown Greek who carved the Demeter of the British Museum.

The success of the Pietà brought Michelangelo not only fame, which he humanly enjoyed, but money, which his relatives were ready to enjoy with him. His father had lost, with the fall of the Medici, the little sinecure that Lorenzo the Magnificent had given him; Michael’s older brother had entered a monastery; the two younger brothers were improvident, and Michael became now the main support of the family. He complained of this necessity, but gave generously.

Probably because the disordered finances of his relatives called him, he returned to Florence in 1501. A unique assignment came to him in August of that year. The Operai or Board of Works at the cathedral owned a block of Carrara marble thirteen and a half feet high, but so inegularly shaped that it had lain unused for a hundred years. The Board asked Michelangelo could a statue be chiseled out of it. He agreed to try; and on August 16 the Operai del Duomo and the Arte della Lana (the Wool Guild) signed the contract:

That the worthy master Michelangelo… has been chosen to fashion, complete, and finish to perfection that male statue called Il gigante, of nine cubits in height… that the work shall be completed within two years dating from September, at a salary of six golden florins per month; that what is needed for the accomplishment of this task, as workmen, timbers, etc., shall be supplied him by the Operai; and when the statue is finished the Guild consuls and the Operai… shall estimate whether he deserve a larger recompense, and this shall be left to their consciences.³⁰

The sculptor toiled on the refractory material for two and a half years; with heroic labor he drew from it, using every inch of its height, his David. On January 25, 1504, the Operai assembled a council of the leading artists in Florence to consider where Il gigante, as they called the David, should be placed: Cosimo Roselli, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Giuliano and Antonio da Sangallo, Filippino Lippi, David Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Giovanni Piffero (father of Cellini), and Piero di Cosimo. They could not agree, and finally they left the matter to Michelangelo; he asked that the statue be placed on the platform of the Palazzo Vecchio. The Signory consented; but the task of moving The Giant from the workshop near the cathedral to the Palazzo took forty men four days; a gateway had to be heightened by breaking a wall above it before the colossus could pass; and twenty-one additional days were spent in raising it into place. For 369 years it stood on the open and uncovered porch of the Palazzo, subject to weather, urchins, and revolution. For in a sense it was a radical pronunciamento, symbol of the proud restored republic, stern threat to usurpers. The Medici, returning to power in 1513, left it untouched; but in the uprising that again deposed them (1527) a bench thrown from a window of the Palace broke the statue’s left arm. Francesco Salviati and Giorgio Vasari, then lads of sixteen, gathered and preserved the pieces, and a later Medici, Duke Cosimo, had these fragments put together and replaced. In 1873, after the statue had suffered erosion from the weather, David was laboriously transferred to the Accademia delle Belle Arti, where it occupies the place of honor as the most popular figure in Florence.

It was a tour de force, and as such can hardly be overpraised; the mechanical difficulties were brilliantly overcome. Esthetically one may pick a few flaws: the right hand is too large, the neck too long, the left leg overlong below the knee, the left buttock does not swell as any proper buttock should. Piero Soderini, head of the republic, thought the nose excessive; Vasari tells the story—perhaps a legend—how Michelangelo, hiding some marble dust in his hand, mounted a ladder, pretended to chisel off a bit of the nose while leaving it intact, and let the marble dust fall from his hand before the Gonfalonier, who then pronounced the statue much improved. The total effect of the work silences criticism: the splendid frame, not yet swollen with the muscles of Michelangelo’s later heroes, the finished texture of the flesh, the strong yet refined features, the nostrils tense with excitement, the frown of anger and the look of resolution subtly tinged with diffidence as the youth faces the fearsome Goliath and prepares to fill and cast his sling—these share in making the David, with one exception,* the most famous statue in the world. Vasari thought it “surpassed all other statues ancient and modern, Latin or Greek.”³¹

The Duomo Board paid Michelangelo a total of 400 florins for the David. Allowing for the depreciation of currency between 1400 and 1500, we may equate this roughly at $5000 in the money of 1952; it seems a rather small sum for thirty months’ work; presumably he accepted other commissions during that time. Indeed the Board and Guild themselves, while David was in process, engaged him to carve statues, six and a half feet high, of the twelve Apostles, to be placed in the cathedral. He was allowed twelve years for the work, was to be paid two florins a month, and a house was to be built for his free occupancy. Of these statues the sole survivor is a St. Matthew, only half emerged from the block of stone, like some figure by Rodin. Looking at it in the Florence Academy, we understand better what Michelangelo meant when he defined sculpture as the art “that works by force of taking away”; and again, in one of his poems: “In hard and craggy stone the mere removal of the surface gives being to a figure, which ever grows the more the stone is hewn away.”³² He often spoke of himself as searching to find the figure concealed in the stone, knocking the surface away as if seeking a miner buried in fallen rock.

About 1505 he carved for a Flemish merchant the Madonna that sits in the church of Notre Dame at Bruges. It has been highly praised, but it is one of the artist’s poorer works—the drapery simple and dignified, the head of the Child quite out of proportion to the body, the face of the Virgin pouting and mournful as if she felt that it was all a mistake. Still stranger is the homely Virgin in the Madonna painted (1505) for Angelo Doni. In truth Michelangelo did not care much for beauty; he was interested in bodies, preferably male, and represented them sometimes with all the defects of their seen forms, sometimes in a way to convey some sermon or idea, but seldom with a view to catching beauty and imprisoning it in lasting stone. In this Doni Madonna he offends good taste by placing a row of naked youths on a parapet behind the Virgin. Not that he was paganizing; he was apparently a sincere, even a puritan, Christian; but here, as in The Last Judgment, his fascination with the human body triumphed over his piety. He was deeply interested, too, in the anatomy of position, in what happens to limbs, extremities, frame, and muscles when the body changes its pose. So here the Virgin leans backward, apparently to receive the Child over her shoulder from St. Joseph. It is excellent sculpture, but lifeless and almost colorless painting. Michelangelo was to protest, time and again, that painting was not his forte.

Therefore he must have felt no great pleasure when Soderini invited him (1504) to paint a mural in the Hall of the Great Council of the Palazzo Vecchio, while his bête noire, Leonardo da Vinci, was to paint an opposite wall. He disliked Leonardo for a hundred reasons—for his aristocratic manners, his costly and pretentious dress, his retinue of pretty youths, perhaps for his greater success and fame, till then, as a painter. Angelo was not sure that he, a sculptor, could rival Leonardo in painting; it was courageous of him to try. For his preliminary cartoon he set up a panel of linen-backed paper 288 square feet in area. He had made some progress on this sketch when a summons came to him from Rome: Julius needed the best sculptor to be found in Italy. The Signory fumed, but let Michelangelo go (1505). Perhaps he was not sorry to leave the pencil and the brush, and return to the laborious art that he loved.

2. Michelangelo and Julius II: 1505–13

He must have seen at once that he would be miserable with Julius, they were so much alike. Both had temper and temperament: the Pope imperious and fiery, the artist somber and proud. Both were Titans in spirit and aim, acknowledging no superior, admitting no compromise, passing from one grandiose project to another, stamping their personalities on their time, and laboring with such mad energy that when both were dead all Italy seemed exhausted and empty.

Julius, following the example long since set by the cardinals, wanted for his bones a mausoleum whose size and splendor should proclaim his greatness even to distant and forgetful posterity. He looked with envy upon the beautiful tomb that Andrea Sansovino had just carved for Cardinal Ascanio Sforza in Santa Maria del Popolo. Michael proposed a colossal monument twenty-seven feet in length and eighteen in width. Forty statues would adorn it: some symbolizing the redeemed Papal States; some personifying Painting, Architecture, Sculpture, Poetry, Philosophy, Theology—all made captive by the irresistible Pope; others depicting his major predecessors, as, for example, Moses; two would picture angels—one weeping at Julius’ removal from the earth, the other smiling at his entrance into heaven. At the top would be a handsome sarcophagus for the mortal papal remains. Along the surfaces of the monument would run bronze reliefs recounting the achievements of the Pope in war, government, and art. All this was to stand in the tribune of St. Peter’s. It was a design that would use many tons of marble, many thousands of ducats, many years of the sculptor’s life. Julius approved, gave Angelo two thousand ducats for the purchase of marble, and sent him off to Carrara instructed to pick the finest veins. While there Michael noted a hill overlooking the sea, and conceived the idea of carving the mount into a colossal human figure, which, lighted at the top, would serve as a beacon to distant mariners; but Julius’ tomb called him back to Rome. When the marble that he had bought arrived, and was piled up in a square by his lodgings near St. Peter’s, people marveled at its quantity and cost, and Julius rejoiced.

The drama became tragedy. Bramante, desiring money for the new St. Peter’s, looked askance at this titanic project; moreover he feared that Michelangelo would replace him as the Pope’s favorite artist; he used his influence to divert papal funds and passion from the proposed tomb. For his part Julius was planning war upon Perugia and Bologna (1506), and found Mars an expensive god; the tomb should wait for peace. Meanwhile Angelo had received no salary, had spent on marble all that Julius had advanced him, had paid out of his own pocket to furnish the house that the Pope had provided for him. He went to the Vatican on Holy Saturday, 1506, to ask for money; he was told to return on Monday; he did, and was told to return on Tuesday; like rebuffs met him on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday; on Friday he was turned away with the blunt statement that the Pope did not wish to see him. He went home and wrote a letter to Julius:

Most Blessed Father: I have been turned out of the Palace today by your orders; wherefore I give you notice that from this time forward, if you want me, you must look for me elsewhere than at Rome.³³

He gave instructions for the sale of the furniture he had bought, and took horse toward Florence. At Poggibonsi he was overtaken by couriers bearing a letter from the Pope, which commanded him to return at once to Rome. If we may accept his own account (and he was an unusually honest man) he sent back a reply that he would come only when the Pope agreed to fulfill the conditions of their understanding for the tomb. He continued to Florence.

Now he resumed work on the immense cartoon for The Battle of Pisa. He chose as his subject no actual warfare, but the moment when the soldiers, who had been swimming in the Arno, were suddenly called to action. Michael was not concerned with battles; he wanted to study and portray the nude male form in every position; here was his chance. He showed some men emerging from the river, others running to their weapons, others struggling to pull up stockings on wet legs, others leaping or riding on horseback, others hurriedly adjusting their armor, some running stark naked to the fight. There was no landscape background; Michelangelo never cared for landscape, or for anything in nature except the human form. When the cartoon was finished it was put alongside Leonardo’s in the Hall of the Pope in Santa Maria Novella. There the rival sketches became a school for a hundred artists—Andrea del Sarto, Alonso Berruguete, Raphael, Iacopo Sansovino, Perino del Vaga, and a hundred more. Cellini, who copied Michelangelo’s cartoon about 1513, described it with youthful enthusiasm as “so splendid in action that nothing survives of ancient or modern art which touches the same point of lofty excellence. Though the divine Michel Agnolo in later life finished that great [Sistine] Chapel, he never rose halfway to the same pitch of power.”³⁴

We cannot say as much. The picture was never painted, the cartoon is lost, and only minor fragments survive of the many copies made. While Angelo was working on the sketch Pope Julius sent message after message to the Florentine Signory, commanding them to send him back to Rome. Soderini, loving the artist and fearing for his safety in Rome, temporized. After the third letter from the Pope he begged Angelo to obey, saying that his obstinacy endangered the peaceful relations between Florence and the papacy. Michael demanded a safe-conduct, to be signed by the Cardinal of Volterra. During the delay Julius captured Bologna (November, 1506). Now he sent to Florence a peremptory order that Michelangelo should come to Bologna for an important commission. Armed with a letter from Soderini to Julius, which begged the Pope to “show him love and treat him gently,” Michael went once more over the snows of the Apennines. Julius received him with a heavy frown, ordered from the room a bishop who presumed to rebuke the artist for disobedience, gave Angelo a grumbling pardon, and a characteristic assignment. “I wish you to make my statue on a large scale in bronze. I mean to place it on the façade of San Petronio.”³⁵ Michael was glad to get back to sculpture, though not confident of his ability to cast successfully a sitting figure fourteen feet in height. Julius provided a thousand ducats for the work; Angelo reported later that he had spent all but four ducats on materials, so that he had for himself only that reward for two years of labor in Bologna. The task was as heartbreaking as that which Cellini described for casting the Loggia Perseus. “I work night and day,” the sculptor wrote to his brother Buonarroto; “if I had to begin the whole thing over again I do not think I could survive it.”³⁶ In February, 1508, the statue was raised to its place above the main portal of the cathedral. In March Michael returned to Florence, probably praying that he might never see Julius again. Three years later, as we have seen, the statue was melted into cannon.

Almost at once the Pope sent for him. Angelo went back to Rome, and was chagrined to find that Julius wanted him not to carve the great tomb but to paint the ceiling of the chapel of Sixtus IV. He hesitated to face the problems of perspective and foreshortening in painting a ceiling sixty-eight feet above the floor; he protested again that he was a sculptor, not a painter; in vain he recommended Raphael as a better man for the work. Julius commanded and coaxed, pledging a fee of 3000 ducats ($37,500?); Michael feared the Pope and needed the money. Still murmuring, “This is not my trade,” he undertook the arduous and uncongenial task. He sent to Florence for five assistants trained in design; tore down the clumsy scaffolding that Bramante had raised, erected his own, and set to work measuring and charting the ten thousand square feet of the ceiling, planning the general design, making cartoons for each separate space, including spandrels, pendentives, and lunettes; in all there were to be 343 figures. Many preliminary studies were made, some from living models. When the final form of a cartoon was finished it was carried carefully up the scaffolding and was applied, face outward, to the freshly plastered surface of its corresponding place; the lines of the composition were then pricked through the drawing into the plaster, the cartoon was removed, and the sculptor began to paint.

For over four years—from May, 1508, to October, 1512—Angelo worked on the Sistine ceiling. Not continuously; there were interruptions of uncertain length, as when he went to Bologna to besiege Julius for more funds. And not alone: he had helpers to grind the colors, prepare the plaster, perhaps to draw or paint some minor features; parts of the frescoes reveal inferior hands. But the five artists whom he had summoned to Rome were soon dismissed; Angelo’s style of conception, design, and coloring was so different from theirs and the traditions of Florence that he found them more hindrance than aid. Besides, he did not know how to get along with others, and it was one of his consolations, up there on the scaffold, that he was alone; there he could think, in pain but in peace; there he could exemplify Leonardo’s saying: “If you are alone you will be wholly your own.” To the technical difficulties Julius added himself by his impatience to have the great work completed and displayed. Picture the old Pope mounting the frail frame, drawn up to the platform by the artist, expressing admiration, always asking, “When will it be finished?” The reply was a lesson in integrity: “When I shall have done all that I believe required to satisfy art.”³⁷ To which Julius retorted angrily: “Do you want me to hurl you from this scaffold?”³⁸ Yielding later to the papal impatience, Angelo took down the scaffolding before all final touches had been applied. Then Julius thought that a little gold should be added here and there, but the weary artist persuaded him that gold trimmings would hardly become the Prophets or the Apostles. When for the last time Michael descended from the scaffold he was exhausted, emaciated, prematurely old. A story says that his eyes, long accustomed to the subdued illumination of the chapel, could hardly bear the light of the sun;³⁹ and another story that he found it now easier to read by looking upward than by holding the page beneath his eyes.⁴⁰

The original plan of Julius for the ceiling had been merely a series of Apostles; Michelangelo prevailed upon him to allow an ampler and nobler scheme. He divided the convex vault into over a hundred panels by picturing columns and moldings between them; and he enhanced the tridimensional illusion with lusty youthful figures upholding the cornices or seated on capitals. In the major panels, running along the crest of the ceiling, Angelo painted episodes from Genesis: the initial act of creation separates light from darkness; the sun, moon, and planets come into being at the command of the Creator—a majestic figure stern of face, powerful of body, with beard and robes flying in the air; the Almighty, even finer in form and feature than in the previous panel, extends His right arm to create Adam, while with the left arm He holds a very pretty angel—this panel is Michelangelo’s pictorial masterpiece; God, now a much older and patriarchal deity, evokes Eve from Adam’s rib; Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree, and are expelled from Eden; Noah and his sons prepare a sacrificial offering to God; the flood rises; Noah celebrates with too much wine. All in these panels is Old Testament, all is Hebraic; Michelangelo belongs to the prophets pronouncing doom, not to the evangelists expounding the gospel of love.

In the spandrels of alternate arches Angelo painted magnificent figures of Daniel, Isaiah, Zecharia, Joel, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Jonah. In the other spandrels he pictured the pagan oracles that were believed to have foretold Christ: the graceful Libyan Sibyl, holding an open book of the future; the dark, unhappy, powerful Cumaean Sibyl; the studious Persian; the Delphic and Erythrean Sibyls; these too are such paintings as rival the sculptures of Pheidias; indeed, all these figures suggest sculpture; and Michelangelo, conscripted into an alien art, transforms it into his own. In the large triangle at one end of the ceiling, and in two others at the other end, the artist still stayed in the Old Testament, with the raising of the brazen serpent in the wilderness, the victory of David over Goliath, the hanging of Haman, the beheading of Holofernes by Judith. Finally, as if by concession and afterthought, in the lunettes and arched recesses above the windows, Angelo painted scenes expounding the genealogy of Mary and Christ.

No one of these pictures quite equals Raphael’s School of Athens in conception, drawing, color, and technique; but taken all together, they constitute the greatest achievement of any man in the history of painting. The total effect of repeated and careful contemplation is far greater than in the case of the Stanze. There we feel a happy perfection of artistry, and an urbane union of pagan and Christian thought. Here we do not merely perceive technical accomplishment—in the perspective, the foreshortenings, the unrivaled variety of attitudes; we feel the sweep and breath of genius, almost as creative as in the wind-swept figure of the Almighty raising Adam out of the earth.

Here again Michelangelo has given his ruling passion free rein; and though the place was the chapel of the popes, the theme and object of his art was the human body. Like the Greeks, he cared less for the face and its expression than for the whole physical frame. On the Sistine ceiling are half a hundred male, a few female, nudes. There are no landscapes, no vegetation except in picturing the creation of plants, no decorative arabesques; as in Signorelli’s frescoes at Orvieto, the body of man becomes the sole means of decoration as well as of representation. Signorelli was the one painter, as Iacopo della Quercia was the one sculptor, from whom Michelangelo cared to learn. Every little space left free in the ceiling by the general pictorial plan is occupied by a nude figure, not so much beautiful as athletic and strong. There is no sexual suggestion in them, only the persistent display of the human body as the highest embodiment of energy, vitality, life. Though some timid souls protested against this profusion of nudity in the house of God, Julius made no recorded objection; he was a man as broad as his hatreds, and he recognized great art when he saw it. Perhaps he understood that he had immortalized himself not by the wars that he had won, but by giving the strange and incalculable divinity fretting in Angelo freedom to disport itself on the papal chapel vault.

Julius died four months after the completion of the Sistine ceiling. Michelangelo was then nearing his thirty-eighth birthday. He had placed himself at the head of all Italian sculptors by his David and Pietà; by this ceiling he had equaled or surpassed Raphael in painting; there seemed no other world left for him to conquer. Surely even he hardly dreamed that he had over half a century yet to live, that his most famous painting, his most mature sculpture, were yet to be done. He mourned the passing of the great Pope, and wondered whether Leo would have as sure an instinct as Julius for the noble in art. He retired to his lodgings, and bided his time.

CHAPTER XVIII

Leo X

1513–21

I. THE BOY CARDINAL

THE Pope that gave his name to one of the most brilliant and immoral ages in the history of Rome owed his ecclesiastical career to the political strategy of his father. Lorenzo de’ Medici had been almost destroyed by Sixtus IV; he hoped that the power of his family, and the security of his progeny in Florence, would be helped by having a Medici sitting in the college of cardinals, in the inner circles of the Church. He destined his second son for the ecclesiastical state almost from Giovanni’s infancy. At seven (1482) the boy was given the tonsure; soon he was dowered with benefices in commendam: i.e., he was made absentee beneficiary of church properties, and received their surplus revenue. At the age of eight he was given the abbacy of Font Douce in France; at nine the rich abbey of Passignano, at eleven the historic abbey of Monte Cassino; before his election to the papacy Giovanni had collected sixteen such benefices.¹ At eight he was appointed protonotary apostolic; at fourteen he was made a cardinal.*

The young prelate was provided with all the education available to a millionaire’s son. He grew up amid scholars, poets, statesmen, and philosophers; he was tutored by Marsilio Ficino; he learned Greek from Demetrius Chalcondyles, philosophy from Bernardo da Bibbiena, who became one of his cardinals. From the collections of art, and the conversations about art, in or around his father’s palace he imbibed that taste for the beautiful which was almost a religion to him in his mature years. From his father, perhaps, he learned the profuse and sometimes reckless generosity, and the gay, almost epicurean, manner of life, which were to distinguish his cardinalate and his pontificate, with far-reaching results to the Christian world. At thirteen he entered the university that his father had re-established at Pisa; there, for three years, he studied philosophy and theology, canon and civil law. When, at sixteen, he was allowed openly to join the college of cardinals in Rome, Lorenzo sent him off (March 12, 1492) with one of the most interesting letters in history:

You, and all of us who are interested in your welfare, ought to esteem ourselves highly favored by Providence, not only for the many honors and benefits bestowed on our house, but more particularly for having conferred upon us, in your person, the greatest dignity we have ever enjoyed. This favor, in itself so important, is rendered still more so by the circumstances with which it is accompanied, and especially by the consideration of your youth and of our situation in the world. The first thing that I would therefore suggest to you is, that you ought to be grateful to God, and continually to recollect that it is not through your merits, your prudence, or your solicitude, that this event has taken place, but through His favor, which you can only repay by a pious, chaste, and exemplary life; and that your obligations to the performance of these duties are so much the greater, as in your early years you have given some reasonable expectation that your riper age may produce such fruits…. Endeavor, therefore, to alleviate the burden of your early dignity by the regularity of your life, and by your perseverance in those studies which are suitable to your profession. It gave me great satisfaction to learn that in the course of the past year you had frequently, of your own accord, gone to communion and confession; nor do I conceive that there is any better way of obtaining the favor of heaven than by habituating yourself to a performance of these and similar duties….

I well know that as you are now to reside at Rome, that sink of all iniquity, the difficulty of conducting yourself by these admonitions will be increased. The influence of example is itself prevalent; but you will probably meet with those who will particularly endeavor to corrupt and incite you to vice; because, as you may yourself perceive, your early attainment to so great a dignity is not observed without envy, and those who could not prevent your receiving that honor will secretly endeavor to diminish it, by inducing you to forfeit the good estimation of the public; thereby precipitating you into that gulf into which they have themselves fallen; in which attempt the consideration of your youth will give them a confidence of success. To these difficulties you ought to oppose yourself with the greater firmness as there is at present less virtue amongst your brethren of the college. I acknowledge indeed that several of them are good and learned men, whose lives are exemplary, and whom I would recommend to you as patterns of your conduct. By emulating them you will be so much the more known and esteemed, in proportion as your age, and the peculiarity of your situation, will distinguish you from your colleagues. Avoid, however,… the imputation of hypocrisy; guard against all ostentation, either in your conduct or in your discourse; affect not austerity, nor even appear too serious. This advice you will, I hope, in time understand and practise better than I can express it.

Yet you are not unacquainted with the great importance of the character which you have to sustain, for you well know that all the Christian world would prosper if the cardinals were what they ought to be; because in such a case there would always be a good pope, upon which the tranquillity of Christendom so materially depends. Endeavor then to render yourself such that if all the rest resembled you we might expect this universal blessing. To give you particular directions as to your behavior and conversation would be a matter of no small difficulty. I shall therefore only recommend that in your intercourse with the cardinals and other men of rank your language be unassuming and respectful…. On this your first visit to Rome it will, however, be more advisable for you to listen to others than to speak much yourself….

On public occasions let your equipage and dress be rather below than above mediocrity. A handsome house and a well ordered family will be preferable to a great retinue and a splendid residence.… Silk and jewels are not suitable for persons in your station. Your taste will be better shown in the acquisition of a few elegant remains of antiquity, or in the collecting of handsome books, and by your attendants being learned and well bred rather than numerous. Invite others to your house oftener than you receive invitations. Practise neither too frequently. Let your own food be plain, and take sufficient exercise, for those who wear your habit are soon liable, without great caution, to contract infirmities…. Confide in others too little rather than too much. There is one rule which I would recommend to your attention in preference to all others: Rise early in the morning. This will not only contribute to your health, but will enable you to arrange and expedite the business of the day; and as there are various duties incident to your station, such as the performance of divine service, studying, giving audience, etc., you will find the observance of this admonition productive of the greatest utility…. You will probably be desired to intercede for the favors of the Pope on particular occasions. Be cautious, however, that you trouble him not too often; for his temper leads him to be most liberal to those who weary him least with their solicitations. This you must observe, lest you should give him offense, remembering also at times to converse with him on more agreeable topics; and if you should be obliged to request some kindness from him, let it be done with that modesty and humility which are so pleasing to his disposition. Farewell.²

Lorenzo died less than a month later, and Giovanni had hardly reached the “sink of iniquity” when he hurried back to Florence to support his elder brother Piero in a precarious inheritance of political authority. It was one of Giovanni’s rare misfortunes that he was again in Florence when Piero fell. To escape the indiscriminate wrath of the citizens against the Medici family he disguised himself as a Franciscan friar, made his way unrecognized through hostile crowds, and applied for admission to the monastery of San Marco, which his forebears had lavishly endowed, but which was at the time under the command of his father’s enemy, Savonarola. The friars refused him admission. He hid for a time in a suburb, and then made his way over the mountains to join his brothers in Bologna. Disliking Alexander VI, he avoided Rome; for six years he lived as a fugitive or an exile, but apparently never out of funds. With his cousin Giulio (later Clement VII) and some friends he visited Germany, Flanders, and France. Finally, reconciling himself to Alexander, he took up his residence in Rome (1500).

Everybody there liked him. He was modest, affable, and unostentatiously generous. He sent substantial gifts to his old teachers Politian and Chalcondyles. He collected books and works of art, and even his ample income hardly sufficed for his aid to poets, artists, musicians, and scholars. He enjoyed all the arts and graces of life; nevertheless Guicciardini, who lost no love on the popes, described him as “having the reputation of a chaste person, and of unblameable manners”;³ and Aldus Manutius complimented him on his “pious and irreproachable life.”⁴

His vicissitudes were resumed when Julius II appointed him papal legate to govern Bologna and the Romagna (1511). He accompanied the papal army to Ravenna; walked unarmed amid the battle, encouraging the soldiers; stayed too long on the field of defeat, administering the sacraments to the dying; and was captured by a Greek detachment in the service of the victorious French. Taken as a prisoner to Milan, he was pleased to note that even the French soldiers paid little attention to the schismatic cardinals and their peregrinating council, but came eagerly to him for his blessing, his absolution, perhaps his purse. He escaped from his lenient captors, joined the Spanish-papal forces that sacked Prato and took Florence, and shared with his brother Giuliano in the restoration of the Medici to power (1512). A few months later he was called to Rome to take part in selecting a successor to Julius.

He was still only thirty-seven, and could hardly have expected that he himself would be chosen pope. He entered the conclave in a litter, suffering from an anal fistula.⁵ After a week of debate, and apparently without simony, Giovanni de’ Medici was elected (March 11, 1513), and took the name of Leo X. He was not yet a priest, but this defect was remedied on March 15.

Everybody was surprised and delighted. After the dark intrigues of Alexander and Caesar Borgia, and the wars and turbulence and tantrums of Julius, it was a relief that a young man already distinguished for his easygoing good nature, his tact and courtesy, and his opulent patronage of letters and art, was now to lead the Church, presumably in the ways of peace. Alfonso of Ferrara, so relentlessly fought by Julius, had no fear in coming to Rome. Leo reinvested him with all his ducal dignities, and the grateful prince held the stirrup as Leo mounted a horse to ride in the coronation procession of March 17. These inauguration ceremonies were lavish beyond any precedent, costing 100,000 ducats.⁶ The banker Agostino Chigi provided a float on which a Latin inscription proclaimed hopefully: ‘Once Venus” (Alexander) “reigned, then Mars” (Julius), “now Pallas” (Wisdom) “rules.” A pithier epigram ran the rounds: “Mars was, Pallas is, I, Venus, will always be.”⁷ Poets, sculptors, painters, goldsmiths rejoiced; humanists promised themselves a revival of the Augustan Age. Never had a man mounted the pontifical chair under more favorable auspices of public approbation.

Leo himself, if we may believe the scribblers of the time, said pleasantly to his brother Giuliano: Godiamoci il papato, poichè Dio ci l’ha dato—”Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us.”⁸ The remark, possibly apocryphal, indicated no irreverence, but a blithe spirit, ready to be generous as well as happy, and ingenuously unaware, amid its good fortune, that half of Christendom was swelling with revolt against the Church.

II. THE HAPPY POPE

He began with excellent measures. He forgave the cardinals who had staged the anticouncil of Pisa and Milan; that threat of schism ended. He promised—and kept his promise—to refrain from touching the estates left by cardinals. He reopened the Lateran Council, and welcomed the delegates in his own graceful Latin. He effected some minor ecclesiastical reforms, and reduced taxes; but his edict calling for larger reforms (May 3, 1514) encountered so much opposition from the functionaries whose incomes it would abate that he made no strenuous effort to enforce it.⁹ “I will think the matter over,” he said, “and see how I can satisfy everybody.”¹⁰ This was his character, and his character was his fate.

Raphael’s portrait of him (Pitti), painted between 1517 and 1519, is not as well known as that of Julius, but that was partly Leo’s fault: there were in this case less depth of thought, heroism of action, and worth of inner soul to give majesty to the outward face and frame. The representation is merciless. A massive man, of more than medium height, and much more than medium weight—the indignity of obesity concealed under a fur-trimmed robe of velvet white and cape of scarlet red; hands soft and flabby, here shorn of the many rings that normally adorned them; a reading glass to help shortsighted eyes; round head and plump cheeks, full lips and double chin; large nose and ears; some lines of bitterness from the nose to the corners of the mouth; heavy eyes and slightly frowning brow: this is the Leo disillusioned with diplomacy, and perhaps soured with the unmannerly Reformation, rather than the lighthearted hunter and musician, the generous patron, the cultivated hedonist whose accession had so gladdened Rome. To do him justice the record must be added to the picture. A man is many men, to divers men and times; and not even the greatest portraitist can show all these features in one moment’s face.

The basic quality in Leo, born of his fortunate life, was good nature. He had a pleasant word for everybody, saw the best side of everybody except the Protestants (whom he could not begin to understand), and gave so generously to so many that even this profuse philanthropy, involving heavy drafts on Christian purses, shared in causing the Reformation. We hear much of his courtesy, his tact, his amiability, his cheerful temper even in sickness and pain. (His fistula, repeatedly operated upon, always returned, and sometimes made locomotion an agony.) So far as he could, he let others lead their own lives. His initial moderation and kindliness yielded to severity when he discovered some cardinals plotting against his life. At times he was relentlessly hard, as with Francesco Maria della Rovere of Urbino and Gianpaolo Baglioni of Perugia.¹¹ He could lie like a diplomat when he had to, and now and then bettered the instruction of the treacherous statesmanship that enmeshed him. More often he was humane, as when he forbade (in vain) the enslavement of American Indians, and did his best to check the Inquisitorial ferocity of Ferdinand the Catholic.¹² Despite his general worldliness he fulfilled conscientiously all his religious duties, observed the fasts, and recognized no inherent contradiction between religion and gaiety. He has been charged with saying to Bembo: “It is well known to all ages how profitable this fable of Christ has been to us”; but the sole authority for this is a violent polemic work, The Pageant of Popes, written about 1574 by an obscure Englishman, John Bale; and the freethinking Bayle and the Protestant Roscoe alike reject the story as itself a fable.¹³

His enjoyments ranged from philosophy to buffoons. He had learned at his father’s table to appreciate poetry, sculpture, painting, music, calligraphy, illumination, textiles, vases, glass—all the forms of the beautiful except perhaps their source and norm, woman; and though his enjoyment of the arts was too indiscriminate to be a guide to taste, his patronage of artists and poets carried on in Rome the magnanimous traditions of his ancestors in Florence. He was too easygoing to take philosophy to heart; he knew how precarious all conclusions are, and did not bother his head with metaphysics after his college days. At meals he had books read to him, usually of history, or he listened to music. There his taste was sure; he had a good ear and a melodious voice. He kept several musicians at his court, and paid them lavishly. The improvisatore Bernardo Accolti (called Unico Aretino because of his birth in Arezzo and his unequaled facility in impromptu poetry and music) was able, with the fees that Leo paid him, to buy the little duchy of Nepi; a Jewish lute player earned a castle and the title of count; the singer Gabriele Merino was made an archbishop.¹⁴ Under Leo’s care and encouragement the Vatican choir reached an unprecedented degree of excellence. Raphael rightly pictured the Pope as reading a book of sacred music. Leo collected musical instruments for their beauty as well as their tone. One was an organ adorned with alabaster, and judged by Castiglione to be the loveliest that he had ever seen or heard.

Leo liked also to keep at his court a number of jesters and buffoons. This accorded with the custom of his father and of contemporary kings, and did not altogether shock a Rome that loved laughter only next to wealth and venery; to our hindsight it seems offensive that jests light or coarse should have echoed through the papal court while the Reformation raged in Germany. It amused Leo to see one of his monk buffoons swallow a pigeon at a mouthful, or forty eggs in succession.¹⁵ He received with pleasure from a Portuguese embassy a white elephant—brought from India—which genuflected thrice on meeting His Holiness.¹⁶ To bring him a person whose wit, deformity, or imbecility could refresh his mirth was an open sesame to his heart.¹⁷ He seems to have felt that to indulge in such diversions now and then would distract him from physical pain, relieve his mind of cosmic worries, and prolong his life.¹⁸ There was something disarmingly childlike about him. Occasionally he would play cards with cardinals, allow the public to sit in as spectators, and then distribute gold pieces to the crowd.

Above all other amusements he loved to hunt. It controlled his tendency to corpulence, and allowed him to enjoy the open air and the countryside after being a prisoner of the Vatican. He kept a large stable, with a hundred grooms. It was his custom to devote nearly all of October to the chase. His physicians highly approved of his addiction, but his master of ceremonies, Paris de Grassis, complained that the Pope kept his heavy boots on so long that “no one can kiss his feet”—at which Leo laughed heartily.¹⁹ We get a kindlier view of the Pope than in Raphael’s picture when we read how the peasants and villagers would come to greet him as he passed along their roads, and would offer him their modest gifts—which were so handsomely returned by the pontiff that the people eagerly awaited his hunting trips. To the poor girls among them he gave marriage dowries; he paid the debts of the sick or aged, or the parents of large families.²⁹ These simple folk loved him more sincerely than the 2000 persons who made up his menage at the Vatican.*

But Leo’s court was no mere focus of amusement and hilarity. It was also the meeting place of responsible statemen, and Leo was one of them; it was the center of the intellect and wit of Rome, the place where scholars, educators, poets, artists, and musicians were welcomed or housed; the scene of solemn ecclesiastical functions, ceremonious diplomatic receptions, costly banquets, dramatic or musical performances, poetical recitations, and exhibitions of art. It was without question the most refined court in the world at that time. The labors of popes from Nicholas V to Leo himself in the improvement and adornment of the Vatican, in the assemblage of literary and artistic genius, and of the ablest ambassadors in Europe, made the court of Leo the zenith not of the art (for that had come under Julius) but of the literature and brilliance of the Renaissance. In mere quantity of culture history had never seen its equal, not even in Periclean Athens or Augustan Rome.²²

The city itself prospered and expanded as Leo’s gathered gold flowed along its economic arteries. In thirteen years after his accession, said the Venetian ambassador, ten thousand houses were built in Rome, chiefly by newcomers from northern Italy following the migration of the Renaissance. Florentines in particular crowded in to pick plums from a Florentine pontificate. Paolo Giovio, who moved in Leo’s court, estimated the population of Rome at 85,000.²³ It was not yet so fair a city as Florence or Venice, but it was now by common consent the hub of Western civilization; Marcello Alberini, in 1527, called it “the rendezvous of the world.”²⁴ Leo, amid amusements and foreign affairs, regulated the importation and price of food, abrogated monopolies and “corners,” reduced taxes, administered justice impartially, struggled to drain the Pontine marshes, promoted agriculture in the Campagna, and continued the work of Alexander and Julius in opening or improving streets in Rome.³⁰ Like his father in Florence, he provided circenses as well as panem— engaged artists to plan gorgeous pageants, encouraged the masked festivities of Carnival, even allowed Borgian bullfights to be staged in St. Peter’s square. He wished the people to share in the happiness and jollity of the new Golden Age.

The city took its cue from the Pope, and let joy be unconfined. Prelates, poets, parasites, panders, and prostitutes hurried to Rome to drink the golden rain. The cardinals—dowered by the pontiffs, and above all by Leo, with innumerable benefices that sent them revenues from all parts of Latin Christendom—were now far richer than the old nobility, which was sinking into economic and political decay. Some cardinals had an income of 30,000 ducats a year (1375,000,).³¹ They lived in stately palaces manned by as many as three hundred servants³² and adorned with every art and luxury known to the time. They did not quite think of themselves as ecclesiastics; they were statemen, diplomats, administrators; they were the Roman Senate of the Roman Church; and they proposed to live like senators. They smiled at those foreigners who expected of them the abstinence and continence of priests. Like so many men of their age, they judged conduct not by moral but by esthetic standards; a few commandments might be broken with impunity if it was done with courtesy and taste. They surrounded themselves with pages, musicians, poets, and humanists, and now and then dined with courtly courtesans.³³ They mourned that their salons were normally womanless; “all Rome,” according to Cardinal Bibbiena, “says that nothing is wanting here but a Madonna to hold a court.”³⁴ They envied Ferrara, Urbino, and Mantua, and rejoiced when Isabella d’Este came to spread her robes and feminine graces over their unisexual feast.

Manners, taste, good conversation, appreciation of art were now at their height, and patronage was opulent. There had been cultivated circles in the smaller capitals, and Castiglione preferred the quiet coterie of Urbino to the cosmopolitan, noisier, flashier civilization of Rome. But Urbino was a tiny island of culture; this was a stream, a sea. Luther came and saw it, and was shocked and repelled; Erasmus came and saw it, and was charmed to ecstasy.³⁵ A hundred poets proclaimed that the Saturnia regna had returned.

III. SCHOLARS

On November 5, 1513, Leo issued a bull uniting two impoverished institutions of learning: the Studium sacri palatii—the College of the Holy Palace, i.e., the Vatican—and the Studium urbis, or City College; these now became the University of Rome, and were housed in a building soon known as the Sapienza.³⁶ These schools had prospered under Alexander but languished under Julius, who diverted their funds to war, and preferred a sword to a book. Leo supported the new University handsomely until he too was enmeshed in the expensive game of competitive destruction. He brought in a bevy of devoted scholars, so that soon the institution had eighty-eight professors—fifteen in medicine alone—receiving from fifty to 530 florins ($625 to $6625?) a year. Leo, in these early years of his pontificate, did everything that he could to make the combined colleges the most scholarly and flourishing university in Italy.

It was one of his credits that he established the study of Semitic languages. A chair in the University of Rome was devoted to the teaching of Hebrew, and Teseo Ambrogio was appointed to teach Syriac and Chaldaic in the University of Bologna. Leo welcomed the dedication of a Hebrew grammar composed by Agacio Guidacerio. Learning that Sante Pagnini was translating the Old Testament from the original Hebrew into Latin, he asked to see a specimen, liked it, and undertook at once the expense of the laborious enterprise.

It was Leo, too, who restored Greek studies, which had begun to decline. He invited to Rome the old scholar John Lascaris, who had been teaching Greek in Florence, France, and Venice; and with him he organized a Greek Academy in Rome, distinct from the University. To Lascaris’ pupil Marcus Musurus, chief aide to Manutius, Bembo wrote for Leo (August 7, 1513) a letter inviting the scholar to secure from Greece “ten young men, or as many more as you may think proper, of good education and virtuous disposition, who may compose a seminary of liberal studies, and from whom the Italians may derive the proper use and knowledge of the Greek tongue.”³⁷ A month later Manutius published the edition of Plato that Musurus had completed, and the great printer dedicated the work to the Pope. Leo responded by granting to Aldus, for fifteen years, the exclusive privilege of reprinting the Greek or Latin books that Aldus had already issued, or would in that period publish; all who should encroach upon this privilege were by that deed excommunicated and subject to penalties; this privilegium ad imprimendum solum was the Renaissance way of giving to a printer a copyright on the editions that he had paid to prepare. Leo added to the privilege an earnest recommendation that the Aldine publications should be moderately priced; they were. The Greek college was established in the house of the Colocci on the Quirinal, and a press was set up there to print textbooks and scholia for the students. A similar “Medicean Academy” for Greek studies was about the same time founded in Florence. Under Leo’s encouragement Varino Camerti, who Latinized his name as Favorinus, compiled the best Greek-Latin dictionary yet published in the Renaissance world.

The Pope’s enthusiasm for the classics was almost a religion. He accepted from the Venetians “a shoulder bone of Livy” with the same piety as though it had been a relic of some major saint.³⁸ Soon after his accession he announced that he would amply reward any person who should procure for him unpublished manuscripts of ancient literature. Like his father, he directed his emissaries and appointees in foreign lands to seek and buy for him any manuscripts of ancient pagan or Christian authorship and value; and sometimes he dispatched envoys for that sole and special purpose, and gave them letters to kings and princes soliciting co-operation in the search. His agents seem on occasion to have stolen manuscripts when these could not be bought; this was apparently the case with the first six books of Tacitus’ Annals, found in the monastery of Corvey in Westphalia, for we have a charming letter to the papal agent Heitmers, written by or for Leo after the Annals had been edited and published:

We have sent a copy of the revised and printed books in a beautiful binding to the abbot and his monks, that they may place it in their library as a substitute for the one taken from it. But in order that they may understand that this purloining has done them far more good than harm, we have granted them for their church a plenary indulgence.³⁹

Leo gave the purloined manuscript to Filippo Beroaldo, with instructions to correct and edit the text, and print it in an elegant but convenient form. Said Leo in this letter of instruction:

We have been accustomed, even in our early years, to think that nothing more excellent or useful has been given by the Creator to mankind—if we except only the knowledge and true worship of Himself—than these studies, which not only lead to the ornament and guidance of human life, but are applicable and useful to every particular situation, consoling in adversity, pleasing and honorable in prosperity; insomuch that without them we should be deprived of all the grace of life and all the polish of society. The security and extension of these studies seem chiefly to depend on two circumstances: the number of learned men, and the ample supply of excellent texts. As to the first of these we hope, with the divine blessing, to show still more evidently our earnest desire and disposition to reward and honor their merits, this having been for a long time past our chief delight…. With respect to the acquisition of books, we return thanks to God that in this also an opportunity is now afforded us of promoting the advantage of mankind.⁴⁰

Leo thought that the judgment of the Church should determine what literature would advantage mankind, for he renewed Alexander’s edict for the episcopal censorship of books.

In the sack of the Medici Palace (1494) some of the books collected by Leo’s ancestors had been dispersed. Most of them, however, had been bought by the monks of San Marco; and these salvaged volumes Leo, while still a cardinal, had repurchased for 2652 ducats ($33,150?), and had transferred to his palace in Rome. This Laurentian Library was returned to Florence after Leo’s death; we shall see its further fortune later.

The Vatican Library had now swollen to such proportions as to need a corps of scholars for its care. When Leo acceded to the papacy the head librarian was Tommaso Inghirami—a nobleman and poet, a conversationalist noted for wit and brilliance in a society of brilliant wits, and an actor whose success in the part of Phaedra in Seneca’s Hippolytus earned him the nickname of Fedra. When he died in a street accident in 1516 he was replaced as bibliotecario by Filippo Beroaldo, who divided his affections between Tacitus and the learned courtesan Imperia, and wrote such excellent Latin poetry as to receive six independent translations into French, one by Clement Marot. Girolamo Aleandro or Aleander, who became librarian in 1519, was a man of temper, learning, and ability. He spoke Latin and Greek, and Hebrew so fluently that Luther mistakenly pronounced him a Jew. At the Diet of Augsburg (1520) he strove with more passion than wisdom to halt the Protestant tide. Paul III made him a cardinal (1538), but four years later Aleander died through too assiduous care of his health and too frequent use of medicine.⁴¹ He was highly indignant at being taken off at sixty-two, and scandalized his friends with his exasperation at the ways of Providence.⁴²

Private libraries were now numerous in Rome. Aleander himself had a considerable collection, which he bequeathed to Venice. Cardinal Grimani, envied by Erasmus, had eight thousand volumes, in a variety of languages; he willed these books to the church of San Salvador in Venice, where they were destroyed by fire. Cardinal Sadoleto had a precious library, which he put on a ship to send to France; it was lost at sea. Bembo’s library was rich in Provençal poets and original manuscripts—e.g., of Petrarch; this collection passed to Urbino, thence to the Vatican. Rich laymen like Agostino Chigi and Bindo Altoviti imitated the popes and the cardinals in collecting books, engaging artists, and supporting poets and scholars.

These abounded in Leo’s Rome beyond any precedent or later parallel. Many cardinals were themselves scholars; some, like Egidio Canisio, Sadoleto, and Bibbiena, had been made cardinals because they were scholars of long service to the Church. Most of the cardinals in Rome acted as patrons, usually by rewarding dedications; and the homes of Cardinals Riario, Grimani, Bibbiena, Alidosi, Petrucci, Farnese, Soderini, Sanseverino, Gonzaga, Canisio, and Giulio de’ Medici were surpassed only by the papal court as meeting places for the intellectual and artistic talent of the city. Castiglione, whose genial nature made friends with both the amiable Raphael and the dour and unapproachable Michelangelo, maintained a modest salon of his own.

Leo, of course, was the patron par excellence. No one who could turn a good Latin epigram went away from him giftless. As in the days of Nicholas V, scholarship—but now also poetry—constituted a claim to some place in the vast officialdom of the Church. Lesser lights became apostolic scribes, abbreviatores, brief-writers; brighter luminaries rose to be canons, bishops, protonotaries; stars like Sadoleto and Bembo became secretaries to the Pope; some, like Sadoleto and Bibbiena, were made cardinals. Ciceronian oratory again resounded in Rome; epistles rose and fell in cadenced periods; Virgilian and Horatian verse flowed in a thousand rivulets into the Tiber as their final destination. Bembo set the stylistic standard pontifically; “far better to speak like Cicero;” he wrote to Isabella d’Este, “than to be pope.”⁴³ His friend and colleague, Iacopo Sadoleto, shamed most of the humanists by combining an impeccable Latin style with impeccable morals. There were many men of high integrity among the cardinals of this age, and Leo’s humanists were, by and large, of finer temper and life than those of the preceding generation.⁴⁴ Some, however, remained pagan in everything but their professed creed. It was an unwritten law that whatever one believed or doubted, no gentleman would utter anything critical of a Church that was morally so tolerant, and so munificent a patron.

Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena was a composite of all these qualities-scholar, poet, dramatist, diplomat, connoisseur, conversationalist, pagan, priest, and cardinal. Raphael’s portrait catches only a part of him—his sly eyes and sharp nose; it covers his baldness with a red hat, and his gaiety with an unwonted gravity. He was light of foot and word and spirit, escaping from every vicissitude with a smile. Employed by Lorenzo the Magnificent as secretary and tutor, he shared with Lorenzo’s sons the flight of 1494; but he showed his cleverness by going to Urbino, charming that urbane circle with his epigrams, and using some of his leisure to write and stage a risqué play—Calandra (c. 1508), the oldest of Italian prose comedies. Julius II brought him to Rome. Bernardo managed Leo’s election with so little fuss and friction that Leo at once made him apostolic protonotary, and the next day treasurer of the papal household, and six months later cardinal. His dignities did not prevent him from serving Leo as connoisseur of arts and organizer of festival pageantry. His play was performed before the Pope, who enjoyed it with a good stomach. Sent as papal nuncio to France, he fell in love with Francis I, and had to be recalled as too sensitive for a diplomat. When Raphael decorated his bathroom, it was, by the Cardinal’s choice, with the History of Venus and Cupid, a series of pictures recounting the triumphs of love; nearly all done in true antique Pompeian style, and overleaping Christianity into a world that had never heard of Christ. Leo, pretending not to notice the Venus in Bibbiena, was faithful to him to the end.

Leo relished drama in all its comic forms and degrees, from the simplest farce to the subtlest double-entendres of Bibbiena and Machiavelli. In the first year of his pontificate he opened a theater on the Capitol. There, in 1518, he witnessed a performance of Ariosto’s I Suppositi, and laughed heartily at the equivocal jests that stemmed from the plot—the effort of a youth to seduce a maiden.⁴⁵ Such gala performances were more than mere comedy; they included artistic stage settings (in this case the scenery was painted by Raphael), a ballet, and entr’acte music by a chorus and an orchestra of lutes, violas, cornets, bagpipes, fifes, and a small organ.

To Leo’s pontificate belongs one of the major historical works of the Renaissance. Paolo Giovio was a native of Como. There, and in Milan and Rome, he practised medicine; but, inspired by the literary excitement that greeted Leo’s accession, he gave his leisure hours to writing a Latin history of his own times—i.e., from the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII to Leo’s pontificate. He was allowed to read the first sections to Leo, who, with his customary lavishness, pronounced it the most eloquent and elegant historical writing since Livy, and rewarded him at once with a pension. After Leo’s death Giovio used what he called his “pen of gold” to write a eulogistic life of his dead patron, and his “pen of iron” to indict Pope Adrian VI, who ignored him. Meanwhile he continued to labor at his immense Historiae sui temporis, finally carrying it to 1547. When Rome was sacked in 1527 he hid his manuscript in a church; it was found by a soldier, who then asked the author to buy his own book; Paolo was saved from this indignity by Clement VII, who persuaded the thief to accept, in lieu of more immediate payment, a benefice in Spain; Giovio himself was made bishop of Nocera. His History, and the biographies that he added to it, were acclaimed for their fluent and vivid style, but were denounced for their careless inaccuracies and their flagrant prejudice. Giovio blithely confessed that he praised or condemned the persons of his story according as they or their relatives had or had not lubricated his palm.⁴⁶

IV. POETS

The chief glory of this age was its poetry. As in samurai Japan everyone from peasant to emperor, so in Leo’s Rome everyone from the pontiff to his clowns wrote verse; and nearly everybody insisted on reading his latest lines to the tolerant Pope. He loved clever improvisation, and was himself an expert in that game. Poets pursued him everywhere with outstretched rhymes; usually he rewarded them somehow; on occasion he would content himself by replying with an extempore Latin epigram. A thousand books were dedicated to him. For one he gave Angelo Colocci 400 ducats ($5,000?); but to Giovanni Augurelli, who presented him with a poetical treatise—Chrysopoeia, or the art of making gold by alchemy—he sent an empty purse. He did not have time to read all the books whose dedications he accepted; one such was an edition of the fifth-century Roman poet Rutilius Namatianus, who advocated the suppression of Christianity as an enervating poison, and demanded a return to the worship of the virile pagan gods.⁴⁷ To Ariosto—who may have seemed to Leo sufficiently cared for in Ferrara—he gave merely a bull forbidding the pirating of his verses. Ariosto was peeved, having hoped for a gift commensurate with the length of his epic.

Having lost Ariosto, Leo contented himself too readily with poets of duller radiance and shorter breath. His generosity often misled him into rewarding superficial talents as liberally as genius. Guido Postumo Silvestri, a noble of Pesaro, had fought vigorously, and written violently, against Alexander and Julius for seizing Pesaro and Bologna; now he addressed to Leo an elegant elegiac poem comparing the happiness of Italy under the new Pope with its turmoil and misery in the preceding reigns; the appreciative pontiff restored to him his confiscated estates, and made him a companion in the papal hunts; but Guido soon died (said some contemporaries) of eating too lavishly at Leo’s table.⁴⁸ Antonio Tebaldeo, who had already made a name for himself as a poet in Naples, rushed to Rome on Leo’s election, and (says an uncertain tradition) received five hundred ducats from Leo for an appetizing epigram;⁴⁹ in any case the Pope gave him the superintendence and tolls of the bridge of Sorga, so that “it may enable Tebaldeo to support himself in affluence.”⁵⁰ But money, though it may finance the talent of scholars, seems rarely to feed the genius of poets. Tebaldeo wrote more epigrams, became dependent upon Bembo’s charity after Leo’s death, and took permanently to his bed, “having no other complaint,” said a friend, “than the loss of his relish for wine.” He lived a long time at ease on his back, and died at seventy-four.

Francesco Maria Molza of Modena acquired some proficiency in verse before Leo’s elevation; but hearing of the Pope’s poetic philanthropy, he left his parents, wife, and children, and migrated to Rome, where he forgot them in an infatuation for a Roman lady. He composed an eloquent pastoral poemetto entitled La ninfa Tiberina in praise of Faustina Mancini, and was severely wounded by an unknown assassin. He left Rome after Leo’s death, and at Bologna joined the retinue of Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici, who was said to maintain three hundred poets, musicians, and wits at his court. Molza’s Italian poems were the most elegant of the time, not excepting Ariosto’s. His Canzoni equaled those of Petrarch in style, and surpassed them in fire; for Molza repeatedly fell out of one amorous conflagration into another, and perpetually burned. He died of syphilis in 1544.

Two major minor poets honored Leo’s reign. The career of Marcantonio Flaminio shows the period in pleasant lights—the unfailing kindness of the Pope to men of letters, the unenvious friendship of Flaminio, Navagero, Fracastoro, and Castiglione, though all four were poets, and the clean lives led by these men in an age when sexual license was widely condoned. Flaminio was born at Serravalle in the Veneto, son of Gianantonio Flaminio, himself a poet. Violating a thousand precedents, the father trained and encouraged the boy to poetry, and sent him at sixteen to present to Leo a poem written by the youth urging a crusade against the Turks. Leo had no taste for crusades, but he liked the verses, and provided for the boy’s further education in Rome. Castiglione took him in hand, and brought him to Urbino (1515); later the father sent his son to study philosophy at Bologna; finally the poet settled down at Viterbo under the patronage of the English Cardinal Reginald Pole. He had the distinction of declining two high appointments—as cosecretary, with Sadoleto, to Leo, and as secretary to the Council of Trent. Despite suspicion of sympathizing with the Protestant Reformation, he was handsomely supported by several cardinals. Through all his peregrinations he longed for the peaceful life and clean air of his father’s villa near Imola. His poems—nearly all in Latin, and nearly all in the brief form of odes, eclogues, elegies, hymns, and Horatian epistles to friends—return again and again to his love of old rural haunts:

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 ring 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 and 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

While he prided himself on his supposed noble lineage, he preferred the poor to the rich, the simple to the intellectual, the toil of a worker to the leisure and luxuries of wealth. He gave most of his earnings to maintain his shiftless relatives. He liked solitude; he found it intolerable to make small talk with third-rate minds; wherever he was, he followed his own train of thought. He cared little for beautiful women, and saved a fortune by continence. When a priest expressed regret that Michelangelo had not married and begotten children, he replied: “I have only too much of a wife in my art, and she has given me trouble enough. As to my children, they are the works that I shall leave; and if they are not worth much, they will at least live for some time.”⁶⁴ He could not bear women about the house. He preferred males both for companionship and for art. He painted women, but always in their maternal maturity, not in the bright charm of their youth; it is remarkable that both he and Leonardo were apparently insensitive to the physical beauty of woman, who has seemed to most artists the very embodiment and fountainhead of beauty. There is no evidence that he was homosexual; apparently all the energy that might have gone into sex was in his case used up in work. At Carrara he spent the day, from early morn, in the saddle, directing the stonecutters and road makers; and the evening in his cabin by lamplight, studying plans, calculating costs, projecting the morrow’s tasks. He had periods of apparent sluggishness, and then suddenly the fever of creation would possess him again, and everything else would be ignored, even the sack of Rome.

Absorbed in work, he gave himself little time for friendship, though he had devoted friends. “Rarely did any friend or other person eat at his table.”⁶⁵ He was content with the company of his faithful servant Francesco degli Amadori, who for twenty-five years took care of him, and for many years shared his bed. Michael’s gifts made Francesco a rich man, and the artist was heartbroken at his death (1555). For others he had a bad temper and a sharp tongue, criticized rudely, took offense readily, suspected everybody. He called Perugino a fool, and expressed his opinion about Francia’s paintings by telling Francia’s handsome son that his father made better forms by night than by day.⁶⁶ He was jealous of Raphael’s success and popularity. Though the two artists respected each other, their supporters divided into feuding cabals; and Iacopo Sansovino sent Michael a letter of violent abuse, saying, “May the day be cursed on which you ever said any good about anybody on earth.”⁶⁷ There were a few such days. Seeing Titian’s portrait of Duke Alfonso of Ferrara, Michael remarked that he had not thought that art could perform so much, and that only Titian deserved the name of painter.⁶⁸ His bitter temper and somber mood were his lifelong tragedy. At times he was melancholy to the edge of madness; and in his old age the fear of hell so obsessed him that he thought of his art as a sin, and he dowered poor girls to propitiate an angry God.⁶⁹ A neurotic sensitivity brought him almost daily misery. As early as 1508 he wrote to his father: “It is now about fifteen years since I had a single hour of well-being.”⁷⁰ He would not have many more, though he had still fifty-eight years to live.

VII. RAPHAEL AND LEO X: I513–2O

Leo neglected Michelangelo partly because he liked men and women of equable temper, and partly because he had no great love for architecture or the massive in art; he preferred a gem to a cathedral, and miniatures to monuments. He kept Caradosso, Santi de Cola Sabba, Michele Nardini, and many other goldsmiths busy making jewelry, cameos, medals, coins, sacred vessels. At his death he left a collection of precious stones, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, pearls, tiaras, miters, and pectorals worth 204,655 ducats—over $2,500,000; we should remember, however, that most of these had been inherited from his predecessors, and that they constituted a portion of the papal treasury immune to depreciations of the currency.

He invited a score of painters to Rome, but Raphael was almost the only one that he really cared for. He tried Leonardo, and dismissed him as a dawdler. Fra Bartolommeo came to Rome in 1514, and painted a St. Peter and a St. Paul; but the air and excitement disagreed with him, and he soon returned to the peace of his Florentine monastery. Leo liked the work of Sodoma, but hardly dared let that reckless rake roam too freely about the Vatican. Sebastiano del Piombo was appropriated by Leo’s cousin, Giulio de’ Medici.

Raphael agreed with Leo in both temperament and taste. Both were amiable epicureans who made Christianity a pleasure and took their heaven here; but both worked as hard as they played. Leo plied the happy artist with tasks: the completion of the stanze, the designing of cartoons for the Sistine Chapel tapestries, the decoration of the Vatican Loggie, the building of St. Peter’s, the preservation of classic art. Raphael accepted these commissions with good cheer and appetite, and found time, besides, to paint a score of religious pictures, several series of pagan frescoes, and half a hundred Madonnas and portraits any one of which would have assured him wealth and fame. Leo abused his complaisance by asking him to arrange fetes, to paint the scenery for a play, to make a portrait of a beloved elephant.⁷¹ Perhaps overwork, as well as love, brought Raphael to an early death.

But he was now in the fullness of his powers and the bloom of his prosperity. In a letter (July 1, 1514) to his “dear Uncle Simone… who art dear to me as a father,” and who had reproached him for persistent bachelorhood, he writes in a mood of happy self-confidence:

As for a wife, I must tell you that I am daily thankful that I did not take the one you destined for me, or, indeed, any other. In this instance I have been wiser than you… and I am sure that you must now see that I am better as I am. I have capital in Rome worth 3000 ducats, and an assured income of fifty more. His Holiness allows me a salary of 300 ducats for superintending the rebuilding of St. Peter’s, which will not fail me as long as I live…. Besides this, they give me whatever I ask for my works. I have commenced the decoration of a large hall for His Holiness, for which I am to get 1200 golden crowns. Thus you must see, my dear uncle, that I do honor to my family as well as to my country.⁷²

At thirty-one he was entering into conscious manhood. He had grown a dark beard, perhaps to disguise his youth. He lived in comfort, even splendor, in a palace built by Bramante and bought by Raphael for three thousand ducats. He dressed in the style of a young aristocrat. On his visits to the Vatican he was accompanied by a princely retinue of pupils and clients. Michelangelo reproved him, saying, “You go about with a suite, like a general”; to which Raphael replied, “And you go about alone, like a hangman.”⁷³ He was still a good-natured youth, free from envy but eager with emulation, not quite as modest as before (how could he be?), but always helpful to others, presenting masterpieces to his friends, and even serving as Maecenas and patron to artists less fortunate or gifted than himself. But on occasion his wit could be sharp enough. When two cardinals, visiting his studio, amused themselves by picking flaws in his pictures—saying, for example, that the faces of the Apostles were too red—he replied: “Do not be surprised at that, your eminences; I painted them so deliberately; may we not think that they can blush in heaven when they see the Church governed by such men as you?”⁷⁴ However, he could take correction without resentment, as in the plans for St. Peter’s. He could flatter a succession of artists by imitating their excellences, without ever losing his own independence and originality. He did not need solitude in order to be himself.

His morals were not quite up to his manners. He could not have painted women so attractively had he not been powerfully attracted by their charms. He wrote love sonnets on the back of his drawings for the Disputa. He had a concatenation of mistresses, but everybody, including the Pope, seemed to think that so great an artist had a right to such amusements. Vasari, after describing Raphael’s sexual promiscuity, apparently saw no contradiction in remarking, two pages later, that “those who copy his virtuous life will be rewarded in heaven.”⁷⁵ When Castiglione asked Raphael where he found the models for the beautiful women whom he painted, he replied that he created them in his imagination out of the diverse elements of beauty present in different women;⁷⁶ hence he needed a large variety of samples. Nevertheless there is a healthy, life-enhancing tone in his character and his works, a unity, peace, and serenity in his career, amid the conflicts, divisions, envies, and recriminations of the age. He ignored the politics that were consuming Leo and Italy, perhaps feeling that the repetitious contentions of parties and states for power and privilege are the monotonous froth of history, and that nothing matters but devotion to goodness, beauty, and truth.

Raphael left the pursuit of truth to more reckless spirits, and contented himself with the service of beauty. In the first years of Leo’s reign he continued the decoration of the Stanza d’Eliodoro. By some whim of circumstance—and to symbolize the expulsion of the barbari from Italy-Julius had chosen, for the second main mural of the room, the historic meeting of Attila and Leo I (452). Raphael’s drawing had already given the first Leo the features of the second Julius when the tenth Leo came to the papal throne. The drawing was revised, and Leo became Leo. More successful than this vast assemblage is the smaller picture that Raphael painted in an arch over a window of the same room. Here the new Pope, perhaps to commemorate his escape from the French at Milan, suggested as topic the deliverance of Peter from prison by an angel. Raphael used all his compositional artistry to give unity and life to a story broken by the casement into three scenes: on the left the sleeping guards, at the top an angel waking Peter, at the right the angel leading the drowsy and bewildered Apostle to freedom. The radiance of the angel illuminating the cell, shining upon the soldiers’ armor and blinding their eyes, and the crescent moon whitening the clouds, make this a model pictorial study of light.

The young artist was avid of every new technique. Bramante, without Michelangelo’s permission, had secretly taken his friend to see the frescoes of the Sistine vault before they were finished. Raphael was deeply impressed; perhaps, with the modesty that still accompanied his pride, he felt himself in the presence of a genius more powerful, if less gracious, than his own. He let the new influence move him in the themes and forms of the ceiling frescoes in the room of Helidorus: God Appearing to Noah, Abraham’s Sacrifice, Jacob’s Dream, and The Burning Bush. It shows again in the Prophet Isaiah that he painted for the church of St. Augustine.

In 1514 he began work on the room known from its main picture as the Stanza dell’ Incendio del Borgo. A medieval legend told how Pope Leo III (795–816), merely by making the sign of the cross, had put out a fire that threatened to consume the Borgo—i.e., the borough of Rome around the Vatican. Probably Raphael made only the cartoon for this mural, and assigned the painting of it to his pupil Gianfrancesco Penni. Even so it is a powerful composition, in Raphael’s best episodic narrative style. Mingling classical and Christian story, Raphael showed, on the left, a handsome and muscular Aeneas carrying to safety his old but muscular father Anchises. Another nude male, perfectly drawn, hangs from the top of the wall of the burning building, ready to drop; the influence of Michelangelo is evident in these three nudes. More Raphaelesque is an excited mother leaning over the wall to hand her infant to a man stretching up on tiptoe from below. Between magnificent columns groups of women beseech the aid of the Pope, who from a balcony calmly bids the fire cease. Raphael here is still at the top of his line.

For the remaining pictures in the room Raphael drew the cartoons, perhaps helped even in this by his pupils. From these cartoons Perino del Vaga painted, over the window, The Oath of Leo III exculpating himself before Charlemagne (800); on the exit wall another and greater pupil, Giulio Romano—the only native Roman prominent in Renaissance art—pictured The Battle of Ostia, in which Leo IV (looking remarkably like Leo X) turned back the invading Saracens (849); and in other spaces the able pupils painted idealized portraits of sovereigns who had deserved well of the Church. In a final picture, The Coronation of Charlemagne, Leo X becomes Leo III; and Francis I, here painted as Charlemagne, achieves by proxy his ambition to be emperor. The picture echoed Leo’s meeting with Francis at Bologna the year before (1516).

Raphael made some preliminary sketches for the fourth stanza, the Sala di Costantino; the paintings were executed after his death under the patronage of Clement VII. Meanwhile Leo X urged him to begin the decoration of the Loggie—i.e., the open galleries built by Bramante to surround the court of St. Damasus in the Vatican. Raphael himself had completed the construction of these galleries; now (1517–9) he designed for the ceiling of one gallery fifty-two frescoes retelling the Bible story from the Creation to the Last Judgment. The actual painting was delegated to Giulio Romano, Gianfrancesco Penni, Perino del Vaga, Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio, and others; while Giovanni da Udine decorated pilasters and arch soffits with delightful pictures and arabesques in stucco and paint. These Loggie frescoes sometimes used themes already treated on the Sistine ceiling, but with a lighter hand and in a homelier and more cheerful spirit, seeking not grandeur or sublimity, but pleasant episodes like Adam and Eve and their children enjoying the fruits of Eden, Abraham visited by three angels, Isaac embracing Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel at the well, Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, the finding of Moses, David and Bathsheba, the adoration of the shepherds. These little paintings, of course, cannot compare with Michel angelo’s; they are in a different world and genre—a world of feminine grace, not of masculine strength; they are the sign of the lighthearted Raphael in his last five years, while the Sistine ceiling is Michelangelo in the culmination of his powers.

Perhaps Leo was a bit jealous of the ceiling and the glory that it had shed upon the reign of Julius. Soon after his accession he conceived the idea of commemorating his own pontificate by ad rning the walls of the Sistine Chapel with tapestries. There were no weavers in Italy who could match those of Flanders, and Leo thought there were no painters in Flanders who could equal Raphael. He commissioned the artist (1515) to draw ten cartoons describing scenes from the Acts of the Apostles. Seven of these cartoons were bought at Brussels by Rubens (1630) for Charles I of England, and are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. They are among the most remarkable drawings ever made. Raphael lavished here all his knowledge of composition, anatomy, and dramatic effect; in the whole range of drawing few pieces surpass The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Christ’s Charge to Peter, The Death of Ananias, Peter Healing the Lame Man, or Paul Preaching at Athens—though in this last the fine figure of Paul is stolen from Masaccio’s frescoes in Florence.

The ten cartoons were sent to Brussels, and there Bernaert van Orley, who had been a pupil of Raphael in Rome, superintended the transference of the designs to silk and wool. In the short space of three years seven of the tapestries were completed, and all ten were finished by 1520. On December 26, 1519, seven were hung on the Sistine walls, and the elite of Rome were invited to see them. They created a furore. Paris de Grassis noted in his diary: “The whole chapel was struck dumb by the sight of these hangings; by universal consent there is nothing more beautiful in the world.”⁷⁷ Each tapestry had cost a total of 2000 ducats ($25,000); the expenditure for the ten helped to deplete Leo’s finances, and to induce the further sale of indulgences and offices.* Leo must have felt that now he and Raphael had met Julius and Michelangelo in a battle of art in the same chapel, and had carried off the prize.

The amazing fertility of Raphael—greater in his thirty-seven years than Michelangelo’s in eighty-nine—makes it difficult to summarize him justly, for nearly every product was a masterpiece deserving commemoration. He designed mosaics, woodwork, jewelry, medals, pottery, bronze vessels and reliefs, perfume boxes, statues, palaces. Michelangelo was disturbed when he heard that Raphael had made a model, and that from this the Florentine sculptor Lorenzetto Lotti had carved in marble, a statue of Jonah riding the whale; but the result reassured him—Raphael had strayed unwisely out of his pictorial element. He did better in architecture, for there his friend Bramante guided him. About 1514, when he was put in charge of St. Peter’s, he had his friend Fabio Calvo translate Vitruvius for him into Italian; and from that time he was an ardent lover of classical architectural styles and forms. His continuation of Bramante’s Loggie so pleased Leo that the Pope made him director of all the architectural and artistic departments of the Vatican. Raphael built some undistinguished palaces in Rome, and shared in designing the elegant Villa Madama for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici; this, however, was chiefly the work of Giulio Romano as architect and painter, and of Giovanni da Udine as decorator. Raphael’s one surviving architectural masterpiece is the Palazzo Pandolfini, built from his plans after his death; it is still among the finest palaces in Florence. With sublime indifference he turned his talents to the service of his friend the banker Chigi, and built for him a chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, and for his horses such stables (Stalle Chigiane, 1514) as might have served for a palace. To understand Raphael, and Leo’s Rome, we must pause for a moment and look at the egregious Chigi.

VIII. AGOSTINO CHIGI

He typified a new group in Rome: rich merchants or bankers, usually of non-Roman origin, whose wealth put the old Roman nobility in the shade, and whose generosity to artists and writers was exceeded only by that of popes and cardinals. Born in Siena, he had imbibed financial subtlety with his daily food. By the age of forty-three he was chief Italian moneylender to republics and kingdoms, Christian or infidel. He financed trade with a dozen countries including Turkey, and by lease from Julius II acquired a monopoly in alum and salt.⁷⁸ In 1511 he gave Julius an additional reason for war on Ferrara—Duke Alfonso had dared to sell salt at a lower price than Agostino could afford to take.⁷⁹ His firm had branch houses in every major Italian town, and in Constantinople, Alexandria, Cairo, Lyons, London, Amsterdam. A hundred vessels sailed under his flag; twenty thousand men were in his pay; a half-dozen sovereigns sent him gifts; his best horse was from the Sultan; when he visited Venice (to which he had lent 125,000 ducats), he was seated next to the doge.⁸⁰ Asked by Leo X to estimate his wealth, he answered, perhaps for reasons of tax, that it was impossible; however, his annual income was reckoned to be 70,000 ducats ($875,000). His silver plate and jewelry equaled in quantity that of all the Roman nobility combined. His bedstead was carved in ivory and encrusted with gold and precious stones. The fixtures of his bathroom were of solid silver.⁸¹ He had a dozen palaces and villas, of which the most ornate was the Villa Chigi, on the west bank of the Tiber. Designed by Baldassare Peruzzi, adorned with paintings by Peruzzi, Raphael, Sodoma, Giulio Romano, and Sebastiano del Piombo, it was hailed by the Romans, on its completion in 1512, as the lordliest palace in Rome.

The Chigi banquets had almost the reputation that those of Lucullus had gained in Caesar’s time. In the stables that Raphael had just completed, and before they were occupied by handsomer beasts than men, Agostino entertained Pope Leo and fourteen cardinals, in 1518, with a repast that proudly cost him 2000 ducats ($25,000?). At that distinguished function eleven massive silver plates were stolen, presumably by servants in the retinue of the guests. Chigi forbade any search, and expressed courteous astonishment that so little had been stolen.⁸² When the feast was over, the silk carpet, the tapestries, and the fine furniture were removed, and a hundred horses filled the stalls.

A few months later the banker gave another dinner, this time in the loggia of the villa, projecting out over the river. After each course all the silver used in serving it was thrown into the Tiber before the eyes of the guests, to assure them that no plate would be used twice. After the banquet Chigi’s servants drew up the silver from the net that had secretly been lowered into the stream beneath the windows of the loggia.⁸³ At a dinner given in the main hall of the villa on August 28, 1519, each guest—including Pope Leo and twelve cardinals—was served on silver or gold plate faultlessly engraved with his own motto, crest, and coat of arms, and was fed with special fish, game, vegetables, fruits, delicacies, and wines freshly imported for the occasion from his own country or locality.

Chigi tried to atone for this plebeian display of wealth by an openhanded support of literature and art. He financed the editing of Pindar by the scholar Cornelio Benigno of Viterbo, and set up in his own home a press for its printing; and the Greek type cut for that press excelled in beauty that which Aldus Manutius had used in publishing the Odes two years before. This was the first Greek text printed in Rome (1515). A year later the same press issued a correct edition of Theocritus. Though himself a man of modest education, Agostino prided himself on his friendship with Bembo, Giovio, even Aretino; in this last case the Roman adage, pecunia non olet—“money does not smell”—included a transitive verb. Next to money and his mistress, Chigi loved all the forms of beauty that art had fashioned. He rivaled Leo in commissions to artists, and led him a merry pace in the pagan interpretation of the Renaissance. He collected into his palaces and villas such quantities of art as would have furnished a museum. He seems to have thought of his villa as not merely his home, but as a public gallery of art, to which the public might occasionally be admitted.

In that villa, at the aforementioned dinner on August 28, 1519, Leo himself officiating, Chigi at last married the faithful mistress with whom he had lived for the preceding eight years. Eight months later he died, within a few days of the death of Raphael. His estate, valued at 800,000 ducats ($10,000,000?) was divided chiefly among his children. Lorenzo, the oldest son, led a life of dissipation, and was adjudged insane in 1553. The Villa Chigi was sold to the second Cardinal Alessandro Farnese for a small sum about 1580, and from that time bore the name of Farnesina.

IX. RAPHAEL: THE LAST PHASE

Raphael had accepted minor commissions from the jolly banker as early as 1510. In 1514 he painted a fresco for him in the church of Santa Maria della Pace. The space provided was narrow and irregular; Raphael made it seem adequate by distributing in it four sibyls—Cumaean, Persian, Phrygian, Tiburtine—pagan oracles here sterilized with attendant angels. They are graceful figures, since Raphael could hardly draw anything without grace; Vasari thought they were the young master’s finest work. They are a weak imitation of Angelo’s sibyls, except for the Tiburtine; here the priestess, haggard with age and frightened by the evil fortune she is foretelling, is a figure of original and dramatic power. According to a story not traceable beyond the seventeenth century, some misunderstanding arose between Raphael and Chigi’s treasurer about the fee for these sibyls. Raphael had received five hundred ducats, but, when finished, claimed an additional payment. The treasurer thought the five hundred already paid were all that were due. Raphael suggested that the treasurer should appoint a competent artist to evaluate the frescoes; the official chose Michelangelo; Raphael agreed. Michelangelo, despite his supposed jealousy of Raphael, judged that each head in the picture was worth one hundred ducats. When the astonished treasurer brought this judgment to Chigi the banker ordered him to pay Raphael at once four hundred additional ducats. “Be tender with him,” he cautioned, “so that he may be satisfied. If he makes me pay for the draperies I shall be ruined.”⁸⁴

Chigi had to be careful, for in that same year Raphael was painting for him a delectable fresco in the Villa Chigi—The Triumph of Galatea. The story was taken from Politian’s Giostra: Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops, tries to seduce the nymph Galatea by his songs and flute; she turns from him in disdain—as if to say, Who would marry an artist?—and gives the reins to two dolphins who pull her shell-like vessel out to sea. At her left a robust nymph is gaily seized by a powerful Triton, while from the clouds cupids shoot superfluous arrows to encourage love. Here the pagan Renaissance is in full swing, and Raphael enjoys himself picturing women as his bright imagination thought they should be formed.

In 1516 he adorned the bathroom of Cardinal Bibbiena with frescoes glorifying Venus and the triumphs of love. In 1517 he disported himself still more voluptuously in designs for the ceiling and pendentives of the Villa Chigi’s central hall. Here he adapted his genial fancy to a tale from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Psyche, daughter of a king, arouses by her beauty the envy of Venus; the spiteful goddess bids her son Cupid inspire Psyche with a passion for the most contemptible man to be found. Cupid descends to the earth to fulfill his mission, but falls in love with Psyche at first touch. He visits her in the dark, and bids her repress her curiosity as to who he is. Inevitably she rises from her bed one night, lights a lamp, and is delighted to see that she has been sleeping with the most handsome of the gods. In her excitement she lets a drop of hot oil fall upon his divine shoulder. He awakes, berates her for her curiosity, and leaves her in anger, not realizing that lack of curiosity by a woman in such cases would demoralize society. Psyche wanders over the earth disconsolate. Venus imprisons Cupid for disobeying his mother, and complains to Jupiter that celestial discipline is deteriorating. Jupiter sends Mercury to fetch Psyche, who then becomes the abused slave of Venus. Cupid escapes from his confinement, and begs Jove to grant him Psyche. The puzzled god, torn as usual between opposing prayers, summons the Olympian deities to debate the matter. He himself, susceptible to youthful male charms, sides with Cupid; the complaisant gods vote to free Psyche, to make her a goddess, and to give her to Cupid; and in the final scene they celebrate with an ambrosial banquet the nuptials of Cupid and Psyche. We are assured that the story is a pious allegory, in which Psyche represents the human soul, which, when purified by suffering, is admitted to paradise. But Raphael and Chigi saw in the myth no religious symbolism, but a chance to contemplate perfect male and female forms. Yet there is in Raphael’s sensualism a refinement and grace that disarms puritan criticism; apparently the genial Leo found in them nothing to reprove. Only the figures and composition here are Raphael’s; Giulio Romano and Francesco Penni painted the scenes from his designs, and Giovanni da Udine added enticing enclosing wreaths burgeoning with fruits and flowers. The school of Raphael had become a transmission belt whose end product was almost certain to be some form of loveliness.

Never were pagan and Christian so agreeably merged as in Raphael. This same worldly youth who lived like a prince and loved many women transiently, and (if one may venture such an anomaly) frolicked on ceilings with male and female nudes, painted in these same years (1513–20) some of the most appealing pictures in the gamut of history. With all his guileless sensualism he always returned to the Madonna as his favorite theme; fifty times he pictured her. Sometimes a pupil helped him, as in the Madonna dell’ Impannata; but for the most part he worked on this type of painting with his own hand, and with a touch of the old Umbrian piety. Now (1515) he painted the Sistine Madonna for the convent of San Sisto at Piacenza:* a perfect pyramidal composition; the convincing realism of the old martyr St. Sixtus; the demure St. Barbara, a bit too beautiful and too splendidly gowned; the Virgin’s green robe, over a touch of red, blown by heaven’s winds; the Child quite human in His disheveled innocence; the simple rosy face of the Madonna, a little sad and wondering (as if La Fornarina, who may have posed for this picture, realized her disqualifications); the curtains drawn aside by angels behind the Virgin, admitting her to paradise: this is the favorite picture of all Christendom, the most widely loved product of Raphael’s hand. Almost as fine, and perhaps more moving despite its traditional form, is The Holy Family under the Oak Tree (Prado), also called La Perla, “The Pearl Madonna.” In the Madonna della Sedia or Seggiola (Pitti) the mood is less evangelical, more human; the Madonna is a young Italian mother, buxom and quietly passionate; clasping her fat babe with possessive and protective love, while he nestles timidly against her, as if he had heard some myth of massacred innocents. One such Madonna could atone for many Fornarinas.

Raphael painted relatively few pictures of Christ. His buoyant spirit shrank from the contemplation or portrayal of suffering; or perhaps, like Leonardo, he realized the impossibility of representing the divine. In 1517, probably with the collaboration of Penni, he painted Christ Bearing the Cross for the convent of Santa Maria dello Spasimo in Palermo, whence the picture came to be called Lo Spasimo di Sicilia. According to Vasari it had an adventurous career: the ship that carried it to Sicily was lost in a storm; the crated painting floated safely over the waters, and landed at Genoa; “even the fury of the winds and waves,” said Vasari, “respected such painting.” It was shipped again, and was set up in Palermo, where “it became more famous than the mountain of Vulcan.”⁸⁶ In the seventeenth century Philip IV of Spain had it secretly transferred to Madrid. Christ in this picture is merely an exhausted and defeated man, conveying no sense of a mission accepted and fulfilled. Raphael succeeded better in suggesting divinity in The Vision of Ezekiel, though here again he borrows his majestic God from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.

To this crowded period belongs the St. Cecilia, almost as popular as the Sistine Madonna. A Bolognese lady, in the fall of 1513, announced that she had heard heavenly voices bidding her dedicate a chapel to St. Cecilia in the church of San Giovanni del Monte. A relative undertook to build the chapel, and asked his uncle Cardinal Lorenzo Pucci to order from Raphael, for a thousand gold scudi, an appropriate picture for the altar. Delegating to Giovanni da Udine the representation of the musical instruments, Raphael finished the painting in 1516, and sent it to Bologna, as we have seen, with a kindly letter to Francia. We need not believe that Francia was mortally stricken by its beauty to feel the splendor of the work, its sense of music as something almost celestial, its St. Paul in a “brown study,” its St. John in almost girlish ecstasy, its lovely Cecilia, its still lovelier Magdalen—here transformed into charming innocence—and the living lights and shadows on the drapery and on Magdalen’s feet.

Now, too, came some masterly portraits. The Baldassare Castiglione (Louvre) is one of Raphael’s most conscientious efforts, endlessly enticing, among his portraits second only to the Julius II. One sees first the strange fluffy headdress, then the furry robe and profuse beard, and imagines the man to be some Moslem poet or philosopher, or a rabbi seen by Rembrandt; then the soft eyes and mouth and clasped hands reveal the tender-minded, sentimental, bereaved minister of Isabella at Leo’s court; one should linger over this portrait before reading The Courtier. The Bibbiena shows the Cardinal in his later years, tired of his Venuses and reconciled to Christianity.

La donna velata is not incontestably Raphael’s, yet it is almost certainly the picture that Vasari describes as a portrait of Raphael’s mistress. Her features are those that he used for the Magdalen, even the Cecilia, of St. Cecilia, perhaps for the Sistine Madonna—here dark and demure, a long veil falling from her head, a circlet of gems around her neck, and lucious robes wrapped loosely about her form. Probably by Raphael, but not so clearly representing his mistress as older views claimed, is La Fornarina in the Borghese Gallery. The word means a woman baker, or a baker’s wife or daughter; but such names, like Smith or Carpenter, prove nothing of the bearer’s occupation. This lady is not especially attractive; one misses in her the modest look that makes more charming such immodest revelations.* It seems incredible that the modest Veiled Lady should be the same person as this bold dispenser of hurried joys; but, after all, Raphael had more mistresses than one.

Yet he was more faithful to his mistress than artists—who are more sensitive to beauty than to reason—can be expected to be. When Cardinal Bibbiena urged him to marry Maria Bibbiena, the Cardinal’s niece, Raphael, indebted to him for rich commissions, gave unwilling consent (1514); but he delayed from month to month and from year to year the keeping of this troth; and tradition relates that Maria, so repeatedly put off, died of a broken heart.⁸⁷ Vasari suggests that Raphael delayed in hope of being made a cardinal; to such an elevation marriage was a major—a mistress a negligible —impediment. Meanwhile the artist seems to have kept his mistress within close reach of wherever he was working. When the distance between the Villa Chigi, where Raphael was designing the History of Psyche, and his mistress’ dwelling led to much loss of time, the banker had the lady installed in an apartment of the villa; “that,” says Vasari, “is why the work was finished.”⁸⁸ We do not know if it was with this mistress that Raphael indulged in the “unusually wild debauch” to which Vasari ascribes his death.⁸⁹

His last picture was one of his supreme interpretations of the Gospel story. In 1517 Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici commissioned both Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo to paint altarpieces for the cathedral of Narbonne, of which Francis I had made him bishop. Sebastiano had long felt that his talent was at least equal to Raphael’s though so much less recognized; here was his chance to prove himself. He chose as subject the raising of Lazarus, and secured the help of Michelangelo in making his design. Spurred by the competition, Raphael rose to his final triumph. He took for his theme Matthew’s account of the episode on Mt. Tabor:

And after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, and brought them up into a high mountain apart, and was transfigured before them; and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. And behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him…. And when they returned to the multitude there came to him a certain man, kneeling down to him and saying, Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatic, and sore vexed; for ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water. And I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him.⁹⁰

Raphael took both of these scenes and united them, with excessive strain on the unities of time and place. Above the mountain top the figure of Christ appears soaring in the air, His face transfigured with ecstasy, His garments made shining white by light from heaven; on one side of Him Moses, on the other Elias; and beneath them, lying on a plateau, the three favored Apostles. At the foot of the mountain a desperate father pushes forward his insane boy; the mother and another woman, both of them classic in their beauty, kneel beside the boy and beg a cure from the nine Apostles who are gathered at the left. One of these is startled out of his concentration on a book; another points to the transfigured Christ, and suggests that only He can cure the boy. It is usual to praise the splendor of the upper part of the picture, presumably finished by Raphael, and to deprecate a certain coarseness and violence in the lower group, which was painted by Giulio Romano; but two of the finest figures are in the lower foreground—the disturbed reader, and a kneeling woman with bare shoulder and gleaming drapery.

Raphael began work on the Transfiguration in 1517, but had not finished it when he died. We cannot say how much truth there is in Vasari’s account, written some thirty years after the event:

Raphael continued his secret pleasures beyond all measure. After an unusually wild debauch he returned home with a severe fever, and the doctors believed him to have caught a chill. As he did not confess the cause of his disorder, the doctors imprudently let blood, thus enfeebling him when he needed restoratives. Accordingly he made his will, first sending his mistress out of the house like a Christian, leaving her the means to live honestly. He then divided his things among his pupils, Giulio Romano, of whom he was always very fond, Giovanni Francesco Penni of Florence, and some priest of Urbino, a relation…. Having confessed and shown penitence, he finished the course of his life on the day of his birth, Good Friday, at the age of thirty-seven (April 6, 1520).⁹¹

The priest who had come to shrive him refused to enter the sick room until Raphael’s mistress had left the house; perhaps the priest felt that her continued presence would suggest on Raphael’s part a lack of the contrition required before absolution. Driven away even from the funeral cortege, she fell into a melancholy that threatened insanity; and Cardinal Bibbiena persuaded her to become a nun. All the artists of Rome followed the dead youth to his grave. Leo mourned the loss of his beloved painter; and a papal secretary and poet, the Bembo who could be so eloquent in both Latin and Italian, put aside all rhetoric in writing an epitaph for Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon:

ILLE HIC EST RAPHAEL

—”He who is here is Raphael.” It was enough.

In the opinion of his contemporaries he was the greatest painter of his age. He produced nothing equal in sublimity to the Sistine ceiling, but Michelangelo produced nothing equal in total beauty to the fifty Madonnas of Raphael. Michelangelo was the greater artist, because great in three fields, and deeper in-thought and art. When he said of Raphael, “He is an example of what profound study can bring forth,”⁹² he probably meant that Raphael had acquired by imitation the excellences of many other painters, and had combined them with assiduous talent into a perfected style; he did not feel, in Raphael, the creative fury that soon throws off guidance and cuts a path almost violently for its own way. Raphael appeared too happy to be a genius in the traditional frenzied sense; he had so solved his inner conflicts that he showed few signs of the demonic spirit or force that moves the greatest souls to creation and tragedy. Raphael’s work was the product of finished skill, not of profound feeling or conviction. He adjusted himself to the needs and moods of Julius, then of Leo, then of Chigi, but remained always the guileless youth cheerfully oscillating between Madonnas and mistresses; this was his blithe way of reconciling paganism and Christianity.

As artist in the sense of technician, no one surpassed him; in the arrangement of elements in a picture, the rhythm of masses, the smooth flow of line, no one has equaled him. His life was a devotion to form. Consequently he tended to remain on the surface of things. Except in his portrait of Julius II, he did not probe into the mysteries or contradictions of life or creed; Leonardo’s subtlety and Michelangelo’s sense of tragedy were alike meaningless to him; the lust and joy of life, the creation and possession of beauty, the loyalty of friend and lover, were enough. Ruskin was right: there was now and then in Gothic sculpture and the “Pre-Raphaelite” painting of Italy and Flanders a simplicity, sincerity, and sublimity of faith and hope that sink deeper into the soul than the pretty Madonnas and voluptuous Venuses of Raphael. And yet the Julius II and the Pearl Madonna are anything but superficial; they reach to the heart of male ambition and female tenderness; the Julius is greater and profounder than the Mona Lisa.

Leonardo puzzles us, Michelangelo frightens us, Raphael gives us peace. He asks no questions, raises no doubts, evokes no terrors, but offers us the loveliness of life like an ambrosial drink. He admits no conflict between intellect and feeling, nor between body and soul; everything in him is a harmony of opposites, making a Pythagorean music. His art idealizes all that it touches: religion, woman, music, philosophy, history, even war. Himself fortunate and happy, he radiated serenity and grace. In the arbitrary analogies of genius he finds his place just below the greatest, but with them: Dante, Goethe, Keats; Beethoven, Bach, Mozart; Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael.

X. LEO POLITICUS

It was a pity that amid all this art and literature Leo had to play politics. But he was head of a state, and lived at a time when the powers beyond the Alps had ambitious leaders, large armies, and lusty generals; at any moment Louis XII of France and Ferdinand the Catholic might agree to divide Italy as they had agreed to divide the Kingdom of Naples. To meet these threats—and incidentally to strengthen the Papal States and aggrandize his family—Leo planned to combine Florence (which he already ruled through his brother Giuliano and his nephew Lorenzo) with Milan, Piacenza, Parma, Modena, Ferrara, and Urbino into a new and powerful federation to be ruled by loyal Medici; to unite these with the existing States of the Church as a barrier to aggression from the north; if possible, to secure by marriage, for some member of his house, the succession to the throne of Naples; and, with an Italy so welded into strength, to lead Europe in one more crusade against the ever threatening Turks. Machiavelli, who had no prejudice in favor of Christianity or the popes, warmly approved of this plan, at least so far as concerned the unification and protection of Italy; this was the leading idea of The Prince.

Pursuing these aims with very limited military means at his disposal, Leo used all the methods of statecraft and diplomacy employed by the princes of his day. It was inconvenient that the head of a Christian Church should have to lie, break faith, steal, and kill; but by the common consent of kings these procedures were indispensable to the preservation of a state. Leo, a Medici first and a pope afterward, played the game as well as his corpulence, his fistula, his hunts, his liberalities, and his finances would allow. All the kings denounced him, disappointed that he would not behave like a saint; “Leo,” said Guicciardini, “deceived the expectations conceived of him at his accession, since he appeared to be endowed with greater prudence, but with much less goodness, than all had imagined.”⁹³ For a long time his enemies thought that his Machiavellian subtlety was due to the influence of his cousin Giulio (the future Clement VII), or to Cardinal Bibbiena; but as events matured it became clear that they had to deal with Leo himself, not a lion but a fox, suave and slippery, cunning and incalculable, grasping and devious, sometimes frightened and often hesitant, but, in the last resort, capable of decision, resolution, and persistent policy.

Let us leave his relations with the transalpine states to a later chapter, confine ourselves here to Italian affairs, and deal with these summarily, for the art of Leo’s time is a much more living thing than its politics. He had a great advantage over his predecessors, for Florence, which had opposed Alexander and Julius, was now happy to be part of his realm, since he gave its citizens many papal plums; and when he visited the city of his ancestors it raised a dozen artistic arches to welcome him. From that point d’appui, and from Rome, he deployed his diplomats and patronage and troops to swell his state. In 1514 he secured Modena. In 1515 Francis I prepared to invade Italy and take Milan; Leo organized an army and an Italian alliance to resist him, and ordered the Duke of Urbino, as a vassal of the Holy See and a general in the service of the Church, to join him at Bologna with all the forces he could muster. The Duke, Francesco Maria della Rovere, flatly refused to come, though Leo had recently advanced him money to pay his troops. The Pope with some reason suspected him of having a secret understanding with France.⁹⁴ As soon as his hands were freed from foreign entanglements, Leo summoned Francesco to Rome; the Duke in stead fled to Mantua. Leo excommunicated him, and listened unmoved to the entreaties and messages of Elisabetta Gonzaga and Isabella d’Este, aunt and mother-in-law of the reckless prince; papal troops took Urbino unresisted, Francesco was declared deposed, and Leo’s nephew Lorenzo became Duke of Urbino (1516). A year later the people of the city rose and expelled Lorenzo; Francesco organized an army and recaptured his duchy; Leo was hard put to it to raise funds and forces to recapture it in turn; he succeeded after eight months of war, but the cost exhausted the papal treasury, and turned the good will of Italy against the Pope and his grasping family.

Francis I took the opportunity to win the friendship of the Pope, and proposed a marriage between Lorenzo, the restored Duke of Urbino, and Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne, who had a charming income of 10,000 crowns ($125,000?) a year. Leo agreed; Lorenzo went to France (1518), like an echo of Borgia, and brought back Madeleine and her dowry. A year later she died in giving birth to a daughter Caterina, the future Queen Catherine de Médicis of France; and shortly thereafter Lorenzo himself died, allegedly of a sexual disease contracted in France.⁹⁵ Leo now declared Urbino a papal state, and sent a legate to govern it.

During these complications he had had to bear with two bitter signs of his political weakness and growing unpopularity. One of his generals, Gianpaolo Baglioni, ruler of Perugia by papal grace, had gone over to Francesco Maria, taking Perugia with him; Leo later lured Gianpaolo to Rome with a safe-conduct, and had him put to death (1520). Baglioni had shared also in a conspiracy, led by Alfonso Petrucci and other cardinals, to assassinate the Pope (1517). These cardinals had made such demands upon Leo as even his generosity could not meet; Petrucci, moreover, raged because his brother, with Leo’s connivance, had been ousted from the government of Siena. He planned at first to kill Leo with his own hand, but was persuaded instead to bribe Leo’s physician to poison the Pope while treating his fistula. The plot was discovered; the physician and Petrucci were executed, and several accomplice cardinals were imprisoned and deposed; some were released on paying enormous fines.

Leo’s need for money was now souring his once happy reign. His gifts to relatives, friends, artists, writers, and musicians, his lavish maintenance of an unprecedented court, the insatiable demands of the new St. Peter’s, the expense of the Urbino war and the preparation for a crusade, were leading him to bankruptcy. His regular revenue of 420,000 ducats ($5,250,000?) a year from fees, annates, and tithes was completely inadequate, and yet was always more difficult to secure from a Europe resentful of ecclesiastical collections flowing to Rome. To replenish his treasury Leo created 1353 new and saleable offices, for which the appointees paid a total of 889,000 ducats ($11,112,500?). We must not be too virtuous about this; most of the offices were sinecures whose modest toil could be delegated to subordinates; the sums paid for these appointments were in effect loans to the papacy; the salaries, averaging ten per cent per year on the initial payment, were interest on the loans; Leo was selling what we would now designate as government bonds;⁹⁶ and he would doubtless have urged that he paid a much handsomer return than governments pay today. However, he sold not only these sinecures, but even the highest offices, like that of papal chamberlain.⁹⁷ In July, 1517, he named thirty-one new cardinals, many of them men of ability, but most of them chosen frankly for their capacity to pay for the honor and power. So Cardinal Ponzetti—physician, scholar, author—paid 30,000 ducats; altogether Leo’s pen on this occasion brought half a million ducats into the treasury.⁹⁸ Even blasé Italy was shocked; and in Germany the story of the transaction shared in the anger of Luther’s revolt (October, 1517). When, in this momentous year, Sultan Selim conquered Egypt for the Ottoman Turks, Leo appealed in vain for a crusade. In his blind eagerness he sent agents throughout Christendom to offer extraordinary indulgences in return for contrition, confession, and contribution to the expenses of the proposed crusade.

Sometimes he borrowed money at forty per cent from the bankers of Rome, who charged him such rates because they feared that his careless administration of papal finances would ensure bankruptcy. As security for some of these loans he pledged his silver plate, his tapestries, his jewels. He rarely thought of economizing, and when he did it was by defaulting on the salaries of his Greek Academy and the University of Rome; as early as 1517 the former was closed for lack of funds. He continued his intemperate benevolence, sending rich subsidies to monasteries, hospitals, and charitable institutions throughout Christendom, heaping dignities and funds upon the Medici, and feeding his guests Lucullanly while himself eating and drinking in moderation.⁹⁹ All in all he spent during his pontificate 4,500,000 ducats ($56,250,000?), and died owing 400,000 more. A pasquinade expressed the opinion of Rome: “Leo has eaten up three pontificates: the treasury of Julius II, the revenues of Leo, and those of his successor.”¹⁰⁰ When he died Rome experienced one of the worst financial crashes in its history.

His final year was rife with war. Having regained Urbino and Perugia, it seemed to him that control of Ferrara and the Po was indispensable to the security of the Papal States, and their capacity to check France at Milan. Duke Alfonso had given the requisite casus belli by sending troops and artillery to Francesco Maria for use against the Pope. Alfonso, though ill, and well-nigh exhausted after a generation of papal hostility, fought on with his usual courage, and was saved by Leo’s death.

The Pope too was ill in August, 1521, partly from the pain of his fistula, partly from the worries and excitement of war. He recovered, but fell sick again in October. In November he was well enough to be taken out to his country villa at Magliana. There the news reached him that the papalimperial army had captured Milan from the French. On the 25th he returned to Rome, and was given the wild reception accorded only to victors in war. He walked too much that day, perspiring till his clothes were drenched. The next morning he was put to bed with fever. Now he rapidly grew worse, and realized that his end was near. On December 1 he was cheered by intelligence that Piacenza and Parma had in their turn been taken by the papal forces; once he had declared that he would gladly give his life for the addition of those cities to the States of the Church. At midnight, December 1–2, 1521, he died, ten days before completing his forty-fifth year. Many of the attendants, and some members of the Medici family, carried off from the Vatican everything they could lay their hands on. Guicciardini, Giovio, and Castiglione thought that he had been poisoned, perhaps at the instigation of Alfonso or Francesco Maria; but apparently he died of malarial fever, like Alexander VI.¹⁰¹

Alfonso rejoiced at the news, and struck a new medal EX ORE LEONIS, “from the jaws of the lion.” Francesco Maria returned to Urbino, and was once more restored to his throne. In Rome the bankers despoiled themselves. The Bini firm had lent Leo 200,000 ducats, the Gaddi 32,000, the Ricasoli 10,000; moreover, Cardinal Pucci had lent him 150,000, and Cardinal Salviati 80,000;¹⁰² the cardinals would have first claim on anything salvaged; and Leo had died worse than bankrupt. Some others joined in condemning the dead Pope as a maladministrator of great wealth. But nearly all Rome mourned him as the most generous benefactor in its history. Artists, poets, and scholars knew that the heyday of their good fortune had passed, though they had no suspicion yet of the extent of their disaster. Said Paolo Giovio: “Knowledge, art, the common well-being, the joy of living—in a word, all good things—have gone down into the grave with Leo.”¹⁰³

He was a good man ruined by his virtues. Erasmus had rightly praised his kindness and humanity, his magnanimity and learning, his love and support of the arts, and had called Leo’s pontificate an age of gold.¹⁰⁴ But Leo was too habituated to gold. Raised in a palace, he learned luxury as well as art; he never labored for his income, though he faced perils bravely; and when the revenues of the papacy were placed in his trust they slipped through his careless fingers while he basked in the happiness of recipients, or planned expensive wars. Proceeding on the lines laid down by Alexander and Julius, and inheriting their achievements, he made the Papal States stronger than ever, but he lost Germany by his extravagance and his exactions. He could see the beauty of a vase, but not the Protestant Reformation taking shape beyond the Alps; he paid no attention to a hundred warnings sent him, but asked for more gold from a nation already in revolt. He was a glory and a disaster to the Church.