CHAPTER TWENTY

A VIOLENT AWAKENING

The Reformation was an alarm going off in the night, rousing the Church from somnolence. The call was clear: Reform or self-destruct.

To bring it through the most serious crisis of its fifteen-hundred-year history, the Church turned to the ultimate insider—His Eminence Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. A power player and leading papabile in every conclave, Cardinal Farnese knew everyone who was anyone. In 1534, following the disastrous Medici interregnum, he was elected pope without serious opposition and took the name Paul III.

Although Julius had appropriated Constantine’s imperial title, Pontifex Maximus, Paul III personified it. He was the “supreme bridge-builder,” spanning the divide between the Roman Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation. Farnese was not only well connected, he was scandalously connected. His sister was “la Bella,” the legendary beauty Giulia Farnese who became Alexander VI’s mistress. To please Giulia, the Borgia pope gave her brother a red hat, and Farnese gained the sobriquet “Cardinal Petticoat.”

Farnese was no saint. His personal history suggests that he should have been the quintessential Renaissance pope. Like the Borgias, he pursued a life so notably lacking in poverty, chastity, and obedience that he postponed ordination so that he could continue enjoying it. His behavior was conspicuous for the worldliness and loose morals railed against by reformers inside and outside the Church. A bon vivant and art patron, Farnese lived lavishly with a household of more than three hundred, a mistress who was a Roman noblewoman, and their four children. As pope, his one glaring weakness was his grandchildren. He couldn’t refuse them anything.

A Renaissance pope by disposition, Paul III became the first Counter-Reformation pope by necessity. He was the most pivotal and paradoxical character in the Basilica story. Paul sponsored the monk Nicolaus Copernicus and his seminal work, On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, which posited the revolution of the planets around the sun decades before Galileo. But he also reinstituted the Inquisition.

In the aftershock of the Sack and the furor roused by the Protestant reformers, the status quo was no longer acceptable. Patience with clerical malfeasance and moral decay had run out, and the air was rife with the perfume of the righteous. The one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church was no longer one and no longer holy in the opinion of much of the laity. Its catholicism was compromised, its apostolic authority challenged.

Paul moved decisively to stanch the wounds inflicted by Luther. Smooth, charming, and persuasive, with the silken manners of a diplomat, he put aside his more questionable habits and, over the course of fifteen years, the longest pontificate of the century, began a long-overdue reform. He appointed smart, moral cardinals like Reginald Pole of England and encouraged strict, intellectually rigorous new religious orders, particularly the Society of Jesus, which became known as the Jesuits. He established the Holy Office to safeguard orthodoxy and revived the Inquisition to root out heresy. Most consequential of all, he convened the Council of Trent to correct ecclesiastical abuses and promote reconciliation with the dissidents in the north.

To Paul, the Protestants were not souls lost to the Church, but sheep who had strayed and could be coaxed back to the flock, if the Church cleaned its own house. The Reformation had exposed a system rotted from within. The Council of Trent answered it. Although it took several years to get off the ground, it gave the Church a second chance.

Cardinal Pole defined the Council’s mission as “the uprooting of heresies, the reform of ecclesiastical disciplines and of morals, and lastly the eternal peace of the whole Church. These we must see to, or rather, untiringly pray that by God’s mercy they may be done.”

In time, Paul became convinced that the breach with the Protestants was beyond repair. There was some consolation. Magellan’s round-the-world voyage showed that the earth was many times larger than anyone had suspected. This was welcome news to Rome. The number of souls lost to Protestantism was a drop in the oceans compared with the number of new souls ripe for conversion.

Moving decisively to cut his losses, Paul dispatched missionaries to the New World, and when England became a lost cause as well, he excommunicated Henry VIII. Then he began to clean house. All hope of reconciliation abandoned, the Council of Trent concentrated on internal reform. Familiar habits were forbidden, among them: appointing family members to high office regardless of merit (nepotism), carving dynastic family estates out of church lands (alienation), buying and selling offices (simony), drawing income from many offices and benefices (pluralism) without attending to the duties of any (absenteeism), and remitting the punishment of sin for a price (the sale of indulgences).

Protestant reformers in the north were insisting that the Church make a public confession, beg forgiveness, and accede to their demands. Paul refused to force the Church to conform to the colder, more reserved northern sensibility. The Catholic Church was the Church of Rome in more than name. However far the faith had spread, its soul was Latin, not Bavarian.

Reformers, both those who broke with the Church and those who stayed to fight from within, might have expected a penitent pope. Something comparable to a medieval-style scourging—Paul with a crown of thorns, cardinals in sackcloth, gold chalices and ciboria melted down, matchless art and precious manuscripts auctioned, and the wealth of the Church distributed to the poor. The reality was sharply different. Paul was persuasive when possible, ruthless when necessary, but he refused to grovel.

He had two remarkable answers to counter the Reformation and restore the moral authority of the Church, and he pursued them both with fervor. The first was the Council of Trent. The second was Michelangelo.

 

A cavalcade of carriages carried the new pope, a dozen cardinals, and several members of his household along Via della Lungara. They crossed the river at Ponte Sisto, just beyond Chigi’s Palazzo, now owned by the pope’s family and called Villa Farnesina. Across the river, on the east bank near Palazzo Riario, now renamed and bearing the Medici coat of arms, Antonio da Sangallo was planning a new palace for the new pope. If time permitted, Paul might stop on the way back to see the construction.

The cavalcade proceeded east over the Capitoline hill toward Trajan’s Column. It was a humble neighborhood for a papal visit. The statue of the emperor that once crowned the one-hundred-thirty-one-foot-high column was long gone. In time, it would be replaced with a statue of St. Peter. For now, though, it wasn’t the condition of an ancient relic that concerned the new pope, but the mood of the aging recluse who had taken a studio in Macel de’Corvi in the shadow of the column.

With his cardinals forming a train behind him, Paul approached a narrow door and knocked. He waited for several moments before an old man, dressed in the coarse black clothes of a servant, opened it a crack and peered out. Seeing the august visitors, he stepped back in some confusion. Paul recognized the man—there was no more faithful or long-suffering a servant than Francesco Urbino. He pushed open the door.

“We have come to see your master’s drawings for the altarpiece,” he said.

Behind Francesco, a second man, scruffier and ill kempt, watched warily. No pope had come banging on his door since those heady, early days with Julius when everything seemed possible.

Michelangelo knelt and kissed Paul’s hand. They hadn’t seen each other in years—probably not since 1527, when the Medici lost Florence for the second time—and they had both aged noticeably.

Paul III was tall and slender, his shoulders stooped now. Titian painted him in midlife wearing his papal robes easily. He looks out on the world, watchful and reserved. His face is narrow and elongated, his eyes large and dark. His hair, side-whiskers, and heavy eyebrows are a steely gray in contrast with the white mustache and coarse square beard. What is most striking about the portrait is the hands, the fingers long and tapered like a pianist’s.

Standing in the doorway of the sculptor’s studio in his white robe and short, hooded velvet cape, Paul was the epitome of elegance. On his knees, in a soiled, wrinkled tunic and scuffed work boots, Michelangelo appeared uncouth. He was considerably smaller than the Farnese pope, wiry and disheveled, his hair white from years and marble dust. He looked as if he had slept in his clothes, and judging by his rankness, he probably had.

Many artists became wealthy men working for the popes. Bramante, Raphael, and Antonio da Sangallo enjoyed the good life. But Michelangelo always lived as if he were on the brink of ruin, a prisoner of the tomb and preyed on by his mercenary family. “I live like a poor man,” he would say to the faithful Francesco, “without retinues or velvet britches.”

Paul offered him an annual lifetime salary of 1,200 ducats if he would honor the commitment he had made to Pope Clement and paint the Last Judgment fresco—600 ducats paid directly from the Vatican treasury, and 600 in revenue from the Po River ferry. Since Michelangelo’s father had lived to be ninety-two, it was a very generous offer.

But with Clement dead, Michelangelo finally felt free to return to the heroic sculpture he had dreamed as a naïf, untouched by intrigue, a pure concept to be purely chiseled. Through all the years, he had clung to the unfinished tomb of Julius. Like an escaping dream, it had seemed always just beyond his grasp.

Michelangelo had been thirty-one when he proposed the tomb to Julius. He was almost sixty now. He had outlived all his rivals, his old nemeses, and four popes. Now, another imperious, iron-willed old man sat in the chair of Peter. They had known each other for years. Paul knew the saga of the tomb.

The once-mighty mausoleum had been scaled down and diminished through the years, first by Julius himself, then by his executors and heirs, and again by the Medici popes. They had kept Michelangelo working in Florence, causing a conflict with the della Rovere heirs, who claimed Michelangelo had pocketed thousands of ducats with little or nothing to show for it. They charged, somewhat ludicrously given the disposition of the sculptor, that he was living “a life of pleasure” in Florence on money he had received to sculpt the tomb.

Believing that Julius’s heirs were impugning his integrity, Michelangelo had responded furiously. The memorial became tangled in probate questions and acrimonious payment disputes. What Condivi called “the agony of the tomb” had eaten away the years, scathed Michelangelo’s soul, and corroded his spirit, yet like a spurned lover he kept returning to it and being disappointed.

Although Paul handled the prickly artist with velvet gloves, he was determined to bring the agony to an end, finally. He insisted on seeing the statues that Michelangelo had carved, the cartoons he had drawn for the altarpiece, “and every other single thing.”

Michelangelo had made numerous preliminary drawings for the Last Judgment, and Francesco laid each cartoon on the studio floor for the pope to view. The cardinals fanned out around him to study the sketches. The terrors of Dante’s Inferno seemed to leap from the floor and engulf them. When the images filled the huge space behind the altar in the Sistine Chapel, they would strike the fear of the Lord in all who viewed them.

Paul, overwhelmed by what he saw, ordered Clement’s commission carried out. But Michelangelo, who did not suffer popes gladly, remained obdurate, insisting that he was under contract for the tomb. It had become his obsession and his bane—the grail just out of reach, the cross he refused to lay down.

“Where is this contract? I will tear it up,” Paul threatened. “I am quite set in having you in my service come what may. I have harbored this ambition for thirty years, and now that I am pope, I shall have it satisfied.”

Paul assured Michelangelo that he would reach an agreement with the heirs of Julius. “Paint and don’t worry about anything else,” he advised. But negotiations took time. Michelangelo wrote despondently to the pope’s nephew: “One paints with the head and not with the hands, and if he can’t keep a clear head a man is lost…. I shall paint miserably and make miserable things.”

The tomb haunted, imprisoned, and embittered him. “I lost all my youth chained to this tomb,” he lamented. Even after so many years he could never accept that Bramante’s Basilica had replaced it. Finally, in 1542, the confusions ironed out, Paul imposed a final contract on artist and heirs, in effect rolling back the stone of the tomb and allowing Michelangelo new life.

Reduced five times over the course of forty years, what Michelangelo dreamed as “the triumph of sculpture” ended as a modest memorial in San Pietro in Vincolo, distinguished only by the marble Moses, a commanding horned figure with the rugged visage of il Terribilis.

Julius II was never laid to rest beneath Michelangelo’s Moses, and never given his own memorial in the Basilica he had conceived. After starting his pontificate with such a lofty plan, he ended up in its humblest grave. Interred without a sepulchre, he was stuffed into the same space with his uncle Sixtus. So many wasted years, so much anger and animosity, and nothing commensurate to show for the agony it had caused.

 

Julius and Paul were both patrons, popes, and dominant personalities, yet Michelangelo’s relationship with the two men was very different. With Michelangelo and Julius, two supreme egos contended—one young, ambitious, and full of himself, the other old, ambitious, and absolute. Paul and Michelangelo were contemporaries. They had witnessed the defilement of the Church and city, and they found common ground.

There is a certain irony to the fact that, for his first assignment unshackled from the tomb, Michelangelo returned to the Sistina. This time, he felt no reluctance. It was a catharsis. The bondage of the tomb behind him, the savagery of the Sack before him, he went back to the Chapel where he had triumphed to paint the Last Judgment. In early spring 1535, preparations began in the Sistine Chapel according to Michelangelo’s directives. Scaffolds went up and the altar wall was primed—windows blocked, earlier frescoes scraped away, and the wall itself sloped to prevent dust from gathering. The altar wall was an immense undertaking. The surface area—43 feet wide by 55 feet high, or 2,365 square feet—would make it the largest fresco in Rome. Michelangelo completed his cartoons in September and began painting the following spring when the weather had warmed.

Painting frescos was possible only in mild months, but each day that weather permitted, his assistants applied a ground of damp lime and mortar to the wall area that he would paint that day. By counting the applications, art historians extrapolate that Michelangelo worked 450 days over a span of six years. They say that up close you can see hairs from his brushes still stuck in the wall and the holes from the nails that held his cartoons in place.

Michelangelo’s Last Judgment is not an orderly display, the scales of justice calmly calibrated and brought into perfect balance with acceptance and decorum. It is the dies irae—the day of wrath that will dissolve the world into burning coals when every evil and every wrong will be avenged.

His day of reckoning is chaotic humanity’s final tumult. Time exhausted and hope extinguished, four hundred giant figures, some more than eight feet high, flail and tangle, ascending or falling as salvation and damnation become fixed for eternity. Some of the faces are familiar: Michelangelo’s faithful servant Francesco; Vittoria Colonna and Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, the two dearest to him; the charismatic preacher Savonarola, who had stirred his soul when he was an aspiring young artist in Florence; and Dante, whose Divine Comedy was a source of inspiration.

Michelangelo granted salvation to his friends and heroes, but he showed no mercy to his critics. When the pope’s master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, dared to criticize the fresco, Michelangelo painted him as Minos, lord of the underworld, with the ears of an ass and a snake wrapped around him nibbling on his testicles. The irate Biagio went to Pope Paul demanding redress and was dismissed with the wry rebuff: “Ibi nulla est redemptio”—“From there, no one is redeemed.” If you were in purgatory I could intercede, Paul told him, but not even the pope can rescue a soul from hell.

Few works of art have provoked greater outrage or greater awe than the Last Judgment. When it was unveiled on Christmas Day, 1541, Vasari writes, all Rome was filled with “stupor and wonder” at the huge, disquieting fresco. Seeing the finished altar wall, Paul reportedly knelt and wept at the terror that awaits us all.

Artists were spellbound. Counter-Reformation zealots were apoplectic. Ironically, it was Aretino, the flamboyant swindler, plagiarist, and pornographer, who summed up the objections by declaring that the Last Judgment was more suitable for a public bath than for the Sistine Chapel.

After Paul died, the reactionaries gained greater influence within the Church. They denounced the fresco as prurient and obscene and called for the entire altar wall to be whitewashed. El Greco volunteered to paint over it. The controversy seethed for a decade, until Pope Paul IV ordered Michelangelo’s nudes covered. Daniele da Volterra, the unfortunate artist chosen to clothe the naked, earned the nickname il brachettone—the pantaloon maker.

Dante’s Inferno was not an abstraction to Michelangelo; the stakes were real and eternal—salvation or damnation. His art has no palliative vistas to soften the human condition. There is not a flower, a tree, or a landscape of any kind in his frescoes—only us, teeming, struggling, aspiring. His art is in motion, animated by the primordial struggle of spirit with flesh, of man with God, and with himself. And if, too often, he seemed to be losing the struggle, he was not an optimist by nature. “Let him who does not know what it is to live by anguish and by death join me in the fire that consumes me,” he said.

Single-minded, with a wild, consuming energy, he tortured himself with work. What he made was never as true as the picture in his mind, which is not to suggest that he was falsely modest. Michelangelo didn’t think he was good. He knew he was great. Once a man sitting for a bust complained, “But it doesn’t look like me.” The sculptor shrugged—“Who will know five hundred years from now?”—and went on working. Another time, overhearing someone else claiming to be the sculptor of his Pietà, he sneaked into the old St. Peter’s at night and incised his name in the marble. It is his only signed work.

There was an unalloyed quality in Michelangelo’s art, and it was mirrored in his personality, in his religious fervor, and in his dealings with others. He was—and maybe the greatest artists must be—a supreme egoist, so consumed by what he was creating that he could not understand how anything could be of greater importance. Harmony, so vaunted in the Renaissance, was alien to his character and his art.

His service was prized, yet he always worried that he was facing penury. Michelangelo was his family’s pride and cash cow. He seemed to support them all—father, brothers, sisters-in-law, and nephews. He was a generous son and brother, but their incessant demands for money unnerved him. They were leeches bleeding him dry. “I will send you what you demand of me,” he wrote to his father on one occasion, “even if I have to sell myself as a slave.” In another letter written from Rome to his favorite younger brother, Buonarroto di Ludovico Simoni, he complained, “Let me tell you that I don’t have a penny and that I am practically barefoot and naked.”

Michelangelo lived in anguish and created out of tension. In his old age, freed finally from the tomb, he turned increasingly to poetry and found some degree of solace in the friendship of the poet and radical reformer Vittoria Colonna and the companionship of a young Roman noble, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. Some believe that he and Tommaso were lovers. Although there is no way to prove or disprove the contention, Michelangelo’s age, his deep religion, and his art weigh against it.

He poured his passion into his work, living as austerely as a monk, and Condivi says, as chastely. His art was his life, his life was his art. “I have only too much of a wife in my art,” he said, “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.”