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The Renaissance Popes

The expression Renaissance popes brings a wry smile to people’s faces, as if to indicate they know what scoundrels they were. The name Borgia springs immediately to mind. Textbooks love to depict them as providing the goad that propelled Luther into denouncing the institution as a cesspool of vice and the popes as the very anti-Christ. But the expression brings another kind of smile to the faces of art historians, a smile of pleasure. From the middle of the fifteenth century into the middle of the seventeenth, the popes, their families, and others in their entourage were among the most enlightened and prodigal patrons of the arts of all times. They happened to have at hand towering geniuses—Raphael, Michelangelo, Bernini, and Caravaggio. As if these were not enough, they also had Botticelli, Signorelli, Perugino, Pinturicchio, Pietro da Cortona, Bramante, Borromini, and seemingly countless other artists, architects, engineers, and city planners of awe-inspiring, superlative talent. They turned Rome into a city of incomparable artistic treasure.

Although the lurid aspect of the papacy of the era has been exaggerated, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the achievement of the cultural aspect. Curiously enough, there is a connection between the two, which becomes clear only through an understanding of the problems the popes faced and the solutions they adopted to deal with them. The first and most pressing problem was the old one, their personal safety and the safety of the city. The problem extended to the Papal States, the first line of defense. That is not to deny that popes exploited the city and the States to enrich family and friends. But whatever the motives in play at any given moment, gaining effective military and political control of the States loomed large on the papal agenda during this period.

The popes were not, however, in a strong position to gain such control. Unlike most rulers in Europe by this time, they were elected to their throne. Every death, therefore, was a crisis for the institution. Popes were almost invariably elected when they were already in the final decade of their lives. They had short reigns. They were from now on rarely natives of the city or even the region. They had to establish their authority quickly, or they would not establish it at all.

Since they often did not know whom they could trust, they turned to their families. This was nothing new. Nepotism had for many centuries been almost endemic to the papacy. What was new about it in the Renaissance were a few spectacularly bad nephews and, as the papacy became more secure and prosperous, the prodigality with which the popes were able to lavish both the worthy and the unworthy with lucrative favors.

After the debacle of Basel, the popes became even more wary of councils than they had become of the purported friendship of princes. The Renaissance popes conveniently forgot Frequens. The oaths they were obliged to take before the actual balloting began in the conclave sometimes included a promise to call a council if they were elected, but no pope, once elected, felt obliged to observe it. Pius II, Sixtus IV, and Julius II, moreover, issued bulls prohibiting an appeal to a council over the head of the pope.

The popes wore both a crown and a miter. As they became more wary of princes, they became more professedly princes themselves—partly in self-defense, partly for less worthy motives. The prestige of the papal court took on a new importance, which meant the court needed a fitting setting for itself, a city that would be a credit to it. The defense, restoration, and adornment of Rome became a high priority for the Renaissance popes. Although this enterprise was driven by political motives, it never could be divorced from the popes’ zeal to honor God and the saints with the best that human talent could produce. Constantine had long ago set the standard. As the prior general of the Augustinian order, Giles of Viterbo, said of the new Saint Peter’s as it was being built, “Let it soar to be a magnificent edifice that God might be more magnificently praised.”

The three popes who succeeded Nicholas V did relatively little to promote the arts and in some ways hardly seem like “Renaissance popes.” Callixtus III, pope for only three years, was another compromise candidate and, most surprising, a Spaniard. He burned with a determination, unrealistic in the extreme, to win back Constantinople and tried to launch a crusade to accomplish it. The first of the Borgia popes, he is remembered principally for creating his young nephew Rodrigo a cardinal, the first step toward putting the future and notorious Alexander VI on the road to the papacy.

Callixtus’s successor, Pius II (1458–1464), was an altogether different type, the only pope who can genuinely claim to be a distinguished man of letters. He had had a checkered ecclesiastical career, which included being secretary to Felix V, the anti-pope at Basel. As pope he, like Callixtus, was consumed with the idea of a crusade to recover Constantinople but also like Callixtus was unable to rally kings and princes to undertake it. Despite his background, he did little to promote the cultural and artistic program Nicholas had set in motion.

Paul II (1464–1471), a nephew of Eugene IV, built as his residence while still a cardinal the Palazzo Venezia, even today one of the great monuments in the center of Rome. But as pope he too did relatively little for the cultural life of the city and was in fact unfairly accused of repressing it. The Turks were now pressing hard against Hungary. Paul was not able to do much more than supply some financial assistance against them. It was a pontificate of little import.

The same certainly cannot be said of Sixtus IV (1471–1484), Francesco della Rovere, one of the great enigmas in the history of the papacy. The values he seemed to espouse before he became pope contrast so starkly with his actions as pope that he almost seems to be two different persons. Born of a moderately prosperous family in Savona, he as a teenager entered the Franciscan order, made a brilliant career for himself as a theologian and preacher, and rose to be elected in 1464 superior general of the order. Three years later he was cardinal, four years later pope.

He was elected as a compromise by the slimmest of the required two-thirds margin, twelve votes out of eighteen. New to the college, he was above factions, and he had among his peers a reputation for austerity, learning, and administrative skills. But something happened. The first signs of it appeared during the conclave itself with the machinations of his nephew, Pietro Riario, who acted as his attendant and who promised favors and preferments to the cardinals who voted for his uncle. During the early years of his papacy, the unscrupulous and ambitious Pietro became known as his “tutor,” the man who educated his uncle in the ways of the world. Whether due to Pietro’s influence or some other reason, the new pope, formed as a young man in the austerity and other-worldliness of the Rule of Saint Francis, soon displayed a this-worldliness and ruthlessness that shocked even jaded contemporaries.

The ballots were hardly counted before he made Pietro and another young nephew, Giuliano della Rovere (future Pope Julius II) cardinals and loaded them with benefices. He later made four more nephews cardinals, and through his appointments of thirty other men to the College of Cardinals launched a secularization of it that would not be reversed for a half-century. To pay for his soaring expenditures, he sold offices and privileges, while he meanwhile enriched a swarm of relatives and arranged for some of them, like his nephew Girolamo Riario, highly advantageous marriages.

When Pietro, whose luxurious lifestyle was itself a scandal, died in 1474, his brother, Count Girolamo, took his place at his uncle’s side to involve him in some of the darkest political intrigues of the day. He was principally responsible for dragging Sixtus into the Pazzi Conspiracy in Florence, in which the murders of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of the city, and of Giuliano, his brother, were planned for high mass in the cathedral of Florence on Easter Sunday, April 26, 1478. Lorenzo escaped from the assassins; Giuliano was not so lucky. It is not clear whether Sixtus was aware that assassination was the essential piece in the conspiracy, but Girolamo certainly did. In the aftermath the pope had to go to war with Florence, which led to further military involvements in the peninsula and other political machinations. Ten years after the conspiracy, 1488, Count Girolamo was himself brutally assassinated.

Sixtus was busy, however, about many other things. The Ottoman Turks continued their assaults—they occupied Otranto in southern Italy and continued elsewhere to press westward after Constantinople’s fall. Sixtus spent lavishly on a fleet to oppose them, but with it he accomplished little. He granted many privileges to the religious orders, especially the Franciscans, that allowed them even more freedom than before from bishops’ jurisdiction. He approved the feast of the Immaculate Conception, canonized Saint Bonaventure (the Franciscan rival theologian to Saint Thomas), and on November 1, 1478, he at the request of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile established the Spanish Inquisition and put its operation into their hands.

Sixtus was a prodigious and intelligent patron of art and letters. More than any of his predecessors he was responsible for the cultural and artistic renaissance in the city up to that point. He brought to Rome men of letters and gave them employment. Among such scholars was Bartolomeo Platina, whom Sixtus appointed as the first official Vatican librarian. Sixtus gave Platina funds and a free hand in expanding the collection and provided suitable space for it. If Nicholas V was the founder of the Vatican Library, Sixtus was the patron who made it into a functioning institution.

In the city itself he repaired bridges; restored the Aqua Vergine aqueduct; opened, aligned, and laid out streets; rebuilt the hospital of the Holy Spirit (Santo Spirito); and constructed and restored churches—John Lateran, Santa Maria della Pace, Santa Maria del Popolo, and Sant’Agostino. His most noteworthy achievement was the construction and decoration of the papal chapel. Although dedicated to Mary’s Assumption, the edifice is known by the name of its builder, the Sistine Chapel (Sixtus in Italian is Sisto). To provide music for the liturgies appropriate to the setting, he founded the Sistine Choir.

For the painting of the chapel’s side walls, Sixtus called to Rome, principally from Florence, the leading artists of the day—Perugino, Pinturicchio, Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Signorelli, and Cosimo Roselli. Along the left wall was depicted the life of Moses, and along the right a corresponding cycle of the life of Christ. Decades later his nephew, Julius II, would carry this stupendous monument to its full glory by engaging Michelangelo to paint the ceiling. A few decades after that Clement VII engaged him to paint the Last Judgment.

After a conclave filled with intrigue and promises of favors, Innocent VIII succeeded Sixtus in 1484. Irresolute and chronically ill, the new pope inherited immense debts from his predecessor, which he tried to pay off by creating useless offices in the curia that he sold to the highest bidder. Under him the moral caliber of the papal court sank even lower. Before he was ordained, Innocent had fathered two children. Perhaps his only claim to fame—or infamy—is that he is the first pope openly to acknowledge the fact. The great social event of his pontificate was the elaborate celebration in the Vatican of the marriage of his son Franceschetto to a daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence. Innocent’s eight-year reign, though troubled by heavy involvement in Italian politics, was an insignificant interlude.

In 1492 Alexander VI, Rodrigo de Borgia, almost a synonym for a degenerate Renaissance pope, succeeded Innocent for a pontificate of eleven years. Unworthy though he was of his office, he was not the moral monster depicted in fiction and fantasy. There were no orgies in the Vatican. Francesco Guicciardini, the great historian who was his contemporary, said Alexander “combined rare prudence and vigilance, mature reflection, marvelous powers of persuasion, skill and capacity for the conduct of the most difficult affairs.” Nonetheless, his sensuality and his obsessive love for his children, which led him into a number of sinister political schemes, justify his bad reputation. He fathered nine children by different women and, most scandalous, two while he was pope. The cry of the Gregorian Reform of the eleventh century for a celibate clergy now went unheeded at the highest level of the church.

Alexander stirred up resentment on a broad scale because of his shifting political allegiances, his reckless promotion of his children, and his amorous affairs. No critic was more inflammatory than the apocalyptic Dominican preacher in Florence, Girolamo Savonarola. When King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494 to claim for himself the kingdom of Naples, he on his way south chased the Medici from Florence. Savonarola threw himself into the political gap, continued his preaching against ecclesiastical corruption, with explicit naming of Alexander, and proclaimed Florence as the New Jerusalem. In the summer of 1497 Alexander excommunicated him, which opened the way for Savonarola’s political enemies to move against him. After the preacher confessed to falsifying his prophecies, recanted, and then confessed to them again, he was hanged in the public square of Florence and his body burned. The Dominican order has never entirely given up its hope of having him canonized.

Of all Alexander’s children his son Cesare is the most notorious, the dark hero of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Cesare, a brilliant soldier, with French aid successfully imposed his rule on the Romagna and the Marches, the largest provinces within the Papal States. Alexander deposed the papal vicars in those provinces, which he then conferred upon his son. Cesare continued his military exploits, planning to attack Bologna and move into Tuscany, but his plans were cut short by the death of Alexander on August 18, 1503, almost certainly not by poison, as so often alleged, but by a fever.

After the three-week pontificate of Pius III, nephew of Pius II, the cardinals upon receiving bribes and the promise of lavish benefactions unanimously elected, in a conclave of a single day, Alexander’s mortal enemy, Giuliano della Rovere, nephew of Sixtus IV, who took the name Julius II. This was the papa terribile—not “the terrible pope” but the pope who by word, deed, and mere gaze struck fear and awe into those who knew him. This was the warrior pope, the antihero of Erasmus’s satirical dialogue “Julius Excluded [from heaven],” in which after Julius’s supposed death Saint Peter refuses to let him pass through the pearly gates because he cannot recognize as his successor this man clad in armor.

Julius was bigger than life. He mounted his horse, led his army, and ordered the cardinals to follow him as he began his military campaign to win back for the church the lands the Borgias had alienated. For the nine years of his papacy he used all his diplomatic and military skills to establish a strong papacy in Italy, free from foreign domination. This enterprise entailed almost endless warfare and won him foes from near and far. In 1511 at the instigation of King Louis XII of France and the emperor Maximilian I, a group of cardinals convoked a council at Pisa and summoned him there to answer to their charges. Never one to dodge a challenge, Julius responded by convoking the next year Lateran Council V, which easily carried the day against Pisa and went on to address problems of church reform.

Julius, despite owing his own rise to nepotism, broke the pattern set by his uncle and did practically nothing to enrich or advance his family. Despite being elected through bribery and other sordid means, he issued a bull declaring papal elections by simony nullified. He vigorously supported efforts to reform the religious orders. He spent great sums on his military campaigns and his art patronage, but he was a frugal administrator. He inherited an empty treasury but left a full one. Although he had earlier sired three daughters, he as pope behaved with the utmost decorum.

Like his uncle, his most lasting achievement was artistic and architectural. He followed Sixtus’s lead in restoring churches, laying out new streets, and repairing bridges. But his greatest accomplishments were in the Vatican itself. Even since the days of Nicholas V, popes had worried about the dilapidated state of Saint Peter’s. With characteristic decisiveness Julius engaged Bramante to replace the Constantinian church with a new basilica, a project that in its fullness was not completed for another century and a half.

He was a genius patron who had an eye for genius painters. Instead of more experienced artists he chose the young Raphael to decorate his apartments, which resulted in a series of great masterpieces like the School of Athens and the Dispute on the Sacrament. His stormy relationship with Michelangelo has been told again and again, as the genius patron jousted with the genius artist. Out of the sculptor Michelangelo he drew forth the painter. The result was the Sistine Ceiling. Julius was no saint, but for the Sistine Ceiling alone much must be forgiven him.