Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published by Collins 1969

First issued in Fontana 1972

Copyright© Vincent Cronin, 1969

Vincent Cronin asserts the moral right to be identified as the Author of this work.

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Source ISBN: 9780006530435

Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780008106171

Version: 2014–07–21

Maps

Dedication

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Maps

Dedication

Prologue

1 The Awakening of Rome

2 Julius II

3 After Caesar, Augustus

4 The Challenge from Germany

5 The Courtier’s World

6 The Growth of History

7 All Things in Movement

8 The Arts

9 The Venetian Republic

10 Venetian Architecture

11 Venetian Painting

12 The Response to the Crisis

13 After the Crisis

14 Sunset in Venice

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Appendix A: Italian Currencies

Appendix B: Character and an Anti-Classical Style

Appendix C: The Whereabouts of Works of Art Mentioned in the Text

Sources and Notes

The Popes from 1450 to 1616

A Table of Dates

Index

Notes

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

DURING the fifteenth century, in Florence, a small group of laymen cross-bred Christianity with the best elements of classical Greece and Rome to produce a new way of life which may be termed Christian humanism. This set high value on political freedom, public-spiritedness and free enquiry, on man’s will and imagination, on the beauty and power of the human body which, like all created things, was conceived not as God’s enemy but as His ally, and as an expression of His love. The Christian humanists took a new interest in man as a whole and, as a means of fathoming man’s nature, in literature and the arts, in history and in science. They viewed life no longer as a vale of tears, but as a quest for enlarging man’s powers, and so his awareness of God. They adopted a generous attitude to the views of pagan antiquity and to unorthodox thinkers such as Origen; they even drew near to tolerance in matters of conscience.

The Christian faith still came first with these early humanists, and in the most famous library of the day the Bible was bound in gold brocade, classical writers in silver. But inevitably there was tension. The pagan lion and Christian lamb do not lie down easily together, and though Plato and the Gospels may be made to harmonize, the balance is delicate. At the end of the fifteenth century Christian humanism came under attack from within, when Savonarola denounced it as a pagan way of life, a travesty of the Gospels, and from without, when the French invasion of Italy, culminating in their victory at Fornovo in 1495, showed up the political and military weakness of Florence.

Rome succeeded Florence as the political and intellectual leader of Italy, a development symbolized shortly before 1500 when, at the Pope’s bidding, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s favourite artist, Antonio Pollaiuolo of Florence, added figures of Romulus and Remus to the ancient bronze statue of the suckling She-Wolf. Julius II and Leo X, two of the most powerful and interesting of the Renaissance popes, sought to put into practice a modified version of Christian humanism. They strengthened Rome politically and made it the most civilized city in Europe.

What the popes did was disliked by many, particularly in Germany. When Luther attacked the notion of merit and rejected the popes’ teaching authority, Germans rallied to him; in 1527 a largely German army sacked Rome. These events brought to a head earlier doubts and plunged Italy into a crisis: intellectual, theological, moral and artistic. A period of heart-searching began. Could Italians summon up an adequate answer to the Lutherans? And could they, in face of so widespread a threat, save the principles of Christian humanism?

The answers lie in the texture of Italian life and civilization during the cinquecento. This is surveyed, with a particular eye to the crisis, first in Northern Italy generally, then more specifically in Venice which, after the Sack of Rome, emerged as the chief centre of Christian humanism. All the trends apparent in Venice and elsewhere found expression at the Council of Trent, the Church’s galvanic attempt to find an answer to the crisis posed not only by Lutheranism but in the very fruits of the Italian Renaissance itself. It is the tragedy of Trent that the Church, despite much goodwill on both sides, ultimately came down against the main principles of Christian humanism. The effects of this decision on Italian civilization and the resultant ‘conformism’ offer a striking parallel with events in the Communist world today. Venice alone preserved a measure of independence and artistic vigour and held alight the torch of freedom; her example was to prove an inspiration to those men of the nineteenth century who succeeded in liberating Italy and establishing once again the principles of Christian humanism.

CHAPTER 1
The Awakening of Rome

A PILGRIM arriving in Rome in the jubilee year of 1500 would have been surprised by the city’s appearance. Instead of close-knit streets and stone houses tightly belted by a powerful wall, he would have found a patchwork of fields, vineyards, gardens, marshes and ponds interspersed with clusters of wooden, single-storey houses with outside staircases and balconies, the whole lying loosely within a huge circuit of wall so broken-down that it was easier to pass through the gaps than the gates. This remains of a wall, fourteen miles long, had been built by Aurelian for a city of one million inhabitants; now there were only 40,000, less than in Florence or Venice or Naples. Cattle grazed among the four upright columns of the Forum, hence its name of Campo Vaccino, and the aqueducts had been so shattered by ten sets of invaders during the Dark Ages that even their purpose was forgotten by many: one pilgrim, a Douai draper, was told that ‘the aqueducts were used formerly to bring oil, wine and water from Naples.’

This city-amid-fields offered no arresting landmark: no cathedral, no town hall, no castellated palace. St Peter’s was merely one large church among 280 others, their shabby, often crumbling exteriors giving no hint of the gleaming mosaics within. Seven of them, the Stational churches, had to be visited by pilgrims claiming a plenary indulgence—remission of punishment due to past sins: according to Dom Edme, Abbot of Clairvaux, who went round them in 1521, the visit took eight hours, on poor tracks, sometimes through marshes ‘where the mules sank up to their tails.’

Whereas most Italian cities were famous for this or that product—Lucca for silk, Venice for ships, Milan for steel—Rome produced nothing at all. She had no industries, no raw materials. In 1500 she just about met her needs in corn, grown in the Campagna’s black, difficult soil, but as the century progressed, most of her bread was baked from imported grain. Romans disliked the flat wine of Latium, and so wine had to be imported too, mainly from Corsica, Crete and Naples. Cloth came in from Florence, paper from Fabriano, soap from Genoa, knives and swords from Milan, carpets from Turkey.

To meet the cost of these goods Rome had only her pilgrim trade. The town where St Peter had been crucified and St Paul beheaded attracted 50,000 pilgrims annually. According to the census of 1527, Rome had 236 inns, lodging houses and taverns, one to every 288 inhabitants, compared with one per 1488 inhabitants in Florence. The best of them, the Bear, Sun, Ship, Crown, Camel and Angel, stood close to the Pantheon, and their landlords would send boys to the city gates in order to solicit customers among the pilgrims, most of whom arrived in Lent, a third of them on their own horses. In order to gain the plenary indulgence Italians had to spend fifteen days in Rome, non-Italians eight. During this time they lived well—consumption of meat was extremely high—and they bought guide-books and souvenirs. To the Romans they were an indispensable source of income.

Even without foreign pilgrims, Rome was a cosmopolitan place. Most of its inhabitants had been born outside Rome, 20% were non-Italians, chiefly Spaniards and Germans, while only 16% or 6,400 were Roman born. Of these a handful possessed citizenship and though they claimed the right to rule their city, in practice it was the Pope who ruled, for not only was he by far the largest employer, but he collected and spent the revenue. It was the Pope who chose the Governor—a cleric—and he who paid all the magistrates. True, an ordinary Council met regularly, composed of the various municipal magistrates, and also less often a Great Council, which included the same persons and selected civic notables. The Councils sometimes passed bold decrees against the Pope’s will, but hardly ever dared put them to the test. A popular rising in 1143 had instituted 56 senators, but the Popes had whittled them down to one. This last senator dressed in fine sunset colours—crimson gown, brocade cloak and fur cap—he had the right to a page and four servants, he carried an ivory sceptre, but his power was nil. There was also a Colonel of the Militia of the Roman People—but no militia.

The Romans accepted this. There was no powerful leaven of craftsmen as in Florence, and therefore little republican feeling. Roman citizens were usually of noble or gentle birth and content with trappings of power that vaguely recalled imperial splendour. Yet what privileges they did possess—be it only the Conservators’ right to music at meals—they clung to tenaciously, and on tiny points of protocol they made many a petition to the popes.

The Romans of 1500 retained certain characteristics of their forebears. They loved ceremonies and spectacles. They responded to fine phrases and rolling sentences. They expected of their ruler dignity and largesse, and if they did not get it abused him with satirical and licentious songs. They had a cosmopolitan outlook, though this did not necessarily imply breadth of vision. But they were not grave like the classical Romans. They were turbulent, rowdy and changeable as their weather. When a new pope was elected, they looted, as though by right, his old palace, and when he died, the interregnum was bloodied with murder.

This unproductive half-decrepit city, swept in winter by the icy tramontana and in autumn by a sultry miasmal breeze that caused tertian fever, might long ago have been abandoned to wolves, nettles and ivy but for the fact that it was the see of St Peter, and therefore the seat of government of Catholic Christendom. Here the Curia kept archives and registers of appointments; here they administered justice and held final courts of appeal; it was here that a Flemish burgher applied if he wished to drink milk in Lent, here that a Spaniard who had traded with the Turk sought absolution. But behind the bustle of day-to-day business, much of it petty, lay a central, crucial fact: it was here in Rome that the man who claimed to be the Vicar of Christ sought to preserve and interpret to the world Christ’s message.

In order to accomplish this task the Bishop of Rome decided at a very early date that he required to be independent. It was perhaps the most far-reaching decision ever taken in the Church when the Bishop of Rome, like the bishops of other cities, agreed to accept estates bequeathed to him in the wills of fervent Christians. From being a property-owner, the Bishop of Rome gradually became a lord of towns and cities, and finally, through the Donation of Pepin, the lord of whole provinces. By 1500 the Pope ruled the largest part of Italy after the King of Naples. It comprised Latium, Umbria, Bologna, Romagna and the March of Ancona, with a population of over one million.

The Papal States provided the Pope with political independence, but not with economic independence. The States were in fact as much of an economic burden as Rome, which produced nothing and consumed much. Around 1500 Rome, through customs and excise, and the Papal States, through taxes, which were kept low, provided the Pope with 144,400 gold ducats, at a time when the purchasing power of the ducat was approximately that of one pound sterling today.¹ Out of this the Pope had to pay costs of administration, as well as troops required to defend the States against other Italian powers, and to coerce any feudal prince who declined to pay his taxes.

It was his need to achieve economic independence that turned the Pope to tax Church property outside Italy. This happened in the reign of John XXII, when the Popes were living in Avignon and the Papal States were in revolt. In 1318 John decreed that in future the holder of a benefice must pay to Rome annates—his first year’s revenue—in order to defray costs of the Church’s administration. Annates and similar taxes provided the Pope with a ‘spiritual revenue’ equal in amount to the ‘temporal revenue’ from Rome and the Papal States. So the Pope achieved his goal of economic independence.

But this independence was constantly jeopardized. The French King, by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, reduced annates from France by four-fifths, and then played on the Pope’s need to get the Sanction lifted. A famous example occurred when Louis XI asked Pius II to give the red hat to his favourite, Jouffroy Bishop of Arras. Arras was a tall, handsome, ruddy-cheeked courtier described by the women of Rome, who had good cause to know, as Venus’s Achilles. The sacred college informed Pius that Arras was quite unsuitable, a know-all and a boaster, yet ‘influenced as easily as a child’, while the holy German cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa, actually burst into tears at the proposal. Pius pointed out that Arras, who was Legate to France, had promised to get the Pragmatic Sanction lifted and, if rejected, ‘he will rage like a serpent and spit out all his venom on us.’ Pius was the most eloquent man of his day—eloquence he defined as saying the same thing three times over—and he finally convinced the sacred college. But not content with his red hat, Arras next asked for Besançon and Albi, two very rich sees. Pius said he could have one, but not both, for that would be a grave abuse. Arras flew into a rage, hurled insults and threats at the Pope and finally tried to bribe him, offering 12,000 ducats for both sees. Pius’s patience gave way. ‘Go to the devil,’ he said, and in a sense Arras did. He scandalized Rome with his debauchery and scenes of violence, hurling silver dishes at his servants and even overturning his dining-room table. The Pragmatic Sanction was, however, lifted. Such was the price Popes sometimes had to pay for economic independence. No wonder Pius’s dearest ambition was to see himself at the head of a crusading army, kings as his lieutenants, renewing papal authority with victories over the Turk. Pius’s crusade came to nothing but the economic problem for long continued to bedevil the Papacy.

In 1447 Tommaso Parentucelli, the son of a poor Tuscan physician, was elected Pope with the title Nicholas V. It is an important date because Nicholas was the first Pope for 150 years to spend his whole reign in Rome. During centuries of war with the Emperor and his Ghibelline allies, the Popes could seldom reside for long in so vulnerable a city, and since 1100 they had spent more time outside Rome than in it. But with Nicholas V there began that continual residence which was to make Rome and the Papacy almost interchangeable terms.

The physical return of the Popes coincided with the return to the past we call the classical revival. Nicholas, a modest, peaceable man, had spent much of his earlier life in Florence. He was a close friend of Cosimo de’ Medici, and had been commissioned by him to catalogue Niccolò Niccoli’s library for the Convent of S. Marco. In Florence Nicholas read the newly discovered classical authors. Many priests condemned this ‘pagan’ learning and said it was a mortal sin to read books by adorers of false gods. But Nicholas, like his Florentine friends, welcomed it and recognized at how many points the ancient Greeks and Romans had surpassed the Italians of his day. He saw Ghiberti and Donatello making sculpture according to classical models and Brunelleschi building the soaring dome of Florence cathedral.

Nicholas was the first Pope to patronize the new learning. He invited scholars to Rome to translate into Latin such newly discovered Greek authors as Herodotus, Xenophon, Polybius, Diodorus and Appian. Though Lorenzo Valla had written a treatise discrediting the Donation of Constantine, Nicholas tolerantly made him a papal secretary and commissioned him to translate Thucydides at the handsome fee of 500 ducats. He paid 1000 ducats for the first ten books of Strabo and offered 10,000 for a translation of Homer. If an author showed scruples, the Pope would say kindly, ‘Don’t refuse: you may not find another Nicholas.’ He realized that he was breaking new ground and that later Popes might be less large-minded.

The city of Rome imposed a heavy burden on Nicholas, as on his predecessors. He had to patch up its seemingly endless wall, its old bridges and dozens of medieval churches. So it took an act of courage to decide to stretch already slender resources by beautifying the city. Nicholas called Fra Angelico from Florence to fresco his private chapel in rose and blue with scenes from the lives of St Stephen and St Laurence. He brought Renaud de Maincourt from Paris to found Rome’s first tapestry workshop. He planned to place the Egyptian obelisk near St Peter’s on four colossal figures of the Evangelists, as a spectacular symbol of the harmony between Christian and pagan thought. But his most ambitious plan concerned St Peter’s. The basilica was then 1100 years old, and its southern wall leaned outward to the extent of 3 braccia—4 feet 9 inches. After discussing the matter with the Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti, Nicholas decided completely to rebuild St Peter’s as a domed basilica with nave and double aisles. He got work started at once on foundations for a new choir, using 2500 cartloads of stone from the Colosseum, and although the foundations rose only six feet in his pontificate, a beginning had been made to a new conception of Rome. As Nicholas explained on his deathbed: If the faith of ordinary men is to be strong, ‘they must have something that appeals to the eye … majestic buildings, imperishable memorials and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God.’

Sixtus IV continued Nicholas’s work with all the determination of a Ligurian. He opened, straightened or paved many streets between the new papal residence in the Vatican and the civic centre on the Capitoline Hill. He built the bridge across the Tiber that still bears his name. He built the Sistine Chapel and decorated it with frescoes, notably Perugino’s Giving of the Keys to Peter, and Botticelli’s Old Testament scenes, chosen to show that the Pope was the successor of the priest-kings of Israel. He re-established the Sapienza, as the university of Rome was called, though the professors’ pay several times had to go to soldiers defending the Papal States. One of the professors was Pomponius Laetus, who had learned from Lorenzo Valla the importance of philology in reconstructing history; he made a large collection of Roman inscriptions—only a single Christian example was considered polished enough for inclusion.

Sixtus added 1000 manuscripts to the collection begun by Nicholas, mostly works of theology, philosophy and patristic literature. To house them he also built a splendid library in the new classical style, with round-headed arches on Corinthian columns; its walls were marble, and decorations included Sixtus’s family device, the oak-leaf and acorn. The library was heated in winter—an innovation at that time—and anyone might borrow books on deposit of a small sum. Sixtus got Melozzo da Forlì to paint a commemorative picture of himself in the new library, attended by the first librarian, Platina, and his nephew, Giuliano della Rovere, the future Julius II. Its inscription states that before Sixtus built the library, books had been stacked away ‘in squalor’.

The forty-odd cardinals whose role it was to help the Pope govern the Church also began to build. Raffaello Riario, another of Sixtus’s nephews, was lucky enough to win, in a single night’s gambling, the huge sum of 60,000 ducats, and sensible enough to spend it on what is perhaps the most beautiful of all Roman houses, later to be known as the Palazzo della Cancelleria. Though sparsely furnished, the cardinals’ new dwellings were hung with brocade draperies and their tables gleamed with heavy silver. Profiting from the recent improvement in textiles, the cardinals dressed in fine robes of red watered silk, adding for the street a red hood and their red tasselled hat; in Advent and Lent they wore violet. An innovation in the second half of the century was their right to a silk mitre and red biretta, as well as red caparisons and gilded stirrups for their genets and mules. With a retinue of between 80 and 100 servants each, the cardinals did on a smaller scale what the Popes were doing: built and stocked libraries, commissioned pictures embodying the recent discovery of perspective and took an interest in the city’s classical remains.

In the City of God St Augustine had described the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 as a punishment for sin, in particular for the continuance of pagan practices and, ever since, classical remains had been viewed with awesome guilt. But with the discovery of Latin texts and inscriptions, scholars began to take a closer interest in ancient history and to study the ruins of Rome for their own sake. The first man to do so seriously is known as Flavio Biondo—inexactly as it happens, because Flavio is just an Italian form of Flavus, which in turn is a Latin form of Biondo. He usually signed Blondus Forliviensis, being a native of Forlì in the Papal States, and is best called simply Biondo. Born in 1392, he received a good education and trained as a notary. In 1420 he began a close friendship with Guarino of Verona, a pioneer humanist schoolteacher, and in 1423 married Paola Michelini, a noble lady of Forlì, who bore him ten sons. In 1433 he moved to Rome, and the following year was named apostolic secretary. As well as being a scholar Biondo evidently possessed presence and initiative, for he was sent on diplomatic missions to Venice and to Francesco Sforza, then just an ambitious condottiere. Biondo loved Rome with all the passion of a provincial. In his spare time he measured old buildings and tracked down faded streets until he was able to reconstruct the topography of ancient Rome, publishing his results in 1444–6 in three books entitled Roma instaurata. During the pontificate of Nicholas V he travelled the length and breadth of Italy in order to compile a historical and geographical survey of the peninsula, Italia illustrata, the first of its kind since antiquity. He also sought to interest various rulers, notably the King of Naples, in uniting Italy against the Turk. He returned to Rome and in 1459, four years before his death, published his masterpiece, Roma triumphans.

Biondo’s idea, like all revolutionary ideas, was very simple. His aim was to explain how pagan Rome became triumphant, in the hope that the Pope by emulating Rome’s methods might himself become triumphant. He ascribed the greatness of ancient Rome to her administration, military discipline, customs and institutions, and, above all, to her religion. He began Book I with a quotation from Cicero: ‘Other nations may surpass the Romans in numbers, in the arts, in practical skills, but in religion, piety and theology we leave the rest of the world a long way behind.’ He also quoted Livy’s story about the praetor Gn. Cornelius who was heavily fined for daring to upbraid M. Emilius Lepidus, the Chief Pontiff: ‘the Romans,’ commented Biondo, ‘wished religion to rank above secular affairs.’

Biondo then sought to show that the Papacy, in structure, institutions and customs, was a continuation of the Roman Republic and Empire. Such Christian practices as virginity, fasting, vows, the placing of flowers on a grave had their origin in pagan Rome. After his death a Pope lay in state on a dais, just like the Emperors of old. But Biondo thought the Pope corresponded more to a Consul than to an Emperor, and the cardinals to Senators. Cicero had claimed that Rome was ‘the rock of all the world and all nations’, and that the world found joy and glory in being subject to her. This claim was still valid, but the aims of Christian Rome were higher: she ‘prepares souls for eternal glory as once the pagan Republic pursued ephemeral glory.’ However, in dedicating his book to Pius II Biondo dropped to a lower conception of glory: he expressed the hope that Pius would soon be celebrating ‘a most brilliant and glorious triumph’ over the Turk.

Biondo’s book was to prove enormously influential. His declaration that the Church of Rome was the natural successor of ancient Rome was basically a half-truth, but he accumulated such a wealth of illustrative detail that he made it seem convincing. The abiding effect of the book was to make Romans aware of their past no longer as a remote relic, but as a living presence interwoven in the fabric of daily life, not something to be guilty of but something to love. Just as Leonardo Bruni had awoken patriotism in Florence in 1400 with a panegyric praising his city as the successor of ancient republics, so Biondo awoke Roman patriotism and a healthy ambition to emulate the past. From now on classical Rome was to be an abiding influence.

Biondo’s book was not, however, without dangers. It played down the unique character of Christianity, which at times seems to be merely one more manifestation of the eternal city, and by ignoring the part played by Greek ideas and techniques in Roman civilization, it diverted attention from Greek authors, the study of which had proved so fruitful in Florence.

Biondo, as we have seen, compared the Popes to Consuls, and the cardinals to Senators. That is to say, he thought that the Church resembled and should continue to resemble the Roman Republic. However, since the Republic had given way to the Empire before becoming, in Biondo’s eyes, the Church of Rome, it was natural for any reader who believed in unlimited papal power to assume that the Church was the new Empire, the Pope the new Emperor. This in fact is what usually happened, and the effect of this kind of interpretation can be seen in the following incident, recounted by Pius II in his Commentaries, a book whose title and third-person style is modelled on the Commentaries of Julius Caesar.

One hot summer’s day Pius was travelling from Santa Fiora to Rome. Because of gout, he was carried on a gilded litter, accompanied by a colourful suite of courtiers and horsemen. Pius’s stern nature relaxed on such journeys. He noted the blue of flax fields, the scarlet of wild strawberries, the orange of beeches in autumn, and he liked picnics, especially if a fresh-caught trout was served. As the procession wound over the hills they came on a cowherd tending his beasts. The cowherd realized that some great lord was approaching, and thinking the dust and heat might have made him thirsty, he took out his gourd, squatted beside one of the cows and filled the gourd with milk. Then, excited but hesitant, he offered it to the man who sat in the gilded litter. Pius looked fastidiously at the gourd, which was very dirty and covered with grease. It would be easy to hand it to one of his cardinals or simply to order the procession forward. But suddenly there came to his mind a passage from Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes. Travelling in a distant land, Artaxerxes arrived at a stream where a peasant offered him water in his cupped hands, and Artaxerxes gratefully quenched his thirst. So finally Pius accepted the gourd and, to the cowherd’s great satisfaction, drank the milk.

This small event has a triple interest: it shows how men steeped in classical literature tended to see life as a palimpsest; it shows a humanist acting graciously in imitation not of Christ but of a pagan; and it shows the Pope to whom Biondo had dedicated his book identifying himself with an absolute monarch whose nod, like that of the Roman Emperors, could signify life or death.

If Biondo’s book awoke Rome to a sense of her own great past, it also therefore provided a new notion of the Papacy. Henceforth, and throughout the sixteenth century, the Pope was to see himself as in some sense the successor not only of Peter but also of the Roman Emperors. The medieval concept of the Pope as ‘priest-king’ no longer carried much weight, whereas this ‘historical’ theory of the Pope’s temporal power made an appeal to men enamoured of the classical world, though it was not calculated to please the Germans, who considered their own Holy Roman Emperor to be the lawful successor of the Caesars. The theory was further enhanced by the publication in 1470 of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars. This provided portraits of Julius Caesar and eleven Emperors in unforgettable detail. The book was widely read and constantly reprinted. It was complemented by the publication of Tacitus’s Histories and books 11–16 of the Annals, the three works between them providing a picture of the early Empire much more vivid than any available picture of the Republic in its prime. It was probably Suetonius’s work that gave Sixtus IV the idea of commissioning from Platina the Lives of the Popes, in which Christ is referred to as ‘Emperor of the Christians’.

The new ideal had much in it of good. The early Roman Emperors helped to spread civilization throughout Europe, and Rome’s proudest title had been not Conqueror of Nations but caput mundi, Head of the World. Used with discretion and in the spiritual sense specified by Biondo, it could lead to a new sense of unity within Christendom.

But the ideal was also open to grave abuse, for the Emperors had tried and often succeeded in setting themselves above the law. The first to abuse the ideal was Roderigo Borgia. Elected Pope in 1492, he chose for himself the name of Alexander the Great, having already chosen for his son the name of Caesar. Pope Alexander VI seems to have considered himself, like a new Tiberius, wholly above the moral law. He kept a mistress, he decorated his apartments with such scenes as The Bath of Susannah, he entertained mixed company with the spectacle of stallions suddenly let loose among a herd of mares. His nepotism savoured more of the Caesars than of earlier Popes. On two occasions he handed over control of the Vatican palace to his daughter Lucrezia during his absence, with power to open his correspondence. For his son Juan he carved the dukedom of Nepi out of possessions of Roman barons, and to Caesar he made over much of the Papal States. There had been popes more depraved during the tenth century, but coming at a time of serious intellectual self-searching, Alexander’s behaviour caused general disgust and strengthened the hand of all who desired reform.

In Alexander’s pontificate occurred the decisive event that divides the fifteenth from the sixteenth centuries: the invasion of Italy by King Charles VIII of France—and the Pope’s meeting with Charles in 1495 aptly symbolizes the reaction of Italy as a whole to the French. Alexander was by no means a physically weak man; he liked bull-fights, and seems to have seen himself as a bull-like figure, the family blazon being a bull; yet when he met the tiny myopic youth of twenty-four Alexander quite literally collapsed. He fell into one of those deep faints to which he was subject, and had to be helped out of the garden. It was as though he foresaw, behind the youth with the nervous tic, his tough Breton, German and Scots mercenaries, the whole huge army of 60,000 which was soon to occupy Naples and defeat the combined Italian forces at Fornovo, as though he foresaw the four other invasions within his lifetime which were to divide Italy like surgeons dissecting a leg.

There in the Vatican garden the venerable papal ideal of a respublica Christiana, of collaboration between royal sword and papal crozier, was seen to be defunct. Europe had now fragmented into tough nation states bent on expansion. It was for Alexander’s successors, if they could, to keep the Papacy independent, politically as well as economically, in face of this new threat. It was for them to show whether, with tact and without hubris, they could make good their claim to be heirs of the Roman Emperors. It was for them to try and rally the hundred and one lordships of Italy to a common purpose. Only they now had the requisite authority for, by the first few years of the new century, Milan was occupied by the French, Naples by the Spaniards; Florence, impoverished, was still vainly trying to recapture her port at Pisa, stolen by the French. What power and hope that remained were centred in the city of Rome.

CHAPTER 2
Julius II

ON THE LAST DAY of October 1503 thirty-eight cardinals entered the Vatican Palace in order to choose a new pope. It was the second conclave that year, for Pius III, the successor of Alexander VI, had died after a pontificate of only one month. Each cardinal had one servant and was allotted a cubicle containing a bed, hung with silk curtains and marked with his coat of arms. The windows of the hall had been bricked up and when the cardinals were inside the doors were locked. One of their number went round after dark with a torch in order to ensure that no unauthorized person had slipped through the three rows of guards who ringed the hall. At dinnertime servants placed food in special wooden containers: a senior official cut open the bread, carved the chickens, prodded the joints of meat and held the decanters of wine to the light before sending them in to the cardinals through a revolving hatch. Even so, messages sometimes passed in or out: at the conclave of 1513 the Englishman Bainbridge made known the name of the cardinal then in the lead by scratching it on the base of a silver platter.

The cardinals were obliged to elect one of their own number—that had been the rule since 769—and must do so by a two-thirds majority. Three-fifths of the cardinals were Italian, but so disunited that Louis XII, who held the Duchy of Milan and the Kingdom of Naples, was convinced he could secure the election of Georges d’Amboise. The energetic Giuliano della Rovere argued that a French pope would move the Papacy back to Avignon. Rovere entered the conclave a firm favourite with the Romans, who betted heavily on papal elections, and he took a leading part in the discussions, arguments and bargaining that ensued. Later that night the cardinals sat down at the conclave table, on which lay paper, ink, reed and quill pens. Each cardinal wrote on a slip of paper one name only, then went to the altar on which stood a golden chalice. Removing the paten, he placed his slip in the chalice, then re-covered it with the paten. When the slips were counted, it was found that all but three cardinals—Amboise, the Neapolitan Carafa and Casanova, a Spaniard—had voted for Rovere. According to custom, Rovere then signed a document promising to hold a Council within two years. After that and homage by the cardinals the conclave ended. It had been the shortest in history.

The new Pope, who took the name Julius II, had been born in Albissola, near Savona, on 5 December 1443, his father, Raffaello della Rovere, being a brother of Sixtus IV, his mother, Teodora Manerola, of Greek origin. As a boy he was very poor and used to earn a little money by sailing onions in a small boat down to Genoa. He joined the Franciscans and took a law degree in Perugia. In 1471, when his uncle became Pope, he was made Bishop and Cardinal. He successfully administered and quelled rebellions in the Papal States and later, as Legate to France, got to know French ambitions first hand.

Julius was a fine-looking man. He had a big head, straight nose, powerful jaw and deep-set eyes with an awe-inspiring expression which Italians call terribile. His nervous energy was such that he was seldom still for a minute, and he said exactly what he thought—‘It will kill me if I don’t let it out.’ He had a quick temper and carried a stick with which he would beat those who incurred his anger. When annoying documents were submitted, he would throw his spectacles and the documents too at whoever had brought them. He was also a man who liked to do everything himself. When ill, he ignored his doctors and, to their horror, treated a high fever by chewing, without swallowing, quantities of plums, strawberries and small onions.

Julius kept a good table, his favourite dishes being chicken, game and sucking pig, while his Lenten fare consisted of prawns, tunny, lampreys from Flanders and caviar. He also enjoyed a good wine, especially those of Samos and Corsica. Though as a cardinal he had had three daughters, women no longer played any part in his life. He was essentially a serious person and had so loathed Alexander VI that he spent part of the Borgia’s reign in self-imposed exile in France. Only once was he heard to make a joke. Proto da Lucca, a member of his suite and an incessant chatterer, asked him for the bishopric of Cagli. ‘Impossible,’ said Julius. ‘In Spanish caglio means “I’m silent”.’

The new Pope found a very grave situation in Italy. His independence was threatened from three different quarters. Profiting from disorders under Cesare Borgia, the key cities of Bologna and Perugia had rebelled against papal suzerainty, while the Venetian Republic had seized two more papal cities, Faenza, the majolica centre, and Rimini. Even graver was the French threat. In December 1503 the French lost the Kingdom of Naples to the Spaniards, but it soon became clear that they intended to make good that loss by expanding in northern Italy. Installed in the Duchy of Milan and controlling the politics of Florence, they were busy wooing Mantua from its suzerain the Emperor and Ferrara from its suzerain the Pope.

Julius decided to try and regain the papal cities first. In 1506 he ordered his vassal Guidobaldo of Urbino to raise 500 cavalry, but instead of entrusting them to a general Julius took command of them himself. It was a bold and startling step but, he believed, the only way to get results. Never before had a Pope ridden out of Rome at the head of an army in order to crush a rebellious city, and amid the general amazement none was greater than Gianpaolo Baglione’s, leader of the rebellion in Perugia. Though he was tough and unscrupulous—Machiavelli accuses him of parricide and incest—Baglione lost his nerve and rode forward to Orvieto, where he knelt before Julius, made his submission and offered a levy of troops. Julius forgave him: ‘But do it again and I’ll hang you.’

Julius then pressed over the Apennines for Bologna. It was bitter cold. As his mule-drivers stumbled through patches of snow, they swore and cursed; after each lapse Julius, who liked an oath himself, gruffly absolved them. The sixty-two-year-old Pope crossed torrents swollen by floods and clambered on foot over rocky slopes, but he would get up at dawn to lead the next day’s march. His energy was such that even the French king responded to his curt call for help against a rebel. Giovanni Bentivoglio, the rebel in question, reviewed his 6000 troops in the main square of Bologna and promised to fight to the death. But steadily the warrior Pope advanced, with his 500 cavalry and the aura of success at Perugia. It was too much for Bentivoglio. On 1 November 1506 he secretly slipped away, and ten days later Julius entered Bologna amid wildly cheering crowds. The following Palm Sunday the Pope returned to Rome, where he was welcomed by arches modelled on that of Constantine, decorated with statues and pictures. True, the arches were only of wood, but their inscriptions left nothing to be desired: ‘Tyrannorum expulsori’, ‘Custodi quietis’ and ‘Veni, vidi, vici.’

Julius next turned to Faenza and Rimini. First he tried diplomacy, but when he asked to see Venice’s title deeds to the two Adriatic cities, the Venetian ambassador replied with cool insolence: ‘Your holiness will find them written on the back of Constantine’s donation to Pope Sylvester of the city of Rome and the Papal State.’ Julius was furious and confided to Machiavelli, ‘To ruin the Venetians, I’ll join with France, with the Emperor, with anyone.’ This in fact is what he did. In December 1508 he united France, Germany and Spain in the League of Cambrai, ostensibly against the Turk, in fact against Venice, and on 14 May 1509 a powerful French army routed the Venetians near Cremona. Venice immediately handed over Faenza and Rimini to Julius.

The hardest part of Julius’s task now remained: to expel the French. Julius would repeatedly say how he longed for ‘Italy to be freed from the barbarians.’ If the term ‘barbarians’ savours more of the Roman Emperors than of a Pope, the concept of freeing Italy as a whole—not only the Papal States—was large-minded, and well in advance of most political thinking of the day.

Julius decided to join with Venice and attack the French through their main ally, Ferrara. He saw the war as a personal trial of strength between himself and Louis XII, ‘a cock who wants all the hens’. After wintering in Bologna, where he was struck down by serious illness and for a time lay delirious, Julius rose from his sickbed, mounted his horse and on 2 January 1511 rode out of the town in high spirits: ‘Let’s see who has the bigger testicles, the King of France or I.’

In a heavy snowstorm Julius joined his mainly Venetian army outside Mirandola, a key town of 5000 inhabitants 30 miles west of Ferrara, and defended by powerful walls, a moat and 900 troops, part French, part Ferrarese. Julius took command. Wearing armour under a white cloak with a fur collar, his head muffled in a sheepskin hood—‘he looks like a bear,’ wrote the Mantuan ambassador—Julius toured the lines in snow ‘half as high as a horse’, set up his nine cannon, and cursed the enemy: ‘Rebels! Robbers! That swine of a duke!’ He talked of nothing but capturing the town. Returning to his billet in a convent kitchen near the front line, he would chant over and over, ‘Mirandola! Mirandola!’, bringing a smile of admiration even to his half-frozen aides.

Twelve days later Julius was lying asleep when the convent kitchen received a direct hit from an iron cannon-ball ten inches in diameter. Two of his grooms were wounded but Julius was unhurt. He calmly changed his billet and sent the cannon-ball to the sanctuary of Loreto, where it is still preserved. When the second billet also came under fire, he moved back to the first. Meanwhile the English ambassador arrived and with all the innocence of a newcomer asked why Julius was fighting his compatriots and not the Turk. ‘We’ll talk about the Turk,’ Julius replied, ‘when we’ve taken Mirandola.’

Everything had to bend to the Pope’s iron will, even his gout-weakened body. In weather so cold that the Po had frozen hard, he was everywhere at once, cheering on his men, directing the cannon. At last the thick walls were breached. On 20 January the commander of Mirandola surrendered to Julius and was obliged to pay 6000 ducats for exemption from pillage. Not waiting to have the gates unbarred, Julius eagerly clambered in through the breach on a wooden ladder.

Julius’s success at Mirandola had a symbolic value out of all importance to the strategic value of the town. It showed that he was in deadly earnest about driving the French from Italy. He was thus able to secure allies. The end came in 1513, when 18,000 Swiss pikemen routed the French at the battle of Novara. The remnants of Louis’s army straggled home, while papal troops swept up the Po valley.

Julius had cleared Italy of the French and re-established his authority over the Papal States—two very important achievements. Furthermore, among the city-states abandoned earlier by the French were Parma and Piacenza, both rich, flourishing and strategically placed. Taking the measure of this new Pope who always seemed to win, they declared their wish to become papal cities. The Parmese ambassador addressed a speech to the consistory in which, with more emotion than logic, he recalled that Parma had originally been named Julia Augusta by Julius Caesar, and so ought to belong to the Pope, while a Parmese poet, Francesco Maria Grapaldi, made the same point hexametrically:

Te Regem, dominum volumus, dulcissime Juli:

Templa Deis, leges populis, das ocia ferro:

Es Cato, Pompilius, Cesar, sic Cesare major,

Sit qualis quantusque velit …

Julia Parma tua est merito, quae Julia Juli

Nomen habet, sed re nunc Julia Parma …

Sweet Julius, we want you for our king,

Instead of war you bring peace, religion and law:

Cato you are, Pompilius, a greater than Caesar,

Be whatever you choose to be …

Parma which once bore the name of Julius

Justly belongs to Julius the second …

—verses which won Grapaldi a laurel wreath from the Pope.

By annexing Parma and Piacenza Julius considerably strengthened the Papal States, while by expelling the French he brought a glow of pride to all Italians and especially to the Romans. On the evening of 27 June 1512 they celebrated the liberation of Genoa from French rule. The whole city burst into a flood of light. Fireworks shot up and cannon thundered from S. Angelo. The warrior Pope returned to the Vatican amid a procession of torches, while crowds shouted ‘Julius! Julius!’ ‘Never,’ said the Venetian envoy, ‘was any Emperor or victorious general so honoured on entering Rome as the Pope has been today.’

There were some, however, who refrained from cheering. They believed that by strengthening the Papacy in the things that are Caesar’s, Julius had weakened it in the things that are God’s. Michelangelo wrote a sonnet lamenting that ‘Chalices are turned into helmets and swords, Christ’s cross and thorns to spears and shields’, while Erasmus of Rotterdam, studying Greek in Bologna, had watched Julius’s triumphal entry in 1506 and described his feelings in The Praise of Folly, a book which was to be widely read in Germany:

Although in the Gospel the apostle Peter says to his divine Master: ‘We have forsaken all to follow you,’ the Popes claim that they possess a patrimony consisting of estates, towns, taxes, lordships; and when, driven by truly Christian zeal, they use fire and sword to hold on to this dear patrimony, when their holy, fatherly arm sheds Christian blood on all sides, then, elated at having humbled these wretches whom they call enemies of the Church, they boast of fighting for that same Church and defending the bride of Christ with apostolic courage.

The question was as old as the Papacy itself—should the Bishop of Rome imitate the lamb or the lion? If the former, he endangered the truth he had been commissioned to preserve; if the latter, he endangered Christian charity. Julius considered it imperative to preserve his political and economic independence, even by force of arms; others, like Erasmus, considered that the real challenge to the Papacy came over things that are God’s, and that the Pope should shame aggressive princes by turning the other cheek.

This, however, was not the only grievance to arise from Julius’s temporal and spiritual roles. Shortly after the Pope’s capture of Mirandola five of his cardinals—two Spaniards and three Frenchmen—rode away to join the French king. The fruits of their defection appeared on 28 May 1511, when Julius found a summons affixed to the door of the church of S. Francesco, near his lodgings in Rimini. Delegates of the German Emperor and the most Christian King summoned a Council of the Church, to be held on 1 September, an action which had become necessary, they said, in order to comply with the decree Frequens published by the Council of Constance in 1417, and neglected by the Pope, who had also failed to keep the solemn promise made in conclave.

The decree Frequens had indeed laid down that a Council should be held every ten years; there had been none since 1439. And Julius had indeed sworn to hold a Council by 1505; it was now 1511. Why had none been held? Why did the summons plunge Julius into gloom? Why was a Council anathema to him, as it had been to all Popes for seventy years? The answer lay in another decree, Sacrosancta, passed by that same Council of Constance, to the effect that the General Council, representing as it did all Christendom, derived its authority directly from Christ, hence everyone, the Pope included, was bound to obey it in all that concerns the faith.

This decree had given rise to two conflicting interpretations, both with honourable antecedents as far back as the twelfth century. One held that a Council was ‘above’ a Pope, while the other—the Curia’s view—argued that Sacrosancta had possessed merely an interim validity, from 1415 to 1417, when there had been either a doubtful Pope or no Pope at all.

The first interpretation was held by many men of goodwill who genuinely wished to reform the Church and believed that such reform could be achieved only by limiting the Pope’s absolute power. Unfortunately for the reformers, the same interpretation was also upheld by any and every prince at odds or at war with Rome, and their lawyers used it as ammunition to bombard the Popes politically. The political conciliarists outnumbered the genuine conciliarists and had, by their unscrupulousness, ruined the latter’s case with Rome. Indeed, while French lawyers were even now evolving a view of the Church little short of Gallicanism, the Papacy, in self-defence, had been hardening interpretation of Sacrosancta to the point where Pius II had actually excommunicated in advance anyone who dared to call a Council.

For two months Julius pondered how to deal with the summons. He thought of declaring the throne of France vacant and transferring it to Henry VIII of England, but this plan never went beyond the draft stage. Finally he decided on a much more effective measure. He himself summoned a Council, one he believed he could control, to assemble the following spring in Rome.

The pro-French cardinals duly met in November, at Pisa, supported by a special issue of French coins inscribed Perdam Babylonis nomen and, as expected, they declared Julius suspended. But their assembly was now no more than an ‘anti-Council’, and when Emperor Maximilian withdrew his support from it, no one took its activities seriously, since it was obviously just an instrument of French policy.

Julius’s Council, which assembled in the Lateran in April 1512, was attended mainly by Italian bishops, others being deterred by the war in north Italy. This strengthened Julius’s already strong hand still further. Indeed, like the Roman Emperors, he now had a personal bodyguard consisting of 200 Swiss soldiers, the Swiss being recognized as the best fighting men of the day. Julius completely controlled the Fifth Lateran Council to a degree hitherto unknown. Foreign ambassadors might address the bishops only with the Pope’s permission, and the Council was forbidden to issue decrees in its own name. All decrees took the form of papal bulls, signed by Julius.

To Julius himself and to the Curia this kind of Council seemed a victory, but like his victories on the battlefield, this too had a dark side. By his very strength Julius defrauded the Council of its rightful and necessary role. Instead of acting as a restraining influence on the Pope and voicing the anxieties of Christendom, it merely acted as the Pope’s instrument. This was to anger genuine conciliarists, notably in Germany. Furthermore, Julius left in abeyance the burning question of how Sacrosancta should be interpreted, so that in France, Germany and England many continued to believe that a Council was the Church’s final court of appeal. As late as 1534 Sir Thomas More, no mean scholar, could write to Thomas Cromwell that, while firmly believing the primacy of Rome to have been instituted by God, ‘yet never thought I the Pope above the general council.’

Julius was a successful soldier and a successful politician. But he was not only these things. At heart he seems to have been a man of peace, a member of the Order of St Francis of Assisi whom circumstances obliged to wage war. It is significant that his favourite pastimes were fishing and sailing, and that he liked gardens. Behind the Vatican he laid out the first considerable Roman garden since ancient times, in which aviaries and ponds were shaded by laurels and orange and pomegranate trees. He liked Dante and, lying ill in Bologna, listened to his architect friend Bramante read the Comedy aloud. He was very fond also of classical sculpture, his purchases including the Apollo Belvedere, the Tiber and the Torso del Belvedere. When the Laocoön was discovered on 14 January 1506 by a man digging in his vineyard near the Baths of Trajan, Julius bought it for 4140 ducats and had it conveyed on a cart to the Vatican along flower-strewn roads to the pealing of church bells.

Julius’s patronage of the arts has left a lasting mark on our civilization. It is intimately linked to his political activity, not only because his political successes kept Rome independent and provided money for the arts but because both express the Pope’s determination to assert his authority as an essential condition for preserving and proclaiming Christ’s message.

When he had been Pope for barely eighteen months and all his successes lay in the future, Julius conceived the idea of ordering his own tomb. It would be no ordinary resting-place but a colossal marble edifice decorated with many statues as fine as those in his own collection, a statement in contemporary terms of papal authority. But was there an artist to realize a work so grandiose? Julius, who had seen the Pietà in St Peter’s and certainly heard about the David, called on Michelangelo.

The former protégé of Lorenzo de’ Medici was then aged twenty-nine. Stocky, with a broken nose and curly hair, he was a man who spoke little, worked much and lived simply. He was generous to the poor and needy, and possessed of a strong trust in Providence: ‘God did not create us to abandon us.’ But towards his fellow-men he showed less trust. He was secretive and liked to work in a locked room. His sturdy Florentine independence tended to defiance, so that some found him ‘frightening’ and ‘impossible to deal with’.

Michelangelo at once answered the Pope’s summons. He possessed the largeness of vision to enter into Julius’s idea of a vast tomb, and drew a sketch of a free-standing rectangular monument, some 30 feet long and 20 wide, adorned with statues and rising in three zones to a catafalque. Julius liked the sketch, gave Michelangelo a contract at a salary of 100 ducats a month and sent him off to Carrara to obtain 100 tons of snow-white marble.

After eight months’ gruelling labour in the Carrara quarries Michelangelo set up a workshop in front of St Peter’s and prepared to begin the tomb. Julius however had meanwhile conceived an even more ambitious plan—the rebuilding of St Peter’s—and his passion for the tomb had cooled. In April he told a goldsmith and his master of ceremonies that he would not give another penny for stones, whether large or small. Michelangelo, worried, asked several times for an audience, but Julius, who was preparing to lay the foundation stone of the new St Peter’s, was too busy to see him. Finally, on 17 April 1506, Michelangelo was turned out of the palace.

This rebuff both angered and alarmed him. He sensed secret enemies: ‘I believed, if I stayed, that the city would be my own tomb before it was the Pope’s.’ In 1494 at the time of the French invasion he had fled Florence, and now once again he took flight, selling his scanty possessions and galloping full speed for Florence, pursued by five of the Pope’s horsemen. Once safe on Florentine soil, he wrote to Julius: ‘Since your Holiness no longer requires the monument, I am freed from my contract, and I will not sign a new one.’

In November 1506 Julius entered Bologna in triumph and, not for the first time, invited Michelangelo to re-enter his service. Persuaded by the Florentine Government that it would be patriotic to do so, Michelangelo swallowed his pride and rode to the brown-brick papal city. No sooner had he pulled off his riding-boots than he was escorted to the Palace of the Sixteen, a rope round his neck as a symbol of repentance. Here Julius eyed him sternly. ‘It was your business to come to seek us, whereas you have waited till we came to seek you,’ alluding to his march north.

Michelangelo fell on his knees. He had left Rome, he said, in a fit of rage, and how asked pardon. Julius made no answer, but sat with his head down, frowning. Finally the grim silence was broken by a courtier-bishop.

‘Your Holiness should not be so hard on this fault of Michelangelo; he is a man who has never been taught good manners. These artists do not know how to behave, they understand nothing but their art.’

In a fury Julius turned on the bishop. ‘You venture,’ he roared, ‘to say to this man things that I should never have dreamed of saying. It is you who have no manners. Get out of my sight, you miserable, ignorant clown.’ He struck the bishop with the stick he always carried, and to Michelangelo reached out his hand in forgiveness.

Julius then explained that he wanted a statue of himself in bronze: no ordinary statue, but one 14 feet high—twice the height of the David in Florence. How much would it cost?

‘I think the mould could be made for 1000 ducats, but foundry is not my trade, and therefore I cannot bind myself.’

‘Set to work at once,’ said Julius.

Michelangelo lodged in a poor room, where he slept in the same bed with three helpers for casting the statue. At the end of June they began the bronze-pouring. Technically so large a work presented many problems, and only the bust came out, the lower part sticking to the wax mould. Michelangelo started again and in February 1508 succeeded in delivering a perfect statue weighing six tons. It depicted Julius in full pontificals, the tiara on his head, the keys in one hand, the other raised in blessing. The huge bronze admirably typified the more-than-lifesize Pope, but its dimensions are probably to be explained by Julius’s interest in the Emperors, so many of whom had erected colossal statues of themselves: Nero’s had been 150 feet high. Doubtless Michelangelo was struck by the difference between Julius’s concept of a ruler and that of his former patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, always shunning the limelight and insisting that he was merely one citizen among many; yet both concepts came from classical antiquity.

The statue caused wonder among the people of Bologna. One man asked Michelangelo which he thought was bigger, the statue or a pair of oxen, to which the sculptor, who did not suffer fools gladly, replied: ‘It depends on the oxen. You see, an ox from Florence isn’t as big as one from Bologna.’ Set in position above the door of the church of S. Petronio, the statue of Julius did not remain there long. During a revolution in December 1511 it was toppled down, broken amid gibes and, save for the head, recast as a culverin by Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, who called it La Giulia. So the statue intended to honour Julius ended up as a gun pointed against him.

A friendship was ripening between the Pope and Michelangelo. Though the Pope was twice the sculptor’s age, both were virile, serious, energetic and possessed of breadth of vision. Back in Rome at the beginning of 1508, Julius conceived the plan of getting Michelangelo to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with designs, and the lunettes with large figures: at present the ceiling was painted blue with gold stars. Michelangelo protested that he was a sculptor, not a painter, and would prefer to start carving the Pope’s tomb. But finally he consented.

Michelangelo found himself to some extent limited by the existing decoration. The side walls depicted scenes from the life of Moses facing comparable scenes in the life of Christ: the history of man under the Law, then under Grace. Michelangelo’s first idea was to take man’s history a stage further by painting the Apostles in the lunettes. After making several sketches, he decided that this decoration would be ‘poor’. ‘Why poor?’ asked Julius. ‘Because the apostles were very poor.’ Evidently Michelangelo meant austere and humble, whereas his own particular gift, as he knew by now, was for celebrating the power and beauty of the human body.

Julius and Michelangelo then looked for another subject. Now Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle in Florence had claimed that there exists an underlying harmony between Hebrew, pagan and Christian thought, and this view was widely held by humanist scholars in Rome. Julius was sympathetic to it, and Michelangelo had been brought up in it. According to this view, the world of Greece and Rome which was being rediscovered in all its splendour was not a rival but an ally of truth. Just as the Prophets of Israel and the Sibyls from pagan darkness could speak of the true God, so did the nudes of Polyclitus make an authentic statement about beauty, therefore about God. Michelangelo had already hinted at such an approach in his Doni Holy Family, where the Christ-child is portrayed against a background of nude youths in the classical style, thus suggesting that Christianity fulfils the beauty and promise of antiquity. This was evidently the thinking that led Julius and Michelangelo to agree on a new subject: Scenes from Genesis, that is, the history of man before the giving of the Law; treated, however, prophetically. The Scenes would look forward, through Prophets, Sibyls, the ancestors of Mary and nude figures in the classical style symbolizing natural man, to the Incarnation of Christ. But instead of confining these scenes to the lunettes and painting the ceiling with ‘the usual adornments’, Michelangelo offered to paint the whole surface with figures, more than 10,000 square feet.

This was seven times the area Giotto had painted in the Scrovegni Chapel and it was, as contemporaries recognized, a superhuman task. But here precisely lay its appeal for Julius, who delighted in campaigns that daunted his closest advisers, and for Michelangelo, who had learned from Ficino’s neo-Platonism that an artist receives guidance from God to organize and complete His universe. That summer Julius gave Michelangelo a contract for the ceiling at a fee of 6000 ducats, all paints chargeable to the artist.

Now Michelangelo had never painted a fresco in his life. So while completing the first cartoons and supervising the erection of wooden scaffolding, he sent to Florence for his young studio assistants, hoping that their technical knowledge would help him. But their designs failed to satisfy him. One morning he made up his mind to scrap everything they had done. He shut himself up in the chapel and refused to let them in again.

He was alone with the immense bare vault. Climbing the ladders to the top of the scaffolding, he began work on the first scene, The Flood. He smeared the ceiling above him with a fine layer of intonaco—a plaster composed of two parts volcanic tufa and one part lime, stirred together with a little water. He chose tufa instead of the usual beach sand because it gave a rougher, less white surface. On this layer of intonaco he placed the appropriate piece of the cartoon, smoothing it quite flat and fastening it with small nails. He then dusted powdered charcoal over it. The charcoal passed through holes in the cartoon pricked beforehand and adhered to the moist intonaco, leaving the outlines of the figures. Later he was to omit the charcoal dusting and prick the outlines directly on to the plaster with an awl. He then unfastened the cartoon and began to paint. He had to be quick, especially in summer, when plaster dried in a couple of hours, and accurate too, because mistakes could not be rectified.

In summer the air immediately under the vault was suffocating and the plaster dust irritated his skin. Watercolours dripped on to his face and even into his eyes. He worked standing, looking upwards. In a burlesque sonnet illustrated with a sketch he says that the skin on his throat became so distended it looked like a bird’s crop. The strain was such that after a day’s work he could not read a letter unless he held it above him and tilted his head backwards.

When he had finished The Flood, Michelangelo dismantled that part of the scaffolding and looked at it: from below. He saw that the figures were too small and determined to continue on a broader scale, converting the form, mass and stresses of the vault into artistic values. But would he be able to continue? ‘It has been a year since I got a penny from this Pope,’ he wrote on 27 January 1509, ‘and I don’t ask him for any, because my work isn’t going ahead well enough for me to feel I deserve it. That’s the trouble—also that painting is not my profession.’

Payments however did begin, and when Julius left on his Ferrara campaign again abruptly stopped. At the end of September 1510 Michelangelo found he had no money to buy pigments, so laying his brushes aside he rode the 250 miles to Bologna and persuaded Julius to resume payments. In October he was paid 500 ducats in Rome. But presently money again dried up, and with it his paints. Michelangelo rode a second time to Bologna, and again a hard-pressed Julius decided that the ceiling must come before everything else. In January 1511 Michelangelo had been paid and was back on his scaffolding.

When Julius returned to Rome he naturally wanted to see how work was progressing. Several times he climbed up, with Michelangelo’s strong hand supporting him on the highest ladder, to study the latest scenes, and each time he would ask, ‘When will you finish?’ Michelangelo would reply, ‘When I can.’ He had become more assured now and was painting figures in the lunettes without any cartoon. But when Julius received that answer for the third time, in autumn 1512, he exploded into one of his furies. ‘Do you want me to have you thrown off the scaffolding?’ Though he would have liked to add some touches of gold and ultramarine, Michelangelo saw that the Pope would not wait any longer. So he signed the work, but instead of putting his name he painted the Greek letters Alpha and Omega near the prophet Jeremiah, thus attributing any merit in the ceiling to God, through whose assistance it had been begun and ended. Evidently Michelangelo saw himself in Platonic terms, like the Sibyls and Prophets, as an instrument through whom God made manifest His beauty.

The scaffolding was dismantled and without even waiting for the dust to settle Julius hurried to gaze on the finished whole. The expectations of three and a half years were not disappointed. Julius liked the ceiling very much indeed, as Michelangelo wrote to his father, and ordered it to be shown to the public on 31 October 1512, the Vigil of All Saints, the feast which celebrates the human race glorified in heaven. All Rome flocked to see it, says Vasari, and one can imagine the effect on them of so vast a work, containing 343 figures, some of them as much as eighteen feet high, in its pristine colours of rose, lilac, green and grey.

At a literal level the ceiling is straightforward enough. Five scenes of Creation are followed by the Fall and Expulsion, the Sacrifice of Noah, the Flood, and Noah’s Drunkenness, that darkening of the spirit which was later to be righted when God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses: since that event was already depicted on the wall below, the ceiling dovetailed into the rest of the chapel. Below the Scenes from Genesis are twelve Prophets and Sibyls, who by their utterances look forward to the Incarnation; while in the spandrels and lunettes are the ancestors of Christ.

In depicting these events, Michelangelo makes man the hero. In the centre of the ceiling and dominating the whole is the figure of Adam. Medieval mosaicists had shown God bending over him and breathing into his body a soul, either as rays or as a little Psyche with butterfly wings, psyche being Greek for both soul and butterfly. Breaking with these and other traditions, in an image of genius Michelangelo shows God imparting life through his own and Adam’s outstretched fingers. And this Adam is an image of the God who is creating him, a perfect being unflawed by sin. His body is beautiful and unblemished. It is just such a body as Christ will assume, and which we shall have in heaven. Even after the Fall, it is the most perfect of created things. It is also the most versatile. In the rest of the ceiling Michelangelo celebrates the power and beauty of the human body in a wide variety of actions. He depicts titanic, muscular figures engaged in tasks that test them to the limit. He shows them exercising not faith, hope and charity which have not yet arrived in the world, but classical virtus, virility. They impose their will on events through bodies that drive like tornados, torrents or avalanches. Even as Prophets and Sibyls they are not passive, they strain and twist and writhe in order to glimpse the hidden mystery, then to express it. As the ancestors of Mary, they struggle to protect their children, that long stream of expectant humanity flowing from Adam to Christ.

Michelangelo’s titanic grand design is enriched by innumerable perceptive details. The Ignudi, the nude male figures who represent man in classical times, carry festoons of oak leaves and acorns, as a sign of the golden age in which they lived, and also in allusion to Julius whose family blazon was the oak tree and who was hailed by many as a restorer of the golden age. Again, the Brazen Serpent erected by Moses to heal the people of Israel harks back ironically to the serpent coiled round the Tree of Life. Classical borrowings too add to the theme of harmony between pagan and Christian thought. In the Expulsion, for example, Adam raises his hands in a gesture of defence from the chastising angel and this is a mirror image of Orestes pursued by the Furies in an antique bas-relief. These and many other details give the ceiling an incomparable imaginative richness.

When the Sistine ceiling was finished, Julius, who the previous year had suffered an almost fatal illness, began to take a renewed interest in his tomb. Michelangelo’s design called for three tiers, the lowest where Julius’s body would lie, a middle part decorated with seated figures of Moses and St Paul, and an uppermost part on which two angels would support a figure of the Pope sleeping. Julius now set Michelangelo to work on the statue of Moses, whom the Popes considered a prototype of themselves.

Michelangelo’s Moses is close to the Sistine figures both in time and spirit. He is an incarnation of man’s driving will, and since his own will was immensely powerful so must be his body. Whereas in the David Michelangelo had exaggerated the size of the head, to signify that the young warrior’s triumph had not been one of mere strength, here he exaggerates the size of the arms, boldly marking their veins and sinews. The bearded prophet holds the tablets of the Law in his muscular hands and his gaze, defiant and terrible, was perhaps suggested by Julius in anger. The two horns on his head are explained by the Vulgate’s mistranslation of a passage from Exodus: ‘his brow became horned while he spoke to God’, whereas the Hebrew has ‘radiant’. The horns were a traditional way of designating Moses in art and even in mystery plays. A last curious point is that in the beard Michelangelo has carved small portraits of Julius and himself in profile, evidently to commemorate their collaboration in the tomb.

During 1513 Michelangelo also made two statues for the lowest part of Julius’s tomb. It is uncertain what they represent. Vasari says ‘provinces subjugated by the Pope and made obedient to the Apostolic Church’; Condivi says they are two of the three arts, Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, ‘made prisoners of death with their patron, since they would never find another Pope to encourage them as he had done.’ The two youths, one resigned, the other struggling vainly to free himself, transcend any particular allegory to become symbols of human captivity and, as such, they reveal another side of Michelangelo’s character. The body he exalted in the Moses and the Sistine ceiling was also the body that held him personally captive, for Michelangelo instinctively preferred the love of men to the love of women. Theoretically man’s body was one with the cosmos, in fact it was not.

Michelangelo left the two prisoners unfinished. Several explanations present themselves. He may have left them thus because the relief is more pronounced in unfinished work, or because there is a sense of movement, as though the form were striving to free itself from the block. Or he may have wished them to resemble certain antique statues, such as the Torso del Belvedere, which are more expressive when worn and truncated, or he may have intended to associate his figures, through the rough stone, with the cosmos. But if the prisoners are understood to express a temperamental dilemma that never was and never could be resolved, that perhaps provides the most satisfactory explanation of why they were left unfinished.

The tomb too was left unfinished, at least in the form Julius intended, so that later, after the Pope’s death, when lesser men whittled away the grand design, these prisoners were allowed no part in it and, like Julius himself in earlier life, went into exile in France. It was Julius however who commissioned them; they belong beside the Moses, and they remain the most moving testimony of all to the collaboration of a great artist and a great patron.

On 26 November 1507 Julius made one of his lightning pronouncements. He could not bear to live in the Appartamento Borgia any longer, continually reminded of ‘those Spaniards of cursed memory’ by Pinturicchio’s frescoes of Alexander VI, Lucrezia and the rest. He decided to move to four rooms on the second floor. At once he called in Perugino, Lorenzo Lotto and others to begin decorating the first of the Stanze, as they are called, and Raphael too when he arrived in Rome at the end of 1508. Perceiving the young man’s genius, Julius dismissed the other painters and entrusted the frescoes to Raphael alone.

Raffaello Sanzio was then aged just twenty-six, a slim man with a thin face, dark eyes, slender neck and delicate, probably consumptive, appearance. His sweet, equable character won him everyone’s affection. For many years he was in love with La Fornarina, the baker’s daughter whose large dark eyes and rather round face appear in many of his works, notably the Sistine Madonna, in which Julius is also portrayed; it was perhaps for love of her that he put off marriage to Cardinal da Bibbiena’s wealthy niece.

Julius imparted to Raphael his plan for the Stanze. He wished them to proclaim the absolute power of the Pope, spiritual as well as temporal, the spiritual power being exemplified in the doctrine of the real presence of God in the Blessed Sacrament. Julius had a particular devotion to the Eucharist—in 1508 he took the unusual step of joining the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, a group of Romans who wished to honour God in the Eucharist by providing a torch-carrying escort whenever viaticum was carried to the sick. The Real Presence had been denied by the Bohemians when they separated themselves from Rome and by their theologians was currently under attack.

The Sistine Chapel had proclaimed the Incarnation as the fulfilment of pre-Christian striving, and the most important of the Stanze, the library, proclaims the Real Presence as the fulfilment or culmination of other kinds of truth. First, there is the truth of law, symbolized by the Pandects and the Decretals; second, poetic truth, depicted under the form of Apollo and the Muses; third, philosophic truth, depicted in a fresco larger than the preceding two, known as The School of Athens. In a hall dominated by statues of Apollo and Pallas, symbolizing Reason, the philosophers of antiquity ponder, dispute and finally, in the persons of Plato and Aristotle, reach heights where agreement is possible. Opposite this fresco is one depicting the revealed truth of the Real Presence. Doctors of the Church, saints and popes down the centuries, even Julius’s favourite Dante, are shown paying tribute to the Blessed Sacrament exposed in a monstrance, above and converging on which are the Three Persons of the Trinity attended by the Blessed and by angels.

In the next room, his bedroom, Julius chose to state the truth of the Real Presence in terms of an actual historical incident. A certain Bohemian priest had doubts about transubstantiation; in order to try and overcome them he made a pilgrimage to Rome. On the way, at Bolsena, while celebrating Mass, he saw the host in his hand oozing blood. He tried to hide it in the corporal, but the blood seeped through, leaving a cross-shaped mark on the linen. Following on this miracle, the feast of Corpus Christi had been instituted, and the blood-stained corporal was preserved in Orvieto, where Julius had seen and venerated it.

In Raphael’s rendering of this dramatic scene a hundred years are bridged in order to show Julius at a prie-dieu watching the miracle take place. He is attended by Swiss guards in the handsome striped blue and orange uniforms he had commissioned Michelangelo to design for them. The mural is not only a beautiful and original composition: it is a notable attempt to arrest heresy with paint.

Raphael had arrived in Rome a somewhat languorous artist, and when he attempted to depict people in action as in the Deposition of 1507 he lapsed into a lymphatic formalism. But Julius’s Stanze are robust and vigorous. The School of Athens, in particular, is crowded with energetic figures, notably the portrait of Leonardo da Vinci as Plato. The aging Pope seems to have imparted to the younger man not only his vision of the underlying harmony of classical and Christian truth, but also some of his own unflagging energy.

Julius’s patronage extended also to architecture. In this field the Roman Emperors had been pre-eminent, and it was natural for a Pope who in some degree saw himself as their successor to engage as his architect an expert on the imperial style. This man—the third artist of genius employed by Julius—was Donato d’Angelo Lazzari, known as Bramante from his eagerness in seeking out commissions, bramare meaning to solicit. Born in Lombardy in 1444, Bramante was built like a wrestler, with a forceful muscular head and curly hair. Two little facts are known about him: he had a passion for pears and he liked giving supper parties at which he would entertain his friends by improvising on the lyre. However, like many a convivial Italian, Bramante saw himself as essentially sad and solitary, and wrote sonnets to proclaim the fact. He was a friend of Raphael, but did not get on with Michelangelo.

Julius commissioned Bramante to lay out the great garden mentioned earlier, which stretched from the Vatican proper to the thirteenth-century Belvedere villa 300 yards north, to enclose the garden with two long straight galleries, and to reconstruct the villa along the lines of the imperial Temple of Fortune at Palestrina. This reconstruction called for a two-storeyed façade, having for its centre a vast semi-circular niche with flanking walls of blind arcades, the whole being approached by a double ramp ascending in terraces. Although the full plan was never realized, enough was built to set a classical mark on the largely medieval Vatican Palace. The façade of the Belvedere villa was remodelled, and the gallery on the east side built—the other had to wait fifty years. Julius decorated the gallery’s open colonnades with frescoes representing the chief Italian cities—another example of his feeling for Italy as a whole—and in the courtyard of the Belvedere villa displayed his Apollo, the Laocoön and other works of classical sculpture.

The culmination of Julius’s life both as Pope and patron was the rebuilding of St Peter’s. The idea of a great new basilica, which had been shelved since the death of Nicholas V, naturally appealed to Julius. Not only was the old basilica decrepit, but on men who had come to appreciate the best imperial monuments, its style jarred, notably the vast atrium separating the entrance from the basilica proper, and the crude roof of open timber. Julius wanted a building which would, as he worded it in a bull, ‘embody the greatness of the present and the future’. This could be achieved of course only by turning to the greatness of the past.

‘The dome of the Pantheon over the vault of the Temple of Peace’, is how Bramante described his concept of the new St Peter’s. Like the humanists of Florence, Bramante considered a centrally-planned church most suited to express the perfection of God, and his first design took the form of a Greek cross. However, in order to retain the tomb of St Peter under the dome—Julius would not hear of it being moved—he found that the arms of the cross would have to be shortened unduly. He then submitted a quite different project. Inside, it called for a traditional nave and aisles, outside for a portico entrance derived from the Pantheon, a dome marked with concentric rings like those on the Pantheon also, and four secondary domes at the intersection of the arms. While numerous towers gave the impression of complexity, unity was maintained by heavy cornices extending throughout on the same level.

Julius was not easy to please. He had already turned down plans by Sangallo and Rossellino. But he liked Bramante’s new design, approved it in October 1505, commissioned Caradosso to strike a medal depicting its elevation, and ordered work to begin. The soil was marshy, and workmen had to dig down 25 feet before striking solid tufa. On Low Sunday 1506 Julius climbed down to that level to bless and set in place the white marble foundation stone—twelve inches by six by one and a half—inscribed: ‘Pope Julius II of Liguria in the year 1506 restored this basilica, which had fallen into decay.’

Thereafter not a moment was lost. Julius proclaimed an indulgence within Italy in order to raise money for the cartloads of honey-coloured travertine which workmen carted from the Tivoli region, marble from Carrara, puzzolane from around Rome, lime from Montecello. Henry VIII sent tin for the roof and Julius, who knew his man, thanked him with barrels of wine and hundreds of Parmesan cheeses. Costabili of Ferrara wrote on 12 April 1507: ‘Today the Pope went to St Peter’s to inspect work. I was there too. The Pope brought Bramante with him, and said smilingly to me, “Bramante tells me that he has 2500 men on the job; one might hold a review of such an army.”’

A single misjudgmcnt marred the great undertaking. Bramante was so fervent a classicist that he found no beauty in Constantine’s basilica. He had the medieval candelabra, icons and mosaics destroyed, though fortunately Giotto’s Navicella escaped his workmen’s hammers. He earned the title of ‘il Ruinante, and a lampoon pictures the architect arriving at the gates of heaven, where St Peter reproaches him with destroying his church and tells him to wait outside until it is rebuilt; Bramante coolly replies that he intends to spend his time replacing the narrow path to heaven by a well-paved Roman highway.

By the end of his reign Julius had spent 70,653 ducats on St Peter’s. Four great piers rose to the level of the dome and the arcades which were to bear the dome were partly finished. The walls of the projecting choir were also complete, and vaulting begun on the south transept. Building would continue through many reigns, and modifications would be made to Bramante’s designs, but to Julius must go the honour of having chosen so grand a plan and in a mere seven years carried the work so far.

It is difficult to believe that Julius crowded so much action and activity into a pontificate of less than, ten years. It was exhausting work for a man in his late sixties to launch out into so many new schemes, and in Raphael’s portrait, probably of 1512, the Pope’s eyes are downcast and tired, and his powers seem beginning to fail. In the following February he was prevented by illness from attending the fifth session of the Lateran Council. He lay in the room Raphael had decorated for him, close to the new Belvedere, close also to the Sistine Chapel. He could claim to have fulfilled his task of reasserting papal authority and proclaiming Christianity in contemporary terms through the techniques that had most advanced in his day: sculpture, painting and architecture. Indeed the new Christian Rome could now compare favourably with the classical, hence the title of Albertini’s little book, published in 1510: The Marvels of Modern and Ancient Rome. Only the great tomb was not ready. Julius left 10,000 ducats for its completion, and finally, thirty-one years later, in a much reduced form, it was to hold his mortal remains, not, as he would have liked, in St Peter’s, but in S. Pietro in Vincoli.

On 20 February 1513 Julius II died. He was described by the Florentine historian Guicciardini, no lover of the Papacy, as ‘worthier than any of his predecessors to be honoured and held in illustrious remembrance.’ The Romans agreed. ‘I have lived forty years in this city,’ wrote Paris de Grassis, his master of ceremonies, ‘but never yet have I seen such a vast throng at a Pope’s funeral. The guards could not control the crowds as they forced their way through to kiss the dead man’s feet…. Many even to whom the death of Julius might have been supposed welcome for various reasons burst into tears, declaring that this Pope had delivered them and Italy and Christendom from the yoke of the French barbarians.’

CHAPTER 3
After Caesar, Augustus

I HAVE THREE SONS,’ Lorenzo de’ Medici used to say, ‘one foolish, one good and one clever.’ The clever son was born in the Palazzo Medici on 11 December 1475 and christened Giovanni Romolo Damaso. He was ‘brought up in a library’—the phrase is his own—learning Latin and Greek from Poliziano, imbibing the broad-minded philosophical ideas of Pico and Ficino, laughing at Pulci’s burlesque Morgante, watching Michelangelo shape a block of marble in the Palazzo garden. Destined by Lorenzo for a career that would bring Florentine principles to the capital of Christendom, at seven he received minor orders, at twelve the abbey of Monte Cassino, at seventeen a Cardinal’s hat. He studied canon law at the University of Pisa but before he could graduate or learn theology Charles VIII rode in. With his ‘foolish’ brother Piero he was driven from Florence and spent an unhappy period wandering in Germany and France. In 1497 he returned to Rome and three times served as Legate, on the last occasion being captured by the French at the Battle of Ravenna. He was imprisoned in a pigeon-cote from which, however, he escaped hidden in a basket. He attended the conclave on a litter, suffering from an anal fistula, which between scrutinies his doctor lanced. In a long, commendably unsimoniacal election, during which the sacred college was reduced to a vegetable diet, he was chosen in preference to Raffaello Riario—whom Lorenzo had saved from lynching at the time of the Pazzi plot—mainly by the younger cardinals, who did not want a second nephew of Sixtus IV. He took his name in evident allusion to Leo the Great, who had kept the Hun from Rome—but by diplomacy, not arms. He was still in minor orders and was ordained priest four days after his election.

The new Pope was above middle height, broad-shouldered and portly. His head was set on a short neck, and the cheeks were puffy. He was short-sighted—hence the magnifying-glass in Raphael’s portrait, and his enemies’ quip: ‘Blind cardinals have chosen a blind Pope.’ He had shapely white hands and liked to show them off, as the fashion was, with diamond rings. He perspired easily and during long ceremonies would be seen mopping his face and hands. He also suffered from the cold, and in severe weather would wear gloves, even to say Mass.

Though he was not robust, Leo was a happy man who liked to make others happy. He was generous to a fault and whenever he could grant a favour did so. He had inherited Lorenzo’s easy, tactful manner, but not his daring. In politics, for instance, Leo moved cautiously—hence the nickname given him by Julius: ‘Your Circumspection’; and once when fire broke out in the Vatican his alarm was judged excessive. Otherwise he had plenty of self-control. He fasted twice a week, and his name was never associated with any woman. He took his religious duties seriously, said his office every day, and once, on ascending the Scala Sancta, was heard to beg God’s indulgence for not climbing it on bended knee like the poor women of Rome. As his papal motto he chose the first verse of Psalm 119: ‘Happy those who are irreproachable in their life, who walk in the way of the Lord.’ The linking of happiness and virtue is typical of the man.

Soon after his election Leo is reported to have said to his brother, ‘Let us enjoy the Papacy since God has given it to us.’ Though first recorded by a Venetian two years after the event, the mot may well be authentic; if so, it is much less ingenuous than it sounds. Leo had been raised in a civic-minded and civilized Republican family, and enjoyment for him meant extending through patronage the principles of Christian humanism. His ambition as Pope was to renew Christianity through learning, literature and the arts. Rome in particular he intended to become a great civilized city, a worthy successor to the Rome of Virgil and Horace. The humanists understood this when they hailed Leo on the morrow of his election with the phrase: ‘After Caesar, Augustus.’

To civilize Rome was no small ambition. Despite Julius’s building, the city was still an inhumane and bloodthirsty place. Within memory a Pope’s son had been stabbed to death, and when someone who had seen the body being thrown into the Tiber was asked by the magistrates why he had not revealed the fact, he replied that murder was an everyday occurrence and it had never dawned on him to go to the authorities. With advances in medicine poison was now being increasingly and more subtly used; indeed it was a Florentine cardinal, Ferdinando Ponzetti, who in 1521 published the first handbook on poisons. Leo himself was to be the object of a plot headed by Alfonso Petrucci, who disapproved of papal policy in Siena, and five other cardinals. They planned that Leo’s fistula should be treated with ointment containing poison. Through an intercepted letter the plot was discovered and quashed, but the incident puts into relief the ambitious nature of Leo’s programme.

As an essential condition for civilizing Rome, Leo had to preserve the peace won for Italy by Julius II’s wars. Under their ambitious young king, François I, the French again crossed the Alps in 1515, while the election of Charles V as Emperor in 1519 united in a formidable coalition Spanish with German strength. Applying Lorenzo’s principle of the balance of power, Leo skilfully got the Emperor to expel François from Milan and thereafter played off the two rulers against each other. He also forestalled any future French schism by the Concordat of 1516. This laid down that the Pope and the King of France were jointly to appoint bishops; it made the King to a certain extent overlord of the French Church, but also at the same time its natural protector. For three hundred years Leo’s Concordat was to ensure that French kings would, if only from self-interest, remain loyal to Rome.

Leo began his work of civilizing Rome by refounding the Sapienza, which because of war had been inoperative for thirty years. He did so on a lavish scale. He appointed no less than 88 professors at salaries totalling 14,490 ducats, part of which, in case of sickness, was payable to their dependants. With his usual broad-mindedness he increased the range of faculties: civil law was the largest—Leo lifted the ban on clerics studying this subject—then came rhetoric, philosophy and theology, medicine, canon law, Greek, mathematics, astronomy and botany. Leo rejected the chauvinism implicit in Pomponius Laetus’s boast that he declined to learn Greek for fear of spoiling his Latin accent; the new Pope summoned Giovanni Lascaris, Lorenzo’s former librarian, to strengthen the Greek faculty, and subsidized Varino Favorino, who had once taught him Greek, in his task of composing an important Greek lexicon. Leo also founded a Greek press, attached to the Sapienza, which published scholarly editions of Didymus’s Commentaries on Homer, Porphyry’s Homeric Questions, and the Scholia of Sophocles’s tragedies. He encouraged Cardinal Ximenes in his five-language edition of the Bible, and shipped to him in Toledo boxes of precious Greek manuscripts chained and padlocked. Hebrew studies Leo also promoted by founding a chair of Hebrew and a Hebrew press. When the German scholar Johann Reuchlin was denounced to Rome by the Dominicans for advocating the study of all Hebrew books, even those hostile to Christianity, Leo dropped the case, a gesture which German humanists interpreted as a blessing on free enquiry.

Leo’s most imaginative scheme concerns the Latin language. In common with most of his educated contemporaries Leo had a great personal liking for classical Latin and spoke it fluently, but where others saw Latin only as a means of penetrating the admired world of Cicero and Virgil, Leo saw it as a means of attaining through a study of origins to a deeper self-consciousness. With this in mind he decreed that every meeting of the Conservators—the municipal Council of Rome—should open with a speech in Latin by a native Roman about distinguished Roman citizens of past ages. But this was only one half of Leo’s plan for Latin. He wished also to make the language of Cicero the universal language of educated men, and as such, an instrument of civilization and peace. Just as the Roman Emperors used Latin to unite their Empire—Latin, claimed Valla, had more power than all the legions combined—so he would use it to unite Christendom. The very first thing Leo did on leaving the conclave was to appoint as his domestic secretaries the two most elegant Latin stylists alive—Jacopo Sadoleto of Modena and Pietro Bembo of Venice—with instructions to draft all the Pope’s official correspondence, within and without Italy, in Ciceronian Latin.

With the same aim in mind Leo encouraged the writing and improvisation of Latin verse. At meals he liked to swap impromptu repartee with Camillo Querno, a prolific versifier with long flowing hair, known as ‘the archpoet’:

Querno: Archipoeta facit versus pro mille poetis.

Leo: Et pro mille aliis Archipoeta bibit.

Querno: Porrige quod faciat mihi carmina docta Falernum.

Leo: Hoc etiam enervat debilitatque pedes.

Querno: The archpoet turns out verses like a thousand poets.

Leo: And puts away wine like a thousand more.

Querno: Pass me the Falernian that inspires my witty songs.

Leo: It excites you and makes you unsteady on your pins.

If Querno failed to produce a reply in perfect hexameters, Leo would add water to his wine.

Leo issued an invitation to the poets of Italy to come to Rome and write Latin verse. Nearly three hundred accepted, and most of them lived at Leo’s expense. Young Ariosto was one who came for a time. He was warmly welcomed by the Pope, who kissed him on both cheeks and gave him a copyright for his verses, but finally he decided that he would rather be ‘first in Italian than second in Latin.’ Among those who stayed the majority produced clever occasional pieces. Biagio Palladio wrote about the passing of the most famous Roman courtesan, Imperia, who at the age of thirty-one drankpoison after a lovers’ quarrel: ‘Mars gave imperial rule to Rome, and Venus gave us Imperia; Fortune deprived us of imperial rule, Imperia of our hearts.’ In an excellent poem Sadoleto hailed the Laocoön as an image of Roma rediviva and said he could almost hear the figures groaning, whereupon Francesco Arsilli, not to be outdone, wrote a poem about Sadoleto praising the Laocoön: ‘Never, Sadoleto, will your name be lessened by usurious Time.’

A few of the three hundred were genuine poets. They found that a classical language and the establishment of classical standards released creative energies, and they used the materials of antiquity in order to express a distinctively personal vision. Such was Marcantonio Flaminio, who arrived from a village in the Dolomites at the age of sixteen, and was hailed by Leo as a prodigy. Flaminio’s pure style is revealed in the opening strophe of his Ode to Diana:

Virgo sylvestrum domitrix ferarum,

Quae pharetratis comitata nymphis,

Cynthium collem peragras, nigrique

Silvam Erymanthi….

Maiden, tamer of the wild beasts of the woods,

Who, in the company of the quiver-bearing nymphs,

Range Cynthius’s hill and the forest

Of black Erymanthus….

Another remarkable poet is Zaccaria Ferreri, abbot of Monte Subasio. He had actively supported the Council of Pisa, but Leo was not one to bear a grudge, and he commissioned Ferreri to replace the medieval hymns of the Breviary, whose language and rhymes were deemed inelegant, with new ones in classical Latin. Ferreri published his versions in 1525. For the feast of Corpus Christi, instead of Thomas Aquinas’s Pange Lingua, he offered beautiful, closely knit sapphics, of which this is the last stanza:

Zographi non ars sapientis ulla

Fingere, aut ullus penetrare vivens

Hoc valet sacrum, neque te triforme

Numen Olympi.

Artist’s brush is powerless to paint

And mortal mind to probe this act,

Or to fathom you, threefold

God of Olympus.

The best of the Latin poets patronized by Leo is Marco Girolamo Vida, who was born in Cremona about 1490 and came to Rome with verses on chess and silkworms. Leo saw that the young poet was capable of more than these trifles. Wishing to be an Augustus to a new Virgil, he commissioned Vida to write a Christian Aeneid. He also gave Vida the necessary means, naming him prior of a quiet and beautiful monastery, S. Silvestro in Frascati. There Vida wrote his Christias, six books of chiselled Latin hexameters recounting the life of Christ from Bethlehem to his death on Calvary. It is a sincere work—Vida was a holy priest—with none of the pagan trappings which Erasmus thought disfigured the De Partu Virginis by Sannazzaro of Naples, and it remains the finest Latin poem of the sixteenth century.

Latin prose Leo also encouraged. It was at the Pope’s special request that Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, Queen Isabella’s Lombard chaplain, wrote his important account of thirty-four years of ocean discovery, Decades de orbe novo, first published in full in 1516, and it was the Pope who urged the converted Moslem, Leo the African, to write a description of his native continent. By such activities as these, by his example and patronage Leo did more than anyone to establish the language of Cicero’s Rome as a vehicle for contemporary writing. During his reign Italian poets in France, Spain and England were writing Latin verses and encouraging others to do so. There seemed a real chance that Latin-writing humanists could draw together the nations of Europe.

Leo’s literary patronage extended also to the vernacular, and to a sphere which no previous Pope had entered, namely the theatre. As a boy in Florence Leo had acted in at least one St John’s Day play, and his tutor Poliziano had written in Orfeo the first secular play in Italian ever to be performed. Ferrara had been staging Plautus and Terence since 1486, and vernacular comedy since around 1500. Mantua and Urbino also staged plays, and it was evident to Leo that if Rome were to take the intellectual lead in Italy she must do no less. When his closest friend among the Cardinals, Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, wrote a comedy suggested by Plautus’s Menaechmi, Leo decided, the year after his accession, to stage it.

The Calandria is set in Rome and its plot, like Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, turns on identical twins. Lidio and Santilla, refugees from the Turk, arrive in Rome by different routes. Santilla, for safety, has disguised herself as a man, while Lidio, in order to visit his sweetheart, poses as Santilla, whom he believes dead. This gives rise to predictable doubles entendres and mistakes of identity. The play takes its name from Calandro, the gullible husband of Fulvia, with whom Lidio is in love. Fulvia asks Rufo, a wily magician, to smuggle Lidio into her room. Rufo, while pretending to agree, introduces not a man disguised as a woman but a real woman. Fulvia gives vent to her rage and bewilderment. Is Lidio a hermaphrodite, or does Rufo, as Fulvia is led to believe, possess the power to alter at will a person’s sex? Finally, for a fatter fee, Rufo succeeds in introducing Lidio, dressed in woman’s clothes, to Fulvia’s room, whereat the curtain falls.

The importance of his mildly amusing play lies in its tone. Sexual love is praised as the sweetest pleasure in the world, anyone who does not enjoy it is a fool, but it is constantly being thwarted as the man in question turns out to be a woman. The constant references to changes of sex and hermaphrodites point to a general truth which Bibbiena puts into the mouth of one of his characters: ‘Everyone knows that women are so highly valued today that there isn’t a man who does not imitate them, down to becoming a woman in body and soul.’ The classical revival had titillated appetites which because of the vow of celibacy could not be satisfied, and in a predominantly masculine city this could, and often did, lead to effeminacy. Tommaso Inghirami, Vatican Librarian and one of Rome’s leading orators, whose round face and upturned eyes with a cast are familiar from Raphael’s portrait, was actually known by the name Phaedra, after playing that role in Seneca’s Hippolytus.

Another comedy, Ariosto’s I Suppositi, Leo staged in the palace of his nephew, Cardinal Cibo, in 1519. The Pope ‘took his place at the door and quietly, with his blessing, gave permission to enter, as he saw fit.’ Two thousand crowded in, causing such a crush that the Ferrarese ambassador almost had a leg broken. Leo took his place on a dais in the front row; his name was spelled out by candelabra on either side of the stage, and on the curtain, which Raphael had designed, Leo’s favourite buffoon was depicted sporting amid devils. Fifes, bagpipes, violas and comets provided gay music.

Ariosto’s play is inspired by Terence’s Eunuch and Plautus’s Captives. A young couple much in love but too poor to marry contrive to thwart the advances of a rich old suitor; after much duplicity and deceit, the hero comes into money, casts off his servant’s disguise and marries the girl who for two years has secretly been his mistress. In one scene a parasite named Pasifilio reads the hand of the suitor, Cleando. Here is a snatch of their dialogue translated by Gascoigne in The Supposes of 1566, which is sometimes described as the first English comedy worthy of the name:

Pasiphilo: O how straight and infracte is this line of life!

You will live to the yeeres of Melchisedech.

Cleando: Thou wouldst say, Methusalem.

Pasiphilo: Why, is it not all one?

Cleando: I perceive you are no very good Bibler, Pasiphilo.

Pasiphilo: Yes, sir, an excellent good Bibbelere, specially in a bottle.

At these and similar jokes Leo laughed heartily, which shocked Frenchmen in the audience. They thought it unseemly that a Pope should attend so frivolous a play.

A third comedy to be staged in Rome, at Leo’s special request, was Machiavelli’s Mandragola. A Florentine youth named Callimaco falls in love with Lucrezia, the virtuous young wife of an impotent husband, Nicia. Callimaco poses as a doctor and persuades Nicia that a potion of mandrake can cure Lucrezia’s childlessness. There is, however, one snag. The first to sleep with a woman who has taken such a potion, dies. So a stranger must be introduced for the night to Lucrezia’s bed, and Callimaco firmly intends to be that stranger. For a fee the local priest, Fra Timoteo, persuades Lucrezia to accept the outrageous plan, and next morning, after the trick has been successfully perpetrated, takes them all to church in a general mood of self-congratulation.

Once again the play turns on sexual inadequacy, which here appears to reflect a deeper inadequacy, Florence’s recent fiasco on the battlefield. For Callimaco, the potent: young lover, has just returned from Paris, and it is in Paris that he has learned the reckless insolence which enables him to seduce Lucrezia. Her name, too, is significant, for the patrician girl who committed suicide had, by Botticelli and others, been made a familiar symbol of Florence in defeat.

As well as comedy, Leo also liked farce. He often summoned to Rome a famous Sienese troupe called I Rozzi—the Rough Ones—to perform dialect burlesques in which country bumpkins declare their love in boorish similes, play crude practical jokes and fall prey to a stereotyped villain. Sometimes pastoral and mythological elements were mixed in, and the coarse rustics would be joined by Arcadian shepherds: a happy combination which Shakespeare was later to use in As You Like It.

Leo’s patronage of the theatre was criticized by some, and his biographer, Bishop Paolo Giovio, felt it necessary to defend the Pope’s attendance at comedies such as Mandragola: it is significant that he pointed as a precedent to Trajan. But Leo knew what he was about. It was proper that the head of the Church should be in touch with the body, proper that he should understand what was being said and thought by the writers of his day. And it doubtless did not escape his notice that the line, ‘Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto’ occurs in a play by Terence. By his tolerant attitude Leo showed that the Church had nothing to fear from the theatre; by his patronage he played an important part in encouraging Italian comedy and farce during their formative years.

Leo also continued his predecessor’s patronage of Raphael. The young painter from Urbino had now become the idol of Rome and would walk the streets attended by fifty admiring artist friends. One day Michelangelo in his grim way called out: ‘Where are you going, surrounded like a provost?’ to which Raphael replied: ‘And you, all alone like an executioner?’ But despite their different temperaments, Raphael admired Michelangelo and added his portrait to The School of Athens, an almost Sistine figure pondering on the lowest step beside a block of stone. As commissions poured in, Raphael employed a large workshop to do the rough work and quickly amassed a fortune of 16,000 ducats, twice as much as Michelangelo would earn in a life more than twice as long. But he retained his modest amiable manner, even when he moved into a splendid new house designed by Bramante and adorned on the outside with classical columns.

Leo’s most important commission to Raphael are the cartoons for ten tapestries to hang on the lower walls of the Sistine Chapel. The subject Leo chose is the very one rejected by Michelangelo, namely humble incidents in the lives of the Apostles. These include Peter’s healing of the lame man and Paul’s imprisonment. In his choice of two of the other subjects Leo shows the same interest as Julius and Michelangelo in the close link between early Christian and pagan thought. The first depicts the scene in Lystra when certain citizens, impressed by the Apostles’ miracles, called Barnabas Jupiter, and Paul Mercury, because he was the chief speaker; ‘and the priest of Jupiter, Defender of the City, brought out bulls and wreaths to the gates, eager, like the multitude, to do sacrifice,’ a folly from which the Apostles dissuaded them. The second scene shows Paul preaching in Athens, seeking to convince the Athenians by quoting not the Old Testament but their own poets—Aratus, Cleanthes and Epimenides—in support of his claim that we are all the children of God. Taken together, the two scenes amounted to a clear statement that Christianity was a fulfilment of pagan insights. This of course chimed in with the view that Christian Rome was a fulfilment of the imperial city.

The tapestries cost 16,000 ducats, of which Raphael received one thousand, and seldom has a fee been better earned. In contrast to, and complementing, Michelangelo’s vault, Raphael’s seven surviving cartoons are imbued with the New Testament spirit, in particular with what may be termed the grandeur of simplicity. Perhaps the best of them, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, shows the apostles divided between two boats. In one John and James raise a net, their bent straining bodies clearly inspired by a figure in Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina. In the other Andrew recognizes the miracle with outstretched arms, while Peter kneels humbly before the seated figure of Christ, and although placed at the extreme left edge it is Christ who dominates the whole scene, partly by virtue of his calm attitude, partly because he partakes of the open sea and sky above him. Since a classical note was de rigueur, Raphael introduces to the foreground three cranes, a symbol of filial obedience. For all its drama, the main impression of this great drawing is one of serenity and Christian trustfulness.

As a counterpart to the tapestries Leo, who loved music, engaged the best choristers from Flanders, France, Greece and Mantua to sing divine Office in the Sistine Chapel, thus making it an artistic as well as liturgical holy of holies. Their voices must surely have gained in jubilation under Michelangelo’s newly painted vault and amid Raphael’s newly woven tapestries, hung at Christmas 1519. After a good performance Leo would sit enraptured, head sunk on his breast and eyes closed, lost to everything, drinking in the sweet tones and humming them softly to himself.

Leo’s other big commission to Raphael was the decoration of a shady promenade alongside the papal apartments known as the Loggie. Excavations on the Esquiline Hill had recently revealed certain elaborately decorated underground rooms, to visit which one had to be let down on a rope. They belonged to Nero’s Golden House, of which the Emperor exclaimed, ‘Good, now I can at last begin to live like a human being,’ but Leo’s contemporaries did not know this: they believed them to be part of the palace of Titus. They called them grottoes and the delicate architectural trompe l’æil framing small landscapes with figures they called ‘grottesque’. It was in this style that Leo asked Raphael to decorate the Loggie. The artist’s gay and inventive interweaving of flowers, cupids, winged beasts and other ‘grottesques’ recaptures the charm of the Roman paintings and imparts to the promenade an apt note of relaxation. Leo was pleased with the work; his pleasure has a touch of irony considering its Neronian origin.

Raphael painted another masterpiece at this period, and although not commissioned by the Pope it throws considerable light on Leo’s Rome. Agostino Chigi, Leo’s banker, wished to decorate his new palace with the story of Amor and Psyche, and as a subordinate theme asked Raphael to fresco one of the walls with The Triumph of Galatea. Raphael shows Galatea driving her scallop-shell chariot and team of dolphins through the waves, while on either side Tritons carry off sea-nymphs, at whom three cupids aim their arrows. The literary sources are Virgil’s Eclogues and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the iconography comes from Philostratus, while Galatea’s billowing cloak and energetic movement derive from ancient bas-reliefs of Leucothea which then stood in the monastery of S. Francesco a Ripa. As for the term ‘triumph’, it denotes that Galatea has successfully resisted the brutal passion of Polyphemus. So the subject was vaguely moral. Raphael, however, cares more for the vitality and beauty of Galatea, whom he renders with obvious admiration. At first sight it is remarkable that the supreme painter of Madonnas should bring equally deep feeling to the portrayal of a pagan sea-nymph. But Raphael was not above using La Fornarina as a model for his Madonnas. He seems to have believed that all feminine beauty, whether of mistress or naiad, is an ally, not a rival of Christ’s mother. ‘Religio hic regnat, gloria, et alma Venus,’ wrote one of Leo’s poets in praise of Rome, and the last two words are a literary equivalent of Raphael’s fresco. They also express the spirit of the Leonine city. Julius’s Rome had been assertively virile; Leo introduced a gentler, more feminine note, and the Galatea is its image.

So much for Leo’s positive achievements. They were important at the time and have left to the world a rich legacy of Christian humanism. His other activities reflect the same large-mindedness. One or two of them, however, innocent in themselves, represented tinder in regions which had already shown themselves highly critical of the Church.

The first is hunting. Leo had begun to ride to hounds at the age of nine. He liked the sport for itself and because it was good for his health and figure. He saw no reason why he should not continue to practise it as Pope. In 1516 he hunted thirty-seven days in a row. If kept in Rome by business, he would run down deer and stags in the Baths of Diocletian, but the country he preferred was the wooded hills around Viterbo, where after a hard ride he could soak in the warm baths. ‘He left Rome without a stole,’ lamented his master of ceremonies in January 1514, ‘and, what is worse, without his rochet; and, worst of all, with boots on. That is quite incorrect, for no one can kiss his feet.’ Leo just laughed at this punctiliousness. Peasants lined the road to offer presents, being rewarded so generously, says Giovio, that they saw in Leo’s arrival, a harvest far more productive than the best from their fields. At dawn teams of men enclosed a section of the forest with sheets of canvas, each sixty feet long and six feet high, fastened with wooden hooks and held upright by forked poles. At a signal from Leo, transmitted from glen to glen by the sound of horns, groups of archers, halberdiers, gamekeepers and beaters would drive the game forward with shouts and the beating of drums. The main sport came from deer, boar or wolf. Spectacles on his nose, Leo would dispatch these with lance or javelin. Firearms were not used, being considered unsporting.

Leo’s hunts were an occasion for display. His hounds imported from France, his falcons from Crete, the Pope was attended by a suite of 140 horsemen, a body guard of 160 and the poet Guido Postumo, who put the whole colourful chase into verse. Inevitably this encouraged lavish spending among the sacred college. Cardinals began to give their hounds silver collars or gold-encrusted leashes, and in 1514 Sanseverino appeared at the papal hunt with a lion skin round his shoulders. Galeotto della Rovere bought a string of racehorses, and Cibo opened a stud to provide fast hunters. Italians expected prelates to participate in lordly sports and to look the part, but other nationalities found these activities shocking. In Portugal, for example, clergy were forbidden to hunt; and the ban was made, at the King’s request; by Leo himself.

The second activity to occasion adverse comment was Leo’s attendance at banquets, his own and others’. He gave lavish dinners in the Vatican at which delicious food, including peacocks’ tongues, was served on chased silver, and the best musicians in Italy sang and played. Leo himself ate moderately, though he had a penchant for lampreys cooked with cloves and nuts in a Cretan wine sauce; after dinner he joked publicly with his Dominican clown, Fra Mariano, who possessed a prodigious appetite and is said to have eaten twenty chickens at a sitting. Leo would set Mariano going by serving him a delicious-looking dish containing ravens or apes or even pieces of string, then rock with laughter as the clown champed at the tough food and tried to disguise his misery with polite smiles or expressions of bliss.

Leo enjoyed going out to banquets too. The most famous were given by Agostino Chigi. A native of Siena, for fifteen years Chigi was the leading banker in Europe. He handled Tolfa alum for the Popes and his annual income amounted to 87,000 ducats. He possessed bathroom fixtures of solid silver and an ivory and silver bed that cost 1,592 ducats. The famous Imperia had for long graced this prodigious couch, but now Chigi suffered from dropsy and took his pleasure in other ways. Once he offered dinner to the sacred college, at which every cardinal was served delicacies brought by special messenger from his own region or country, on silver engraved with his coat of arms. But Chigi’s tour de force was a dinner for Leo, held in a loggia overlooking the Tiber. To prove to his guests that the same silver was not used twice, after each course he instructed his servants to throw the silver dishes into the river. Nets however had been laid underwater, from which the silver was later retrieved.

If Leo’s presence at banquets was criticized abroad, at least he brought to these otherwise vulgar displays the Medici wit he had inherited from Lorenzo. When the Emperor sent him fourteen hunting eagles Leo, in a letter of thanks, joked about the danger of giving away his emblem of imperial power. When he wished to give a red hat to his nephew, Innocenzo Cibo, and someone objected that he was only twenty-one, Leo remembered that he had received the cardinalate younger still from a Pope of the same name, and said with his usual smile, ‘What I received from Innocent, I repay to Innocent.’ When a Venetian presented him with a poem on the art of making gold, Leo sent back a richly decorated purse but, contrary to his usual practice, empty: ‘since you possess the secret of filling it’. And wit led to wit. Leo gave Fra Mariano a post as piombatore: the work involved affixing a lead seal to papal bulls and brought in 800 ducats a year, which prompted the clown to boast that he had discovered the alchemists’ secret, since now he could make gold out of lead.

Trifles such as these help to set a tone. The tone in Leo’s Rome was broadminded and gay. Taken in conjunction with his patronage of learning, Latin literature, Italian comedy and the plastic arts, Leo may be said to have achieved his ambition of making Rome the most civilized city in Europe. At any rate it was now the place where everyone wanted to be. During Leo’s reign more than 20,000 people came to swell the population, to savour the precious freedom and versatility of talent that Erasmus praised in a nostalgic letter, to see the fine new houses and the gardens which Julius had popularized. In one of the gardens belonging to a papal employee named Angelo Colocci writers and humanists liked to gather, and the mood of Leo’s Rome is summed up in a fountain that played beside a little statue bearing the inscription: ‘I am the spirit of joy, yield to my law or else go away.’

Leo himself liked to think that the spirit of his pontificate was embodied in a remarkable elephant. Captured in India, the elephant was sent as a gift to the Pope by the King of Portugal. In colour white, ‘the size of three oxen, with the pace of a tortoise’, it paraded through Rome carrying in a howdah jewels, brocade and pearls worth 60,000 ducats. Leo watched from a window of Castel S. Angelo; the great loping beast genuflected three times to him, bending its head low, and made a noise described as ‘bar, bar, bar!’ It then plunged its trunk into a cistern and, to the crowd’s delight, sent a spray of water almost up to the window.

Leo, who liked animals, was captivated by the elephant, just as Lorenzo had been by the Sultan of Egypt’s giraffe. He kept it in the Belvedere, commissioned its portrait, in intarsia, for one of the doors of his private apartments, and had his poets celebrate the elephant’s size, intelligence and classical associations. He decided to call it Annone, after the Carthaginian general Hanno, thus making it a symbol of Rome’s glories. But this did not exhaust the beast’s significance. According to Pliny, elephants are the only animals who say their prayers. They are also temperate, benign—they possess no gall—and chaste, for they can breed only after having absorbed, as an aphrodisiac, mandragora root. So Annone was an apt symbol of Christian Rome, heir to past glories.

If Leo’s intentions in Rome were praiseworthy, and many of his achievements admirable, they were not without grave danger. The danger arose from the nature of the city and the nature of his court, the one inorganic and unproductive, the other without any real roots in Rome, an all-male society living away from family and place of origin, both therefore tending to artificiality and exaggeration in a way the Florentines would never have countenanced.

Let us take the matter of a pure Latin style. This demanded the use of words sanctioned by classical authors. When poets described SS. Peter and Paul as ‘Dii tutelares Romae’, when they translated ‘excommunicate’ by ‘forbid fire and water’, turned ‘to forgive the sins of a dying man’ into ‘to appease the powers of Hades and the Manes’, when faith became ‘persuasion’, a priest ‘a flamen’, the Vatican ‘the Capitol’ and Mary a ‘goddess’, or even ‘Diana’, they were blurring the distinctiveness of Revelation. Real misunderstanding crept in when Christ was referred to as ‘hero’ or ‘Apollo’, and the Christian message transformed into a ‘philosophy’ compatible with the humane ethic of classical Rome. In one of his sermons Tommaso Inghirami compares the death of Jesus to the oratorical power of Cicero because he filled his disciples first with sadness and consternation, then with triumphant joy. He then likens Jesus to Curtius, Cecrops, Aristides, Epamonidas and even Iphigenia, who were all devoted to the common good. The sermon would have horrified Savonarola, all the more since it was delivered on Good Friday, yet his audience considered that Inghirami had surpassed himself.

Closely linked with this danger was another, which Petrarch had been the first to spot. Against Cicero’s statement in the De Natura Deorum that men are quite willing to attribute their prosperity to the gods, but not their virtue—‘virtutem autem nemo deo acceptam rettulit,’ Petrarch had written ‘Cave male dicas: Be careful what you say.’ The poet’s warning went unheeded among the leading spirits of Leo’s Rome. Even the pious Sadoleto described wisdom as a human virtue naturally acquired, and declared that sages such as Socrates, Plato and Cicero were in every respect complete and perfect men, despite the fact that they had never received the Church’s grace-giving sacraments. Formerly man was deemed to have value only in so far as he partook of heavenly grace, but now it was man who had value in himself, and Vasari could write of Raphael after his death: ‘We can be sure that just as he embellished the world with his talent, so his soul now adorns heaven itself.’ This exaltation of man was of course a form of osmosis in a world flooded by classical values. If there was any betrayal of Christian truth, it was quite unconscious. It was none the less dangerous for that, especially if doings or phrases were to be interpreted out of context by men living far from Rome and unfamiliar with her new, rather peculiar conventions.

Exaltation of man led to exaltation of particular men, notably the Popes. It has to be remembered that fulsome language was a feature of the age: the satirist Pietro Aretino was variously addressed as ‘Precellentissimo’, ‘Unichissimo’, ‘Divino’, and ‘Omnipotente’, but in Rome adulation went beyond bounds. Orators and poets addressed the Pope as once their forbears had addressed those Emperors who believed themselves divine. Inghirami hailed Julius as a Jupiter making the universe tremble with his frown, a Dominican poet compared Leo to the sun-god Apollo, while Giovanni Capito addressed these lines to the elephant Annone:

If you think you are serving a Libyan Lion

You err: this Leo came down from the skies.

He is your master, the world’s highest glory,

Whose head is crowned with the tiara,

Holding among men a more than mortal rank:

With the right to close and open the world’s frontiers.

If to serve God is truly to reign, then you,

As Leo’s servant, truly reign, Leo being God on earth.

Like every great lord, Leo had his ‘taster’ to sample all food for possible poison, but against this particular kind of poisonous sugar he had no one to defend him, and the tragedy is that sometimes he succumbed. When his brother Giuliano died in 1516 it was expected that Leo would order the Court into mourning and take part in the solemn funeral ceremonies. But Leo decided otherwise. A Pope, he informed his master of ceremonies, should place himself above family griefs: he should consider himself ‘quia ipse jam non ut homo sed ut semi deus—not as a man, but as a demi-god.’

The final evil of Leo’s reign stems jointly from the peculiar nature of Rome and from the Pope’s character. Rome was not only unproductive, it had no native traditions of craftsmanship or art. So that in civilizing Rome, Leo had to bring everything from outside. The poets came from outside, so did the musicians, the painters, the architects. Of 267 artists who worked in Rome between 1503 and 1605 only seventeen were Romans, and only one—Giulio Romano—became famous. They had to be lured to Rome by high fees, they had to be well housed, and this meant that the cost of civilization was enormously increased. And the man who was paying for all this was open-handed to a fault. ‘Liberalitas Pontificia’ proclaimed one of Leo’s medals—and the medal, like everything else commissioned by the Pope, from tiara to silver stirrups—was a beautiful object, designed at great expense. After a game of chess, win or lose, Leo would hand his opponent several gold ducats before blessing the board and leaving. He increased the papal household to 683 and spent on it twice as much as Julius. He would give 50 ducats for one bottle of amber, 500 at a time for sables and ermines, 900 for three gold chains. He gave Guido Postumo 300 ducats and a new house for versifying his hunts, 33 ducats a quarter to a favourite trombonist, a castle and the title of count to a lutenist named Giammaria Leo. He could not possibly afford to be so open-handed, even though papal revenue had risen to 420,000 ducats. As early as 1515 he was in arrears with the pay of his 88 university professors, some of whom began to seek more stable positions elsewhere. And so the scramble for money began.

First thing when he woke, before prayers, before Mass, the datary Gianmatteo Giberti entered the Pope’s bedroom—Leo liked to lie in—and there discussed who should get what benefice and for how much. Bishoprics, abbeys, even quite small parishes—all had their price, and if an applicant held one already, so much the better, because to hold a second he would have to pay. Then there were the saleable offices in the Curia and in the municipality. Leo doubled these to a total of 2150, thus raising 1,200,000 ducats, on which, however, an annual interest of 328,000 ducats had to be paid, since holders received more than 10% return on what was in effect a State investment. But the most profitable item of all was the creation of cardinals, forty-two in all, of whom at least thirty owed their red hats to money or political influence, which in the last resort also meant money: so the Church was no more independent as a result of returning to Rome, only it was now subject to money rather than to the threat of force. Ponzetti, who finally secured the cardinalate at the age of eighty, is said to have stopped a soldier in the street, and removing the soldier’s cap to have measured it thoughtfully. ‘Your hat is two inches bigger than mine, but yours cost one ducat, whereas mine cost 60,000.’ He was not exaggerating.

Even so, income failed to match expenditure, and Leo had to borrow: 32,000 ducats from the Gaddi, with the proviso that one of the family would receive the red hat; from the Ricasoli 10,000; from the father of Cardinal Salviati 150,000. In 1521, when his overdraft reached 156,000 ducats, Leo accorded the Bini brothers, Florentine bankers, the right to sell to the highest bidder offices in the Curia, and as surety gave them Paul II’s jewelled mitre, Julius II’s tiara, and ‘the sacred pontifical silver vessels, including those used for the celebration of divine service’.

It was under these conditions that Leo grappled with the immense task bequeathed him by Julius, the building of St Peter’s. When Bramante died in 1514 he placed Raphael in charge and allocated him 60,000 ducats, whereupon Raphael remarked that the basilica would cost a million—as it eventually did. At least 10,000 ducats a year would be required, probably much more in these early stages, and Leo looked around for ways of raising such a sum. His predecessor had issued a bull, Liquet omnibus, granting Christians remission of punishment due to past sins, on condition that they went to confession and contributed according to their means to the fund for building St Peter’s. Living well within his income, Julius had been able to raise sufficient money by publishing the bull only in Italy. Although there were signs that indulgences were abused and resented abroad, Leo decided to extend the bull. He spoke of a basilica ‘which is first among all the churches of the world and, as it were, the fixed home of Christianity’; ‘since the income of the Apostolic Chamber is insufficient to meet the cost of such an incredibly vast work, the help of Christians is urgently needed.’ In the fateful month of December 1514 Pope Leo X appointed commissioners—who, incidentally, were scrupulously honest—to administer the St Peter’s indulgence in Avignon and the surrounding Comtat; also in Cologne, Trier, Salzburg, Bremen and other provinces of Germany.

CHAPTER 4
The Challenge from Germany

IN 1515 Giangiorgio Trissino, a highly cultivated patrician of Vicenza, visited Germany as the Pope’s nuncio and was deeply struck ‘by the horror of huge forests, deep marshes and barren plains. Winds and snow whip that unhappy land; the soil is like iron and encrusted with ice…. A barbarous people shut themselves up in warm houses and laugh at the Arctic blasts, gaming and drinking far into the night.’

Trissino is stating, rather unsympathetically perhaps, the basic truth that Italy and Germany are profoundly different lands. Wittenberg, in central Germany, lies nine degrees north of Rome, and here nature is not a friend but a wolf to be kept at bay. The people of such a region are physically robust, steeled by hard occupations like mining and forestry. They make brave soldiers. It was Germans who inflicted their most serious defeat on Augustus’s legions and, first in tribes and now in innumerable principalities, they had waged war often and bitterly. They were familiar with suffering, took it indeed for granted. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century German art abounds in Pietàs and St Sebastians dripping with blood, teeth bared in agony. But there was genuine piety as well as horror. German artists emphasized the unjust suffering of Christ because, in their harsh world of violence and torture, this allied him with them.

Where Italians suppressed or embellished the dark side of life, Germans fixed attention on it. When depicting the Trinity, Raphael showed Christ standing in triumph, but Dürer placed him agonizing on the Cross. Dürer was the first artist to depict a syphilitic. His portraits of himself and of Oswald Krell reveal men who are disturbed. Their eyes are burning, their hands, one senses, are restless. They are subject to nightmarish dreams such as one which left Dürer ‘trembling all over’. They look inward, finding themselves ‘fools’, experiencing doubts as terrible as that described by Ulrich von Hutten in a youthful poem with the significant title of ‘Nobody’. They find the world not tidily terraced, but craggy and baffling. In Melencolia I Dürer depicted a new archetype of human inadequacy: a winged female figure, hand on chin, brooding darkly amid unsolved problems. But the problems demanded solution, because over this awesome world stood a God even more awesome, severe as their climate, a God who was a Judge. This God was represented in The Last Judgment—a subject much commoner in Germany than in Italy—towering over the damned, who suffer torments terrible as those being inflicted in real life on German witches: whip, thumbscrew, rack and studded chair slowly heated from below.

These people were deeply religious. But they could never feel at one with nature in quite the same way as the Italians. And so their piety took a different direction. John of Wesel in Erfurt and Conrad Summenhardt in Tübingen had tended, often excessively, to depreciate the value of works and to emphasize inwardness, faith in the suffering Christ. Inwardness was fostered by the reading of spiritual books, for the Germans, leading a largely indoor life, read much more than did Italians. They were particularly devoted to the Bible: it is no accident that this was the first considerable work to issue from Gutenberg’s press. The first Bible to appear in the vernacular was also a German publication, and no fewer than fourteen German Bibles appeared before 1522. In his inaugural address at Wittenberg Philip Melanchthon described his joy in the text of Scripture: how its true meaning lights up ‘like the midday sun’, adding ominously, ‘All the countless dry glossaries, concordances, discordances and the like are only hindrances for the Spirit.’

Study of the Bible, especially of the early Church, brought into relief existing evils and intensified a desire for reform. Between 1450 and 1515 Germans held four provincial councils and no less than a hundred diocesan synods in order to try and correct abuses such as simony and appointment of unsuitable bishops, without, however, any noticeable effect. Yet there remained a thirst for reform, for a pure religion like that of the early Christians.

Differences of land and climate, of physiology and psychology, of language and aesthetics, as well as different individual and collective experiences had created if not a radically different soul, at least radically different spiritual needs and forms from the ones obtaining in Italy. This in itself was no bad thing. The one Gospel is recorded in very different ways by the four Evangelists, and Christendom had gained not lost from being polyphonic. But such a situation clearly called for understanding, and this in turn for communication. Now, communication had seldom been worse. Fighting in Lombardy had reduced trans-Alpine travel to a trickle. Of fifty-four cardinals under Julius II and Leo X, only two were Germans, and of these the interests of one were exclusively political. Roman Legates in Germany were merely diplomats, and they seldom spoke German. If German reform plans ever reached Rome, too often they were ignored because the officials concerned had only a sketchy knowledge of actual conditions.

Desire for reform crystallized therefore in a growing antipathy to Rome. Germans disliked the fact that Alexander VI had kept a mistress, that Julius took part in battles, and that Leo attended comedies and banquets. They disliked the Pope’s claim to be heir of the Roman Emperors, and the seizure of Piacenza and Parma, which since the eleventh century had owed allegiance, albeit formal, to the German Emperor. They disliked the Italian domination of the Church which followed on the Popes’ return to Rome. They disliked papal domination of the Fifth Lateran Council, the petty reforms it proposed, and the loopholes therein: a cardinal’s funeral must cost no more than 1500 crowns ‘unless there is just cause’. Above all, they disliked the ‘spiritual’ taxes and dispensations, whereby, they believed, they footed the bill for Leo’s poets and artists, musicians and goldsmiths—all the expensive business of this new Christian humanism. The taxes were constantly increasing—the one on briefs had risen fivefold in sixty years—and on this whole matter several diets during the fifteenth century had gone so far as to break with Rome.

Into this world and sharing many of its values Martin Luther was born on 10 November 1483. He was the son of a peasant who had risen to be a well-off mining operator in Eisleben, a town, incidentally, which lies 770 miles from Rome but only 100 miles from heretical Bohemia. Physically strong, his craggy face marked by high cheekbones and a firm jaw, Luther described himself as ‘rough, boisterous, stormy and altogether warlike, I am born to fight against innumerable monsters and devils.’

The Devil loomed large for Luther and, when he came to write his Greater Catechism, he was to cite the name of the Devil sixty-seven times, compared to sixty-three citations for the Saviour. As a law student he was one day caught in a thunderstorm and almost struck by lightning. This near escape from death impressed him deeply, and he vowed to enter religion. In 1505 he joined the Augustinians, two years later receiving the priesthood.

Luther attended the recently founded university in Wittenberg, a town of 2000 inhabitants, mainly brewers. Here degree requirements were lenient, and Luther took his doctorate in theology in five years instead of the usual twelve. He therefore skipped scholastic niceties and stuck to what he calls ‘the kernel of the grain and the marrow of the bones’, by which he meant Scripture. In 1512 he became Professor of Scripture at Wittenberg.

Luther was a deeply religious man who sought perfection in his chosen life: ‘I would have martyred myself to death with fasting, prayer, reading and other good works.’ But try as he might he could never attain his own ideal of goodness. This puzzled and troubled him deeply, for the whole trend of the age was to emphasize man’s will, his powers of achievement. But always Luther felt his complete unworthiness before God, whom he had been brought up to believe was above all a Judge. ‘We grew pale at the mention of Christ, for he was always represented to us as a severe judge, angry with us.’ ‘When will you do enough,’ Luther asked himself, ‘to win God’s clemency?’ And it became clear that the answer was, Never.

How then could he be saved? As a Professor of Scripture, Luther sought an answer in the New Testament, and as an Augustinian, in the commentaries of the founder of his Order. Now it so happened that a complete edition of St Augustine’s works, in nine volumes, had for the first time become available in 1506. Augustine had started life as a Manichaean, and the Manichaean battle between matter which is bad and the spirit which is good marks nearly all his writings. Moreover, in a fight to the death with the heresy of Pelagius, who denied original sin, Augustine had laid a sometimes excessive emphasis on man’s need for grace, and his incapacity to do good unaided. Both characteristics appealed to something deep in the German character, and notably in Luther’s. To the question, How then could he be saved? Luther found an answer in the 17th verse of the first chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans as interpreted by St Augustine. Not efforts of will, but faith alone could justify man before God, and this faith was not something to be toiled for, not a result of virtus, but a free gift from above, a grace. Grace, moreover, was granted to man irrespective of his merit, and God’s decision to grant or withhold it lay completely beyond the range of human understanding. This discovery comforted Luther, who believed that formerly he had been on the wrong track.

In 1510 Luther visited Rome on business for his Order. ‘I fell on my knees,’ he says, ‘held up my hands to heaven and cried “Hail, holy Rome, sanctified by the holy martyrs and by the blood they shed here.”’ Luther was not a humanist save in so far as he valued sound texts of Scripture and the Fathers, and he took no interest in the Sistine ceiling or the Laocoön. He was annoyed by the speed at which Roman priests said Mass: ‘By the time I reached the Gospel the priest next to me had already ended and was shouting “Come on, finish, hurry up.”’ But this was hardly a scandal to Luther, whose own life had become so hectic by 1516 that he wrote: ‘Rarely do I have time for the prayers of the breviary or for saying Mass.’

What did profoundly shock Luther in Rome was the Renaissance itself. Aristotle’s Ethics was a prime text in Rome and it figures in Raphael’s Stanze; Luther abhorred the book, declaring it ‘grace’s most dangerous enemy’. Italians, particularly since the revival of Platonism around 1460, held the created world to be both good and beautiful. Luther did not find the world either good or beautiful. He was shocked by the way clergy and laity alike had reconciled the spiritual with the physical, the pursuit of salvation with the pursuit of happiness here and now. While remaining spiritual beings directed towards the life beyond, they had completely adjusted themselves to the world below. Hence Luther’s complaint that the Italians were ‘Epicureans’. ‘If, they say, we had to believe the word of God in entirety, we should be the most miserable of men, and could never know a moment’s gaiety.’

Luther returned to Wittenberg in 1511 to resume teaching and his study of St Augustine. Presently one of the great German princes, Albert of Hohenzollern, decided to acquire the archbishopric of Mainz. Since he was only twenty-four and thus well below the prescribed age, and furthermore was already Bishop of Magdeburg and Halberstadt, he applied to Rome for a costly dispensation. In order to help Albert, Pope Leo agreed that the St Peter’s indulgence should be preached in North Germany on special terms. The great banking family of the Fuggers would advance the dispensation payment in return for administering the indulgence, half the proceeds of which would go to Albert, half to building St Peter’s. As part of the ensuing campaign in 1517 a Dominican named Johann Tetzel began preaching near Wittenberg. He was somewhat imprudent in his methods, especially regarding indulgences for the dead, and a famous verse was attributed to him:

As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,

The soul into heaven springs.

Luther watched in dismay as the brewers of Wittenberg trooped across the Elbe to buy Tetzel’s indulgence: those earning 500 gold guilders a year paid six guilders, those earning 200, three, and so on. For one who believed that man was justified by faith alone, the notion of achieving forgiveness by works, still more by work in the form of money, was utterly repugnant. Luther decided to protest. By nature conservative in his attitude to society, he did so in the approved manner, by writing letters describing the abuse to four local bishops. The result proved disappointing. Some scoffed at his scruples, others pointed out that this indulgence was the Pope’s and outside their control.

Luther then drafted 95 theses stating his views on indulgences and other matters, and posted them on the door of the university church: a usual way of inviting discussion and in no sense a gesture of defiance. The first four theses are related and evidently express what was then uppermost in Luther’s mind:

1. Our Lord and Master Christ, in saying ‘Do penance’, intended the whole life of every man to be penance.

2. This word cannot be understood as referring to penance as a sacrament (that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the ministry of priests).

3. This word also does not refer solely to inner penitence; indeed there is no penitence unless it produces various outward mortifications of the flesh.

4. Therefore punishment [of sin] remains as long as the hatred of self (that is, true inward penitence), namely until entering the kingdom of heaven.

The key words in the 95 theses—‘tribulations’, ‘fear’, ‘punishment’, ‘despair’, ‘horror’—would have puzzled an Italian. Indeed, they are conspicuous by their absence from Italian writings of the day. Partly they reflect the national temperament, but to a larger degree they reflect Luther’s own spiritual crisis and the solution to it he had found in St Augustine. Luther makes plain in the 95 theses that what counts in Christianity is inner disposition, not rites and sacraments. In February 1518 he made the point more forcefully still by addressing to Rome a highly critical Resolution concerning the Virtue of Indulgences.

Rome was now directly involved. At this time the city had only one topic of conversation: whether or not Roman citizenship should be conferred on Christophe Longueil, a French resident who had changed his name to Longolius and made stirringly Ciceronian speeches in praise of the city. Longolius had once compared Augustus unfavourably with Charlemagne: Leo thought this youthful indiscretion should be overlooked, but others held that it marked Longolius as an irredeemable barbarian. It is one of the tragedies of history that the large-minded Leo, who knew Germany at first hand from his years of exile, had never studied theology, and was therefore incompetent to treat with Luther, as he did with Longolius. The Luther affair passed to the Master of the Sacred Palace, a highly intransigent Dominican named Sebastiano Prierias, who once stated that ‘anyone who denies that the doctrine of the Roman Church and of the Roman Pontiff is virtually infallible, so that even Holy Scripture draws its force and authority therefrom, is a heretic.’ Shocked by Luther’s Resolution Prierias dashed off a reply, abusing the German roundly, calling him a son of a bitch, and centring his arguments less on Luther’s statements than on the fact that a humble friar had dared to question the teaching of the Pope.

Leo, however, did not leave it at that. He had a friend in the leading Italian philosopher of the day, a man of the same moderate temperament as himself. This was Tommaso de Vio, known as Cajetan, a Dominican who at the time of the Council of Pisa had written a sensible defence of the Papacy, marred, however, by a failure to probe the metaphor underlying his description of the Pope as ‘head of the Church corporate’. Leo instructed Cajetan, who was then in Germany, to hold an interview with Luther.

‘I was received,’ writes Luther, ‘by the most reverend lord cardinal legate both graciously and with almost too much respect, for he is a man in every way different from those extremely harsh bloodhounds who track down monks among us … I immediately asked to be instructed in what matters I had been wrong, since I was not conscious of any errors.’ Cajetan began by pointing to a statement by Luther that the merits of Christ do not constitute the treasure of merits of indulgence; this, he said, contradicted an Extravagante¹ issued by Clement VI (1342–52). He did not expect Luther to know the Extravagante, which was absent from some editions of canon law. But Luther did know it and replied that it did not impress him as being truthful or authoritative, chiefly because ‘it distorts the Holy Scriptures and audaciously twists the words into a meaning which they do not have in their context.’ The Scriptures, he concluded, were in every case to be preferred to the Extravagante, which merely trotted out the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas. Further discussions then took place ‘but in no one point did we even remotely come to any agreement.’

Agreement was precluded by the fact that Luther differed radically from Cajetan on the nature of the Pope’s teaching authority. Luther began to see that there was more than a fortuitous link between Clement VI’s attitude in the Extravagante and the behaviour of Popes in his own lifetime. Both tried to mould God to man’s needs. So Luther’s next move was to criticize the way papal authority was exercised by such Popes as Julius II and Leo X. In a letter to Leo dated 6 April 1520 Concerning Christian Liberty, Luther attacks the Petrine office less as an institution based on canon law than against its ‘excessive’, imperialistic claim to power, and its abandonment of the notion of service to the Church as the community of the faithful. In a passage which shows how sensitive he was to the actual language employed in Rome, Luther writes: ‘Therefore, Leo, my Father, beware of listening to those sirens who make you out to be not simply a man, but partly God—mixtum Deum—so that you can command and require whatever you will. This shall not be, nor will you prevail. You are the servant of servants, and the most wretchedly and dangerously placed man alive.’

Later in the same year Luther rejected the teaching authority of the Pope altogether and, putting himself at the head of the movement which saw in Rome the chief obstacle to reform, appealed to a Council to be summoned by the Emperor Charles V: a new Nicaea presided over by a new Constantine, at which not only clergy but laity too would hammer out a pure religion like that of the early Christians.

In Rome the machinery for dealing with revolt now slipped into action. Luther’s appeal to a Council was rejected on the basis of Pius II and Julius II’s prohibition of any such move. A commission presided over by Cajetan pronounced heretical 41 propositions in Luther’s writings, most of them already condemned by the University of Louvain, a body which Luther himself had named as being impartial. Among the views condemned were Luther’s conception of all-powerful sin (‘In every good work the righteous man sins,’ ‘A good work done very well is a venial sin,’ ‘No one is certain that he is not always sinning mortally, because of the truly hidden vice of pride’), his interpretation of the role of faith, and of the sacraments, and finally his rejection of papal authority. On 2 May Leo examined a draft of the bull Exsurge at his hunting-lodge, and it was then submitted to the sacred college at no less than four consistories; it is noteworthy that the German episcopate was excluded altogether from proceedings against Luther, and this was later to have an adverse effect on Rome. In June 1520 Exsurge was published, condemning the 41 propositions, ordering Luther’s writings destroyed, forbidding him to teach or preach, and threatening him with excommunication if he did not recant within two months. Copies were sent for enforcement to the Emperor and the German princes.

But Rome was already one move behind. In July Luther had published his Letter to the Christian Nobility of Germany in which, drawing on the views of John Huss and the Bohemians, he moved beyond an attack on the papacy to a complete rejection of tradition, in place of which he set up the holy word of Scripture. By taking his stand on Scripture Luther hoped to re-establish the sovereignty of God alone, over against anything the Church had said or might say. In December Luther publicly burned the bull Exsurge. On 3 January 1521 Leo excommunicated Martin Luther: cut him off ‘as a dead branch’.

But Luther was hardly ‘a dead branch’. As a Saxon and a Wittenberg Professor, he belonged to a vigorous community conscious of its independence and protected by the swaggering, moustachioed Frederick, Elector of Saxony, absolute lord in his own domain and the founder of Wittenberg University, whose professors he looked on as his own children. Frederick had no intention of handing Luther over to be burned at the stake, like poor John Huss a century earlier. Intellectually, too, Luther belonged to a flourishing band of scholars, notably Philip Melanchthon, the armourer’s frail son who was the best humanist in Germany, and Ulrich von Hutten, a tough knight errant steeped in Tacitus’s Germania, finding in that book the purity of morals and manliness he ascribed to the German character. And behind Luther stood the men of Germany, disliking and sometimes hating Rome, conscious of their new strength as a people. Roman cardinals might be rich, but they banked with the Fuggers; German mercenaries in Charles VIII’s invasion army had scattered the Italians, thus proving themselves worthy successors of Arminius, the tribal leader who decisively defeated Varus in 9 A.D. The late Emperor, Maximilian, had confided to his sister that one day he intended to add the papal tiara to his iron crown: was it so impossible an ambition?

These were the men who read Luther’s writings, and were stirred by his extremely powerful, scathingly witty style derived from Lucian. As so often happens, their reactions were at variance with the author’s intention, and by sheer weight of numbers they were to drag Luther in directions he did not always want to go. What appealed to the average reader was less the corruption of man than the corruption of Rome: that Babylon where Christian blood was shed with St Paul’s sword, Plato and Aristotle were painted opposite the Blessed Sacrament, and Bembo advised Sadoleto to ‘avoid the Epistles of St Paul, lest his barbarous style should spoil your taste’. In vain did Leo’s representative, Girolamo Aleandro, argue that abuses committed by Rome should not be confused with Catholic truth; as a scholar, he could not see that it is love and hate, not calm reason, that determine most men’s view of truth. In place of the authority of Rome Luther’s followers erected the authority of Scripture interpreted by the individual Christian according to the light of the Holy Spirit. This had a profound appeal at a time when the printed word, so recent an invention, still wore something of a halo. And so the rift widened: Scripture against Church, Grace against Works, Predestination against Free Will, communion service against sacrifice, the priesthood of every Christian against the teaching authority of the Pope.

In the early 1520’s it became evident in Rome that Exsurge had neither silenced Luther nor checked Lutheranism, which was beginning to erect itself into an organized Church, styled Apostolic and declaring the Roman Church heretical. An answer would have to be found, and found quickly: preferably a dogmatic answer to what was primarily a dogmatic challenge. But precisely here Rome found herself ill-prepared. Ever since 1380 when John Wycliffe first challenged traditiones humanae and William of Waterford made the mistake of defending unwritten traditions by arguing from the insufficiency of Scripture, a false antithesis had been set up: Tradition and Scripture, each envisaged separately. This had sufficed to condemn Huss, but not to provide refutation of his arguments. The Vatican had no books defending Tradition, only Raphael’s painted defence of the Real Presence.

In method also Rome found herself at a disadvantage. As Erasmus remarked, Ciceronian Latin was useless for answering heresy, since it did not contain the necessary vocabulary. There was no chair of Scripture in the Sapienza, and in the words of the Augustinian General, ‘Rome, the prince of cities, is the world’s dunce in Biblical studies.’ Sante Pagnine’s translation of the Old Testament into Latin, made in Lucca in 1518, did not find a publisher until 1528, and then only in Lyons. On his return in 1522 even Aleandro, one of Italy’s foremost humanists, sadly and belatedly had to return to school: ‘I have begun to extract from ancient authors passages which condemn the new enemies of the Church. Since the heresiarchs are always objecting that Latin authors are suspect to them, I have taken these passages from Revelation, from authors who cannot be attacked and from the Holy Councils of the early Church.’

It became obvious to the Pope and his advisers that a complete dogmatic answer could be neither quick nor easy. Meanwhile some other course must be found. The first and most obvious was to call a Council, for Luther had said, ‘I know the Church virtually only in Christ, representatively only in the Council.’ Only a Council could issue a decision which all concerned would regard as undoubtedly binding. Why then did none of the Pope’s best advisers with first hand experience of Germany—Cajetan, Campeggio, Aleandro—recommend a Council?

They were, to start with, victims of the false antithesis Papacy-Council, given new life by the recent Council of Pisa. They could not rid themselves of the fear that the rulers of Europe, acting through their bishops, would destroy the Pope’s independence by whittling away his financial and temporal power. That is why the mere rumour of the summons of a Council caused a sudden fall in the price of all saleable offices. Secondly, and perhaps even more important, they realized that Rome was insufficiently prepared to enter the arena against the new, well-trained, well-armed German gladiators, and that tactical defeat before the assembled prelates of Europe might still further rend Christ’s seamless robe. Twenty-five frustrated years were to pass before a Council would meet.

A third course presented itself: so thorough a Reform in Rome that the Lutherans’ catchword would ring hollow. Here there were hopeful signs. As early as 1515, two years before Luther’s 95 theses, a group of Roman priests and laymen had formed the Oratory of Divine Love in order to sanctify themselves by the sacraments and prayer, and so bring a reforming influence on others. Members set special value on humility: Gaetano di Thiene dwells in his letters on his unworthiness to offer Mass, wherein he, ‘a poor worm of earth, mere dust and ashes, passes, as it were, into heaven and the presence of the Blessed Trinity.’ The Oratory soon numbered more than fifty influential Romans, and from it in 1524 were to issue the Theatines, a new Order of regular clergy vowed to stringent poverty.

To members of the Oratory it seemed nothing less than a direct intervention by the Holy Spirit when the conclave held in 1523 to elect a successor to Leo chose in absentia Adrian Dedal of Utrecht, the son of a poor shipwright who had made his way by intellectual brilliance to become tutor to the Emperor and later his viceroy in Spain. ‘His face is long and pale,’ wrote the Venetian envoy of Adrian VI, ‘his body is lean, his hands are snow-white. His whole bearing impresses one with reverence; even his smile has a tinge of seriousness.’ The new Pope arrived in Rome bent on reform. When told that Leo had employed 100 grooms, he made the sign of the cross and said that four would suffice for his needs, but as it was unseemly that he should have fewer than a cardinal, he would appoint twelve. When Cardinal Trivulzio asked for a bishopric to relieve his poverty, Adrian asked, ‘What is your annual income?’ ‘4000 ducats.’ ‘Mine was 3000, yet I lived on it and even saved.’ It was not meant as a boast. ‘All of us, prelates and clergy, have gone astray, and for long there is none that has done good; no, not one.’

Adrian celebrated Mass daily—and this for a Pope was an innovation. His meals, which he ate alone, were Spartan: a dish of veal or beef, sometimes a soup. When the Laocoön was proudly shown him, he observed dryly—and inexactly: ‘They are only the effigies of heathen idols,’ and ordered all the entrances to the Belvedere walled up save one, the key to which he kept himself. Leo’s poets and painters he would not even see, far less employ. All his time he gave to economies and the appointment of holy, hard-working bishops, who might do something to improve the Italian clergy, only two per cent of whom understood their Latin breviary.

But Adrian lacked warmth and a knowledge of the Italian mind. A Venetian applied to him Cicero’s remark on Cato: ‘He acts as though he were living in some republic of Plato’s, not among the dregs of Romulus.’ The ‘dregs’ hated Adrian. Starved of the pomp which filled their pockets and made their eyes brighten, they jeered at the Pope as a barbarian and mocked at the tongue-twisting names of his advisers: Enkevoirt, Dietrich von Heeze, Johann Ingenwinkel. They composed bitter pasquinades:

Caduto è a terra il gran nome romano

a dato in preda al barbero furore

The great name of Rome has tumbled

And become a prey to the furious barbarian

—little knowing that the lines held a tragic prophecy. At every turn the Romans opposed reform, the whole idea of which they ridiculed. As a result Adrian lived a lonely, wretched life, taking stringent precautions against poison. Then, only thirteen months after entering Rome, he fell ill of a kidney disease induced by the climate—it too was hostile. After asking that no more than 25 ducats be spent on his funeral, this would-be reformer left a world he could not reform. While the Romans facetiously gave thanks to his doctor, an epitaph was cut for his tomb: ‘Alas! how much do the efforts [virtus], even of the best of men, depend upon time and opportunity.’

It now remained to be seen whether Adrian’s successor could achieve the reform for which all Christendom waited. Giulio de’ Medici, who took the name Clement VII, was the son of Giuliano de’ Medici, stabbed to death in Florence Cathedral, and a first cousin of Leo X. Blameless in his personal life, the new Pope possessed a long handsome face, cultivated tastes and the Medici intelligence, without, however, the Medici drive. He had been born an orphan and illegitimate, and all his life he remained to an extreme degree timid and vacillating. He seemed to lack a core.

Clement was, however, full of good intentions and decided to cut the ‘spiritual’ taxes so hated abroad. This was less easy than it sounds. The taxes were payment for legal and secretarial work involved in issuing briefs, dispensations and so on, performed by more than 2000 Curia officials who had bought or inherited their jobs; that is, they or their fathers had put up capital on which they were entitled to a 10% return. If Clement reduced taxes, he would reduce the return, and would have to make good the difference from some other source. But there was no other source: in fact, as certain German princes embraced Lutheranism, income fell sharply. But Clement did make one useful discovery. He saw that the remuneration of Curia officials was being confused with what was in effect the Papacy’s public debt and, banker’s nephew that he was, began to clear up the confusion. When he had to raise money in 1526, he did so not with the creation of new offices but by issuing under the name Monte della Fede

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