The Ugly Renaissance (40 page)

Even had it been possible for them to free themselves from the domination of the French crown and resolve their differences with the Empire, Rome was simply too dangerous for the popes to contemplate leaving their “Babylonian Captivity” in Avignon.

After more than six decades in exile, however,
Pope Gregory XI at last decided to return the
Curia to Rome in 1376. But this only made things worse. After Gregory’s death in 1378, the College of Cardinals was under pressure to elect an Italian successor. Fearing the anger of the mob that had gathered outside the Vatican and unable to agree on a candidate drawn from their own ranks, they chose an obscure Neapolitan archbishop as
Pope Urban VI. A quiet, ascetic man, he seemed an ideal choice. But Urban turned out to suffer from a dangerously crazy persecution complex. Driven by an almost pathological hatred, he accused the cardinals who had elected him of corruption, moral degeneracy, and treachery. Six of them were locked up in the dungeons of Nocera, where they were tortured mercilessly. Urban even developed a fondness for sitting outside the cells so that he could listen to their screams of agony as he read his breviary.

The surviving cardinals had had enough. Unable to tolerate Urban’s behavior any longer, they left for Avignon, electing a rival pope as they went.
Urban had split the Church in two. It would remain bitterly divided for the next forty years.

Aeneas was brought up as a member of a Church consumed by chaos and disorder. With two (and, for a brief time, even three) popes vying for supremacy, Christendom as a whole seemed to be at war with itself. With popes and antipopes competing for control of the Church, all of Europe divided into different “obediences,” each owing its allegiance
to a different pontiff. Each side stubbornly defended its own legitimacy, and no one was prepared to back down.

What was to become known as the Great Schism was ended only by a series of general councils of the Church. But even this caused massive problems. In the wake of the Schism, a group of churchmen known as conciliarists had come to believe that it was simply too dangerous to give the pope too much power. Instead, they wanted a kind of ecclesiastical parliament, convened at regular intervals, to have the final say in matters of great importance. The problem was that this was the exact opposite of what the popes wanted. After the Schism had been healed in 1417, Martin V and his successors wanted to take up the reins of power without any interference, least of all from a council filled with rustic clerics from all over Europe. Mutual loathing between the two camps threw the papacy into yet another bout of internecine warfare.

The implications for the cultural life of the papal court were significant. It would, of course, be wrong to think that the papacy existed in a cultural vacuum during the years of exile and chaos between the Babylonian Captivity and the ascendancy of conciliarism. The popes were not insensitive to the radical changes occurring in early Renaissance art and thought. The papal court continued to attract prominent humanists eager for employment and preferment, and a number of Italian artists also found a place in the pontifical household.
Petrarch, for example, spent the greater part of his life in or around Avignon and received several lucrative benefices, while, later,
Leonardo Bruni served as a papal secretary for almost ten continuous years between 1405 and 1415. So, too,
Simone Martini was an important presence in Avignon, and
artists such as
Matteo Giovanetti gave the flamboyant frescoes of the papal palace a distinctly “Italian” feel.

The papal court was nevertheless unable to exert anything more than a minimal and indirect impact on art in Italy at the time. It had neither the resources nor the inclination to engage in the sort of patronage practiced by merchant bankers and
signori
. Costly wars, cash-flow problems, exile, and division had left the papacy incapable of spending large sums of money beautifying churches or palaces that were either too distant to visit or in the hands of rival claimants.

Rome, in particular, was allowed to fall into disrepair. By the third decade of the fifteenth century—at which point the conciliar movement
seemed to be enjoying its greatest triumphs—the city was in a pitiable condition, and humanistically minded visitors were horrified by the neglect they observed. The Florentine
Cristoforo
Landino pictured the ghost of Augustus weeping at the sight of the city he had built sunk to the level of a cesspit. His compatriot
Vespasiano da Bisticci was horrified to see that the Forum had been given over to pasturing cows, and that the great monuments of the past were crumbling into unrecognizable ruins. Even those buildings that were central to the identity of the medieval papacy had degenerated. During this period, the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran—the pope’s official seat in Rome—burned down twice (in 1307 and 1361) and was allowed to fall into a state of complete disrepair for the first time since antiquity.
Far from seeing the city as a rival to Florence, Milan, or Venice, the diarist
Stefano Infessura saw Rome as a hotbed of theft and murder in which the arts had long since decayed.

O
UT OF THE
W
ILDERNESS

Although the papal court had spent more than a century in the cultural wilderness, things were about to change by the time Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini began to make his mark as one of the Church’s rising stars.

Before even taking holy orders, Aeneas had first made a name for himself as one of the leading conciliar theorists at the Council of Basel. But despite these inauspicious beginnings, his youthful opposition to papal authority was greatly outweighed by the obvious value of his literary talents. Before long, he was drawn inextricably into the papacy’s orbit. After a brief period in the service of
Pope Eugenius IV, he saw his fortunes take a turn for the better with the election of his old friend Tommaso Parentucelli da Sarzana as
Pope Nicholas V in 1447. Appointed bishop of Trieste in the same year, Aeneas was transferred to the diocese of Siena in 1451 and entrusted with no end of important missions. He was given a cardinal’s hat in 1456.

Aeneas’s rapid ascent up the ecclesiastical ladder coincided with the reinvigoration of the papal court. In political, geographical, and financial terms, the papacy was finally ascending to a position of greater stability and strength. Despite some lingering difficulties, Eugenius IV had succeeded in stamping out the remaining vestiges of the conciliar movement, and the pope was at last reestablished as the unchallenged
head of the Church. This success had allowed Eugenius to restore the
Curia to Rome in 1445, and the fact that the papacy was once again resident in the Eternal City allowed the pontiffs to make good some of the damage that had been done to the nuts and bolts of papal governance. Unhindered by the disputes and divisions of the past and firmly established in Rome, Nicholas V and his successors were able to take active control of their lands in central Italy, and could set the recently refined papal bureaucracy to the task of regularizing papal incomes for the first time since 1308.

As he spent more and more time in Rome as a result of his rising status, Aeneas would have noted that these shifts in the papacy’s condition were having a profound effect on the Curia’s relationship both with the urban environment and with the arts. Rome was, in fact, a city in the grip of transformation. Well-known for “
his learning and intellectual gifts,” Nicholas V was acutely conscious that the years of chaos and exile had badly damaged the Church’s reputation and might even have dented the piety of ordinary believers. Although the end of the Schism and the collapse of conciliarism had left the papacy in a stronger position than for almost a century and a half, it was clear that if the Church was to make up for the damage that had been done, something more would be required. As it stood, the pitiable state of early-fifteenth-century Rome was hardly well suited to restoring public confidence in the faith. The narrow, dirty streets and tumbledown churches seemed a painful reminder of the bitter rivalries and ungodly squabbles that had marred the Church in the past. They seemed to radiate a sense of dejection and defeat. All that had to change. As the seat of the papacy and the epicenter of the Catholic world, Rome, Nicholas believed, should be a glittering emblem of everything the universal Church stood for, capable of instilling a fervent belief in the tenets of the Christian religion and a powerful respect for the Holy See. As he was reputed to have said on his deathbed,

Only the learned who have studied the origin and development of the authority of the Roman Church can really understand its greatness. Thus, to create solid and stable convictions in the minds of the uncultured masses, there must be something which appeals to the eye; a popular faith, sustained only on doctrines, will never be anything but feeble and vacillating. But if the authority
of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God himself, belief would grow and strengthen from one generation to another, and all the world would accept and revere it. Noble edifices combining taste and beauty with imposing proportions would immensely conduce to the exaltation of the chair of St. Peter.

The truth of Christian teaching and the goodness of Christ’s earthly vicar were to be encapsulated in beauty. Literature, music, and, above all, painting, sculpture, and architecture were to be visible illustrations of all that was meritorious about the Church and its head. The papacy’s newfound wealth was to be invested in the patronage of the arts.

Some tentative steps in the right direction had already been taken by Nicholas’s predecessors. In 1427,
Gentile da Fabriano and
Pisanello had been commissioned to adorn the nave of Saint John Lateran with scenes depicting the life of Saint John the Baptist, and in the following year
Masaccio and
Masolino completed an altarpiece for Santa Maria Maggiore for the family of
Pope Martin V. At around the same time,
Cardinal Giordano Orsini had become the focal point for a circle of humanists whose members included
Lorenzo Valla,
Leonardo Bruni, and Poggio Bracciolini, and had built an indoor theater (the first of its kind) in his palace decorated with frescoes of famous men by Masolino and
Paolo Uccello. A little later, Eugenius IV even contracted
Filarete to cast a set of new bronze doors for Saint Peter’s Basilica. But while this was all very well in its way, it had been very piecemeal and uncertain. Something much more dramatic was needed, and now that the papacy could draw on the resources of the Papal States, it could set its sights a little higher.

Nicholas set about transforming the crumbling ruins of Rome into towering monuments of papal splendor. The epicenter of the Christian world was to be turned into a capital worthy of its vision of Christ the King himself. Taking up residence on the Vatican hill, he completely remodeled the
Apostolic Palace. A vast new wing was added to the old, medieval structure to accommodate the rapidly expanding papal household and to provide a suitably grand set of apartments in which to receive ambassadors and potentates. A massive new tower (the remains of which are still standing) was added just east of the papal apartments.
Fra Angelico—widely renowned as both a brilliant artist and a devout priest—was summoned from Florence to decorate the pope’s private chapel with a magnificent cycle of frescoes depicting the lives of Saints Stephen and Lawrence.
The basis of the Vatican Library was laid down. And, perhaps most important, the architect
Bernardo Rossellino was commissioned to draw up plans for the reconstruction of Saint Peter’s Basilica.

But Nicholas’s ambitions extended well beyond the Vatican. He aimed at nothing less than the wholesale renovation of the entire city.
Although Aeneas noted that he began more projects than he lived to see completed, Vasari rightly observed that he was positively “
turning the city upside down with all his building.” The ancient Acqua Virgine aqueduct was restored to its original glory, bringing much-needed freshwater into the heart of the city and running out into a beautiful new basin in the Piazza dei Crociferi designed by Nicholas’s principal architectural adviser,
Leon Battista Alberti.
So, too, the Borgo, running adjacent to the Vatican, was earmarked for massive renovation. Everywhere Aeneas turned, tumbledown buildings were being demolished, and fresh, imposing structures were springing up under papal patronage.

This new flurry of artistic activity was not limited to the pope himself. Where Nicholas led, his cardinals followed. As
Paolo Cortesi later argued in his
De cardinalatu
, those whose function it was to serve as Christ’s standard-bearers had an obligation to be magnificent.
As princes of the Church, they were expected to shine like stars in the ecclesiastical sky, mimicking the sun-like splendor of the papacy and adding luster to the culture of the Eternal City. A palace was, of course, essential. Many cardinals from older curial families—like the Colonna and the Orsini—or from established ruling dynasties already had at least one spacious palace in the center of Rome and gladly threw themselves into embellishing their already palatial homes with the latest artistic fashions. But even newer cardinals, like Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, were compelled to rent, borrow, or build a property commensurate with their status and to decorate it in a fashion that would inspire a suitable degree of awe and respect. Huge, imposing palaces began to spring up all over the city, with each cardinal doing his best to outdo the others in taste and grandeur. Already, Cardinal Pietro Barbo—who would later rise to the papacy as Paul II, and who was the nephew of Eugenius
IV—had enlarged and enhanced the palazzo that bears his name, possibly employing Alberti for the task. Within forty years of Nicholas V’s election, dozens more would follow:
Cardinal Raffaele Riario would commence the construction of what is today known as the Palazzo della Cancelleria—often said to be the first “true” Renaissance palace—Cardinal Adriano Castellesi da Corneto would commission
Andrea Bregno to design the imposing Palazzo Torlonia, and
Cardinal Domenico della Rovere would start work on a huge palazzo close to the Vatican itself. Every one was stacked full of classical statuary and, more important, the very latest in Renaissance art. Artists were summoned from every corner of Italy to serve cardinals hungry for their work.