The Ugly Renaissance (41 page)

The Renaissance had well and truly arrived. Despite—or rather, because of—the years of exile and chaos that had gone before, the reign of Nicholas V marked the beginning of the papacy’s emergence as a powerhouse of artistic patronage. Nicholas had set the tone for all of his successors. Almost without exception, they bought into his vision of a “new Rome” and followed his lead, often on an even more ambitious scale. Determined to glorify the Church and exalt the majesty of the papacy, the popes not only added ever more extensively to the Vatican complex but also continued reshaping the face of Rome. After Aeneas’s death,
Sixtus IV sponsored the construction of the chapel now named in his honor (the Sistine Chapel), oversaw the completion of a new bridge across the Tiber, massively enlarged the Vatican Library, and began a new papal tradition of collecting ancient statuary.
His successor, Innocent VIII, commissioned
Antonio Pollaiuolo to build the
Belvedere villa, while
Alexander VI was to employ nearly every well-known artist of the day in beautifying the papal apartments. Most impressively of all, Sixtus IV’s nephew Julius II employed Michelangelo to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, ordered Bramante to design two huge loggias linking the Belvedere with the
Apostolic Palace, and took up Nicholas V’s great dream of remodeling Saint Peter’s Basilica, a project that all but bankrupted his successor, Leo X.

Whereas in previous years artists had been inclined to view Rome as a cultural backwater that was best avoided, the papacy’s outlook on its return to the Eternal City turned the papal court into a magnet for artistic talent. Seduced by the promise of lavish payments and attracted by the prospect of working alongside some of the leading lights of the day, painters, sculptors, and architects began flocking to Rome in droves in
the hope of picking up commissions that, they hoped, would make their careers. Before long, in fact, popes and cardinals were frantically competing for their services and making increasingly forceful demands in their bid to make the city the jewel in Christendom’s crown. Everyone in the Curia was desperate to have the best artists’ most brilliant works, and they would do anything to guarantee their services. In the midst of completing the Sistine Chapel ceiling, for example, Michelangelo once asked the pope’s permission to go back to Florence for the feast of Saint John (always the highlight of the city’s year) and experienced an encounter that encapsulated the papal court’s infatuation with the arts:

“Well, what about this chapel? When will it be finished?” [asked the pope].

“When I can, Holy Father,” said Michelangelo.

Then the pope struck Michelangelo with a staff he was holding and repeated:

“When I can! When I can! What do you mean? I will soon
make
you finish it.”

However, after Michelangelo had gone back to his house to prepare for the journey to Florence, the pope immediately sent his chamberlain, Cursio, with five hundred crowns to calm him down … and the chamberlain made excuses for his holiness, explaining that such treatment was meant as a favour and a mark of affection. Then Michelangelo, because he understood the pope’s nature and, after all, loved him dearly, laughed it off, seeing that everything redounded to his profit and advantage and that the pope would do anything to keep his friendship.

B
EYOND
B
ELIEF

In the space of a few short years, Rome had been put on the fast track to becoming a dazzling city of culture, packed with churches and palaces that advertised the learning, sophistication, and confidence of a rejuvenated papal court. Walking around the streets of Rome and gazing up at the buildings, frescoes, and altarpieces that were taking shape around him, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini would have felt himself in the presence of a fitting monument to the faith he cherished. Rivaling the artistic wonders of Florence, Milan, and Venice, Rome had finally begun to
radiate a sense of the Church’s worthiness and of the godliness of its servants.

Yet while the new Rome taking shape around Aeneas was intended to display the strength and vigor of the newly rejuvenated Church, the massive growth of artistic patronage at the papal court wasn’t just about faith. Beneath the surface of every fresco and behind the facade of every palace lurked an altogether different side to the papacy’s interest in the arts.

Although Nicholas V’s deathbed statement presented the pope as the spiritual head of the Christian faith, the reality was quite different: the pontiff was also a political leader. For centuries, the papacy had laid claim to sovereignty over huge tracts of land in the middle of the Italian peninsula that were collectively known as the Patrimony of St. Peter (or the Papal States for short) and had long asserted its supremacy over the Holy Roman Emperor himself. During the
Babylonian Captivity and the Schism, these claims had existed only in the realm of theory. Impeded either by a distance of several hundred miles or by the existence of a number of rival claimants, the popes had been unable to actualize their right to govern the Papal States. Now that the wounds of the past had been healed and the papacy was firmly reestablished in Rome, however, things were different. The popes were determined to take up the reins of temporal power once again. No longer “merely” God’s vicegerent on earth, the pontiff became a potentate of immense stature, a ruler whose word was law, and a sovereign lord to whom cities and
signori
owed allegiance. What was more, as the master of one of the largest territorial states in Italy, the pope also became a major player on the European political scene. Determined to protect the borders of the Papal States and maintain the delicate balance of power on which their security depended, the papacy came to be an arbiter of war and peace, a keen practitioner of international diplomacy, and the leader of Italy’s largest armies.

While the damage wrought by the Babylonian Captivity and the Schism had given the popes an acute awareness of the need for spiritual regeneration, the Curia’s return to Rome had also transformed it into a much more “secular” institution. The equal of kings and princes, the papal court became dominated by worldly concerns. At least until the advent of the Reformation, it was not devotional practices and liturgical reform that came uppermost in the minds of popes and cardinals but
taxes, accounts, property rights, diplomacy, military campaigns, and territorial expansion. Though dressed up in terms of conserving the earthly health of the Holy Mother Church, these were matters of hard-nosed politics of the most brutal kind.

This gave a different character to the papal court. Every aspect of life at the Curia was affected. The way popes and cardinals lived, worked, and played shifted to take account of the Church’s temporal aspirations. The priorities, methods, and ambitions of the College of Cardinals lurched radically toward the ways of the world, and the proclivities of the most senior members of the ecclesiastical government drew ever closer to those of their secular counterparts. Indeed, the notoriously porous boundary between the “secular” and the “religious” all but broke down, with individuals and families moving freely between the two, with schemes, plots, and projects feeding from one to the other and back again. Seedy, unpleasant, and altogether un-priestly practices began to dominate the papal court as the papacy’s vision of its role in the world metamorphosed into an almost unrecognizable form.

In turn, this transformed the manner in which the papal court engaged with the arts after its return to Rome. It was not that Nicholas V’s desire to reinvigorate the faith of ordinary believers through art was in any way insincere, or that the churches, frescoes, and altarpieces commissioned in their hundreds were lacking in Christian devotion. But the religious “surface” of papal patronage coexisted with other, darker, and more sinister goals that had grown out of the worldly character of the Renaissance papacy. Just as merchant bankers and condottieri could use religious imagery or devotional bequests to craft an image that responded to the grim realities of their existence, so the papal court employed patronage for purposes that addressed the wholly unchristian objectives that had become part and parcel of curial life.

Despite their appearance, delicate paintings of saintly figures, fine statues of the Virgin Mary, and elegant buildings dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Christ himself were masks for materialistic ambition, rampant self-obsession, endemic corruption, lust, violence, and bloodshed. But just how dark and ugly were the hearts and minds of the men who fueled the “papal Renaissance” only becomes clear when the deep and unpleasant changes wrought by the papacy’s return to Rome are excavated a little more.

C
OURTLY
V
ICES

In taking up the reins of power in the Patrimony of St. Peter once again, the papacy assumed the burdens of government that were familiar to Italy’s kingdoms, city-states, and
signorie
. This was, however, much more than a matter of bureaucracy, administration, and diplomacy. Authority was as much about creating a culture of power as anything else. If the papacy wanted to keep a firm grip on the
Papal States and to deal with its counterparts from a position of strength, it had to project an image of solid rulership that its dependents and rivals could appreciate in their own terms.

A Renaissance state was nothing without courtly life. The court was a meeting place for the powerful, an arena for the resolution of disputes, and the threshing floor of ambitions; but most important, it was the setting for the display of temporal might. Kings, princes,
signori
, and even some communes took care to maintain magnificent courts as a manifestation of their power; and the papal court—comprising both the household of the pope himself and the satellite courts of his cardinals—had to operate just like its secular equivalents, only bigger and better. As courtly theorists such as
Pietro Aretino and
Paolo Cortesi argued, popes and cardinals had to live like lords if they wanted to be taken seriously, and to live like lords, they had to be every bit as magnificent as lords.

Taking up residence in the Eternal City as a new cardinal, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini would have been sucked into the very heart of the rejuvenated papal court. In the corridors of ecclesiastical power, in the reception rooms of the Vatican Palace, and in the palazzi of his colleagues in the Sacred College, he would have been surrounded by grandeur and magnificence.

Everything about the Roman court was enormous—almost overpoweringly so. The Vatican Palace was “
probably the most splendid of any government in Europe,” and the cardinals’ residences were hardly less impressive. Vast suites of reception rooms and great courtyards were essential to awe visiting diplomats, while facades and entrances needed to be both big and fashionably designed. And since no man of power could possibly be seen to eat, sleep, or converse in shabby little hallways, even “private” apartments (which were, naturally, anything
but private) had to be on a grand scale. Every surface shimmered with frescoes and paintings; every niche revealed ancient statues or carvings in the latest style; every window was expertly set in the most elegant of frames.

The court buzzed with the hum of hordes of people. It was not just that the Curia was continually playing host to foreign potentates. The courtly life demanded that a palace throng with life and that its owner be at the center of a never-ending whirl of activity. The households of every one of its members were packed with dependents, as befitted the lifestyle of any great prince of the age.
Shortly after the death of Callixtus III, the pontiff’s household comprised no fewer than 150 “lords” and “ministers,” together with 80 ancillary servants, whose activities were regulated with almost military precision.
By the same token, no self-respecting cardinal would make do without a
famiglia
comprising at least 100–120 attendants and hangers-on, a sizable number of whom would ride out with him whenever he ventured forth into the city. If this weren’t enough, it was also expected that each cardinal would throw his house open to all and sundry in a conspicuous display of munificence. As a sixteenth-century papal bull put it, “
The dwelling of a cardinal should be an open house, a harbor and a refuge especially for upright and learned men, and for poor nobles and honest persons.” At the upper end of the scale, dozens of petitioners seeking grants, benefices, or favors flocked through the doors of his palace each day from morning to night, in the hope that the great man would put in a good word or welcome them into his household.
But at the lower end of the scale, there were crowds of poor, down-at-heel men and women gathered around the gates, begging for food or money, and a good cardinal had to provide for as many as possible.

Perhaps most impressive of all was the scale of the entertainments that the papal court laid on. The palace was ultimately a place of bacchanalian revelry. The
Belvedere Courtyard in the Vatican Palace played host to enormous tournaments and bullfights throughout the Renaissance, the papal gardens housed great collections of exotic animals (including Hanno, the white elephant), and glamorously staged plays were a regular occurrence. More dramatically, popes and cardinals were all but obliged to hold bewilderingly regular banquets of colossal richness. There were dozens of rich courses, countless barrels
of the finest wines, scores of musicians, and every opportunity for making merry until dawn. In June 1473, for example,
Cardinal Pietro Riario held a vast banquet with more than forty different dishes, including (inexplicably) gilded bread and a roast bear.

Magnificent as it all may have been, however, the cultivation of courtly grandeur came at a price. However much the Curia tried to justify its opulent lifestyle by appealing to the respect and honor due to the Chair of Saint Peter, it simply wasn’t possible to indulge the splendor of courtly life without also falling prey to the vices of secular courts. In Rome, the moral standards of the Curia degenerated at the same rate as the grandeur of the papacy increased.