The Ugly Renaissance (45 page)

But the Donation of Constantine was too useful for the forgery to be acknowledged openly. Dismissing Valla’s treatise and overlooking
Aeneas’s own work on the subject, Renaissance popes continued to behave as if the document were completely genuine, and even if papal bulls largely ceased to refer to it after the pontificate of Nicholas V, the papacy was relentless in its attempts to provide visual affirmations of the Donation’s veracity. Art could give life to the claims embodied in the fraudulent text in a way that legal and philological arguments simply could not.

The most dramatic example is found in
the so-called Sala di Costantino in the private apartments of the
Apostolic Palace. Commissioned from
Raphael’s workshop by
Pope Julius II, the frescoes in this chamber (the largest of those constructed) were intended to provide a very clear indication that—despite being a forgery—the Donation of Constantine remained the basis of papal policy. In the hands of the artists
Giulio Romano,
Raffaellino del Colle, and
Gianfrancesco Penni, the story of Constantine’s life became a celebration of the rightful supremacy of the Church in temporal matters, and especially in Italy. After Constantine’s vision of the cross and subsequent victory at the
Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the emperor’s baptism and supposed donation of the Empire are depicted in two massive and dramatic scenes. Although some of the figures are attired in historically accurate costumes, Pope Sylvester and his clerical attendants are all painted in early-sixteenth-century vestments, as if to underscore the legal continuity linking the fourth-century pontiff and Julius II.

The message was pointedly emphasized in another room in the new papal apartments, the Stanza d’Eliodoro. Painted by Raphael himself, the fresco cycle in this room extends the sense of the Donation of Constantine by illustrating the virtues and strength of the temporal power of the papacy through other historical and pseudo-historical episodes. In the
Expulsion of Heliodorus
and the
Repulse of Attila
, Julius II and Leo X are respectively cast as the enemies of godless tyrants and the protectors of Rome, while the
Mass at Bolsena
shows the second della Rovere pontiff witnessing a thirteenth-century miracle that was thought to evidence the supreme truth of the faith defended by the papacy. The final fresco—the
Deliverance of Saint Peter
—tops everything off by showing the “prince of the apostles” freed from prison by a merciful angel, an illustration of “
the futility of the force used against the first Vicar of Christ.”

Living by the Sword

However impressive their territorial claims may have been, the popes still had to back up their pretensions with something a little more tangible. There were dangers everywhere. The
Papal States were threatened on all sides by powerful and aggressive states, and the popes were continually afraid of Neapolitan or French invasions; the Church’s vassals in central Italy—cities and
signori
alike—were so troublesome and restive that their loyalty could never be counted upon; and the peninsula was full of avaricious condottieri like
Jacopo Piccinino who were always on the lookout for an opportunity to ravage or seize the papacy’s possessions. If the popes were going to continue enjoying—and abusing—the Patrimony of St. Peter, they had to do something to maintain their control.

Diplomacy offered one solution. Recognizing that a stable balance of power represented the best (and most economical) means of protecting the Papal States, the popes initially sought to achieve the security they desired by acting as peacemakers.
Perhaps motivated by a vestigial sense of Christian duty, Nicholas V did his utmost to broker a stable and lasting peace among the warring states of Italy, and dispatched the young Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini to calm tempers in Milan and Naples on a number of occasions. The resulting
Peace of Lodi, agreed in the spring of 1454, was something of a triumph. Not only did it bring an end to the long and violent wars in Lombardy that had worried so many of Nicholas’s predecessors, but it also seemed to offer hope that the Patrimony of St. Peter would remain secure for the foreseeable future.

The papacy’s commitment to peace was, however, every bit as cynical as its use of the
Donation of Constantine. The Peace of Lodi was only valuable insofar as it served the popes’ interests, and even while the fragile truce held, Nicholas and his successors gladly donned armor to make sure the cash kept flowing from the Papal States. It was not merely that pontiffs had to maintain an army to fend off attacks from condottieri,
as when Callixtus III sent
Giovanni Ventimiglia to repel an invasion by Jacopo Piccinino. The popes were quite prepared to treat any hint of restiveness among their own subjects with the utmost brutality. Mercenary generals were hired with alarming regularity, and cardinals themselves—many of whom had inherited the martial interests of their noble forebears—began to take the field.
Pius II sent
his own nephew, Cardinal Niccolò Forteguerri, to lead the papal forces alongside Federico da Montefeltro against
Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the papal vicar of Rimini, and the campaign appears to have been fearfully savage. Continuing in the same vein,
Sixtus IV ordered the rebellious town of Spoleto to be sacked as a brutal warning to any other cities that might think about breaking free from their papal overlords.

But as they strengthened their position in the Papal States, the popes inadvertently left themselves vulnerable to a more insidious form of violence. Destabilizing alliances began to form behind the scenes. Increasingly on the receiving end of papal brutality,
signori
from the Papal States began conspiring with those farther afield whom Rome’s bellicosity had begun to alarm. Plots abounded, and even so well regarded a pontiff as Pius II was not immune from danger. Having quarreled with the pontiff over the lordship of Vico,
Everso degli Anguillara plotted with the condottiere
Jacopo Piccinino and the Florentine merchant
Piero de’ Pazzi to assassinate Pius in 1461. Although it ultimately came to nothing, Piccinino’s chancellor claimed he had discovered “
a poison such that if a very little were rubbed on the pope’s chair, it would kill him when he sat down.”

Despite being bound by the terms of the Peace, the popes had to respond in kind. They became past masters in the art of conspiracy and had no hesitation in plotting coups and assassinations wherever they felt it might serve their interests. Although Pius II seems to have been comparatively restrained in this regard, Sixtus IV threw himself into plotting with unaccustomed zeal.
Acting as a lightning rod for opposition to the Medici, Sixtus was ultimately behind the brutal
Pazzi conspiracy in 1478.

After purchasing the border city of
Imola and appointing his nephew
Girolamo Riario as its new governor, Sixtus began scheming to remove the Medici from power in Florence with the Pazzi family, who had lent him the money to buy Imola, and Francesco Salviati, whom he had made archbishop of Pisa and who came from a family of papal bankers. Sixtus also secretly secured the backing of Federico da Montefeltro, who promised to contribute six hundred soldiers to the plot. Although Sixtus took care to distance himself from the details, he knew the Medici could never be ousted except by murderous means. Set into motion on April 26, the plan was devilishly simple. It began with death. In the middle of High Mass in the Duomo,
Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bernardo
Bandi stabbed Giuliano de’ Medici to death in front of hundreds of worshippers. They had intended to kill his brother, Lorenzo, too, but only succeeded in wounding him. Meanwhile, Francesco Salviati and his family were massing on the Palazzo Vecchio in the hope of seizing the heart of Florence’s government and establishing a new regime at knifepoint. It was, in fact, only by the narrowest of margins—thanks to some swift action by Lorenzo de’ Medici and his associates—that the plot failed. Even though Jacopo de’ Pazzi was thrown from a window and Francesco Salviati was hanged from the walls of the Palazzo Vecchio, Sixtus and his successors were not deterred.

After the collapse of the
Peace of Lodi, the papacy hurled itself into a series of relentless military campaigns that formed a part of what are now known as the Italian Wars, and that ultimately led the popes to become the greatest source of instability in peninsular affairs.
Kicking off more than sixty years of warfare,
Alexander VI allied with Naples against the armies of
Milan and France (whose king, Charles VIII, wished to claim the
kingdom of Naples for himself) and—through cataclysmic mismanagement—plunged the
Papal States into near anarchy. Only a few years later, the aggressively warlike Julius II set his eyes on conquering
Venice’s possessions in the Romagna and agreed a pact with the Holy Roman Emperor, the king of France, and the king of Naples. The bloody Battle of
Agnadello (1509) was a triumph for papal ambitions but only complicated the situation further and brought Julius into conflict with France, alongside Venice, his erstwhile enemy, a largely unnecessary development that was excoriated by
Desiderius Erasmus in his satirical dialogue
Julius exclusus de caelis
(Julius excluded from heaven). Despite the hideous complexity of the conflict, Julius’s Medici successors Leo X and Clement VII took up the baton with remarkable energy, broadening the scope of the Italian Wars and generating even more bloodshed, albeit with less military skill than earlier popes. Indeed, so terrible did things become that in 1527 the
Holy Roman Emperor Charles V felt compelled to sack Rome itself and to imprison the terrified Clement.

Inflamed by the swirling confusion of almost constant military campaigns, the ambitions of the popes inclined them ever more strongly toward underhanded conspiracies. None, however, was fonder of nefarious schemes than Alexander VI, whom Machiavelli described in terms that were harsh even by his standards. In
The Prince
, he contended that the pontiff

never did anything, or thought of anything, other than deceiving men; and he always found victims for his deceptions. There never was a man capable of such convincing asseverations, or so ready to swear to the truth of something, who would honour his word less. None the less his deceptions always had the result he intended, because he was a past master in the art.

Indeed,
Machiavelli observed that Alexander only managed to add anything to the papacy’s temporal power by ruining the descendants of those whom the Church had previously supported. It was, however, for his supposed mastery of the dark arts of poisoning and assassination that Alexander VI was most infamous. Although it is difficult to come by any conclusive proof, the pope’s final days provide perhaps the strongest testimony to his reputed fondness for such methods. On August 10, 1503, Alexander VI and
Cesare Borgia attended a sumptuous luncheon given by the fabulously wealthy
Cardinal Adriano Castellesi da Corneto. The cardinal had, however, heard a rumor that the pope was planning to have him killed using a poisoned jam, and to seize his money and possessions. Attempting to forestall the
papal plot, Castellesi bribed the man who had been paid to administer the poison to give the deadly jam to Alexander and Cesare instead. Within two days, the pope was found to be mortally ill, and Cesare, too, fell sick. But something had gone horribly wrong. While Alexander was fighting for his life (he eventually died on August 18), Castellesi discovered he had inadvertently ingested some of the poison as well and suffered grievously for many days.

From the moment of its return to Rome, therefore, the papacy had become a fundamentally militaristic institution and had found itself obliged to indulge in the conspiracies and bloodshed that were an integral part of Renaissance warfare. But while this reflected a decidedly unchristian dimension to the Renaissance papacy, the popes displayed a remarkable absence of shame. If anything, they actually showed a certain pride in their violent ways. Just as they were willing to use patronage to endow the fraudulent
Donation of Constantine with a veneer of respectability, so they used the visual arts to celebrate, glorify, and legitimate their military and conspiratorial excesses.

The pattern was set at an early stage. In the frescoes commemorating the life of Pius II in the Piccolomini Library in Siena, for example,
Pinturicchio devoted an entire scene to showing Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini
urging
Pope Callixtus III to muster his armies for war. Similarly,
Sixtus IV—who seems to have shown no desire whatsoever to atone either for his aggression or for his cultivation of violent conspiracies—began a papal trend for linking pontifical authority with the military achievements of the Roman emperors by commissioning commemorative medals conceived in imitation of ancient coins.

During the reign of Julius II, the exaltation of militarism and violence began to reach its zenith. Reveling in his reputation as the warrior pope, Julius never missed an opportunity to have himself portrayed as something of a soldierly superman. Vasari relates that once, when Michelangelo was completing a clay statue of the pope intended for display in Bologna, the two men struck up a conversation that revealed the true character of the pontiff’s self-image:

When [Julius] saw the right hand raised in an imperious gesture, he asked whether it was meant to be giving a blessing or a curse. Michelangelo replied that the figure was admonishing the people of Bologna to behave sensibly. Then he asked the pope whether he should place a book in the left hand, and to this his holiness replied: “Put a sword there. I know nothing about reading.”

The same sense of pride in all things military was evident in Julius’s efforts to use art to draw visual parallels between his pontificate and the rule of Julius Caesar. Following the lead of his kinsman Sixtus IV,
Julius commissioned Giancristoforo Romano and
Cristoforo Caradosso to cast medals that explicitly identified him not only with the building of Saint Peter’s Basilica, but also with the construction of fortifications at Civitavecchia and the “protection” of Church lands in central Italy.