R. A. Scotti Read online
BASILICA
ALSO BY R. A. SCOTTI
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R. A. SCOTTI
BASILICA
The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St. Peter’s
VIKING
VIKING
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First published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Rita A. Scotti, 2006
All rights reserved
Illustration credits appears at the end of this book.
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ISBN: 978-1-1011-5781-7
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CONTENTS
Building the Basilica: Time Line
Visual Glossaries
Author’s Note
PART I. THE CHRISTIAN CAESAR 1503–1513
1. The First Stone, April 1506
2. The First St. Peter’s
3. Il Terribilis
4. A Trojan Horse
5. A Surprise Winner
6. Imperial Dimensions
7. Vaulting Ambition
8. Onward Christian Soldiers
9. A Christian Imperium
10. A Viper’s Nest
11. The Death of Julius
PART II.THE DEPLORABLE MEDICI POPES 1513–1534
12. The First Medici Prince
13. An Empty Stage
14. A Roman Candle
15. The Revenge of the Sangallos
16. Salvation for Sale
17. Sweet Revenge
18. A Brief Moment of Truth
19. Medici Redux
PART III. THE MICHELANGLELO IMPERATIVE 1546–1626
20. A Violent Awakening
21. Julius’s Folly
22. Motu Proprio
23. An Immovable Object
24. The Swineherd Who Built Rome
25. Raising the Dome
26. A New Century
27. The Knaves of St. Peter’s
28. 1,300 Years Later
PART IV. BERNINI’S GRAND ILLUSIONS 1623–1667
29. The Romance of the Baroque
30. Full Circle
Epilogue
Appendix I: The Popes from Nicholas V to Alexander VII
Appendix II: Statistics
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
If they were great enough to invent such legends, we at least should be great enough to believe them.
—Goethe
BUILDING THE BASILICA
Basilica of Constantine
When Nicholas V (1447–1455) returned the papacy to Rome after Avignon, he made the Vatican the permanent seat of the Church for the first time and, soon after, he began to rebuild the hallowed, old basilica of St. Peter, erected by Constantine in A.D. 326. After Nicholas died, the project languished until the new century, when Julius II was consecrated pope. During the interim years, Columbus discovered a New World, Lorenzo de’ Medici died in Florence, Michelangelo, Raphael, Magellan, Copernicus, and Martin Luther were born, and Leonardo painted The Last Supper.
Basilica of Julius
(For a complete list of the popes from Nicholas V to Alexander VII, see the appendix.)
VISUAL GLOSSARIES
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I first saw St. Peter’s Basilica on a scorching late September day of my first week in Rome. I was nineteen and spending a year in Italy. An Italian cousin picked me up in the morning in a green-and-black Roman cab and we rode out to the beach at Ostia, where, in my one-piece American bathing suit, I appeared ludicrously overdressed.
I was living at CIVIS, an international house for students, and I had to be back by three o’clock at the latest. My group had a papal audience at four. I couldn’t miss it, not only because no one stands up the pope but also because he and my father had been friends for years. They had met when my father was studying medicine at the University of Rome and Paul VI, then the young Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, was chaplain of an anti-Fascist student group. In his pre-pontiff days, he would visit us whenever church business brought him to the States. Somewhere I still have the photograph of his cat, taken on the balcony of his Vatican apartment, that he sent to me when I was nine or ten. He had to give the cat away when he was elected pope, and I had written to say how sad it was that the pope could not keep a pet.
On that September day, the sun and the wine at lunch and the salty Mediterranean air made time irrelevant. When I finally tore into CIVIS sunburned and sticky, it was well after three, and the group had left without me. CIVIS is a couple of miles north of the Vatican on the same side of the Tiber River, near Ponte Milvio, the bridge where Constantine, leading his army into the imperial city in A.D. 312, saw a cross in the sky and the words In hoc signo vinces—“By this sign you will conquer.”
Constantine was a young general advancing on Rome to challenge Maxentius, the foremost contender to succeed the emperor Diocletian. With Christ so obviously on his side, Constantine defeated his rival easily and was crowned emperor. He mended his pagan ways and soon after built the first basilica of St. Peter.
Nothing happens quickly in Rome, but over the course of more than sixteen hundred years, a village grew up around Ponte Milvio. By the time I arrived, the old bridge still spanned the Tiber, but the road linking the village to the city proper had become a wide avenue with a bowling alley, a soccer stadium, and a half-mile stretch where prostitutes were allowed to solicit openly. (Only the bridge and the soccer stadium were mentioned in my guidebook.)
At three forty-five, I was standing at the bus stop just beyond the ancient bridge, in black dress, black heels, and black lace mantilla, prescribed attire fo
r a papal audience but notably conspicuous for an average afternoon. The only vehicle in sight was a vintage pickup truck, one of those uniquely Italian three-wheeled contraptions. It appeared as ancient as the city as it hiccupped toward me. I stepped off the curb and waved. An immense workman with a very shiny, very black mustache sprouting beneath wide nostrils filled the cab. My father had warned me about Italian men. Being one himself, he knew the subject. But I was going to see the Holy Father—what could happen?—and the truck was going my way. Before the driver could protest, I edged in beside him. “Il Papa,” I said in my rudimentary Italian. “Vaticano! Subito, per favore!”
St. Peter’s should be hard to miss, but as we putted along, I strained in vain for a glimpse of the Basilica. As I was trying to orient myself, the truck lurched to a stop. “Ecco!” The driver pointed. Directly ahead of us, a line of stone columns stretched horizontally in both directions as far as the eye could see. Too flustered to recognize what they were, I began again. “Il Papa…” By then, it was about two minutes to four, and I must have sounded frantic, because the driver, gesticulating broadly, shouted, “Si, San Pietro in Vaticano. Eccolo!”
“Ma, scusi,” I ventured tentatively. “Eccolo,” he shouted louder, flailing his arms. “Pazza Americana!” His words chased me from the cab and trailed after me—“St. Peter’s. Right there! Crazy American!” And so I entered the line of stone columns—Bernini’s illusory colonnade. It is the first of the many illusions that compose St. Peter’s.
Most visitors approach from Via della Conciliazione, the ostentatious avenue built by Mussolini to appease the papacy and trumpet the grandeur of the Church of Rome. Because I approached from the side, the colonnade concealed the Basilica until the precise moment when I stepped through the Doric columns into the sublime surprise of St. Peter’s Square. No photograph, film, or book of art treasures had prepared me for the physical experience of that first encounter. Twin fountains sprayed into the vastness of the piazza. Between them, the obelisk brought by the emperor Caligula from Heliopolis ascended into heaven like a pagan convert. Ahead, spreading horizontally across the piazza and rising to the crescendo of the dome, appeared the first church of Christendom.
St. Peter’s dominates the landscape of Rome. Its cold stones and immense size should make the human scale inconsequential. Yet coming upon it from any angle—seen at dusk from the Pincio when the dome glows in the sunset, at dawn as a pale globe on the city skyline, or even from the cab of a sputtering three-wheeled truck—the pilgrim or the prodigal is overwhelmed with a feeling of coming home. This is its magnificence and its mystery.
Both a brilliant failure and an extraordinary feat of architecture and engineering, the Basilica of St. Peter was the most monumental undertaking of the High Renaissance, and the story of its construction is as convoluted and controversial as the Church it serves. It is a grand adventure. A clash of titans in cassocks and artists’ smocks. A sprawling saga of glorious imagination, petty jealousy, magnanimous collaborations, and incalculable cost. Begun as a symbol of Christian unity, the Basilica would fracture the Church and ignite the Protestant Reformation.
The landmarks of a city reveal its architects. From Windsor to Buckingham, London landmarks carry the names of peers of the realm. New York is a city of industrialists—Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, the Chrysler Building. Roman landmarks bear the names of papal families—the Borghese Gardens, Palazzo Farnese, Piazza Barberini. There is a symbiotic relationship between the city and the Church. The popes who built St. Peter’s also built Rome. They commissioned the fountains and gardens, palaces and piazzas, and from the rubble of a vanished empire created a new city that would be a worthy setting for a Christian imperium.
St. Peter’s was a gauge of urban progress. When the Basilica grew, Rome grew. When construction lagged, the city lagged. But gradually, under the aegis of these discerning, liberal patrons, Rome once again became “the rendezvous of the world.” The splendor of Rome and la fabbrica di San Pietro—“the building of St. Peter’s”—are so entwined that the history of one cannot be told without the other.
Rome seems an eternal story. It began twenty-eight centuries ago in 753 B.C., when, according to legend, Romulus built a town on a hill by the Tiber River. The story stretches across civilizations to 49 B.C., when Julius Caesar, having conquered Gaul, returned home to invent a capital; to 27 B.C., when Augustus made the city of the Caesars the center of the known world, an imperial forum unparalleled in splendor and power. As Rome grew, successive emperors added to its beauty. Hadrian built the Pantheon, an astonishing circular temple to the gods; Nero finished his palace in gold; and in just five years, Vespasian and his son Titus built an amphitheater for gladiatorial games that was so huge it became known as the Colosseo*—the colossus. By the fourth century, Rome was a city of some eight hundred thousand, spreading across the fabled seven hills on the east bank of the Tiber.
A millennium later, the Christian popes would cart the stone of the pagan city across the river to build their Basilica, and this extraordinary merging of the sacred and the profane would become the centerpiece of a second Golden Age.
Conceived on a grand scale, constructed at an unimagined cost, created from a confusion of ideas, St. Peter’s consumed the talents—and in some cases the genius—of the greatest artists of the age, among them Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bernini. They built at the command or whim of a pontiff-patron, often tearing up one another’s plans and imposing their own contending visions. Designs were added to, jettisoned, cobbled together.
The popes who commissioned them were not cast from a single mold. They included aesthetes and epicures, monks and militants, a pair of Medici princes, a burgher, a bastard, a bookworm, at least two poets, a scholar, and a swineherd. If their morals were questionable, their taste was impeccable. They coaxed and commanded the greatest work from the largest number of master-artists ever engaged on a single project.
At times, the endeavor seemed more like the stone of Sisyphus than the rock of Peter. But over the course of two centuries, they shepherded the Basilica through intrigues and assassination attempts, through schism and the Sack of Rome, through the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Inquisition. Their passion for the arts created a world unsurpassed for the exuberance of its ideas and its freedom of expression.
Building St. Peter’s spanned thirty papacies. The popes who contributed the most—the implacable della Rovere, Julius II; the suave Farnese, Paul III; the rough-edged Peretti, Sixtus V; and the brilliant Barberini, Urban VIII—were all old men: iron-willed, impatient, imperial pontiffs with much to accomplish and little time.
As building proceeded, the convulsions of history became a backdrop that changed like a series of stage sets. Over the decades of construction, the Church evolved, and the world evolved with it and sometimes because of it. Nationalism and religious revolution, one impossible without the other, reshaped Europe, and la fabbrica di San Pietro entered the Italian lexicon as a way of describing a project with no end in sight.
Motives are rarely pure or purely wicked, but a muddle of ambition, ambivalence, misperception, and sometimes desperation. If our own motives are often unclear, the motives of a pope or a painter five hundred years ago are at best conjecture. I have tried not to ascribe or assume motive and suggest it only when I can quote someone’s own words. Since even these can be misleading, proceed with a generous mind.
PART ONE
THE CHRISTIAN CAESAR
1503–1513
The man who was capable of conceiving such a work of art as St. Peter’s, and of beginning to execute it, deserves, by that fact alone, to live forever in the memory of mankind.
—Gregorovius
CHAPTER ONE
THE FIRST STONE
APRIL 1506
Wrapped in a lavender cloak the color of dusk, riding headlong against a sharp north wind, Michelangelo Buonarroti made his escape. He had waited in his workshop behind Piazza Rusticucci for the cover of n
ight, then, slipping through Porta San Pellegrino, the northern gate of the Leonine City, * he galloped along Via Cassia into the dangerous countryside beyond Rome. Thieves, cutthroats, and ravenous wolves scavenged in the campagna, but those terrors seemed less sinister than the ones he was fleeing.
“Sell all the furniture to the Jews,” he had charged his servants, and, in his haste, left everything behind. He took only his chisels and hammer, the tools of his trade—some would say his genius. They clunked in his saddle pack as he rode. The only other sounds were the drumbeat of the hooves, the bay of a solitary wolf, and his own breath, sharp and quick.
The wind bit through his cloak, which was thin now and worn through in spots. It had been a gift from his first patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, truly “il Magnifico,” dead fifteen years. Now in his place was a new patron, Giuliano della Rovere, His Holiness Pope Julius II—il pontefice terribile.
More than a singular individual, more than an ambitious man, although he was both, Julius II was a force of nature, restlessly moving from one grand enterprise to another. He did everything in a big way. He funded the arts, flayed his challengers, and sinned conspicuously. Romans called him “il Terribilis” with a mixture of awe and approbation. The incredulous Venetian ambassador to the Vatican summed him up this way: “No one has any influence over him, and he consults few or none…. It is almost impossible to describe how strong and violent and difficult to manage he is…. Everything about him is on a magnificent scale, both his undertakings and his passions.”
In the final hours of April 17, the first Saturday after Easter in the year 1506, the moon was waning, and the glorious promise shattered. Work and future abandoned, Michelangelo raced through the night, stopping at wayside hostelries for a fresh horse, then galloping on, afraid to rest until he was beyond papal dominion.