The Ugly Renaissance (44 page)

All of this had a dramatic—and highly visible—impact on the papal
court’s patronage of the arts. As the devastating criticisms leveled against the papacy by Savonarola and, later, by Calvin and Luther were to demonstrate, it was important to project an impression of good taste and Christian virtue, even if the reality was quite different. Working in parallel with this, a desire also emerged to consolidate familial gains by visual means. The more powerful and ambitious the families who dominated the Curia became, the more they longed to legitimate their position both in Rome and in their own lands by cultivating an image of justified authority. This entailed not only a propensity for lavishness and grandeur but also a willingness to highlight family ties in an almost dynastic fashion.

The most imposing manifestation of this was
architectural. For the Curia’s wealthiest cardinals, palaces were as much an expression of family prestige as they were settings for courtly revelry, and it was thus imperative that people viewing a palazzo know who was responsible for its studied magnificence. The owner of every palace took care to have his family coat of arms (or at least a suitably imposing inscription) displayed in as prominent a position as possible. Thus, when
Cardinal Raffaele Riario built a new palace—today known as the Palazzo della Cancelleria—in 1496, he not only made sure it was far larger than anything else in Rome but also had a dedicatory epigraph included on an upper cornice to ensure that everyone would know that it was
his
palace and that he had been raised to his august position by his relative
Pope Sixtus IV. So, too, in commissioning
Antonio da Sangallo to design a suitable palace in 1515, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (later
Pope Paul III) instructed that the facade of the vast new structure—which is today the French embassy—be dominated by the family coat of arms placed above the main doorway.

Although they officially resided in the
Apostolic Palace, and hence had slightly different needs, the popes took this tendency to an even higher level. Obsessed with putting his family’s stamp on the Vatican itself, each pontiff strove to enlarge the complex with yet another addition, and endeavored to emphasize the splendor of his family by having its coat of arms emblazoned in a prominent location, as in the Sala Regia, where Pope Paul III had the Farnese crest placed high above the doorway. Indeed, later, when
the new Saint Peter’s Basilica was completed, Sixtus V had an inscription claiming the edifice as his own inscribed around the base of the lantern, while Paul V tried to take credit for
the whole project by having both his regnal name and his family name written on the facade.

Yet identification often went much further than such crude signposting and was at once subtle and intense.
The Borgia Apartments, which were decorated with an iconographically rich series of frescoes by
Pinturicchio that even included a portrait of Alexander VI’s mistress
Giulia Farnese in the guise of the Virgin Mary, were, for example, so heavily associated with the pontiff’s notorious family that they were subsequently abandoned for many years. But perhaps the best example is the Sistine Chapel, which—despite the addition of certain features by other popes—has a good claim to be regarded as a temple to the della Rovere. While Sixtus IV (Francesco della Rovere) ordered the construction of the chapel and had its walls decorated with frescoes by Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and
Perugino, it was his ambitious nephew Julius II (Giuliano della Rovere) who commissioned Michelangelo to paint its ceiling as a continuation of the programmatic glorification of the della Rovere’s achievements.

Particularly when popes hailed from families that aspired to improve a previously limited role in their native region, architectural and decorative projects on a grand scale could also be instigated outside Rome.
As part of his broader scheme to establish a Piccolomini “dynasty,” for example, Pius II employed
Bernardo Rossellino to remodel completely his hometown of Corsignano. Employing the very latest techniques in urban design, Rossellino transformed Corsignano (renamed Pienza) into an ideal Renaissance town to which Pius II could retire when he wanted to get away from Rome. Not only was his family’s coat of arms emblazoned on almost every major building (even including the well in the piazza outside the Palazzo Comunale), but the new town was also dominated by a massive palace intended to serve as a residence for the Piccolomini family.

A more direct means of emphasizing “dynastic” power within the Curia was, however, the sophisticated use of portraiture and pictorial commemoration. On the one hand, second- and third-generation popes used the achievements of their pontifical ancestors to bolster the perceived strength of their “descent.”
Pope Pius III, for example,
commissioned Pinturicchio to paint a magnificent hagiographical fresco cycle depicting the life and career of Pius II in the library of
Siena Cathedral (today known as the Piccolomini Library) and underscored his ties
to the alleged virtues of the first Piccolomini pontiff in a dedicatory inscription that made clear the family relationship between the two men. But on the other hand, popes of all stripes were fond of having portraits painted that showed them surrounded by other members of their family, particularly when they were also cardinals. The viewer was left in absolutely no doubt about the dynastic ambitions of the sitters. In 1477, for example,
Melozzo da Forlì was commissioned to paint a fresco depicting Sixtus IV nominating Bartolomeo Platina as the first prefect of the Vatican Library (
Fig. 31
). Now housed in the Pinacoteca Vaticana, this painting not only shows the scholarly Platina kneeling before the pontiff but also includes portraits of four of the pope’s nephews (Cardinals Pietro Riario and Giuliano della Rovere on the right, and
Girolamo Riario, the lord of Imola and Forlì, and the condottiere
Giovanni della Rovere on the left). Later,
Raphael famously painted a portrait of the fat, shortsighted Leo X with his cousins Cardinals Giulio di Giuliano de’ Medici (later Clement VII) and Luigi de’ Rossi (
Fig. 32
), and
Titian completed a rather more sinister-looking depiction of the decrepit Paul III in the company of his grandsons
Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and the fawning Ottavio Farnese, duke of Parma, Piacenza, and Castro.

Just as gluttony, greed, and lust transformed the palaces of Rome into houses of pleasure and ill repute, so equally unpleasant (and unchristian) sentiments underpinned some of the most impressive examples of patronage at the papal court. Far from being reflections of high-minded ideals or deep-seated faith, some of the most iconic works of Renaissance art—the Sistine Chapel, the Borgia Apartments, even Saint Peter’s itself—were testaments to the overpowering sense of ambition that drove popes and cardinals to annex the power of the Church to their own family interests and to fill their pockets with the tithes of ordinary believers. Beautiful though the palaces, churches, and chapels of the papal court may have been, this side of the Renaissance papacy was—as Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini knew from the violence and
simony that accompanied his own election—dark, devious, and utterly corrupt.

S
ECRETS
, L
IES, AND
B
LOODSHED

As Pius II would have realized shortly after his coronation, however, being pope entailed more than wanton revelry and family aggrandizement.
Far from being a locus for introspective navel-gazing, cut off from the outside world by its pleasure-seeking ways, the Roman court was one of the epicenters of Italian politics, and it was not long before Pius was compelled to engage with the challenges of international affairs.

The new pope was confronted with two major crises. On the one hand, there was the problem of
Sicily. Shortly before Pius’s election, a furious row had blown up between Callixtus III and King
Alfonso. For reasons best known to himself, Alfonso had haughtily demanded not only that the pope confirm him as the rightful king of Sicily but also that the Church hand over the march of Ancona and a number of other ecclesiastical fiefdoms.
Callixtus, of course, refused point-blank and, after Alfonso’s untimely death on June 27, 1458, claimed that the island had reverted to the papacy on the grounds that the kingdom had long been a papal fief. Only Callixtus’s death had prevented a full-scale papal invasion. Now that Pius was pope, he had to deal with the fallout.
While Alfonso’s son, Ferrante, wanted the pope to consent to his rule, the pope himself needed to safeguard the Church’s possessions and calm the dogs of war.

On the other hand, there was the problem of the
Papal States themselves. While the conclave had been going on, the condottiere
Jacopo Piccinino had taken advantage of the momentary lack of leadership to invade the Church’s lands in central Italy.
In a lightning campaign, he had captured Assisi, Gualdo, and Nocera, and had terrorized the whole of Umbria. As a matter of urgency, Pius needed to drive Piccinino out of the Church’s heartlands.

They were really two sides of the same coin, and the only way forward was to address both at once. In order to set the Papal States on a secure footing, Pius decided to strike a deal with Ferrante. Not only did this sort out the problem of Sicily, but it also set aside all of the dangers threatened by Alfonso. What was more, Ferrante promised to give Pius his help in getting Piccinino out of Umbria. The only remaining difficulty was that in return Pius agreed to sort out Ferrante’s bitter feud with
Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta and to stabilize affairs in the North. It was to deal with this particularly tricky piece of business that the pope stopped off in Florence en route to Mantua in the spring of 1459.

Now that he was pope, Pius had to keep a lot of political and diplomatic plates spinning at once, and everything was linked together. If one plate fell, the whole lot would come tumbling down. But Pius’s
difficulties were merely an expression of the concerns that exercised the papacy throughout the Renaissance. Since the popes’ return to Rome and resumption of power in the Papal States, they had been unable to avoid being swept along by the shifting currents of Italian political affairs. Indeed, the familial ambitions and drunken debauchery to which the papal court had become accustomed depended on the papacy’s active involvement in the difficult and dangerous business of international relations. The Papal States were the key to everything. They provided the greater part of the income on which the papal court depended, and they needed to be protected, preserved, and—where possible—enlarged. Although it was obviously rather different in character, this naturally obliged the pope to conduct himself like the head of any other state in Italy and to take a keen interest in matters of diplomacy, defense, and property rights. The only problem was that the politicking involved was a very far cry from Nicholas V’s vision of the Renaissance Church as a bastion of true faith and a paragon of unworldly virtue. If the daily life of the papal court was riddled with vice, corruption, and immorality, the practices on which everything depended were the most sinister of all that were found in Rome. And, like anything else in the Eternal City, the papacy lost no time in using the patronage of the arts either to mask or to celebrate its darkest and ugliest face.

Living a Lie

Underlying the crises that confronted Pius II in 1458–59 was the thorny problem of authority. Even though some—like
Marsilius of Padua—occasionally called it into question, the foundation of the popes’ claims to spiritual supremacy was firmly established within the Church during the Renaissance. On the assumption that there was a direct line of succession between the first among the apostles and the pope himself, Christ’s own words were inscribed in huge letters around the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.” But if the popes were able to justify their primacy in religious matters by appealing to Scripture, things were not quite so simple when it came to their claims to temporal authority. As the Spiritual
Franciscans had been quick to point out in earlier centuries, there was absolutely nothing in the Bible to say that Christ had wanted his Church to
possess anything at all, least of all several million acres of land in central Italy. In fact, several passages in the Gospels could be interpreted as affirmations of the need for absolute evangelical poverty.

Biblical exegesis being what it is, there were a host of cunning scriptural arguments on which the popes could—and did—draw to support their wealth and power. Given the ambiguity of the Gospels, the words of Christ could, after all, be used to justify almost anything. But even if they could show that it was legitimate for the Church to own property and even to wield temporal power in the abstract, nothing in the Bible suggested that God had endowed the popes with any actual title to such a colossal amount of land. To shore up its position, the papacy had to turn to something else entirely.

History provided the solution. There were lots of episodes from the past—such as
Pope Leo I’s repulse of Attila and the coronation of
Charlemagne—that could be read as proof positive of the papacy’s right to rule central Italy and of its superiority to all other forms of worldly authority. But one piece of “evidence” stood out. Throughout the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, the popes based their claims to temporal power on a document known as the
Donation of Constantine. Purportedly written in the early fourth century, the text affirmed that in gratitude for having been cured of leprosy after being baptized and confirmed, the emperor Constantine had handed over the entire Roman Empire to
Pope Sylvester I. After this point, it was thought, successive popes had retained sovereign rights over the Empire and had merely entrusted emperors down to the present day with custodianship of its territories, excepting—in later years—the territories that were to become known as the Papal States.

The snag was that the Donation was a forgery that had been written at some point in the early eleventh century. The Renaissance popes weren’t ignorant of this fact. Even before the Schism had ended,
Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa had questioned the document’s veracity, and in 1439–40
Lorenzo
Valla had used his philological expertise to prove its inauthenticity beyond all doubt. Before his election as Pius II, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini himself had even written a tract on the invalidity of the text.