The greatest architect of the High Renaissance was Bramante of Urbino. He, like Leonardo, worked in Milan during the resplendent reign of Lodovico Sforza. There he did much charming work and imposed his personality on Lombard architecture; but his great reputation was made in Rome, whither he went, drawn by the great Romeward flow of art, when the French invasion drove the fine arts from Milan. In Rome, Bramante became the papal architect. He shares with Raphael and Michelangelo the honour of making St. Peter's basilica and the Vatican palace what they are. He also built a little building, whose historical importance is ludicrously out of proportion to its size, it being as little as St. Peter's is big. It is a tiny circular temple in the court of a church on the Janiculum hill across the Tiber. On the ground floor a Doric colonnade encircles the temple, on the second story a balustrade. A dome, capped by a lantern, covers the whole. It is the first building which fully reproduced the style and spirit of antiquity. It set the fashion for the architecture of the sixteenth century, and determined, among other indirect and not altogether happy results, the plan of St. Paul's Cathedral in London and the Capitol in Washington.
It was not chance which took Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo to Rome. They went because the papal court, pursuing its policy of maintaining the Papacy at the head of Christendom by means of culture, summoned them to come. Rome never produced great artists. She never was artistic, any more than she had been spiritual. But just as in earlier times she had drawn spiritual forces to herself and used them, so now she attracted to herself and used the artistic forces of Italy. She had been making ready for years; step by step as she had become more secular, she had also become more artistic, more intellectual. For seventy years every Pope contributed to this end. Eugenius IV employed distinguished humanists as his secretaries, and invited the most notable painters and sculptors to Rome. Nicholas V conceived the splendid scheme of making Rome the mistress of the world's culture. Pius II, Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, was the most eminent man of letters of his age. Paul II was a virtuoso in objects of art and increased the grandeur of the papal court. Sixtus IV improved the city, built the Sistine Chapel, and employed Botticelli, Perugino, Signorelli, Ghirlandaio, and Rosselli to decorate it. Innocent VIII brought Mantegna from Padua and Pinturicchio from Perugia to embellish the Vatican palace. Pope Borgia made Pinturicchio his court painter; and that charming master decorated the papal apartments in the Vatican with the great bull of the Borgia crest, and with portraits of the Pope's children and (so Vasari says) of the lovely Giulia Farnese as the Virgin with the Pope worshipping her.
Popes and cardinals felt the great movement and many strove to lead it, but the master figure of the Renaissance at Rome was the fiery Julius II, whose plans in the arts were even more grandiose than in politics. He was the centre of this period, as Cosimo and Lorenzo had been in their generations. Less astute than Cosimo, far less subtle and accomplished than Lorenzo, he was a much more heroic leader than either. His hardy, weather-beaten face in Raphael's portrait, with its strong, well-shaped features, shows his imperious, arrogant, irascible, and yet noble, nature. This Pontiff brought to Rome the greatest genius of the Renaissance, Michelangelo, bade him build for him a monumental tomb, more splendid than any tomb ever built, twelve yards high and proportionately wide and deep, and decked with two or three score statues. Such a gigantic monument could not have found room in the old basilica of St. Peter's, and therefore, as St. Peter's was the proper place for it, it became necessary to proceed with the larger plans of Nicholas V. Piecing and patching did not suit Julius. He discussed plans with his architects Bramante and Giuliano da San Gallo, and then resolved to pull down the old basilica, founded by Constantine and Silvester, despite its thousand years of sacred associations, and build a new church in its place. Bramante's fiery enthusiasm for great designs matched the Pope's. Satire suggested that in heaven he would say to St. Peter, "I'll pull down this Paradise of yours and build another, a much finer and pleasanter place for the blessed saints to live in." He designed the new church in the form of a Greek cross with a cupola, proposing, as it were, to lift the dome of the Pantheon on the basilica of Constantine, an enormous ruin in the Roman Forum. This gigantic plan befitted the new papal scheme of making Rome the head of Europe and the Papacy the head of culture. The corner-stone was laid on April 18, 1506, and the old building was demolished piecemeal, the choir first, the nave last; and in its place, as demolition proceeded bit by bit, the cathedral now standing rose, slowly lifting its great bulk in the air, and finally reached completion and consecration in 1626. The greatest architects of Italy succeeded one another as masters of the works, Bramante, Giuliano da San Gallo from Florence, Fra Giocondo from Verona, Raphael, Antonio da San Gallo the younger, Baldassare Peruzzi from Siena, and Michelangelo, who, when an old man, took charge and designed the dome.
The Vatican was altered according to Bramante's plans in order to make it a fit abode for the head of cultured Christendom: Michelangelo painted his frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-12); and Raphael began to paint the stanza della segnatura. Raphael, the most charming figure in the world of art, was equally charming in life. Vasari says: "Among his exceptional gifts I take notice of one of such rare excellence that I marvel within myself. Heaven gave him power in our art to produce an effect most contrary to the humours of us painters, and it is this: the artists and artisans (I do not refer only to those of meaner sort, but to those who are ambitious to be great—and art produces many of this complexion) who worked in his atelier were so united and had such mutual good-will, that all jealousy and crossness were extinguished on seeing him, and every mean and spiteful thought vanished from their minds. Such unity was never seen before. And this was because they were overcome both by his courtesy and his art, but more by the genius of his good nature, which was so full of kindness and overflowing with charity, that not only men, but even the beasts almost worshipped him."
At this time, too, classic art, owing to the discovery of antique statues, had its fullest effect. The Nile, now in the Vatican, had been found in a Roman garden, the Apollo Belvedere in a vineyard near the city, and the Laocoön and many others here and there. Of the discovery of the Laocoön a record remains. "I was at the time a boy in Rome," wrote Francesco, son of Giuliano da San Gallo, the architect, "when one day it was announced to the Pope that some excellent statues had been dug up out of the ground in a grape-patch near the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. The Pope immediately sent a groom to Giuliano da San Gallo to tell him to go directly and see what it was. Michelangelo Buonarroti was often at our house, and at the moment chanced to be there; accordingly my father invited him to accompany us. I rode behind my father on his horse, and thus we went over to the place designated. We had scarcely dismounted and glanced at the figures, when my father cried out, 'It is the Laocoön of which Pliny speaks!' The labourers immediately began digging to get the statue out; after having looked at them very carefully, we went home to supper, talking all the way of antiquity."[22]
Thus these various forces—the discovery of antique statues, the passion for art, the eager Italian intellect, the conception of Rome as the mistress of culture, the character of Julius II and the genius of Bramante, Michelangelo, and Raphael—worked together to cover the Papacy with a pagan glory in its time of religious need. On the other hand, as these monumental works required vast sums of money, the sale of indulgences and the exaction of tribute buzzed on more rapidly than ever.
Leo X (1513-21) has given his name to this age of papal culture, but he was not entitled to the honour; he had the inborn Medicean interest and enjoyment in intellectual matters, a nice taste, and some delicacy of perception, but it needs no more than a look at his fat jowl in Raphael's portrait to see that he could not have been a motive force in a great period. He stands on an historic eminence as the last Pope to wield the Italian sceptre over all Europe, the last to send his tax-collectors from Sicily to England, from Spain to Norway, the last to enjoy the full heritage of Imperial Rome.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] Book of the Courtier, p. 305, translated by L. E. Opdycke.
[22] Rome and the Renaissance, from the French of Julian Klaczko, p. 93.