The Makers of Modern Rome, in Four Books

by Mrs. Oliphant

It is happily possible to pass over the succeeding pontificates of Innocent VIII. and Alexander VI. These Popes did little for Rome except, especially the last of them, to associate the name of the central city of Christendom with every depravity. The charitable opinion of later historians who take that pleasure in upsetting all previous notions, which is one of the features of our time, has begun to whisper that even the Borgias were not so black as they were painted. But it will take a great deal of persuasion and of eloquence to convince the world that there is anything to be said for that name. Pope Innocent VIII. continued the embellishment of the Vatican, which was his own palace, and completed the Belvedere, and set Andrea Mantegna to paint its chambers; but this was not more than any Roman nobleman might have done for his palace if he had had money enough for decorations, which were by no means so costly in those days as they would be now, and probably indeed were much cheaper than the more magnificent kinds of arras or other decorative stuffs fit for a Pope's palace. Alexander, too, added a splendid apartment for himself, still known by his name; and provided for possible danger (which did not occur however in his day) by making and decorating another apartment in the castle of St. Angelo, whither he might have retired and still managed to enjoy himself, had Rome risen against him. But Rome, which often before had hunted its best Popes into the strait confinement of that stronghold, left the Borgia at peace. We are glad to pass on to the next Pope, whose footsteps, almost more than those of any other of her monarchs, are still to be seen and recognised through Rome. He gave more to the city than any one who had preceded him, and he destroyed more than any Pope before had permitted himself to do.

Julius II., della Rovere, the nephew of Pope Sixtus, for whom and for his brother and cousin that Pope occupied so much of his busy life, was a violent man of war, whose whole life was occupied in fighting, and who neither had nor pretended to have any reputation for sanctity or devotion. But passionate and unsparing as he was, and fiercely bent on his own way, the aim of his perpetual conflicts was at all events a higher one than that of his uncle, in so far that it was to enrich the Church and not his own family that he toiled and fought. He was the centre of warlike combinations all his life—League of Cambrai, holy League, every kind of concerted fighting to crush those who opposed him and to divide their goods; but the portion of the goods which fell to the share of Pope Julius was for the Church and not for the endowment of a sister's son. He was not insensible altogether to the claims of sister's sons; but he preferred on the whole the patrimony of St. Peter, and fought for that with unfailing energy all round. There are many books in which the history of those wars and of the Renaissance Popes in general may be read in full, but the Julius II. in whom we are here interested is not one who ever led an army or signed an offensive league: it is the employer of Bramante and Michael Angelo and Raphael, the choleric patron who threatened to throw the painter of the Sistine chapel from his scaffolding, the dreadful iconoclast who pulled down St. Peter's and destroyed the tombs of the Popes, the magnificent prince who bound the greatest artists then existing in Italy, which was to say in the world, to his chariot wheels, and drove them about at his will. Most of these things were good things, and give a favourable conception of him; though not that which was the most important of all.

How it was that he came to pull down St. Peter's nobody can say. He had of course the contempt which a man, carried on the highest tide of a new movement, has by nature for all previous waves of impulse. He thought of the ancient building so often restored, the object of so much loving care, with all the anxious expedients employed by past Popes to glorify and embellish the beloved interior, giving it the warmest and most varied historical interest—with much the same feeling as the respectable churchwarden in the eighteenth century looked upon the piece of old Gothic which had fallen into his hands. A church of the fourteenth century built for eternity has always looked to the churchwarden as if it would tumble about his ears—and his Herculean efforts to pull down an arch that without him would have stood till the end of time have always been interpreted as meaning that the ancient erection was about to fall. Julius II. in the same way announced St. Peter's to be in a bad way and greatly in need of repair, so as scarcely to be safe for the faithful; and Bramante was there all ready with the most beautiful plans, and the Pope was not a patient man who would wait, but one who insisted upon results at once. This church had been for many hundreds of years the most famous of Christian shrines; from the ends of the world pilgrims had sought its altars. The tomb of the Apostles was its central point, and many another saint and martyr inhabited its sacred places. It had seen the consecration of Emperors, it had held false Popes and true, and had witnessed the highest climax of triumph for some, and for some the last solemnity of death.[10] But Bramante saw in that venerable temple only the foundations for a new cathedral after the fashion of the great Duomo which was the pride of Florence; and his master beheld in imagination the columns rising, and the vast arches growing, of such an edifice as would be the brag of Christendom, and carry the glory of his own name to the furthest ends of the earth: a temple all-glorious in pagan pride, more classical than the classics, adorned with great statues and blank magnificence of pilasters and tombs rising up to the roof—one tomb at least, that of the della Roveres, of Sixtus IV. and Julius II., which should live as long as history, and which, if that proud and petulant fellow Buonarotti would but complete his work, would be one of the glories of the Eternal City.

OLD ST. PETER'S.
To face page 584.

The ancient St. Peter's would not seem to have had anything of the poetic splendour and mystery of a Gothic building as understood in northern countries: the rounded arches of its façade did not spring upwards with the lofty lightness and soaring grace of the great cathedrals of France and Germany. But the irregular front was full of interest and life, picturesque if not splendid. It had character and meaning in every line, it was a series of erections, carrying the method of one century into another, with that art which makes one great building into an animated and varied history of the times and ages through which it has passed, taking something from each, and giving shelter and the sense of continuance to all. There is no such charm as this in the most perfect of architectural triumphs executed by a single impulse. But this was the last quality in the world likely to deter a magnificent Pope of the fifteenth century, to whom unity of conception and correctness of form were of much more concern than any such imaginative interest. However Julius II. must not have greater guilt laid upon him than was his due. His operations concerned only the eastern part of the great church: the façade, and the external effect of the building remained unchanged for more than a hundred years; while the plan as now believed, was that of Pope Nicolas V., only carried out by instalments by his successors, of whom Julius was one of the boldest.

It is, however, in the fame of his three servants, sublime slaves, whose names are more potent still than those of any Pontiff, that this Pope has become chiefly illustrious. His triumphs of fighting are lost from memory in the pages of the historians, where we read and forget, the struggle he maintained in Italy, and the transformations through which that much troubled country passed under his sway—to change again the morrow after, as it had changed the day before the beginning of his career. To be sure it was he who finally identified and secured the Patrimony of St. Peter—so that the States of the Church were not henceforward lost and won by a natural succession of events once at least in the life of every Pope. But we forget that fact, and all that secured it, the tumultuous chaos of European affairs being as yet too dark to be penetrated by any certainty of consolidation. The course of events was in large what the history of the fortunes of St. John Lateran, for example, was in small. From the days of Pope Martin V. until those of Sixtus IV. a change of the clergy there was made in almost each pontificate. Eugenius IV. restored the canons regular, or monks: who were driven forth by Calixtus III., again restored by Paul II., and so forth, until at length Sixtus, bringing back the secular priests for the third time, satisfied the monks by the gift of his new church of Sta. Maria della Pace. The revolution of affairs in Italy was almost as regular, and it is only with an effort of the mind that the reader can follow the endless shifting of the scenes, the combinations that disperse and reassemble, the whirl of events for ever coming round again to the point from which they started. But when we put aside the Popes and the Princes and the stamping and tumult of mail-clad warriors—and the crowd opening on every side gives us to see a patient, yet high-tempered artisan mounting day by day his lofty platform, swung up close to the roof, where sometimes lying on his back, sometimes crouched upon his knees, he made roof and architrave eloquent with a vision which centuries cannot fade, nor any revolution, either of external affairs or of modes of thought, lessen in interest, a very different feeling fills the mind, and the thoughts, which were sick and weary with the purposeless and dizzy whirl of fact, come back relieved to the consoling permanence of art. The Pope who mounted imperious, a master of the world, on to those dizzy planks, admired, and blasphemed and threatened in a breath; but with no power to move the sturdy painter, who, it was well known, was a man impossible to replace. "When will you have done?" said the Pope. "When I can," replied the other. The Pontiff might rage and threaten, but the Florentine painted on steadily; and Pope Julius, on the tremulous scaffolding up against the roof of his uncle's chapel, is better known to the world by that scene than by all his victories. Uncle and nephew, both men of might, warlike souls and strong, that room in the Vatican has more share in their fame than anything else which they achieved in the world.

Another and a gentler spirit comes in at the same time to glorify this fortunate Pope. His predecessors for some time back had each done something for the splendour of the dwelling which was their chief residence, even the least interested adding at least a loggia, a corridor, a villa in the garden, as has been seen, to make the Vatican glorious. Alexander VI. had been the last to embellish and extend the more than regal lodging of the Pontiffs; but Julius II. had a hatred of his predecessor which all honest men have a right to share, and would not live in the rooms upon which the Borgias had left the horror of their name. He went back to the cleaner if simpler apartments which Nicolas V. had built and decorated by the hands of the elder painters. Upon one of these he set young Raphael to work, a young man with whom there was likely to be no such trouble as that he had with the gnarled and crabbed Florentine, who was as wilful as himself. Almost as soon as the young painter had begun his gracious work the delighted Pope perceived what a treasury of glory he had got in this new servant. What matter that the new painter's master, Perugino, had been there before him with other men of the highest claims? The only thing to do was to break up these old-fashioned masters, to clear them away from the walls, to leave it all to Raphael. We shiver and wonder at such a proof of enthusiasm. Was the young man willing to get space for his smooth ethereal pictures with all their heavenly grace, at such a price? But if he made any remonstrance—which probably he did, for we see him afterwards in much trouble over St. Peter's, and the destruction carried on there—his imperious master took little notice. Julius was one of the men who had to be obeyed, and he was always as ready to pull down as to build up. The destruction of St. Peter's on one hand, and all those pictures on the other, prove the reckless and masterful nature of the man, standing at nothing in a matter on which he had set his heart. In later days the pictures of Perugino on the wall of the Sistine chapel were demolished, as has been said, to make place for the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo; but Pope Julius by that time had passed into another sphere.

Most people will remember the famous portrait of this Pope by Raphael, one of the best known pictures in the world. He sits in his chair, an old man, his head slightly bowed, musing, in a pause of the endless occupations and energy which made his life so full. The portrait is quite simple, but full of dignity and a brooding power. We feel that it would not be well to rouse the old lion, though at the moment his repose is perfect. Raphael was at his ease in the peacefulness of his own soul to observe and to record the powerful master whose fame he was to have so great a share in making. It would have been curious to have had also the Julius whom Michael Angelo knew.