Leo X: Patron of the Arts and Politics (1513–1521)

Introduction: The Medici Cardinal and His Early Life

The pope who gave his name to one of the most brilliant and corrupt periods in Roman history owed his ecclesiastical career to his father’s political strategy. Lorenzo de’ Medici had been nearly destroyed by Sixtus IV but hoped that the power and security of his family in Florence could be assured by placing one of its members in the College of Cardinals and in the inner circles of the Church. With this in mind, he dedicated his second son, Giovanni, to the Church from early childhood. Giovanni’s head was tonsured at the age of seven (1482); soon he became a protonotary and received additional revenues from ecclesiastical benefices. At eight he was made abbot of the abbey of Fonte-Douce in France; at nine, abbot of the wealthy abbey of Passignano; and at fourteen, abbot of the historic abbey of Monte Cassino. Before his election to the papacy he held sixteen such offices. At eight he was appointed first secretary to the pope, and at fourteen he became a cardinal.

The young prelate received the education available only to the wealthiest. He was raised among scholars, poets, statesmen, and philosophers; his tutor was Marsilio Ficino, he learned Greek from Demetrius Chalcondyles, and philosophy from Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, who later became one of his cardinals. From the art collections and artistic conversations in his father’s palace or around it, he acquired the taste for beauty that in his maturity became almost a religion. Perhaps the excessive and sometimes reckless generosity and the cheerful, almost Epicurean life that marked his cardinalate and pontificate, and produced such momentous results for Christendom, were learned from his father. At thirteen he entered the university that his father had re-founded at Pisa; there for three years he studied philosophy, theology, canon law, and civil law. When at sixteen he was publicly allowed to join the College of Cardinals in Rome, Lorenzo sent him with one of the most interesting letters in history (March 12, 1492).

Election and the Joyful Beginning of His Pontificate

Everyone was surprised and delighted by his election. After the dark intrigues of Alexander and Cesare Borgia, and the wars, tumults, and conflicts of Julius’s time, people felt relief at the choice of a young man of easy temper, famous for good nature, intelligence, modesty, and patronage of literature and art, whose rule of the Church would probably lead to peace and calm. Even Alfonso of Ferrara, who had been so ruthlessly attacked by Julius, now dared to come to Rome. Leo restored all the rights of his duchy, and the grateful duke held the stirrup of Leo’s horse when the pope was about to mount for his coronation. The ceremony was unprecedentedly costly, absorbing 100,000 ducats. Agostino Chigi the banker provided a float on which, in the manner of an inscription, was written the hopeful Latin sentence: “Once Venus (Alexander) ruled, after her Mars (Julius) reigned, and now Pallas (wisdom) governs.” Another witty remark circulated: “Mars was, Pallas is, and I, Venus, shall always be.” Poets, sculptors, and goldsmiths rejoiced; the humanists promised themselves a return of the Augustan age. Never had anyone ascended the papal throne under such favorable conditions of universal admiration.

If we believe the anecdotists of the time, Leo himself wrote joyfully to his brother Giuliano: “Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us.” This saying, which seems apocryphal, was not irreverent but expressed the cheerful spirit ready for pleasure and liberality, and perhaps, in simple faith, unaware that half of Christendom was already preparing a revolt against him.

The Happy Pope and His Court

Leo X began his reign with good measures. He pardoned the cardinals who had formed the anti-papal council at Pisa and Milan, and the threat of schism ended. He promised—and kept the promise—to refrain from seizing the property of deceased cardinals. He reopened the Lateran Council and greeted the delegates with his elegant Latin. He carried out some minor reforms in Church administration and reduced taxes; but a decree on more important reforms (May 3, 1514) met strong opposition from officials whose incomes would be cut, and he made little effort to enforce it. He said: “I will think about it and see how everyone can be satisfied.” This was his character, and his character was his fate.

The chief quality of Leo, happily born, was a good nature. He had a pleasant word for everyone; he saw the best side of everyone except the Protestants (whom he could not understand), and was so generous to many that his kindness harmed the papal budget. In matters of modesty, intelligence, kindness, and cheerful temper—even in illness and pain—stories are told. His fistula, which was repeatedly operated on, always returned and sometimes turned movement into the agonies of death. As far as he could, he let people live as they pleased. But when he discovered a conspiracy by certain cardinals against his life, his kindness turned to severity. Sometimes he could be cruelly harsh, as in the cases of Francesco Maria della Rovere of Urbino and Giovanni Paolo Baglioni of Perugia. He could lie like a diplomat and occasionally practiced the political arts better than the princes who had entrapped him. Most of the time, like when he forbade the enslavement of American Indians (with no result) and tried hard to prevent the cruelty of Ferdinand the Catholic’s Inquisition, he had benevolent intentions. Despite his involvement in worldly affairs, he performed his religious duties perfectly; he fasted in Lent; and he saw no contradiction between religion and pleasure. He has been accused of saying: “The usefulness of the story of Jesus has been known to us for centuries”; but the only source for this is a violent polemical work, the Papal Star, written around 1574 by an obscure Englishman named John Bale; both the freethinker Bayle and the Protestant Roscoe consider it a legend.

His pleasures ranged from philosophy to the antics of jesters. In his father’s house he had learned to appreciate poetry, sculpture, painting, music, calligraphy, illumination, weaving, and the making of delicate crystal vessels—all forms of beauty, perhaps except its source and model, which is woman; and though his enjoyment of the fine arts was indiscriminate, he continued the patronage of artists and poets in Rome and the grand seigneurial traditions of his ancestors in Florence. He was so unrestrained that he made no effort to master philosophy completely; he knew how unstable philosophical conclusions are, and therefore, after his student days, he did not trouble himself much about them. At meals he had books read to him, usually history, or listened to music. In this he had excellent taste, a sensitive ear, and a fine voice; he kept several musicians at his court and was generous to them. Bernardo Accolti the improviser (called “Unico Aretino” because of his birthplace in Arezzo and his unequaled skill in poetry and music) had been able, with the salary Leo paid him, to buy the small duchy of Nepi; a Jewish lute player bought a palace and obtained the title of count; Gabriele Merino, a singer, rose to the archbishopric. The choir of the Vatican, under Leo’s care and encouragement, reached an unprecedented excellence. Raphael’s portrait of the pope reading a sacred musical score was entirely appropriate. Leo also collected musical instruments both for their beauty and for their pleasant sound. One of these was an organ decorated with white marble that Castiglione judged the most beautiful of all the instruments he knew.

Leo also liked to keep a number of jesters and buffoons at his court. This was in keeping with the custom of his father and contemporary kings and caused no surprise to the Romans, who loved laughter more than anything after wealth and sexual relations; to us looking back on that time, when the note of religious reform was sounding in Germany, jest and buffoonery at the papal court seem indecent. Leo found that one of his monk-jesters swallowing a pigeon whole or eating forty eggs at a sitting relieved his physical pain, freed his mind from worldly troubles, and lengthened his life. There was something childlike in his nature. Sometimes he played cards with the cardinals, allowed the public to sit and watch, and then scattered gold coins among the spectators.

He loved hunting more than any other amusement. To prevent himself from growing too fat, and after a period of residence in the Vatican, which seemed to him like a prison, he would go to the countryside and enjoy the fresh air. He kept a large stable with a hundred grooms. It was his custom to devote almost the entire month of October to hunting. His physicians approved of this habit, but his master of ceremonies, Paris de Grassis, complained that the pope kept his heavy boots on so long that “no one can kiss his foot”—Leo laughed heartily at this complaint. Reading the accounts of the pope’s rural journeys gives a better picture than Raphael’s portrait. As he passed along the roads, peasants lined up to greet him and offered small gifts. The pope rewarded these gifts with such generosity that people always looked forward to his hunting trips. He gave dowries to poor girls among the welcomers; he paid the debts of the sick and elderly or of men with large families. These simple people loved him more sincerely than the two thousand servants in the Vatican.

But Leo’s court was not only a center of pleasure and gaiety; it was also the meeting place of responsible statesmen and of Leo himself; the focus of Rome’s intellect and a place where scholars, teachers, poets, artists, and musicians were honored and some even resided; the scene of official Church ceremonies, formal diplomatic receptions, magnificent banquets, dramatic or musical performances, recitation of poetry, and the display of art—and undoubtedly the most refined court in the world at that time. The efforts of the popes from Nicholas V to Leo himself in reforming, decorating, and enlarging the Vatican, and in gathering the geniuses of literature, art, and the most capable ambassadors of Europe, made Leo’s court the pinnacle of the Renaissance not in art (which had reached its height under Julius) but in literature and cultural splendor. Up to that time, history had seen no such cultural flowering—even in the Athens of Pericles or the Rome of Augustus.

As Leo’s gathered gold flowed through the economic channels of Rome, it increased the city’s prosperity and size. The Venetian ambassador said that in the thirteen years since Leo’s accession, ten thousand houses had been built in Rome, mostly by immigrants who, drawn by the Renaissance from northern Italy toward the city, had come and settled there—especially Florentines seeking material favor from a pope who was their fellow citizen. Paolo Giovio, who worked at Leo’s court, estimated Rome’s population at eighty-five thousand. Rome was still not as beautiful a city as Florence or Venice, but now, in the general opinion, it was the center of Western civilization; in 1537 Marcello Alberini called it “the rendezvous of the world.” While Leo amused himself and managed foreign affairs, he regulated the import and price of food, broke monopolies and hoarding, reduced taxes, established justice, tried to drain the Pontine marshes, promoted agriculture in the Campagna, and continued the work of Alexander and Julius in opening new streets or widening existing ones in Rome. Like his father, he organized circus and recreational games—hired artists to arrange magnificent spectacles, promoted carnival festivities, and even revived the bullfighting customary in Borgia’s time in the Piazza of St. Peter. He wanted the people to share in the joy of the new golden age.

The people of the city, imitating the pope, let loose the reins of joy. First priests, poets, parasites, procurers, and prostitutes flocked to Rome to be refreshed by the “golden rain.” The cardinals—who, by the favor of the popes, and above all Leo, possessed numerous benefices whose revenues came to them from all parts of Latin Christendom—were now richer than the old nobility. Some cardinals had incomes of 30,000 ducats (375,000 dollars) a year. They lived in stately palaces that had up to three hundred servants and were adorned with works of art and all the luxuries of the time. They did not consider themselves entirely priests; they were administrators, diplomats, and politicians, senators of the Roman Church, and they wanted to live like senators. They laughed at foreigners who expected them to live with the frugality and restraint of priests. Like many men of their time, they judged conduct by aesthetic rather than moral standards; and they believed that with grace and taste one could violate certain commandments of the law. They surrounded themselves with groups of young nobles, musicians, poets, and humanists and sometimes dined with aristocratic courtesans. They complained that their salons lacked women; according to Cardinal Bibbiena, “the people of Rome say that there is no lack here except a lady to manage the court.” They envied Ferrara, Urbino, and Mantua; and when Isabella d’Este came to spread her feminine dress and grace over their one-sided festivities, they rejoiced.

Good manners, taste, elegant speech, and appreciation of art had now reached their height, and patrons were more generous than ever. Even in the smaller capitals there were cultural circles, and Castiglione preferred the refined Urbino salon to the brilliant but coarser Roman mother-city. But Urbino was a small island of culture, while Rome was like a river or even a sea. Luther came to Rome and was disgusted by it; Erasmus also visited and was enchanted. Dozens of poets declared that the age of happiness had returned.

Scholars and the Revival of Greek Studies

In 1513 Leo issued a decree uniting the two poor institutions of the papal palace, the Vatican, and the city college into the University of Rome, which soon concentrated in a building called the Sapienza. These schools had flourished under Alexander but languished under Julius, for Julius spent their budget on war and preferred the sword to the book. Leo maintained the new university financially until he too was drawn into the expensive game of destruction. He hired a devoted and sincere group of scholars, so that the institution soon had eighty-eight professors receiving from 50 to 350 florins (625 to 6,625 dollars) a year. The medical faculty alone had fifteen professors. In the early years of his pontificate Leo worked hard to make these two united colleges the most learned and progressive university in Italy.

One of his important works was the establishment of Semitic language departments. A chair of Hebrew was assigned at the University of Rome, and Thesauro Ambrogio was appointed to teach Syriac and Chaldean at the University of Bologna. Leo welcomed the composition of a Hebrew grammar by Agacio Guidacerio and its dedication to himself. When he heard that Sante Pagnini was engaged in translating the Old Testament from the original Hebrew into Latin, he asked for a sample, approved it, and took upon himself all the expenses of that laborious work.

It was also Leo who restored the teaching of Greek, which was declining. He summoned the aged scholar Janus Lascaris, who had taught Greek in Florence and Venice, to Rome and with his help founded a Greek academy separate from the university. Bembo wrote a letter in Leo’s name to Marcus Musurus, Lascaris’s pupil and Aldus Manutius’s chief assistant (August 7, 1513), inviting the scholar to “hire ten or more young, learned, and pious men from Greece to establish a high school of liberal studies so that Italians may learn from them the knowledge and correct use of the Greek language.” A month later Aldus dedicated to the pope an edition of Plato’s works that Musurus had completed. Leo honored this act by granting Aldus for fifteen years the absolute privilege of printing Greek and Latin books that Aldus had published or might publish in that period. In the decree issued for this purpose, the pope stipulated that Aldus’s publications must be sold at a reasonable price; this recommendation was carried out. The Greek college was established in the Colocci family building on the Quirinal Hill, and a press was set up there to print textbooks and commentaries needed by the students. At the same time a similar academy for Greek studies was founded by the Medici in Florence. Guarino Camerti, who took the Latin name Favorinus, compiled the best Greek-Latin lexicon that had yet appeared in the Renaissance world.

Leo’s enthusiasm for classical literature had almost taken the form of a religious duty. He accepted with such reverence the “shoulder blade of Livy” that the Venetians sent him as if it were a relic of a great saint. Soon after his accession he announced that anyone who found unpublished manuscript copies of ancient literature would receive a generous reward. Like his father, he instructed his envoys and appointees in foreign lands to seek out and buy any valuable manuscript books, whether their authors were pagan or Christian; sometimes he sent special agents abroad for this purpose and in letters asked kings and princes for their cooperation in the search. His agents apparently stole manuscripts when they could not buy them; this is clearly shown in the case of the first six books of Tacitus’s Annals, found in the Corvey monastery in Westphalia; for a remarkable letter written after the purification and publication of those books by the pope or on his behalf to his agent Heitmers confirms this. Leo sent a beautifully bound and revised printed copy of the books to the abbot and monks to replace what had been taken from their library. But to show them that this theft had been more beneficial than harmful, he granted them a full indulgence for their church.

Leo gave the stolen manuscript to Filippo Beroaldo and ordered him to correct and purify the text and print it beautifully but suitably. In his decree Leo said: “We have from our youth been accustomed to the thought that the supreme Creator—apart from the true knowledge and worship of His own being—has given man nothing more excellent or useful than these studies; studies that not only adorn and guide human life but are applicable and useful to every special condition: in adversity a comfort, in prosperity a delight and an honor; so that without them we should be deprived of all the virtues of life and social refinements. The provision and expansion of these studies apparently depends mainly on two qualities: the number of learned men, and a plentiful supply of excellent texts. But as for the first of these two, we hope, by God’s favor, to make our serious desire to reward and honor their merits even clearer; this desire has long been our great joy. ... As for the acquisition of books, we thank God that in this part also we now have the opportunity to benefit mankind.”

Leo thought that the judgment of the Church should determine which writings would benefit mankind, and for this reason he renewed Alexander’s decree for the censorship of books by the Church.

In the sack of the Medici palace (1494) some of the books that Leo’s ancestors had collected were scattered; nevertheless, most of them were bought by the monks of San Marco. Leo bought these rescued books while he was still a cardinal for 2,652 ducats (33,150 dollars?) and transferred them to his palace in Rome. This library was returned to Florence after Leo’s death. We shall learn its later fate.

The Vatican Library had now grown so large that it needed a group of scholars for its own care. When Leo ascended the papal throne, Tommaso Inghirami was head of the library. He was a noble and a poet, had a great gift for speech and eloquence, and was famous among the witty for his unity of mind in wit; he was also a skilled actor whose success in playing the role of Phaedra in Seneca’s Hippolytus earned him the nickname Fedra. When he was murdered in a street accident in 1516, Filippo Beroaldo was appointed to succeed him as head of the library. Filippo divided his affection between Tacitus and a learned courtesan named Imperia; and he wrote such an elegant Latin commentary that it was translated into French in six independent versions; one of these translations was by Clément Marot. Girolamo Aleandro, who became librarian in 1519, was a moderate, learned, and capable man. He spoke Latin and Greek fluently and spoke Hebrew so well that Luther mistakenly called him a Jew. At the Diet of Augsburg (1520) he tried to stop the wave of the Protestant movement, and his effort was more angry than wise. Paul III made him a cardinal (1538), but four years later, because of too much attention to his health and frequent use of medicine, he died. He was very angry at having to leave this world at sixty-two and distressed his friends with his anger at the ways of fate.

At this time private libraries were numerous in Rome. Aleandro himself had a considerable collection that he bequeathed to Venice by will; these books were later destroyed by fire there. Cardinal Grimani, who was envied by Erasmus, had eight thousand books in various languages that he left to the church of San Salvatore in Venice; these were burned there. Cardinal Sadoleto had a valuable library that he loaded on a ship to send to France; the library was lost at sea. Bembo’s library was rich in Provençal poets and manuscripts—for example, Petrarch’s books. This collection was transferred to Urbino and from there to the Vatican. Laymen such as Agostino Chigi and Bindo Altoviti also followed the popes and cardinals in collecting books, employing artists, and supporting poets and scholars.

These collectors were unusually numerous in Leo’s Rome. Many cardinals were themselves scholars; some, like Egidio Canisio, Sadoleto, and Bibbiena, were appointed cardinals because of their long record in scholarly service to the Church. Most cardinals in Rome usually supported learning and literature by giving pensions to those who dedicated their works to them; the houses of certain cardinals—Riario, Grimani, Bibbiena, Alidosi, Petrucci, Farnese, Soderini, Sansovino, Gonzaga, Canisio, and Giulio de’ Medici—lacked only the papal court in the gathering of intellectuals and artists. Castiglione, who through his noble character was friends with both the lovable Raphael and the surly and unpleasant Michelangelo, had his own small literary society.

Leo of course was the chief patron. Anyone who could say a witty word in Latin could hardly leave his presence without a reward. As in the days of Nicholas V, scholarship—and now poetry too—had a prominent place in the vast administrative staff of the Church. Those of lower rank were chosen for ecclesiastical secretaryships; those higher became members of the Church or rose to the episcopate; the stars of literature, like Sadoleto and Bembo, became papal secretaries; some, like Sadoleto and Bibbiena, were elevated to the cardinalate. Ciceronian oratory again resounded in Rome; compositions matured and declined at fixed periods; the poems of Virgil and Horace flowed like a thousand streams to their final destination, the Tiber. Bembo laid a very solid foundation for style; in a letter to Isabella d’Este he wrote: “Speaking in the manner of Cicero is better than being pope.” His friend and colleague Jacopo Sadoleto shamed most humanists by combining an elegant Latin style with refined morals. Among the cardinals of this age there were many very pure men, and Leo’s humanists were on the whole more refined and lived cleaner lives than the previous generation. Nevertheless, some of them were pagan in everything except their professed faith. It had become the custom for a gentleman, whatever his beliefs or doubts, not to utter a critical word against the Church that was so morally tolerant and so generously supported art.

Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena was the complete embodiment of all these conditions—scholar, poet, playwright, diplomat, connoisseur, orator, pagan, priest, and cardinal. Raphael’s portrait of him shows only part of his qualities—his cunning eyes and sharp nose, his bald head covered with a red hat, and his cheerfulness veiled by an unusual gravity. He was quick-footed, quick-tongued, and light-hearted, and for this reason he passed through the changes of the times with a smile. While in the service of Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1494, he fled with his sons; but by going to Urbino and charming its refined literary circle with his witticisms, and spending part of his leisure writing and staging a licentious play called Calandra (about 1508), he showed his cleverness. Julius II brought him to Rome. Bernardo so skillfully arranged Leo’s election with the minimum of noise and conflict that Leo immediately appointed him first secretary of the Church, the next day made him treasurer of the papal family, and six months later created him a cardinal. His high offices did not prevent him from performing the duties of connoisseur and organizer of festivities; his play was performed before the pope, and the pope was greatly pleased with it. He was sent on a papal embassy to France but so won the favor of Francis I that he was recalled to Rome, for his sensitivity was too great for diplomacy. When Raphael was decorating his bathroom, he chose scenes from the story of Venus and Cupid at his own choice. The pictures represented the triumphs of love; almost all of them were in a special style and led Christianity into a world that had never heard of Christ. Leo, pretending not to notice Bibbiena’s pagan nature, remained faithful to him to the end.

Leo loved drama in all its forms and degrees of comedy, from simple farces to the subtlest “similarities” of Bibbiena and Machiavelli. In the first year of his pontificate he opened a theater in the Capitol. In 1518 he saw a performance of Ariosto’s I Suppositi in that theater and laughed heartily at its double entendres—the effort of a youth to deceive a maiden. Such festive and recreational performances were more than pure comedy and included other parts as well, such as artistic backgrounds (the scenery was Raphael’s work), a ballet, an interlude with music by a group of singers and an orchestra of lutes, viols, cornets, bagpipes, flutes, and a small organ.

One of the great historical works of the Renaissance occurred during Leo’s pontificate. Paolo Giovio of Como practiced medicine there and also in Milan and Rome; but when he was stirred by the literary enthusiasm that arose with Leo’s accession, he devoted his leisure hours to writing a history of his own time in Latin. This time began with Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy and ended with Leo’s reign. He was allowed to read the first parts of it to Leo. After much praise, and saying that his writing was the most elegant and Ciceronian since the time of Livy, Leo immediately, with his usual generosity, established a pension for him. After Leo’s death, Giovio used what he called his “golden pen” to praise his deceased patron, and what he called his “iron stylus” to censure Pope Hadrian VI, who paid him no attention. At the same time he continued his work on the history of his time and brought its contents down to 1547. When Rome was sacked in 1527, he hid his manuscript in a church; it was later found by a soldier, and the finder asked the author to buy his own book; Paolo was saved from this insult by Clement VII, who suggested to the thief that instead of receiving immediate payment he should accept the revenues of a benefice in Spain; Giovio himself was appointed bishop of Nocera. His histories, and the biographies added to them, were praised for their fluent and lively style but censured for inaccuracy and the prejudices employed in them. Giovio frankly admitted with delight that he had praised or censured persons according to whether they or their relatives had been generous or ungenerous to him.

Poets and the Revival of Classical Art

The pagan spirit of the age was exalted by the presence and rescue of classical art. Poggio, Biondo, Pius II, and others condemned the destruction of classical foundations; nevertheless, this destruction continued and probably intensified, as the money of Rome enabled the building of new structures with materials from the ruins of old buildings. Builders of new buildings continued to throw marbles into kilns to be turned into lime. Paul II used the wall of the Colosseum to build the Palazzo San Marco; Sixtus IV destroyed the Temple of Hercules and turned one of the Tiber bridges into cannonballs. The Temple of the Sun provided materials for these buildings: a chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore, two fountains, and a papal palace on the Quirinal Hill. Artists themselves were indifferent plunderers; Michelangelo used one of the columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux to make a base for the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, and Raphael took part of another column from the same temple to make a statue of Jonah. The materials of the Sistine Chapel were taken from Hadrian’s Mausoleum. Almost all the marble used in building the new St. Peter’s was taken from old buildings, and for the same church the pavement under the columns, steps, and pediment of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, the triumphal arches of Fabius Maximus and Augustus, and the Temple of Romulus son of Maxentius were used. In just four years (1546–1549) the builders of new buildings destroyed the temples of Castor and Pollux, Julius Caesar, and Augustus. The destroyers argued that enough relics of paganism remained, that the abandoned ruins occupied valuable space and hindered the regular rebuilding of the city, and that the materials taken were in most cases used to build churches that were as beautiful as those ruins and perhaps more pleasing to God. At the same time the invisible hand of time, the great plunderer of all those monuments, had buried the Forum and other historic sites under successive layers of earth, debris, and vegetation, so that in some places the Forum lay more than thirteen meters below the level of the city that surrounded it; part of it was mainly devoted to pasture and called the Campo Vaccino (cow pasture). Time was the plunderer of all those relics.

The arrival of large numbers of artists and humanists delayed the rate of destruction, and movements arose to preserve ancient monuments. The popes collected statues and architectural fragments in the Vatican and the Capitoline museums. Poggio, the Medici, Pomponius Laetus, bankers, and cardinals collected as many precious objects and ancient remains as they could in their private collections. Many classical statues found their way into palaces and gardens and remained there until the nineteenth century; names such as the Barberini Faun, the Ludovisi Throne, and the Farnese Hercules originated from those collections.

When excavators found a new and complex group statue near the Baths of Titus in 1506, all Rome was delighted. Julius II sent Giuliano da Sangallo to examine it; Michelangelo also went with him. As soon as Giuliano saw it, he cried: “This is the Laocoön described in Pliny’s works.” Julius ordered it brought to the Belvedere palace and gave the finder and his son an annual pension of 600 ducats (7,500 dollars); statues had become so valuable. Such rewards encouraged antiquarians. A year later one of them found another group statue, Hercules with the infant Telephus, and soon after that the Sleeping Ariadne emerged from the earth. The enthusiasm for finding manuscripts now harmonized with the love of recovering and preserving ancient works of art. These two feelings were strong in Leo. It was during his pontificate that excavators found what they called the Antinous and the statues of the “Nile” and the “Tiber”; these two latter statues were placed in the Vatican Museum. Whenever he could, Leo bought jewels and precious stones, medallion reliefs, and other scattered works of art that had once been in the possession of the Medici, and placed them also in the Vatican. With Leo’s support, and beginning from the previous works of Fra Giocondo and others, Jacopo Mazzocchi and Francesco Albertini in four years copied all the inscriptions they could find in the Roman ruins and printed their copies under the title Elegant Speeches on the Ancient City of Rome (1521). This was a great event in the history of archaeology.

Leo in 1515 appointed Raphael superintendent of antiquarian research. This young painter, with the assistance of Mazzocchi, Andrea Fulvio, Fabio Calvo, Castiglione, and others, prepared an ambitious archaeological plan. In 1518 he wrote a letter to Leo and earnestly asked him to use the Church’s authority to preserve all remains of ancient monuments. The words of this letter may belong to Castiglione, but the feeling in it has the ring of Raphael: “When we think of the divinity of those ancient spirits … when we see the mangled corpse of this noble city, which was the mother and queen of the world, how sorrowful we become. … How many popes have allowed the destruction and disfigurement of temples, statues, arches, and other ancient buildings. I venture to say that all this new Rome that we now see, however beautiful it may be and adorned with palaces, churches, and other buildings, is built with lime made from the marbles of antiquity. …”

This letter shows how much destruction had occurred even during Raphael’s ten years’ residence in Rome. It reviews the history of architecture, condemns the crudeness and roughness of Romanesque and Gothic styles (in the letter these are called Gothic and Teutonic), and praises the Roman-Greek systems as models of perfection and taste; finally it proposes that a group of experts be formed; Rome be divided into fourteen regions according to the division made in ancient times by Augustus; in each of those regions a careful inspection of the remains of ancient monuments be made and notes taken. Raphael’s premature death, which was soon followed by Leo’s death, delayed this worthy undertaking.

The influence of the recovered remains was felt in every branch of art and thought. This influence worked on Brunelleschi, Alberti, and Bramante, until in the works of Palladio it led to slavish imitation of ancient forms. Ghiberti and Donatello had tried to base their works on the classical style. Michelangelo fully carried out the classical method in his Brutus, but in the rest of his works he applied his non-classical emotions. Literature transformed Christian theology into pagan mythology and made Olympus a substitute for heaven. In painting the classical influence took the form of pagan subjects and even introduced pagan nude forms into Christian subjects. Raphael himself, who was dear to the popes, painted scenes of Psyche, Venus, and Cupid on palace walls; and classical designs and arabesques became the means of decorating columns, cornices, and inscriptions in thousands of buildings in Rome.

Classical art displayed its victory most clearly in the new St. Peter’s Basilica. Leo, as long as he could, kept Bramante as “superintendent of buildings,” but the old architect was ill with gout, and Fra Giocondo was commissioned to assist him in the design. But Fra Giocondo was more than ten years older than the seventy-year-old Bramante. In January 1514 Leo appointed Giuliano da Sangallo, who was also seventy, to lead the building operations. On his deathbed Bramante earnestly asked the pope to entrust the work to a young man, especially Raphael. Leo accepted his request and in August 1514 appointed the young Raphael and the old Fra Giocondo superintendents of buildings. Raphael for a while worked with enthusiasm in a task unsuited to his nature, like an architect; he said that from then on he would work only in Rome, and this “from love of building St. Peter’s … the greatest building that man has ever seen.” He continued his words with his usual modesty: “The cost of this building will amount to several million gold ducats, while the pope has ordered only 60,000 ducats to be paid. He thinks nothing of this work. He has made me the colleague of an experienced monk who is over eighty. The pope feels that this monk cannot live much longer, and therefore His Holiness has decided that I should benefit from the teachings of that artist and acquire greater skill in the art of architecture, of which that monk is deeply knowledgeable in all the secrets of beauty. … The pope receives us every day and discusses the building with us in detail.”

Fra Giocondo died on January 1, 1515, and on the same day Giuliano da Sangallo withdrew from the group of designers. Raphael, now at the head of the group, replaced Bramante’s ground plan with a Latin cross plan whose arms were unequal, and designed a dome for it that Antonio Sangallo (Giuliano’s nephew) proved too heavy for its columns. In 1517 Antonio was appointed to the architectural leadership on an equal footing with Raphael. Now at every step there were disputes; and Raphael, who was overwhelmed with painting tasks, lost his enthusiasm for that architectural work. At the same time Leo’s budget ran out, he tried to raise more money by issuing indulgences, and as a result found himself involved in the German religious reform movement (1517).

The building of St. Peter’s made no significant progress until Michelangelo was appointed to its direction in 1546.

Michelangelo and Leo X

Julius II had left enough money with his agents to complete his tomb on a smaller scale than Michelangelo had designed. The artist worked on that tomb during the first three years of Leo’s reign and received 6,100 ducats (76,250 dollars) in wages from Leo’s agents. Most of what remains of that tomb was probably made in this period along with the Risen Christ statue belonging to the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. This statue represents a beautiful nude hero who was later covered with a bronze loincloth. A letter from Michelangelo, written in May 1518, says that Signorelli came to his studio and borrowed eighty giuli (800 dollars?) from him and never repaid it. He then adds: “He found me working on a marble statue four cubits high with its hands tied behind its back.” This statue was apparently one of the Prigioni (prisoners) or Captivi (captives), that is, figures that were to represent the cities or arts captured by the warrior pope. A statue in the Louvre fits this description: a muscular figure wearing only a loincloth with its hands so tightly tied behind its back that the ropes sink into the flesh; near it is a more delicate prisoner wearing only a narrow breastband; in this statue the muscle structure is not exaggerated; the limbs are harmonious in health and beauty; it is an example of Greek perfection. Four half-finished slaves in the Florentine Academy were apparently intended for the caryatid columns of the tomb’s superstructure. The half-finished tomb in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli consists of a beautiful massive base, columns with delicate carving, and a seated Moses—a monster with disproportionate limbs, a forked beard, and an angry brow, holding the tablets of the law. If we accept Vasari’s incredible account, the Jews entered that Christian church every Saturday to “worship this statue, not as the work of human hands, but as a divine object.” To the left of Moses is a statue of Leah, and to the right is a statue of Rachel—statues that Michelangelo called “active and contemplative life.” The remaining statues of the tomb were made with indifference in an incongruous collection by Michelangelo’s assistants: above the Moses statue is a figure of the Virgin, and below it a half-reclining statue of Julius II with the papal tiara. The entire tomb is an incongruous collection that resulted from intermittent work in different years from 1506 to 1545: confused, massive, mismatched, and vulgar.

While these statues were being made, Leo—probably during his stay in Florence—was thinking of completing the church of San Lorenzo. This was the Medici mausoleum that contained the tombs of Cosimo, Lorenzo, and many other members of the family. Brunelleschi had built the church but left its façade unfinished. Leo asked Raphael, Giuliano da Sangallo, Baccio d’Agnolo, Andrea, and Jacopo Sansovino to make designs for the church’s front. Michelangelo, apparently on his own initiative, sent a design of his own that Leo accepted as the best design; therefore the pope cannot be blamed for diverting Michelangelo from building Julius’s tomb—as some have done. Leo sent him to Florence, from where he went to Carrara to obtain the necessary marble. Michelangelo, after returning to Florence, chose assistants for the work, quarreled with them, and dismissed them; then he passively pondered the unfamiliar architectural task that had been assigned to him. Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, Leo’s cousin, allocated some of the unused marbles to the cathedral; Michelangelo was angry but still evaded. Finally (in 1520) Leo freed him from the contract and did not even ask for an account of the money that had been paid to the architect as advances. When Sebastiano del Piombo asked the pope to give Michelangelo other commissions, Leo apologized. He recognized Michelangelo’s superiority in art but told his interlocutor: “As you see, he is a terrible man and in no way can one deal with him.” Sebastiano reported this conversation to his friend and added: “I told His Holiness that your terrible manner harms no one and that only your loyalty and steadfastness in the work to which you have devoted yourself make you seem terrible to others.”

What made this famous man terrible? First, his temperament, a destructive force that tormented Michelangelo’s body and at the same time preserved it enough to bring him to the age of eighty-nine; second, a willpower that directed that temperament toward one purpose—art—and ignored everything else. A temperament directed by a unifying will is always a sign of genius. The temperament that challenged the shapeless stone, clung to it, and struck it furiously with hammer and chisel to give it shape and importance was the same power that swept contemptuously past the worthless but attractive treasures of life, thought nothing of dress, cleanliness, and superficial courtesies, and blindly passed through broken contracts, violated friendships, impaired health, and finally a worn-out spirit that crushed body and soul toward its goal; but the result of his work, despite all these causes, was the most outstanding paintings, the finest statues, and some of the best architecture of the time. He himself said: “If God helps, I will create the greatest work that Italy has ever seen.”

In an age that shone with personal beauty and splendor of dress, Michelangelo attracted less attention than anyone else. Of medium height, broad shoulders, a slender body, a large head, raised eyebrows, ears protruding from behind the cheeks, protruding temples in front of the ears, a dark and wrinkled face, a broken nose, small and sharp eyes, and half-gray hair and beard—this was Michelangelo in the prime of youth. He wore old clothes and kept them on so long that they almost became part of his body, and as if he obeyed half of his father’s advice: “Beware of washing yourself; rub the dirt off your body, but do not wash your body.” Although he was wealthy, he lived like a poor man; not only with economy but with stinginess. He ate whatever he found and sometimes finished dinner with a piece of bread. In Bologna he and his three workers lived in one room and slept in one bed. Condivi says: “When he was in the prime of his strength, he usually went to bed clothed and did not even take off his boots, because he had a chronic tendency to muscle cramps. … In some seasons he kept his boots on so long that when he took them off, the skin of his feet came off with the leather.” As Vasari says: “His indifference to taking off his clothes was only so that he would not have to put them on again.”

While boasting of his supposed high birth, he preferred the poor to the rich, simple people to intellectuals, and the toil of workers to the luxury and pomp of the wealthy. He spent most of his income on maintaining his idle relatives. He loved solitude; he could not tolerate empty talk with third-rate minds; wherever he was, he followed the thread of his own thoughts; he paid no attention to beautiful women; and as a result of his frugality he accumulated wealth. When a priest expressed regret that Michelangelo had not married and had children, he replied: “I have more than enough woman in my art, and it has troubled me enough. But as for children, my works are my children; and if they are not very valuable, at least they will last for a while.” He could not tolerate the presence of women around the house either. He preferred men, both for companionship and for his artistic works. He painted women, but always in the position of a mother, not in the dazzling youth of a maiden; it is interesting that both he and Leonardo apparently were insensitive to the physical beauty of woman, which for many artists is the source and embodiment of beauty. There is no evidence to suggest that Michelangelo was homosexual; apparently all his temperament was consumed in his work. In Carrara he spent the whole day from early morning on horseback guiding stonecutters and road builders; and at night in his hut, by lamplight, he examined plans, calculated expenses, and prepared the designs for the next day’s work. He had periods of apparent laziness and slowness; but suddenly the creative fever seized him again and everything else, even the sack of Rome, became a matter of indifference to him.

Because he was absorbed in his work, he had no time to make friends, although he had loyal friends. “Rarely did a friend or anyone else dine at his table.” He was content with the company of his faithful servant Francesco d’Amadore, who took care of him for twenty-five years and shared his bed. Michelangelo’s generosity made Francesco a wealthy man, and the artist was heartbroken at his death. As for others, Michelangelo had a bad temper and a sharp tongue, criticized severely, was easily offended, and suspected everyone. He called Perugino mad, and expressed his opinion of Francia’s paintings to his handsome son in this way: “Your father makes better faces at night than during the day.” He envied Raphael’s success and popularity. Although the two artists respected each other, their patrons were rivals, and Jacopo Sansovino sent an insulting letter to Michelangelo in which he said: “God damn the day when you have spoken well of anyone.” Incidentally, such days existed in Michelangelo’s life. When he saw the portrait of Duke Alfonso of Ferrara, he said: “I did not think that art could produce such a work; only Titian deserves the name of painter.” His fierce and gloomy temper was the misfortune of his life. Sometimes he fell into a state bordering on hypochondriac madness; and in old age the fear of hell tormented him so much that he even considered his own art a sin, and gave dowries to poor girls to please the angry God. In 1508 he wrote a letter to his father in which he said: “Now fifteen years have passed since I enjoyed an hour of good health.” After that letter he also enjoyed many hours of health, although he still had fifty-eight years ahead of him.

Raphael and Leo X: 1513–1520

Leo, to some extent, alienated Michelangelo because he liked well-balanced men and women, and to some extent because he had little love for architecture or grandeur in art; he preferred the beauty of a vase to a cathedral, and a miniature to a monument. He employed Caradosso, Santi di Cola Saba, Michele Nardini, and many other goldsmiths in jewelry making, medallion relief work, medal making, coin minting, and the making of sacred vessels. At his death he left a collection of precious stones, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, pearls, the papal tiara, bishop’s miters, and jeweled pectorals worth 204,655 ducats (more than 2,500,000 dollars). It should be noted that most of these he had inherited from his predecessors and they formed part of the papal treasury that was safe from the effects of currency devaluation.

Leo invited about twenty painters to Rome, but Raphael was almost the only one to whom Leo showed favor. He tested Leonardo and dismissed him as a “time-waster.” Fra Bartolommeo came to Rome in 1514 and painted a St. Peter and a St. Paul; but the air and excitement of Rome were unsuited to his nature and he soon returned to the calm of his Florentine monastery. Leo liked Sodoma’s work but rarely dared to let that bold libertine wander freely in the Vatican. Sebastiano del Piombo had been taken into the service of Leo’s cousin, Giulio de’ Medici.

Raphael, both in morals and in taste, agreed with Leo. Both were lovable pleasure-seekers who had made Christianity pleasurable; but both worked as hard as they played. Leo kept that cheerful artist busy with many tasks: completing the painting of the pope’s private residence, designing patterns for the Sistine Chapel tapestries, decorating the loggias of the Vatican, building St. Peter’s, and preserving classical art. Raphael carried out these missions with cheerfulness and enthusiasm, and in addition found time to paint twenty religious pictures, several pagan frescoes, fifty Madonnas, and portraits each of which brought him wealth and fame. Leo took advantage of his service and asked him to arrange festivities, paint scenery for theater decoration, and make a likeness of a beloved elephant. Perhaps overwork, as well as love, brought Raphael a premature death.

But he was now in the prime of his strength and the height of happiness. In a letter to “dear uncle Simone … who is as dear to me as a father,” who had reproached him for his prolonged celibacy, he writes with a cheerful nature full of self-confidence: “But as for marriage, I must say that I am glad every day that I did not see the one you had chosen for me, or indeed anyone else. In this matter I have been wiser than you … and I am sure that you must now recognize that my situation is better this way. I have in Rome a capital of 3,000 ducats, and a secure income of 50 ducats more than that. His Holiness has established a salary of 300 ducats for me for supervising the rebuilding of St. Peter’s, which will not be taken from me as long as I live. … In addition, they give me what I ask for my works. I have begun to decorate a large hall for His Holiness, and for this work I must receive 1,200 gold crowns. In this way, dear uncle, you see that I have brought honor to my family and my country.”

At thirty-one he had entered the ranks of aware men. Perhaps to cover his youth, he had grown a black beard. Raphael lived comfortably, and even magnificently, in a palace that Bramante had built and which he had bought for 3,000 ducats. His dress resembled that of a young nobleman. When he appeared in the Vatican, he was accompanied by a magnificent retinue of pupils and clients. Michelangelo reproached him and said: “You go about like a general with an entourage”; and Raphael replied: “And you go about alone, like an executioner.” He was still an irreproachable youth, free from envy, but he had a love of competition, was no longer as modest as before (how could he be?), but was always encouraging to others; he gave masterpieces to his friends and even acted as a patron to second- and third-rate painters. But, as the case might be, he could be offensively witty. When two cardinals who were visiting his studio decided to find fault with his paintings—for example, saying that the faces of the apostles were too red—he replied: “Do not be surprised at this, Your Eminences; I painted them deliberately this way; can one not imagine that when they see that the Church is governed by men like you, they will blush with shame in heaven?” Nevertheless, he accepted without resentment the corrections that were made in his work; for example, in the plans he had drawn for St. Peter’s. He could congratulate other painters by imitating the excellent aspects of their art without detracting from the independence and originality of his own work. To be himself, he did not need solitude.

His morals did not fully match his behavior. If he had not been strongly attracted to the beauty of women, he could not have painted them with such attractiveness. He wrote sonnets on the backs of his paintings for the Disputation book. He had a group of mistresses, but everyone, even the pope himself, apparently thought that such a great artist had the right to enjoy such amusements. Vasari, after describing Raphael’s secret debauchery, apparently did not notice the inconsistency in what he says two pages later. That sentence is: “Those who imitate his chaste life will receive their reward in heaven.” When Castiglione asked Raphael where he found the models for the beautiful women he painted, he replied that he made them in his imagination from the various elements of beauties he had seen in different women; therefore he needed many such examples. Nevertheless, there is a healthy and invigorating quality in his character and works; in his artistic life there is unity, calm, and purity amid the conflicts, divisions, jealousies, and slanders of that age; he paid no attention to the politics that were about to ruin Leo and Italy; perhaps he felt that the rivalries of parties and countries for power and privilege were a worthless and monotonous game of history and that nothing but devotion to good, beauty, and truth was important.

Raphael left the pursuit of truth to bolder spirits and contented himself with the service of beauty. In the early years of Leo’s pontificate he continued to decorate the Stanza di Eliodoro. With a sudden whim—and to depict the expulsion of the barbarians from Italy—Julius had chosen for the second main wall painting of the room the historic meeting of Attila and Leo I (452). Raphael had given the features of Julius II to Leo I in the painting when Leo X ascended the papal throne. The painting was revised and Leo became Leo. More successful than this large group picture is a smaller panel that Raphael painted in the lunette above the window of the same room. Here the new pope, perhaps in memory of his escape from the French in Milan, suggested the subject of the liberation of Peter from prison by an angel. Raphael used all his compositional skill to give unity and life to a story whose window location in the room divided the painting into three scenes: on the left the sleeping guards are seen, above an angel is waking Peter, and on the right that angel is leading the sleepy and astonished apostle toward freedom. The brightness of the angel illuminating the prison shines on the soldiers’ shields and blinds their eyes; and the crescent moon, which whitens the clouds, turns this scene, in terms of light study, into a spectacular one.

The young artist had a special eagerness to learn every new style. Bramante had taken his friend without Michelangelo’s permission to see the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel ceiling before they were finished. Raphael was deeply impressed. Perhaps, with a humility still accompanied by pride, he felt himself in the presence of a genius who possessed a talent superior to his own, although less endowed with external grace. He surrendered himself to that new influence so that it would flow into his being when painting the frescoes of the Stanza di Eliodoro and help him in subjects and forms. These pictures are: the appearance of God to Noah, the sacrifice of Abraham, Jacob’s dream, and the burning bush. This influence again showed itself in the painting of the prophet Isaiah, which he painted for the church of Sant’Agostino.

In 1514 Raphael began work in a room that from its main picture is called the Stanza dell’Incendio di Borgo. A medieval legend says how Pope Leo III (795–816), simply by making the sign of the cross, extinguished a fire that threatened to burn Borgo—the area of Rome around the Vatican. Perhaps Raphael only prepared the model for this wall painting and delegated its painting to his pupil Gianfrancesco Penni. Nevertheless, its composition is very powerful and painted in Raphael’s best narrative style. By mixing classical and Christian stories, Raphael drew on the left a handsome and muscular Aeneas carrying his old but muscular father Anchises to safety. Another nude man, perfectly drawn, hangs from the top of that burning building and is ready to fall; Michelangelo’s influence is evident in these three nudes. More Raphaelesque is a distraught mother hanging from the top of the wall to hand her child to a man who has stood on tiptoe and stretched out his hand from below. Among the huge columns groups of women beg help from the pope, and the pope slowly from the loggia commands the fire to stop. Here Raphael is still at the head of his line and profession.

For the remaining pictures in the room, Raphael drew preliminary sketches; and perhaps in this work he was even helped by his pupils. From these sketches, Perino del Vaga painted the oath of Leo III above the window. In that panel Leo III clears himself of guilt before Charlemagne (800); on the exit wall one of his older pupils, Giulio Romano—the only prominent Roman in Renaissance art—painted the battle of Ostia in which Leo IV (who looks remarkably like Leo X) repelled the invading Arabs (849); and in other spaces his skilled pupils drew ideal portraits of kings that were well worthy of being represented in the Church. In a final portrait, the coronation of Charlemagne, Leo X becomes Leo III; and Francis I, who is here painted like Charlemagne, achieves in another guise his desire to attain the empire. This picture represents the meeting of Leo with Francis in Bologna the previous year (1516).

Raphael prepared several preliminary sketches for the fourth room, which is called the Stanza di Costantino; this painting was carried out after his death under the patronage of Clement VII; at the same time Leo forced him to begin decorating the loggias that Bramante had built to surround the courtyard of San Damaso in the Vatican. Raphael himself had completed the construction of these loggias; now he began to paint fifty-two frescoes for the ceiling of one loggia (1517–1519) that depict the story of the Bible from the beginning of creation to the Last Judgment. The painting work was delegated to Giulio Romano, Giovanni Francesco Penni, Perino del Vaga, Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio, and several others; while Giovanni da Udine decorated the pilasters and spandrels of the arches with images and arabesque designs in stucco and color. These frescoes sometimes use subjects that had previously been done on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but with a lighter hand and a simpler and more cheerful spirit that did not seek grandeur or sublimity but sought pleasing incidents from the stories: such as Adam and Eve and their children enjoying the fruit of paradise, the meeting of the three angels with Abraham, Isaac embracing Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel at the well, Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, the finding of Moses, David and Bathsheba, and the adoration of the shepherds. These small paintings of course cannot be compared with Michelangelo’s paintings; for their world and type are different—a world of feminine grace, not masculine power; they are a sign of the lighthearted Raphael in the last five years of his life, and the paintings of the Sistine Chapel ceiling are a sign of Michelangelo at the height of his power.

Perhaps Leo was a little envious of that ceiling and the glory it had brought to Julius’s pontificate. After his appointment to the papacy, he thought of immortalizing the memory of his own pontificate by adorning the walls of the Sistine Chapel with tapestries. There were no weavers in Italy who could compete with the Flemish weavers, and Leo thought there were no painters in Flanders who could equal Raphael. He commissioned the artist (1515) to draw ten cartoons of scenes from the Acts of the Apostles. Seven of these cartoons were bought by Rubens in Brussels for Charles I, king of England (1630), and are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. These are among the most interesting paintings ever made. Here Raphael used all his knowledge of composition, anatomy, and dramatic effect; among all painted works, only a few pieces can surpass the miraculous catch of fish, the mission of Jesus to Peter, the death of Ananias, Peter healing the lame man, or Paul preaching in Athens—although in this last picture the beautiful face of Paul is stolen from Masaccio’s frescoes in Florence.

These ten cartoons were sent to Brussels, and there Bernard van Orley, who had been Raphael’s pupil in Rome, supervised the transfer of the designs to silk and wool fabrics. In a short three years, seven of the tapestries were completed, and all ten were finished by 1520. On December 26, 1519, seven of these tapestries were hung on the walls of the Sistine and the elite of Rome were invited to see them. The sight of them caused a stir. Paris de Grassis wrote in his diary: “All the congregation present in the chapel was amazed at the sight of these tapestries; everyone agrees that there is nothing more beautiful in the world.” Each tapestry was worth a total of 2,000 ducats (25,000 dollars); the costs related to these ten tapestries helped to empty Leo’s treasury and necessitated the sale of more indulgences and offices. Leo must now have felt that he and Raphael had faced Julius and Michelangelo in an artistic battle in the same chapel and won the prize.

Raphael’s astonishing fertility—which was greater at thirty-seven than at Michelangelo’s eighty-nine—makes a concise and accurate description of him difficult, for every product of his was a masterpiece worthy of immortality. He designed patterns for transfer to mosaic, wood, jewels, medals, pottery, bronze vessels, and jewelry boxes. He made designs for statues and plans for palaces. When Michelangelo heard that Raphael had made a model from which Lorenzo Tolomei had made a marble statue of Jonah riding the whale, he was upset, but the result of the work again reassured him—Raphael had foolishly departed from his pictorial element. He worked better in architecture, because his friend Bramante guided him in that work. Around 1514, when he was appointed to the direction of the work on St. Peter’s, he commissioned his friend Fabio Calvo to translate Vitruvius’s work into Italian; and from then on he became an impatient lover of classical architectural styles and forms. His continuation of the work on the construction of the loggias so pleased Leo that he appointed him director of all architectural and artistic parts of the Vatican. Raphael built several less famous palaces in Rome and participated in the design of the Villa Madama for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici; however, the construction of this villa was mainly the work of Giulio Romano as architect and painter, and Giovanni da Udine as decorator. One of Raphael’s architectural masterpieces that still stands is the Palazzo Pandolfini, which was built after his death from his plans; this palace is still among the best palaces in Florence. With a noble detachment, he put his talents at the service of the banker Chigi himself, built a chapel for him in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, and built such stables for his horses (1514) as were worthy of a palace. To know Raphael and Leo’s Rome, we must pause for a moment and take a look at the magnificent Chigi.

Agostino Chigi

Agostino was an example of a new group in Rome: the group of wealthy merchants and bankers, usually of non-Roman origin, whose wealth had overshadowed the nobility of Rome and whose generosity toward artists and writers was second only to that of the popes and cardinals. He was born in Siena, and economic cleverness seemed to be in his blood. At the age of forty-three he was the greatest lender to republics and kingdoms, whether Christian or infidel. He financed trade with several countries (including Turkey) and, by renting mines, obtained from Julius II a monopoly in the extraction of alum and salt. In 1511 he gave another reason for Julius to go to war with Ferrara—that the duke Alfonso had dared to sell salt at a price lower than what Agostino had the power to buy it for. His trading house had branches in all the major cities of Italy, as well as in Constantinople, Alexandria, Cairo, Lyon, London, and Amsterdam. A hundred ships sailed under his flag; twenty thousand men were in his employ; several sultans sent him gifts; the best horse he had was sent by the Ottoman sultan; when he traveled to Venice (to which he had lent 125,000 ducats), he sat next to the “Doge” at the head. When Leo asked him to estimate his wealth, he replied—perhaps to escape taxes—that such an estimate was impossible; nevertheless, his annual income amounted to 70,000 ducats (875,000 dollars). His silver and jewel vessels, in quantity, equaled all the nobility; his bed was of ivory and had a cover of jeweled gold; his bathroom fixtures were of pure silver. He had several palaces and villas, the most splendid of which was the Villa Chigi on the west bank of the Tiber. The design of this villa was prepared by Baldassare Peruzzi, decorated with paintings by Peruzzi, Raphael, Sodoma, Giulio Romano, and Sebastiano del Piombo, and when it was completed in 1512 it was praised by the Romans as the most splendid palace.

Chigi’s banquets almost had the fame of Lucullus’s feasts in Caesar’s time. In 1518, in the stable that Raphael had just finished, and before more shapely animals than humans occupied it, Agostino entertained Pope Leo and fourteen cardinals with a dinner that cost 200 ducats (25,000 dollars). In that magnificent feast eleven large and heavy silver plates were stolen, perhaps by servants accompanying the guests. Chigi forbade the search for them and politely expressed surprise at how so little had been stolen. When the feast ended, the silk carpets, tapestries, and other fine furnishings were removed and a hundred horses were placed in their positions.

A few months later the banker gave another dinner, this time in the loggia of the villa, which projected from the main building and hung over the river. After each course of food, all the silver vessels used were thrown into the river in front of the guests’ eyes so that they would be sure that no plate was used twice. After the feast ended, Chigi’s servants pulled the silver vessels out with a net that had been thrown into the river under the windows of the hall. In the dinner he gave on August 28, 1519, in the hall of the villa, every guest—including Pope Leo and twelve cardinals—ate from silver or gold plates that bore the coats of arms and emblems of their own families; every guest was fed with fish, game meat, vegetables, fruit, sweets, and wine that had recently been brought from their own country or place for that feast.

Chigi tried to compensate for this vulgar display of wealth with generous support for literature and art. He financed the purification of Pindar’s book, which had been done by the scholar Cornelio Benigno of Viterbo, and established a press in his house to print it; the Greek letters made for that press, in terms of beauty, surpassed those that Aldus Manutius had used two years earlier in printing the odes. This was the first printed text in Rome (1515). A year later the same press printed a correct edition of Theocritus. Although Agostino was a man of average education, he prided himself on his friendship with Bembo, Giovio, and even Aretino; after money and his mistress, he loved all forms of beauty created by art. In assigning commissions to artists, he competed with Leo and sometimes even surpassed him in the pagan interpretation of the Renaissance. In his palaces and villas he had so many works of art that he could fill a museum with them. Apparently he considered his villa not only his home but also a public art gallery that was occasionally open to the general public.

In the same villa, in the same feast that he arranged on August 28, 1519, and which we mentioned earlier, Chigi finally married his faithful mistress, with whom he had lived for the past eight years; Leo himself performed the marriage ceremony. Chigi died eight months later, a few days after Raphael’s death. His estate, which was worth 800,000 ducats (10,000,000 dollars?), was divided mainly among his children. Lorenzo, his eldest son, led a wasteful life and was declared insane in 1553. The Villa Chigi was sold to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese the Younger for a small sum—about 1,580 ducats—and from then on its name was changed to Farnesina.

Raphael: The Last Phase

Raphael had received smaller commissions from that cheerful banker since 1510. In 1514 Raphael made a fresco for him in the church of Santa Maria della Pace. The space given to him for this work was narrow and irregular; Raphael made the painting space seem suitable by drawing pictures of four sibyls in it—the Cumaean, Persian, Phrygian, and Tiburtine—and adorned these pagan images with angels he had drawn beside them. These figures are beautiful and delicate—generally it was hardly possible for Raphael to make a figure lacking these aspects; Vasari thought they were the young master’s best work. They are a weak imitation of Michelangelo’s sibyls, except for the Tiburtine sibyl which here, while decrepit with old age and terrified by the bad fortune she has foreseen, is an original and wonderfully powerful figure. According to a story whose origin cannot be traced before the seventeenth century, misunderstandings arose between Raphael and Chigi’s treasurer about the payment for these sibyls. Raphael had received 500 ducats, but when the work was finished, he demanded an additional amount. The treasurer thought that the 500 ducats paid had been his entire fee. Raphael suggested that the treasurer should appoint a qualified artist to evaluate the frescoes, and that person should be Michelangelo, who held an official position; this suggestion was accepted. Michelangelo, although he apparently envied Raphael, ruled that each head in those pictures was worth 100 ducats. When the treasurer reported this ruling to Chigi, the banker ordered that 400 more ducats be paid immediately and added: “Be so kind to him that he is satisfied. If he asks a fair price for the cartoons, I will be ruined.”

Chigi must have been kind and careful in his behavior toward Raphael, because in the same year Raphael made a delightful fresco for him—the Triumph of Galatea—in the Villa Chigi. The basis of this fresco is Politian’s story of the wheel of fortune. Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops, tries to seduce Galatea with his songs and the sound of his flute; Galatea turns away from him with contempt—as if to say “Who marries an artist?”—and entrusts the reins to two dolphins that will pull her shell-like boat to the sea. On her left a robust nymph is joyfully seized by a powerful Triton, while Cupid shoots arrows from among the clouds to encourage love. Here the pagan Renaissance reaches the height of activity and Raphael enjoys painting women in the way that his bright imagination gives them the desired shape.

In 1516 he began to decorate Cardinal Bibbiena’s bathroom with frescoes that celebrate Venus and the triumphs of love. In 1517 he devoted himself even more sensually to preparing designs for the ceiling and spandrels of the central hall of the Villa Chigi. Here he used his pleasant whim in a picture of a story from Apuleius’s Metamorphoses. Psyche, the daughter of a king, arouses the envy of Venus with her beauty; that vengeful goddess orders her son Cupid to ensnare Psyche with the love of the lowest man he can find; Cupid descends to earth to carry out his mission; but at the first encounter he falls in love with Psyche. He meets Psyche in darkness and orders her to suppress her curiosity about his identity. Psyche, out of necessity, rises from bed one night, lights a lamp, and is delighted to find that she is sleeping with the most beautiful god. Out of joy her hand shakes and a drop of hot oil falls on Cupid’s shoulder. Cupid wakes up, reproaches Psyche for her curiosity, and leaves her in anger, without realizing that a woman’s lack of curiosity in such cases corrupts society. Psyche wanders sadly on earth. Venus imprisons Cupid for disobeying his mother’s command and complains to Jupiter that heavenly discipline is on the verge of corruption. Jupiter sends Mercury to bring Psyche, who at that time has become the insulted slave of Venus. Cupid escapes from prison and begs Jupiter to give Psyche to him; the surprised god, who usually does not know which of the conflicting prayers to accept, summons the Olympian gods to negotiate the matter. He himself, who is under the influence of male beauties, takes Cupid’s side; the gods, ready to serve, decide to free Psyche, make her a goddess, and give her to Cupid; and in the last scene they hold the wedding ceremony of Cupid and Psyche with a heavenly feast. We are sure that this story is a religious allegory in which Psyche represents the human soul that, when purified by suffering, will go to heaven. But Raphael and Chigi saw no religious sign in this legend but found in it an opportunity to observe perfectly formed male and female shapes. Nevertheless, in Raphael’s sensuality there is a delicacy and grace that neutralizes dry religious criticism; Leo apparently found nothing in them worthy of blame. In this picture only the shapes and composition are Raphael’s. Giulio Romano and Francesco Penni painted those scenes from his design; and Giovanni da Udine painted a delightful garland of flowers around them adorned with fruit. Raphael’s school had become a transitional belt whose final product always had a form of beauty and charm.

Never had Christian and pagan art been mixed with such harmony as existed in Raphael’s works. This same pleasure-loving youth who lived like a prince, had a fleeting love for many women, and played with nude men and women on ceilings, during these same years (1513–1520) created some of the most attractive pictures in the history of art. With all his innocent sensuality, he always looked at the Virgin as a favorite subject; he painted the image of the Virgin fifty times. Sometimes a pupil helped him, but often in such paintings he worked solely with his own hand, and that too with a part of the old Umbrian piety. In 1515 he painted the Sistine Madonna for the monastery of San Sisto in Piacenza: the composition of this picture is completely pyramidal; the convincing realism of the old martyr, St. Sixtus; the dignified St. Barbara, who is a little more beautiful than she should be and more elegantly dressed than she perhaps is; the Virgin’s green robe, on a shadow of red, fluttering with heavenly wind; the Child (Jesus) who, in all his innocent disarray, looks completely human; the simple rosy face of the Virgin who is a little sad and surprised (as if La Fornarina, who may have been a model for this picture, has felt her own unworthiness); the curtains drawn back by angels who are behind the Virgin and lead her into heaven: this is the beloved picture of all Christendom, which has been more accepted than all of Raphael’s achievements. Almost as delicate and perhaps, despite its ordinary shape, more exciting is the Holy Family under the Oak Tree (Prado Museum) which is also called the Pearl Madonna. In the Madonna of the Chair (Pitti Palace) the character of the picture is less evangelical and more human; the Virgin is a young Italian mother, healthy and rosy-cheeked and with a silent affection, while she presses her plump child to her with possessive and protective love, and the child also presses himself to her in fear, as if he has heard the legend of the innocents slaughtered. Such a “Madonna” could compensate for many of the famous Fornarina panels.

Raphael painted relatively few pictures of Jesus. His cheerful spirit was averse to thinking about and depicting suffering; or perhaps he too, like Leonardo, recognized the impossibility of depicting divinity. In 1517, perhaps with Penni’s collaboration, he painted Christ Carrying the Cross for the monastery of Santa Maria dello Spasimo in Palermo, which for that reason is called the Spasimo di Sicilia. According to Vasari’s story, that panel had an interesting fate; the ship carrying it to Sicily lost its way in a storm; the box containing the picture floated on the water and landed in Genoa. Vasari says: “Even the wrath of the winds and waves cherished such a panel.” The box was placed back on the ship and taken to Palermo, where the picture was installed and there “became more famous than Mount Etna.” In the seventeenth century Philip IV, king of Spain, secretly transferred it to Madrid. In this panel Jesus is only a weary and defeated man and shows no feeling of a mission accepted and fulfilled. Raphael was more successful in depicting divinity in the fresco of Ezekiel’s Vision, although here too he borrowed his majestic God from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.

The panel of St. Cecilia is almost as popular as the Sistine Madonna. A Bolognese lady in the autumn of 1513 announced that she had heard heavenly voices commanding her to dedicate a chapel in the church of San Giovanni del Monte to St. Cecilia. One of her relatives undertook to build that chapel and asked his uncle, Cardinal Lorenzo Pucci, to commission a worthy picture for the altar for a fee of one thousand gold scudi. Raphael, after delegating the painting of musical instruments to Giovanni da Udine, finished painting the panel in 1516. He sent it to Bologna, and as we saw, also sent a letter for Francia with it. There is no need to believe that Francia was so enchanted by the beauty of that panel that he did not feel its grandeur, its almost heavenly musical meaning, Paul the Apostle in his thoughtful melancholy, John the Baptist in his maidenly ecstasy, and Cecilia the graceful one in it, and even more graceful the Magdalene in it—who here has been transformed into an attractive innocence—and its lively chiaroscuro on robes, fabrics, and Mary’s feet.

Masterpieces were still coming from his hand. The portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (Louvre) is the product of one of Raphael’s most conscious efforts, which among his portraits is second only to the portrait of Julius II, and among all his works has a lasting charm. First one sees his fur-hooded figure, then his fur garment and thick beard; and one imagines him as a poet or a Muslim philosopher or a rabbi seen through Rembrandt’s eyes; then his delicate eyes and mouth and hooked hands recall the sensitive, emotional, and heartbroken priest Isabella in Leo’s court; one must contemplate this picture before reading the Courtier book. The portrait of Cardinal Bibbiena shows him in the later years of his life, tired of his Venuses and reconciled with Christianity.

Lady Mary the Modest is undoubtedly not by Raphael, yet it is almost certainly the portrait that Vasari described as a portrait of Raphael’s mistress. Her features are the same that Raphael had used for the image of the Magdalene and even Cecilia in the Santa Cecilia chapel, or perhaps for the Sistine Madonna—here Mary is dark-skinned and dignified, a long veil has fallen on her face, she has a jeweled necklace around her neck, and delightful garments are wrapped around her body. A portrait that is perhaps by Raphael, but not as clearly as the predecessors claimed to represent his mistress, is that of La Fornarina (Borghese Gallery). The word La Fornarina means a baker woman or girl; but such names, like Smith (blacksmith) or Carpenter (carpenter), are no reason for the profession of the name-bearer. This lady in particular is not attractive; one does not find in her that modest appearance that makes such immodest portraits more attractive. It is unbelievable that that modest lady is the same person who is the giver of fleeting pleasures; but apart from everything, Raphael had more than one mistress.

Nevertheless, he was more faithful to his mistress than artists are expected to be, because artists are more sensitive to beauty than to reason. When Cardinal Bibbiena insisted that he marry Maria Bibbiena, the cardinal’s niece, Raphael, because he had taken profitable commissions from him, agreed against his will (1514). But he postponed the marriage month by month and year by year so much that, according to one account, Maria died of heartbreak. Vasari notes that Raphael delayed in the hope of becoming a cardinal; for such a high position marriage was a great obstacle and mistress-keeping a small one. At the same time, the painter apparently always took his mistress with him and kept her near his workplace. When the distance between the Villa Chigi, where Raphael was preparing the design for the story of Psyche, and his mistress’s residence caused much time loss, the banker (Chigi) settled the lady in one part of the villa; Vasari says: “For this reason the work was finished.” It is not known whether Raphael, as Vasari says, died as a result of that “wild and unusual drinking” with this mistress.

His last picture was one of the highest interpretations of the Gospel story. In 1517 Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici commissioned Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo to paint altarpieces for the cathedral of Narbonne, which the first French pope had chosen him as bishop for. Sebastiano had long felt that his talent was at least equal to Raphael’s, although less recognized; here he had found an opportunity to show himself. He chose the raising of Lazarus as his subject and obtained Michelangelo’s help in designing it. Raphael, who was stimulated by the competition, set out for the final victory. For his subject he chose the implicit story of Mount Tabor from the Gospel of Matthew: “And after six days Jesus took Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain apart; and he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light; and behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with him. … And when they came to the crowd, a man came up to him and kneeling before him said, Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic and he suffers terribly; for often he falls into the fire and often into the water. And I brought him to your disciples, and they could not heal him.” Raphael took both scenes and with extraordinary effort united them in the unities of time and place. At the top of the mountain the figure of Jesus is visible, his face changed with ecstasy, and his clothes white and shining with heavenly light; on one side of him is Moses and on the other Elijah; and at their feet are his three beloved apostles who are lying on rocks. At the foot of the mountain a desperate father is leading his afflicted son forward; the boy’s mother and another woman, both of classical beauty, are kneeling beside the boy and begging healing from the nine apostles who are gathered on the left. One of them suddenly loses his concentration on the book he is reading; another points to the transfigured Jesus and says that only he can heal the boy. Usually the grandeur of the upper part of the picture, which was probably completed by Raphael himself, is praised and some of the roughness and intensity of the lower part, which was painted by Giulio Romano, is criticized. But two of the best figures are in the foreground in the lower part—one is the reader who loses his concentration and the other is the woman who is kneeling with a bare shoulder and a shining garment.

Raphael began work on the Transfiguration in 1517, but could not complete it until his death. We do not know how true Vasari’s account is, which was written thirty years after the event: “Raphael continued his secret debauchery to the extreme. After a wild and unusual drinking bout, he returned home with a high fever and the physicians thought he had caught a cold; because he did not reveal the cause of his disorder. The physicians rashly prescribed bloodletting and thus, when he needed strengthening more than anything, they weakened him. As a result he made his will. First, like a good Christian, he sent his mistress out of the house and provided for her to continue an honorable life. Then he divided his belongings among his pupils, a priest from Urbino, and one of his relatives. … His pupils were: Giulio Romano, who was always his beloved master, and Giovanni Francesco Penni of Florence. After confession and repentance, he ended his life on his birthday, Good Friday, at the age of thirty-seven (April 6, 1520).”

The priest who had come to perform the religious rites refused to enter the patient’s room until his mistress left the house; perhaps because he thought her presence would prevent Raphael from making a sincere confession of his sins, which was necessary before absolution. That mistress, after being even prevented from attending the funeral of the deceased, fell into such grief that it might have led to madness; and Cardinal Bibbiena urged her to become a nun. All the artists of Rome followed the coffin to the grave. Leo mourned the loss of his beloved painter; and one of the pope’s secretaries and poets, the famous Bembo who was eloquent in both Latin and Italian, contented himself with a simple sentence in writing an inscription for Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon: “He who lies here is Raphael.” This one sentence was enough.

Raphael was, in the opinion of his contemporaries, the greatest painter of his age. He created nothing that could equal the excellence of the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but Michelangelo created nothing that could equal the overall beauty of Raphael’s fifty Madonnas. Michelangelo was a greater artist because he worked in three fields and was deeper in thought and art. When he said about Raphael: “He is an example of what deep study can produce,” he probably meant that Raphael, by imitating the details of many other painters, had turned them with his serious talent into a complete style; he did not feel in Raphael that creative anger that soon throws off the chain of leadership and fiercely opens a new path for itself. Raphael seemed so cheerful that he could not be called a genius in the full sense of the word; he had solved his inner conflicts so that there was little sign of that spirit or force that moves the greatest souls toward creativity and tragedy. Raphael’s work was the product of a completed migration, not deep feeling or belief. He adapted himself to the needs and whims of Julius, then Leo, and then Chigi. But he was always that irreproachable youth who cheerfully oscillated between “Madonnas” and “mistresses”; this was his pleasant way of reconciling paganism with Christianity.

As an artist in the sense of a craftsman, no one surpassed Raphael; in arranging elements in a picture, harmonizing parts, and coherence of lines, no one equaled him. His life was loyalty to form; as a result, he always remained at the surface of things. Except in the case of the portrait he painted of Julius II, he never deeply entered the secrets or contradictions of life with faith; both Leonardo’s details and Michelangelo’s sense of tragedy were equally meaningless to him; the lust for pleasure and life, creating and possessing beauty, and the intimacy of friend and lover were enough for him. What Ruskin said about Raphael in this way was true: sometimes in Gothic sculpture and “pre-Raphaelite” painting in Italy and Flanders there was a kind of simplicity, sincerity, and sublimity of faith and hope that penetrated deeper into the soul than Raphael’s beautiful “Madonnas” and sensual Venuses. Nevertheless, Julius II and the Pearl Madonna are everything except superficial; they reach the height of masculine nobility and feminine tenderness; Julius is greater and deeper than the Mona Lisa.

Leonardo amazes us, Michelangelo frightens us, and Raphael calms us. He asks us no question, arouses no doubt, and creates no terror, but offers the beauty of life to us like a heavenly wine. He creates no conflict between intelligence and feeling or between body and soul; everything in him is a harmony of opposites that produces a Pythagorean music. His art gives an ideal character to everything it touches—religion, woman, music, philosophy, history, and even war. Because he himself is happy and cheerful, he spreads calm and grace around him.

In the optional comparisons that are made of genius, Raphael ranks second after the greatest geniuses, but he is with them: Dante, Goethe, Keats, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael.

Leo Politicus

It is regrettable that amid all this art and literature Leo was forced to play political games. But he was the head of a state and lived in a time when the powers beyond the Alps had adventurous leaders, large armies, and strong command; Louis XII king of France and Ferdinand the Catholic could at any moment agree on the division of Italy, just as they had compromised on the division of Naples. To counter these threats—and also to strengthen the Papal States and enlarge his own family—Leo decided to unite Florence (which at that time was governed by his brother Giuliano and his nephew Lorenzo) with Milan, Piacenza, Parma, Modena, Ferrara, and Urbino and form a league under the rule of loyal members of the Medici family; and then to unite those lands, with the existing Papal States, as a barrier against invasion from the north; and if possible, to secure the succession of the kingdom of Naples, through marriage, for one of the members of his family; then, with an Italy thus strengthened, to lead Europe in another crusade against the Turks. Machiavelli, who had no prejudice in favor of Christianity or the popes, greatly approved of this plan—at least insofar as it led to the union and protection of Italy; this was the main idea in writing The Prince.

Leo, in pursuing these goals, with the very limited military means at his disposal, used all the methods of statecraft and diplomacy customary among the princes of his time. Lying, breaking treaties, theft, and murder were not worthy of the head of a Christian Church; but all kings agreed that these things were necessary for maintaining the kingdom. Leo, who was first a member of the Medici family and then became pope, fulfilled that role as well as his obesity, fistula, hunting, generosity, and financial strength allowed. All kings criticized him for not behaving like a saint; but, as Guicciardini said, “Leo, upon ascending the papal throne, frustrated all expectations, for he seemed more intelligent than imagined but much less good.” His enemies for a while thought that his Machiavellian cleverness was due to the influence of his cousin Giulio (the future Clement VII) or Cardinal Bibbiena; but when events took their course, it became clear that they (the enemies) should have dealt with Leo himself, that is, not with the lion but with the fox, with someone who was polite and slippery, cunning and incalculable, sometimes fearful and sometimes hesitant, but capable of making decisions and pursuing a firm policy in carrying out the work.

Let us postpone his relations with the states beyond the papacy to another chapter and limit ourselves here to the affairs of Italy and describe them briefly, for the art of Leo’s time is a livelier subject than his politics. He had a great advantage over his predecessors, for Florence, which had opposed Alexander and Julius, was now happy to be part of his domain, for he had given countless benefits to its citizens, and when he visited the city of his ancestors, its people welcomed him warmly by erecting several beautiful triumphal arches. From that “base” and also from Rome, he extended his diplomats and soldiers, as well as his support for art, abroad to expand his territory. In 1514 he acquired Modena. In 1515 Francis I prepared to invade Italy and capture Milan; Leo prepared an army to resist him, formed an Italian league, and ordered the duke of Urbino, who was a fief of the ecclesiastical domain and the papal residence, to gather all the forces he could and join him in Bologna. That duke, Francesco Maria della Rovere, refused to come, although Leo had recently given him money to give to his soldiers. The pope suspected for some reason that he had a secret connection with France. As soon as he was free from foreign troubles, he summoned Francesco to Rome; instead of going to Rome, the duke fled to Mantua. Leo excommunicated him and paid no attention to the pleas and messages of Elisabetta Gonzaga and Isabella d’Este, the aunt and mother-in-law of that bold duke; papal forces took Urbino without resistance, Francesco was declared deposed and Lorenzo, Leo’s nephew, became duke of Urbino (1516). A year later the people of the city rose up and expelled Lorenzo; Francesco gathered an army and recovered his duchy; Leo worked hard to collect money and forces; after eight months of war he achieved his goal, but the cost of the war emptied the papal treasury and turned the goodwill of Italy toward the pope and his extortionate family into ill will.

Francis I took the opportunity to seek the friendship of the pope and proposed the marriage of Lorenzo, the newly restored duke of Urbino, to Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne, who had a notable income of 10,000 crowns (125,000 dollars) a year. Leo agreed; Lorenzo went to France (1518) and brought Madeleine and her dowry with him. A year later, Madeleine, after giving birth to a daughter who was named Catherine and later became Catherine de’ Medici queen of France, died; and shortly after that Lorenzo himself also passed away. It was said that the cause of Lorenzo’s death was a venereal disease that he had contracted in France. Leo now declared Urbino part of the Papal States and sent a representative to govern it.

Amid these troubles, Leo had to deal with two issues that were signs of political weakness and growing unpopularity. One of his generals, Giovanni Paolo Baglioni, who ruled Perugia by the pope’s favor, had joined Francesco Maria and with him had taken Perugia; Leo later lured Giovanni Paolo to Rome with a safe-conduct and killed him (1520). Baglioni had also participated in a conspiracy to kill the pope led by Alfonso Petrucci and other cardinals (1517). These cardinals had such demands from Leo that even his generosity had not been able to satisfy them; moreover, Petrucci was angry that his brother had been deposed from the government of Siena with the pope’s connivance. At first he planned to kill Leo with his own hand, but later he was persuaded to bribe the pope’s physician to poison him while treating the pope’s fistula. This plot was discovered; the pope’s physician and Petrucci were executed, and several of the complicit cardinals were imprisoned and deposed; some of them bought their freedom by paying heavy fines.

Leo’s need for money now made his once joyful reign unpleasant. His gifts to relatives, friends, artists, writers, and musicians; his extravagant expenses for maintaining an unprecedented court; the endless needs of building St. Peter’s; the cost of the Urbino war; and the preparation of his crusade were driving him to bankruptcy. His regular income, which amounted to 420,000 ducats (5,250,000 dollars) a year and came from annuities, annual taxes, and tithes, was completely insufficient, and earning them from a Europe that was dissatisfied with their flow to Rome was becoming increasingly difficult. To fill his treasury Leo created 1,353 new and salable offices whose appointees paid a total of 889,000 ducats (11,112,500 dollars). We should not judge this sale of offices piously; most of the offices were irresponsible jobs whose even minor burdens could be delegated to subordinates; the amounts paid for these offices were in fact a loan given to the pope; the salaries of the officeholders, which amounted to ten percent of the total amount paid, were in fact the interest due on their money. Leo was in fact selling what we today call government bonds; and no doubt if he were alive today he would complain that he paid much more interest than current governments pay. In any case, he not only sold these irresponsible and profitable offices but even resorted to selling higher offices, such as the treasury. In July 1517 he appointed thirty-one people to the cardinalate, many of whom were capable men, but most of them were appointed explicitly because they could pay for the honor and power they received. In this way, Cardinal Ponzetti the physician, scholar, and author paid 30,000 ducats; Leo’s pen in this case could bring half a million ducats into the treasury. Even Italy was shaken by this act; and in Germany the story of this “deal” played a major role in provoking Luther’s revolt (October 1517). When in that important and sensitive year Sultan Selim conquered Egypt for the Ottoman Turks, Leo’s urging for a crusade went nowhere. The pope eagerly sent agents throughout Christendom to sell indulgences extraordinarily and thus finance the crusade.

Sometimes he borrowed money from the bankers of Rome at forty percent interest, and the bankers set such interest rates because they feared that the papal financial administration’s carelessness would cause their bankruptcy. In return for some of these loans he pawned his silver vessels, tapestries, and jewels. He rarely thought of economy, and when he did, he touched the salaries of the members of his Greek academy and the professors of the University of Rome; that academy was closed in 1517 due to lack of budget. The pope continued his extravagant charities and sent large donations to monasteries, hospitals, and asylums throughout Christendom; he saturated the members of the Medici family with splendor and money, and fed his guests like Hatim; while he himself ate and drank with moderation. On the whole, during his reign he spent 4,500,000 ducats (56,250,000 dollars) and when he died he owed 400,000 ducats; a lampoon attached to the statue of Pasquino said: “Leo has eaten three papal treasuries: the treasury of Julius II, the revenues of Leo, and the income of his successors.” When he died, Rome suffered one of the worst financial failures in its history.

His last year of life was full of war. After recovering Urbino and Perugia, it seemed to him that sovereignty over Ferrara and the Po River was necessary for the security of the Papal States and their power to prevent France in Milan. Duke Alfonso had given the necessary excuse for war by sending military contingents and artillery to Francesco Maria for use against the pope; although Alfonso was ill and almost exhausted after a generation of conflict with the pope, he fought with his usual courage and was saved by the pope’s death.

The pope was also ill in August 1521, partly because of the pain of his fistula and partly because of the sufferings and excitements of the war. He recovered but fell ill again in October. In November he improved enough to be taken to his villa in Magliana. There he received the news that the joint army of the pope and the emperor had taken Milan from the French. On October 25 he returned to Rome and was warmly welcomed like the victors of war. On that day he walked a lot and sweated so much that his clothes became wet. The next day he fell ill with a high fever. His condition rapidly worsened, and he felt that the end of his life was near. On December 1 he returned to Rome. On the night of December 2, 1521, ten days before the end of his forty-fifth year of life, he died. Many of his servants and some members of the Medici family took whatever they could from the Vatican. Guicciardini, Giovio, and Castiglione thought he had been poisoned—perhaps at the instigation of Alfonso or Francesco Maria; but he apparently died of malaria like Alexander VI.

Alfonso was happy at the news of the pope’s death and struck a new medal with the inscription: “From the lion’s jaws.” Francesco Maria returned to Urbino and once again gained his throne. In Rome the bankers, by lending to the pope, seemed to have plundered their own property; the Bini, Gaddi, and Riccasoli firms had lent the pope 200,000, 32,000, and 10,000 ducats respectively; Cardinal Pucci had lent him 150,000 and Cardinal Salviati 80,000 ducats; the cardinals claimed priority for themselves in seizing everything that had been saved from plunder; Leo had died worse than a bankrupt. Some others joined his opponents in condemning the deceased pope as a bad administrator of great wealth. But almost all the people of Rome mourned him as the most generous benefactor in the history of Rome. Artists, poets, and scholars knew that their season of fortune had come to an end, although they were not yet aware of the extent of their misfortune. Paolo Giovio said: “Knowledge, art, public welfare, the joy of life—in short, everything good—went to the grave with Leo.”

He was a good man who was ruined by his own virtues. Erasmus rightly praised his kindness and humanity, generosity and learning, and love and patronage of art, and called Leo’s pontificate a golden age. But Leo had become too accustomed to gold. Because he had been raised in a palace, he had become as familiar with luxury as with art; he had never suffered to earn income, although he bravely faced danger; and when the papal revenues were placed at his disposal, they slipped through his reckless fingers while he joyfully shared in the joy of its recipients or devised plans for expensive wars. By pursuing the methods that had been inherited for him from Alexander and Julius, and by inheriting the successes of those two, he made the Papal States stronger than ever, but he lost Germany with extravagance and excessive demands. He could see the beauty of a flower vase but not the Protestant reforms that were taking place beyond the Alps; he paid no attention to the hundred warnings that were sent to him, but demanded more gold from a nation that had risen in revolt. For the Church, he was both glory and misfortune.

He was the most generous of all art patrons, but not the most enlightened. With all his love of art, no great literature emerged during his pontificate. The works of Ariosto and Machiavelli were too difficult for him, although he could appreciate the works of Bembo and Politian. His artistic taste was not as sure and sublime as that of Julius; we do not owe him the new St. Peter’s or the paintings of the School of Athens. He loved beautiful form very much but had little affection for that mysterious grandeur that art gives to beautiful form. He overworked Raphael, appreciated Leonardo less than he deserved, and like Julius could not find a way from Michelangelo to his genius. He loved comfort too much to be able to reach greatness. It is regrettable to judge him so harshly, for he was lovable.

Time rightly received his name; for although he gave more to time than time gave to him, it was he who brought the heritage and wealth and taste of the Medici family and the splendid art patronage he had seen in his father’s house from Florence to Rome and, with that wealth and the executive guarantee of his papal office, provided a stimulating incentive for such literature and art that was sublime in style and form. His example encouraged a hundred other men to seek talent, support it, and create a precedent and standard for appreciation and value for northern Europe. He preserved the historical remains of ancient Rome more than any other pope and encouraged people to compete with them. He accepted the pagan pleasure of life; yet in his behavior, in an unrestrained age, he practiced restraint. His support for the humanists of Rome helped them to spread their literature and classical style into France. Under his attention, Rome became the heart of European culture; artists flocked to that city to paint, sculpt, or build; scholars came to study, poets to sing, and wits to scatter points. Erasmus wrote: “O Rome, before I forget you, I must immerse myself in the river Lethe. … What precious freedom there is in you, what a treasure of books, what depth of knowledge among scholars, and what useful companionships! Where else can one find such a literary society or such variety and talent in one place?” Castiglione the good-natured, Bembo the refined, Lascaris the scholar, Fra Giocondo, Raphael, the Sansovinos and Sangallos, Sebastiano, and Michelangelo—where else shall we find such people in one city and one ten-year period and in such a gathering?