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Leo: Et pro mille aliis Archipoeta bibit.
Querno: Porrige quod faciat mihi carmina docta Falernum.
Leo: Hoc etiam enervat debilitatque pedes.
Querno: The archpoet turns out verses like a thousand poets.
Leo: And puts away wine like a thousand more.
Querno: Pass me the Falernian that inspires my witty songs.
Leo: It excites you and makes you unsteady on your pins.
If Querno failed to produce a reply in perfect hexameters, Leo would add water to his wine.
Leo issued an invitation to the poets of Italy to come to Rome and write Latin verse. Nearly three hundred accepted, and most of them lived at Leo’s expense. Young Ariosto was one who came for a time. He was warmly welcomed by the Pope, who kissed him on both cheeks and gave him a copyright for his verses, but finally he decided that he would rather be ‘first in Italian than second in Latin.’ Among those who stayed the majority produced clever occasional pieces. Biagio Palladio wrote about the passing of the most famous Roman courtesan, Imperia, who at the age of thirty-one drankpoison after a lovers’ quarrel: ‘Mars gave imperial rule to Rome, and Venus gave us Imperia; Fortune deprived us of imperial rule, Imperia of our hearts.’ In an excellent poem Sadoleto hailed the Laocoön as an image of Roma rediviva and said he could almost hear the figures groaning, whereupon Francesco Arsilli, not to be outdone, wrote a poem about Sadoleto praising the Laocoön: ‘Never, Sadoleto, will your name be lessened by usurious Time.’
A few of the three hundred were genuine poets. They found that a classical language and the establishment of classical standards released creative energies, and they used the materials of antiquity in order to express a distinctively personal vision. Such was Marcantonio Flaminio, who arrived from a village in the Dolomites at the age of sixteen, and was hailed by Leo as a prodigy. Flaminio’s pure style is revealed in the opening strophe of his Ode to Diana:
Virgo sylvestrum domitrix ferarum,
Quae pharetratis comitata nymphis,
Cynthium collem peragras, nigrique
Silvam Erymanthi….
Maiden, tamer of the wild beasts of the woods,
Who, in the company of the quiver-bearing nymphs,
Range Cynthius’s hill and the forest
Of black Erymanthus….
Another remarkable poet is Zaccaria Ferreri, abbot of Monte Subasio. He had actively supported the Council of Pisa, but Leo was not one to bear a grudge, and he commissioned Ferreri to replace the medieval hymns of the Breviary, whose language and rhymes were deemed inelegant, with new ones in classical Latin. Ferreri published his versions in 1525. For the feast of Corpus Christi, instead of Thomas Aquinas’s Pange Lingua, he offered beautiful, closely knit sapphics, of which this is the last stanza:
Zographi non ars sapientis ulla
Fingere, aut ullus penetrare vivens
Hoc valet sacrum, neque te triforme
Numen Olympi.
Artist’s brush is powerless to paint
And mortal mind to probe this act,
Or to fathom you, threefold
God of Olympus.
The best of the Latin poets patronized by Leo is Marco Girolamo Vida, who was born in Cremona about 1490 and came to Rome with verses on chess and silkworms. Leo saw that the young poet was capable of more than these trifles. Wishing to be an Augustus to a new Virgil, he commissioned Vida to write a Christian Aeneid. He also gave Vida the necessary means, naming him prior of a quiet and beautiful monastery, S. Silvestro in Frascati. There Vida wrote his Christias, six books of chiselled Latin hexameters recounting the life of Christ from Bethlehem to his death on Calvary. It is a sincere work—Vida was a holy priest—with none of the pagan trappings which Erasmus thought disfigured the De Partu Virginis by Sannazzaro of Naples, and it remains the finest Latin poem of the sixteenth century.
Latin prose Leo also encouraged. It was at the Pope’s special request that Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, Queen Isabella’s Lombard chaplain, wrote his important account of thirty-four years of ocean discovery, Decades de orbe novo, first published in full in 1516, and it was the Pope who urged the converted Moslem, Leo the African, to write a description of his native continent. By such activities as these, by his example and patronage Leo did more than anyone to establish the language of Cicero’s Rome as a vehicle for contemporary writing. During his reign Italian poets in France, Spain and England were writing Latin verses and encouraging others to do so. There seemed a real chance that Latin-writing humanists could draw together the nations of Europe.
Leo’s literary patronage extended also to the vernacular, and to a sphere which no previous Pope had entered, namely the theatre. As a boy in Florence Leo had acted in at least one St John’s Day play, and his tutor Poliziano had written in Orfeo the first secular play in Italian ever to be performed. Ferrara had been staging Plautus and Terence since 1486, and vernacular comedy since around 1500. Mantua and Urbino also staged plays, and it was evident to Leo that if Rome were to take the intellectual lead in Italy she must do no less. When his closest friend among the Cardinals, Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, wrote a comedy suggested by Plautus’s Menaechmi, Leo decided, the year after his accession, to stage it.
The Calandria is set in Rome and its plot, like Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, turns on identical twins. Lidio and Santilla, refugees from the Turk, arrive in Rome by different routes. Santilla, for safety, has disguised herself as a man, while Lidio, in order to visit his sweetheart, poses as Santilla, whom he believes dead. This gives rise to predictable doubles entendres and mistakes of identity. The play takes its name from Calandro, the gullible husband of Fulvia, with whom Lidio is in love. Fulvia asks Rufo, a wily magician, to smuggle Lidio into her room. Rufo, while pretending to agree, introduces not a man disguised as a woman but a real woman. Fulvia gives vent to her rage and bewilderment. Is Lidio a hermaphrodite, or does Rufo, as Fulvia is led to believe, possess the power to alter at will a person’s sex? Finally, for a fatter fee, Rufo succeeds in introducing Lidio, dressed in woman’s clothes, to Fulvia’s room, whereat the curtain falls.
The importance of his mildly amusing play lies in its tone. Sexual love is praised as the sweetest pleasure in the world, anyone who does not enjoy it is a fool, but it is constantly being thwarted as the man in question turns out to be a woman. The constant references to changes of sex and hermaphrodites point to a general truth which Bibbiena puts into the mouth of one of his characters: ‘Everyone knows that women are so highly valued today that there isn’t a man who does not imitate them, down to becoming a woman in body and soul.’ The classical revival had titillated appetites which because of the vow of celibacy could not be satisfied, and in a predominantly masculine city this could, and often did, lead to effeminacy. Tommaso Inghirami, Vatican Librarian and one of Rome’s leading orators, whose round face and upturned eyes with a cast are familiar from Raphael’s portrait, was actually known by the name Phaedra, after playing that role in Seneca’s Hippolytus.
Another comedy, Ariosto’s I Suppositi, Leo staged in the palace of his nephew, Cardinal Cibo, in 1519. The Pope ‘took his place at the door and quietly, with his blessing, gave permission to enter, as he saw fit.’ Two thousand crowded in, causing such a crush that the Ferrarese ambassador almost had a leg broken. Leo took his place on a dais in the front row; his name was spelled out by candelabra on either side of the stage, and on the curtain, which Raphael had designed, Leo’s favourite buffoon was depicted sporting amid devils. Fifes, bagpipes, violas and comets provided gay music.
Ariosto’s play is inspired by Terence’s Eunuch and Plautus’s Captives. A young couple much in love but too poor to marry contrive to thwart the advances of a rich old suitor; after much duplicity and deceit, the hero comes into money, casts off his servant’s disguise and marries the girl who for two years has secretly been his mistress. In one scene a parasite named Pasifilio reads the hand of the suitor, Cleando. Here is a snatch of their dialogue translated by Gascoigne in The Supposes of 1566, which is sometimes described as the first English comedy worthy of the name:
Pasiphilo: O how straight and infracte is this line of life!
You will live to the yeeres of Melchisedech.
Cleando: Thou wouldst say, Methusalem.
Pasiphilo: Why, is it not all one?
Cleando: I perceive you are no very good Bibler, Pasiphilo.
Pasiphilo: Yes, sir, an excellent good Bibbelere, specially in a bottle.
At these and similar jokes Leo laughed heartily, which shocked Frenchmen in the audience. They thought it unseemly that a Pope should attend so frivolous a play.
A third comedy to be staged in Rome, at Leo’s special request, was Machiavelli’s Mandragola. A Florentine youth named Callimaco falls in love with Lucrezia, the virtuous young wife of an impotent husband, Nicia. Callimaco poses as a doctor and persuades Nicia that a potion of mandrake can cure Lucrezia’s childlessness. There is, however, one snag. The first to sleep with a woman who has taken such a potion, dies. So a stranger must be introduced for the night to Lucrezia’s bed, and Callimaco firmly intends to be that stranger. For a fee the local priest, Fra Timoteo, persuades Lucrezia to accept the outrageous plan, and next morning, after the trick has been successfully perpetrated, takes them all to church in a general mood of self-congratulation.
Once again the play turns on sexual inadequacy, which here appears to reflect a deeper inadequacy, Florence’s recent fiasco on the battlefield. For Callimaco, the potent: young lover, has just returned from Paris, and it is in Paris that he has learned the reckless insolence which enables him to seduce Lucrezia. Her name, too, is significant, for the patrician girl who committed suicide had, by Botticelli and others, been made a familiar symbol of Florence in defeat.
As well as comedy, Leo also liked farce. He often summoned to Rome a famous Sienese troupe called I Rozzi—the Rough Ones—to perform dialect burlesques in which country bumpkins declare their love in boorish similes, play crude practical jokes and fall prey to a stereotyped villain. Sometimes pastoral and mythological elements were mixed in, and the coarse rustics would be joined by Arcadian shepherds: a happy combination which Shakespeare was later to use in As You Like It.
Leo’s patronage of the theatre was criticized by some, and his biographer, Bishop Paolo Giovio, felt it necessary to defend the Pope’s attendance at comedies such as Mandragola: it is significant that he pointed as a precedent to Trajan. But Leo knew what he was about. It was proper that the head of the Church should be in touch with the body, proper that he should understand what was being said and thought by the writers of his day. And it doubtless did not escape his notice that the line, ‘Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto’ occurs in a play by Terence. By his tolerant attitude Leo showed that the Church had nothing to fear from the theatre; by his patronage he played an important part in encouraging Italian comedy and farce during their formative years.
Leo also continued his predecessor’s patronage of Raphael. The young painter from Urbino had now become the idol of Rome and would walk the streets attended by fifty admiring artist friends. One day Michelangelo in his grim way called out: ‘Where are you going, surrounded like a provost?’ to which Raphael replied: ‘And you, all alone like an executioner?’ But despite their different temperaments, Raphael admired Michelangelo and added his portrait to The School of Athens, an almost Sistine figure pondering on the lowest step beside a block of stone. As commissions poured in, Raphael employed a large workshop to do the rough work and quickly amassed a fortune of 16,000 ducats, twice as much as Michelangelo would earn in a life more than twice as long. But he retained his modest amiable manner, even when he moved into a splendid new house designed by Bramante and adorned on the outside with classical columns.
Leo’s most important commission to Raphael are the cartoons for ten tapestries to hang on the lower walls of the Sistine Chapel. The subject Leo chose is the very one rejected by Michelangelo, namely humble incidents in the lives of the Apostles. These include Peter’s healing of the lame man and Paul’s imprisonment. In his choice of two of the other subjects Leo shows the same interest as Julius and Michelangelo in the close link between early Christian and pagan thought. The first depicts the scene in Lystra when certain citizens, impressed by the Apostles’ miracles, called Barnabas Jupiter, and Paul Mercury, because he was the chief speaker; ‘and the priest of Jupiter, Defender of the City, brought out bulls and wreaths to the gates, eager, like the multitude, to do sacrifice,’ a folly from which the Apostles dissuaded them. The second scene shows Paul preaching in Athens, seeking to convince the Athenians by quoting not the Old Testament but their own poets—Aratus, Cleanthes and Epimenides—in support of his claim that we are all the children of God. Taken together, the two scenes amounted to a clear statement that Christianity was a fulfilment of pagan insights. This of course chimed in with the view that Christian Rome was a fulfilment of the imperial city.
The tapestries cost 16,000 ducats, of which Raphael received one thousand, and seldom has a fee been better earned. In contrast to, and complementing, Michelangelo’s vault, Raphael’s seven surviving cartoons are imbued with the New Testament spirit, in particular with what may be termed the grandeur of simplicity. Perhaps the best of them, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, shows the apostles divided between two boats. In one John and James raise a net, their bent straining bodies clearly inspired by a figure in Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina. In the other Andrew recognizes the miracle with outstretched arms, while Peter kneels humbly before the seated figure of Christ, and although placed at the extreme left edge it is Christ who dominates the whole scene, partly by virtue of his calm attitude, partly because he partakes of the open sea and sky above him. Since a classical note was de rigueur, Raphael introduces to the foreground three cranes, a symbol of filial obedience. For all its drama, the main impression of this great drawing is one of serenity and Christian trustfulness.
As a counterpart to the tapestries Leo, who loved music, engaged the best choristers from Flanders, France, Greece and Mantua to sing divine Office in the Sistine Chapel, thus making it an artistic as well as liturgical holy of holies. Their voices must surely have gained in jubilation under Michelangelo’s newly painted vault and amid Raphael’s newly woven tapestries, hung at Christmas 1519. After a good performance Leo would sit enraptured, head sunk on his breast and eyes closed, lost to everything, drinking in the sweet tones and humming them softly to himself.
Leo’s other big commission to Raphael was the decoration of a shady promenade alongside the papal apartments known as the Loggie. Excavations on the Esquiline Hill had recently revealed certain elaborately decorated underground rooms, to visit which one had to be let down on a rope. They belonged to Nero’s Golden House, of which the Emperor exclaimed, ‘Good, now I can at last begin to live like a human being,’ but Leo’s contemporaries did not know this: they believed them to be part of the palace of Titus. They called them grottoes and the delicate architectural trompe l’æil framing small landscapes with figures they called ‘grottesque’. It was in this style that Leo asked Raphael to decorate the Loggie. The artist’s gay and inventive interweaving of flowers, cupids, winged beasts and other ‘grottesques’ recaptures the charm of the Roman paintings and imparts to the promenade an apt note of relaxation. Leo was pleased with the work; his pleasure has a touch of irony considering its Neronian origin.
Raphael painted another masterpiece at this period, and although not commissioned by the Pope it throws considerable light on Leo’s Rome. Agostino Chigi, Leo’s banker, wished to decorate his new palace with the story of Amor and Psyche, and as a subordinate theme asked Raphael to fresco one of the walls with The Triumph of Galatea. Raphael shows Galatea driving her scallop-shell chariot and team of dolphins through the waves, while on either side Tritons carry off sea-nymphs, at whom three cupids aim their arrows. The literary sources are Virgil’s Eclogues and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the iconography comes from Philostratus, while Galatea’s billowing cloak and energetic movement derive from ancient bas-reliefs of Leucothea which then stood in the monastery of S. Francesco a Ripa. As for the term ‘triumph’, it denotes that Galatea has successfully resisted the brutal passion of Polyphemus. So the subject was vaguely moral. Raphael, however, cares more for the vitality and beauty of Galatea, whom he renders with obvious admiration. At first sight it is remarkable that the supreme painter of Madonnas should bring equally deep feeling to the portrayal of a pagan sea-nymph. But Raphael was not above using La Fornarina as a model for his Madonnas. He seems to have believed that all feminine beauty, whether of mistress or naiad, is an ally, not a rival of Christ’s mother. ‘Religio hic regnat, gloria, et alma Venus,’ wrote one of Leo’s poets in praise of Rome, and the last two words are a literary equivalent of Raphael’s fresco. They also express the spirit of the Leonine city. Julius’s Rome had been assertively virile; Leo introduced a gentler, more feminine note, and the Galatea is its image.
So much for Leo’s positive achievements. They were important at the time and have left to the world a rich legacy of Christian humanism. His other activities reflect the same large-mindedness. One or two of them, however, innocent in themselves, represented tinder in regions which had already shown themselves highly critical of the Church.
The first is hunting. Leo had begun to ride to hounds at the age of nine. He liked the sport for itself and because it was good for his health and figure. He saw no reason why he should not continue to practise it as Pope. In 1516 he hunted thirty-seven days in a row. If kept in Rome by business, he would run down deer and stags in the Baths of Diocletian, but the country he preferred was the wooded hills around Viterbo, where after a hard ride he could soak in the warm baths. ‘He left Rome without a stole,’ lamented his master of ceremonies in January 1514, ‘and, what is worse, without his rochet; and, worst of all, with boots on. That is quite incorrect, for no one can kiss his feet.’ Leo just laughed at this punctiliousness. Peasants lined the road to offer presents, being rewarded so generously, says Giovio, that they saw in Leo’s arrival, a harvest far more productive than the best from their fields. At dawn teams of men enclosed a section of the forest with sheets of canvas, each sixty feet long and six feet high, fastened with wooden hooks and held upright by forked poles. At a signal from Leo, transmitted from glen to glen by the sound of horns, groups of archers, halberdiers, gamekeepers and beaters would drive the game forward with shouts and the beating of drums. The main sport came from deer, boar or wolf. Spectacles on his nose, Leo would dispatch these with lance or javelin. Firearms were not used, being considered unsporting.
Leo’s hunts were an occasion for display. His hounds imported from France, his falcons from Crete, the Pope was attended by a suite of 140 horsemen, a body guard of 160 and the poet Guido Postumo, who put the whole colourful chase into verse. Inevitably this encouraged lavish spending among the sacred college. Cardinals began to give their hounds silver collars or gold-encrusted leashes, and in 1514 Sanseverino appeared at the papal hunt with a lion skin round his shoulders. Galeotto della Rovere bought a string of racehorses, and Cibo opened a stud to provide fast hunters. Italians expected prelates to participate in lordly sports and to look the part, but other nationalities found these activities shocking. In Portugal, for example, clergy were forbidden to hunt; and the ban was made, at the King’s request; by Leo himself.
The second activity to occasion adverse comment was Leo’s attendance at banquets, his own and others’. He gave lavish dinners in the Vatican at which delicious food, including peacocks’ tongues, was served on chased silver, and the best musicians in Italy sang and played. Leo himself ate moderately, though he had a penchant for lampreys cooked with cloves and nuts in a Cretan wine sauce; after dinner he joked publicly with his Dominican clown, Fra Mariano, who possessed a prodigious appetite and is said to have eaten twenty chickens at a sitting. Leo would set Mariano going by serving him a delicious-looking dish containing ravens or apes or even pieces of string, then rock with laughter as the clown champed at the tough food and tried to disguise his misery with polite smiles or expressions of bliss.
Leo enjoyed going out to banquets too. The most famous were given by Agostino Chigi. A native of Siena, for fifteen years Chigi was the leading banker in Europe. He handled Tolfa alum for the Popes and his annual income amounted to 87,000 ducats. He possessed bathroom fixtures of solid silver and an ivory and silver bed that cost 1,592 ducats. The famous Imperia had for long graced this prodigious couch, but now Chigi suffered from dropsy and took his pleasure in other ways. Once he offered dinner to the sacred college, at which every cardinal was served delicacies brought by special messenger from his own region or country, on silver engraved with his coat of arms. But Chigi’s tour de force was a dinner for Leo, held in a loggia overlooking the Tiber. To prove to his guests that the same silver was not used twice, after each course he instructed his servants to throw the silver dishes into the river. Nets however had been laid underwater, from which the silver was later retrieved.
If Leo’s presence at banquets was criticized abroad, at least he brought to these otherwise vulgar displays the Medici wit he had inherited from Lorenzo. When the Emperor sent him fourteen hunting eagles Leo, in a letter of thanks, joked about the danger of giving away his emblem of imperial power. When he wished to give a red hat to his nephew, Innocenzo Cibo, and someone objected that he was only twenty-one, Leo remembered that he had received the cardinalate younger still from a Pope of the same name, and said with his usual smile, ‘What I received from Innocent, I repay to Innocent.’ When a Venetian presented him with a poem on the art of making gold, Leo sent back a richly decorated purse but, contrary to his usual practice, empty: ‘since you possess the secret of filling it’. And wit led to wit. Leo gave Fra Mariano a post as piombatore: the work involved affixing a lead seal to papal bulls and brought in 800 ducats a year, which prompted the clown to boast that he had discovered the alchemists’ secret, since now he could make gold out of lead.
Trifles such as these help to set a tone. The tone in Leo’s Rome was broadminded and gay. Taken in conjunction with his patronage of learning, Latin literature, Italian comedy and the plastic arts, Leo may be said to have achieved his ambition of making Rome the most civilized city in Europe. At any rate it was now the place where everyone wanted to be. During Leo’s reign more than 20,000 people came to swell the population, to savour the precious freedom and versatility of talent that Erasmus praised in a nostalgic letter, to see the fine new houses and the gardens which Julius had popularized. In one of the gardens belonging to a papal employee named Angelo Colocci writers and humanists liked to gather, and the mood of Leo’s Rome is summed up in a fountain that played beside a little statue bearing the inscription: ‘I am the spirit of joy, yield to my law or else go away.’
Leo himself liked to think that the spirit of his pontificate was embodied in a remarkable elephant. Captured in India, the elephant was sent as a gift to the Pope by the King of Portugal. In colour white, ‘the size of three oxen, with the pace of a tortoise’, it paraded through Rome carrying in a howdah jewels, brocade and pearls worth 60,000 ducats. Leo watched from a window of Castel S. Angelo; the great loping beast genuflected three times to him, bending its head low, and made a noise described as ‘bar, bar, bar!’ It then plunged its trunk into a cistern and, to the crowd’s delight, sent a spray of water almost up to the window.
Leo, who liked animals, was captivated by the elephant, just as Lorenzo had been by the Sultan of Egypt’s giraffe. He kept it in the Belvedere, commissioned its portrait, in intarsia, for one of the doors of his private apartments, and had his poets celebrate the elephant’s size, intelligence and classical associations. He decided to call it Annone, after the Carthaginian general Hanno, thus making it a symbol of Rome’s glories. But this did not exhaust the beast’s significance. According to Pliny, elephants are the only animals who say their prayers. They are also temperate, benign—they possess no gall—and chaste, for they can breed only after having absorbed, as an aphrodisiac, mandragora root. So Annone was an apt symbol of Christian Rome, heir to past glories.
If Leo’s intentions in Rome were praiseworthy, and many of his achievements admirable, they were not without grave danger. The danger arose from the nature of the city and the nature of his court, the one inorganic and unproductive, the other without any real roots in Rome, an all-male society living away from family and place of origin, both therefore tending to artificiality and exaggeration in a way the Florentines would never have countenanced.
Let us take the matter of a pure Latin style. This demanded the use of words sanctioned by classical authors. When poets described SS. Peter and Paul as ‘Dii tutelares Romae’, when they translated ‘excommunicate’ by ‘forbid fire and water’, turned ‘to forgive the sins of a dying man’ into ‘to appease the powers of Hades and the Manes’, when faith became ‘persuasion’, a priest ‘a flamen’, the Vatican ‘the Capitol’ and Mary a ‘goddess’, or even ‘Diana’, they were blurring the distinctiveness of Revelation. Real misunderstanding crept in when Christ was referred to as ‘hero’ or ‘Apollo’, and the Christian message transformed into a ‘philosophy’ compatible with the humane ethic of classical Rome. In one of his sermons Tommaso Inghirami compares the death of Jesus to the oratorical power of Cicero because he filled his disciples first with sadness and consternation, then with triumphant joy. He then likens Jesus to Curtius, Cecrops, Aristides, Epamonidas and even Iphigenia, who were all devoted to the common good. The sermon would have horrified Savonarola, all the more since it was delivered on Good Friday, yet his audience considered that Inghirami had surpassed himself.
Closely linked with this danger was another, which Petrarch had been the first to spot. Against Cicero’s statement in the De Natura Deorum that men are quite willing to attribute their prosperity to the gods, but not their virtue—‘virtutem autem nemo deo acceptam rettulit,’ Petrarch had written ‘Cave male dicas: Be careful what you say.’ The poet’s warning went unheeded among the leading spirits of Leo’s Rome. Even the pious Sadoleto described wisdom as a human virtue naturally acquired, and declared that sages such as Socrates, Plato and Cicero were in every respect complete and perfect men, despite the fact that they had never received the Church’s grace-giving sacraments. Formerly man was deemed to have value only in so far as he partook of heavenly grace, but now it was man who had value in himself, and Vasari could write of Raphael after his death: ‘We can be sure that just as he embellished the world with his talent, so his soul now adorns heaven itself.’ This exaltation of man was of course a form of osmosis in a world flooded by classical values. If there was any betrayal of Christian truth, it was quite unconscious. It was none the less dangerous for that, especially if doings or phrases were to be interpreted out of context by men living far from Rome and unfamiliar with her new, rather peculiar conventions.
Exaltation of man led to exaltation of particular men, notably the Popes. It has to be remembered that fulsome language was a feature of the age: the satirist Pietro Aretino was variously addressed as ‘Precellentissimo’, ‘Unichissimo’, ‘Divino’, and ‘Omnipotente’, but in Rome adulation went beyond bounds. Orators and poets addressed the Pope as once their forbears had addressed those Emperors who believed themselves divine. Inghirami hailed Julius as a Jupiter making the universe tremble with his frown, a Dominican poet compared Leo to the sun-god Apollo, while Giovanni Capito addressed these lines to the elephant Annone:
If you think you are serving a Libyan Lion
You err: this Leo came down from the skies.
He is your master, the world’s highest glory,
Whose head is crowned with the tiara,
Holding among men a more than mortal rank:
With the right to close and open the world’s frontiers.
If to serve God is truly to reign, then you,
As Leo’s servant, truly reign, Leo being God on earth.
Like every great lord, Leo had his ‘taster’ to sample all food for possible poison, but against this particular kind of poisonous sugar he had no one to defend him, and the tragedy is that sometimes he succumbed. When his brother Giuliano died in 1516 it was expected that Leo would order the Court into mourning and take part in the solemn funeral ceremonies. But Leo decided otherwise. A Pope, he informed his master of ceremonies, should place himself above family griefs: he should consider himself ‘quia ipse jam non ut homo sed ut semi deus—not as a man, but as a demi-god.’
The final evil of Leo’s reign stems jointly from the peculiar nature of Rome and from the Pope’s character. Rome was not only unproductive, it had no native traditions of craftsmanship or art. So that in civilizing Rome, Leo had to bring everything from outside. The poets came from outside, so did the musicians, the painters, the architects. Of 267 artists who worked in Rome between 1503 and 1605 only seventeen were Romans, and only one—Giulio Romano—became famous. They had to be lured to Rome by high fees, they had to be well housed, and this meant that the cost of civilization was enormously increased. And the man who was paying for all this was open-handed to a fault. ‘Liberalitas Pontificia’ proclaimed one of Leo’s medals—and the medal, like everything else commissioned by the Pope, from tiara to silver stirrups—was a beautiful object, designed at great expense. After a game of chess, win or lose, Leo would hand his opponent several gold ducats before blessing the board and leaving. He increased the papal household to 683 and spent on it twice as much as Julius. He would give 50 ducats for one bottle of amber, 500 at a time for sables and ermines, 900 for three gold chains. He gave Guido Postumo 300 ducats and a new house for versifying his hunts, 33 ducats a quarter to a favourite trombonist, a castle and the title of count to a lutenist named Giammaria Leo. He could not possibly afford to be so open-handed, even though papal revenue had risen to 420,000 ducats. As early as 1515 he was in arrears with the pay of his 88 university professors, some of whom began to seek more stable positions elsewhere. And so the scramble for money began.
First thing when he woke, before prayers, before Mass, the datary Gianmatteo Giberti entered the Pope’s bedroom—Leo liked to lie in—and there discussed who should get what benefice and for how much. Bishoprics, abbeys, even quite small parishes—all had their price, and if an applicant held one already, so much the better, because to hold a second he would have to pay. Then there were the saleable offices in the Curia and in the municipality. Leo doubled these to a total of 2150, thus raising 1,200,000 ducats, on which, however, an annual interest of 328,000 ducats had to be paid, since holders received more than 10% return on what was in effect a State investment. But the most profitable item of all was the creation of cardinals, forty-two in all, of whom at least thirty owed their red hats to money or political influence, which in the last resort also meant money: so the Church was no more independent as a result of returning to Rome, only it was now subject to money rather than to the threat of force. Ponzetti, who finally secured the cardinalate at the age of eighty, is said to have stopped a soldier in the street, and removing the soldier’s cap to have measured it thoughtfully. ‘Your hat is two inches bigger than mine, but yours cost one ducat, whereas mine cost 60,000.’ He was not exaggerating.
Even so, income failed to match expenditure, and Leo had to borrow: 32,000 ducats from the Gaddi, with the proviso that one of the family would receive the red hat; from the Ricasoli 10,000; from the father of Cardinal Salviati 150,000. In 1521, when his overdraft reached 156,000 ducats, Leo accorded the Bini brothers, Florentine bankers, the right to sell to the highest bidder offices in the Curia, and as surety gave them Paul II’s jewelled mitre, Julius II’s tiara, and ‘the sacred pontifical silver vessels, including those used for the celebration of divine service’.
It was under these conditions that Leo grappled with the immense task bequeathed him by Julius, the building of St Peter’s. When Bramante died in 1514 he placed Raphael in charge and allocated him 60,000 ducats, whereupon Raphael remarked that the basilica would cost a million—as it eventually did. At least 10,000 ducats a year would be required, probably much more in these early stages, and Leo looked around for ways of raising such a sum. His predecessor had issued a bull, Liquet omnibus, granting Christians remission of punishment due to past sins, on condition that they went to confession and contributed according to their means to the fund for building St Peter’s. Living well within his income, Julius had been able to raise sufficient money by publishing the bull only in Italy. Although there were signs that indulgences were abused and resented abroad, Leo decided to extend the bull. He spoke of a basilica ‘which is first among all the churches of the world and, as it were, the fixed home of Christianity’; ‘since the income of the Apostolic Chamber is insufficient to meet the cost of such an incredibly vast work, the help of Christians is urgently needed.’ In the fateful month of December 1514 Pope Leo X appointed commissioners—who, incidentally, were scrupulously honest—to administer the St Peter’s indulgence in Avignon and the surrounding Comtat; also in Cologne, Trier, Salzburg, Bremen and other provinces of Germany.
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_48529f76-5743-570f-8e0c-c3f49c391f3a)
The Challenge from Germany (#ulink_48529f76-5743-570f-8e0c-c3f49c391f3a)
IN 1515 Giangiorgio Trissino, a highly cultivated patrician of Vicenza, visited Germany as the Pope’s nuncio and was deeply struck ‘by the horror of huge forests, deep marshes and barren plains. Winds and snow whip that unhappy land; the soil is like iron and encrusted with ice…. A barbarous people shut themselves up in warm houses and laugh at the Arctic blasts, gaming and drinking far into the night.’
Trissino is stating, rather unsympathetically perhaps, the basic truth that Italy and Germany are profoundly different lands. Wittenberg, in central Germany, lies nine degrees north of Rome, and here nature is not a friend but a wolf to be kept at bay. The people of such a region are physically robust, steeled by hard occupations like mining and forestry. They make brave soldiers. It was Germans who inflicted their most serious defeat on Augustus’s legions and, first in tribes and now in innumerable principalities, they had waged war often and bitterly. They were familiar with suffering, took it indeed for granted. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century German art abounds in Pietàs and St Sebastians dripping with blood, teeth bared in agony. But there was genuine piety as well as horror. German artists emphasized the unjust suffering of Christ because, in their harsh world of violence and torture, this allied him with them.
Where Italians suppressed or embellished the dark side of life, Germans fixed attention on it. When depicting the Trinity, Raphael showed Christ standing in triumph, but Dürer placed him agonizing on the Cross. Dürer was the first artist to depict a syphilitic. His portraits of himself and of Oswald Krell reveal men who are disturbed. Their eyes are burning, their hands, one senses, are restless. They are subject to nightmarish dreams such as one which left Dürer ‘trembling all over’. They look inward, finding themselves ‘fools’, experiencing doubts as terrible as that described by Ulrich von Hutten in a youthful poem with the significant title of ‘Nobody’. They find the world not tidily terraced, but craggy and baffling. In Melencolia I Dürer depicted a new archetype of human inadequacy: a winged female figure, hand on chin, brooding darkly amid unsolved problems. But the problems demanded solution, because over this awesome world stood a God even more awesome, severe as their climate, a God who was a Judge. This God was represented in The Last Judgment—a subject much commoner in Germany than in Italy—towering over the damned, who suffer torments terrible as those being inflicted in real life on German witches: whip, thumbscrew, rack and studded chair slowly heated from below.
These people were deeply religious. But they could never feel at one with nature in quite the same way as the Italians. And so their piety took a different direction. John of Wesel in Erfurt and Conrad Summenhardt in Tübingen had tended, often excessively, to depreciate the value of works and to emphasize inwardness, faith in the suffering Christ. Inwardness was fostered by the reading of spiritual books, for the Germans, leading a largely indoor life, read much more than did Italians. They were particularly devoted to the Bible: it is no accident that this was the first considerable work to issue from Gutenberg’s press. The first Bible to appear in the vernacular was also a German publication, and no fewer than fourteen German Bibles appeared before 1522. In his inaugural address at Wittenberg Philip Melanchthon described his joy in the text of Scripture: how its true meaning lights up ‘like the midday sun’, adding ominously, ‘All the countless dry glossaries, concordances, discordances and the like are only hindrances for the Spirit.’
Study of the Bible, especially of the early Church, brought into relief existing evils and intensified a desire for reform. Between 1450 and 1515 Germans held four provincial councils and no less than a hundred diocesan synods in order to try and correct abuses such as simony and appointment of unsuitable bishops, without, however, any noticeable effect. Yet there remained a thirst for reform, for a pure religion like that of the early Christians.
Differences of land and climate, of physiology and psychology, of language and aesthetics, as well as different individual and collective experiences had created if not a radically different soul, at least radically different spiritual needs and forms from the ones obtaining in Italy. This in itself was no bad thing. The one Gospel is recorded in very different ways by the four Evangelists, and Christendom had gained not lost from being polyphonic. But such a situation clearly called for understanding, and this in turn for communication. Now, communication had seldom been worse. Fighting in Lombardy had reduced trans-Alpine travel to a trickle. Of fifty-four cardinals under Julius II and Leo X, only two were Germans, and of these the interests of one were exclusively political. Roman Legates in Germany were merely diplomats, and they seldom spoke German. If German reform plans ever reached Rome, too often they were ignored because the officials concerned had only a sketchy knowledge of actual conditions.
Desire for reform crystallized therefore in a growing antipathy to Rome. Germans disliked the fact that Alexander VI had kept a mistress, that Julius took part in battles, and that Leo attended comedies and banquets. They disliked the Pope’s claim to be heir of the Roman Emperors, and the seizure of Piacenza and Parma, which since the eleventh century had owed allegiance, albeit formal, to the German Emperor. They disliked the Italian domination of the Church which followed on the Popes’ return to Rome. They disliked papal domination of the Fifth Lateran Council, the petty reforms it proposed, and the loopholes therein: a cardinal’s funeral must cost no more than 1500 crowns ‘unless there is just cause’. Above all, they disliked the ‘spiritual’ taxes and dispensations, whereby, they believed, they footed the bill for Leo’s poets and artists, musicians and goldsmiths—all the expensive business of this new Christian humanism. The taxes were constantly increasing—the one on briefs had risen fivefold in sixty years—and on this whole matter several diets during the fifteenth century had gone so far as to break with Rome.
Into this world and sharing many of its values Martin Luther was born on 10 November 1483. He was the son of a peasant who had risen to be a well-off mining operator in Eisleben, a town, incidentally, which lies 770 miles from Rome but only 100 miles from heretical Bohemia. Physically strong, his craggy face marked by high cheekbones and a firm jaw, Luther described himself as ‘rough, boisterous, stormy and altogether warlike, I am born to fight against innumerable monsters and devils.’
The Devil loomed large for Luther and, when he came to write his Greater Catechism, he was to cite the name of the Devil sixty-seven times, compared to sixty-three citations for the Saviour. As a law student he was one day caught in a thunderstorm and almost struck by lightning. This near escape from death impressed him deeply, and he vowed to enter religion. In 1505 he joined the Augustinians, two years later receiving the priesthood.
Luther attended the recently founded university in Wittenberg, a town of 2000 inhabitants, mainly brewers. Here degree requirements were lenient, and Luther took his doctorate in theology in five years instead of the usual twelve. He therefore skipped scholastic niceties and stuck to what he calls ‘the kernel of the grain and the marrow of the bones’, by which he meant Scripture. In 1512 he became Professor of Scripture at Wittenberg.
Luther was a deeply religious man who sought perfection in his chosen life: ‘I would have martyred myself to death with fasting, prayer, reading and other good works.’ But try as he might he could never attain his own ideal of goodness. This puzzled and troubled him deeply, for the whole trend of the age was to emphasize man’s will, his powers of achievement. But always Luther felt his complete unworthiness before God, whom he had been brought up to believe was above all a Judge. ‘We grew pale at the mention of Christ, for he was always represented to us as a severe judge, angry with us.’ ‘When will you do enough,’ Luther asked himself, ‘to win God’s clemency?’ And it became clear that the answer was, Never.
How then could he be saved? As a Professor of Scripture, Luther sought an answer in the New Testament, and as an Augustinian, in the commentaries of the founder of his Order. Now it so happened that a complete edition of St Augustine’s works, in nine volumes, had for the first time become available in 1506. Augustine had started life as a Manichaean, and the Manichaean battle between matter which is bad and the spirit which is good marks nearly all his writings. Moreover, in a fight to the death with the heresy of Pelagius, who denied original sin, Augustine had laid a sometimes excessive emphasis on man’s need for grace, and his incapacity to do good unaided. Both characteristics appealed to something deep in the German character, and notably in Luther’s. To the question, How then could he be saved? Luther found an answer in the 17th verse of the first chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans as interpreted by St Augustine. Not efforts of will, but faith alone could justify man before God, and this faith was not something to be toiled for, not a result of virtus, but a free gift from above, a grace. Grace, moreover, was granted to man irrespective of his merit, and God’s decision to grant or withhold it lay completely beyond the range of human understanding. This discovery comforted Luther, who believed that formerly he had been on the wrong track.
In 1510 Luther visited Rome on business for his Order. ‘I fell on my knees,’ he says, ‘held up my hands to heaven and cried “Hail, holy Rome, sanctified by the holy martyrs and by the blood they shed here.”’ Luther was not a humanist save in so far as he valued sound texts of Scripture and the Fathers, and he took no interest in the Sistine ceiling or the Laocoön. He was annoyed by the speed at which Roman priests said Mass: ‘By the time I reached the Gospel the priest next to me had already ended and was shouting “Come on, finish, hurry up.”’ But this was hardly a scandal to Luther, whose own life had become so hectic by 1516 that he wrote: ‘Rarely do I have time for the prayers of the breviary or for saying Mass.’
What did profoundly shock Luther in Rome was the Renaissance itself. Aristotle’s Ethics was a prime text in Rome and it figures in Raphael’s Stanze; Luther abhorred the book, declaring it ‘grace’s most dangerous enemy’. Italians, particularly since the revival of Platonism around 1460, held the created world to be both good and beautiful. Luther did not find the world either good or beautiful. He was shocked by the way clergy and laity alike had reconciled the spiritual with the physical, the pursuit of salvation with the pursuit of happiness here and now. While remaining spiritual beings directed towards the life beyond, they had completely adjusted themselves to the world below. Hence Luther’s complaint that the Italians were ‘Epicureans’. ‘If, they say, we had to believe the word of God in entirety, we should be the most miserable of men, and could never know a moment’s gaiety.’
Luther returned to Wittenberg in 1511 to resume teaching and his study of St Augustine. Presently one of the great German princes, Albert of Hohenzollern, decided to acquire the archbishopric of Mainz. Since he was only twenty-four and thus well below the prescribed age, and furthermore was already Bishop of Magdeburg and Halberstadt, he applied to Rome for a costly dispensation. In order to help Albert, Pope Leo agreed that the St Peter’s indulgence should be preached in North Germany on special terms. The great banking family of the Fuggers would advance the dispensation payment in return for administering the indulgence, half the proceeds of which would go to Albert, half to building St Peter’s. As part of the ensuing campaign in 1517 a Dominican named Johann Tetzel began preaching near Wittenberg. He was somewhat imprudent in his methods, especially regarding indulgences for the dead, and a famous verse was attributed to him:
As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,
The soul into heaven springs.
Luther watched in dismay as the brewers of Wittenberg trooped across the Elbe to buy Tetzel’s indulgence: those earning 500 gold guilders a year paid six guilders, those earning 200, three, and so on. For one who believed that man was justified by faith alone, the notion of achieving forgiveness by works, still more by work in the form of money, was utterly repugnant. Luther decided to protest. By nature conservative in his attitude to society, he did so in the approved manner, by writing letters describing the abuse to four local bishops. The result proved disappointing. Some scoffed at his scruples, others pointed out that this indulgence was the Pope’s and outside their control.
Luther then drafted 95 theses stating his views on indulgences and other matters, and posted them on the door of the university church: a usual way of inviting discussion and in no sense a gesture of defiance. The first four theses are related and evidently express what was then uppermost in Luther’s mind:
1. Our Lord and Master Christ, in saying ‘Do penance’, intended the whole life of every man to be penance.
2. This word cannot be understood as referring to penance as a sacrament (that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the ministry of priests).
