Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel by Andrew Graham-Dixon Read Free Book Online Page A

more than a series of linked villages clustered around the banks of the Tiber. The fabled seven hills of the city of the Caesars had become grassy wooded slopes, where sheep and cattle grazed amongst the overgrown ruins of temple, forum and amphitheatre. The gap-toothed hulk of the Colosseum towered over all, memorial to an empire long since extinct.
    The city was derelict because of the decline that it had suffered during the Middle Ages. When Julius was elected to the papacy, Rome had only been home to the popes for a little more than eighty years. Martin V, whose election in 1417 had ended the Great Schism, had returned there in 1420. According to Platina, the fifteenth-century author of The Lives of the Popes , ‘he found it so dilapidated that it bore hardly any resemblance to a city’. 32 Intervening popes had done what they could to build and rebuild the city’s fortifications, streets, squares and fountains. Julius II’s own uncle, Sixtus IV, whose pontificate began in 1471 and ended in 1484, had established the Vatican Library and rebuilt the old Palatine Chapel of Nicholas III – which henceforth, in Sixtus’s memory, would be called the Sistine Chapel. Before that, a coherent vision of what the city might one day become had been set forth in a speech delivered in 1455 from his deathbed by Pope Nicholas V to his cardinals: ‘to create solid and stable convictions in the minds of the uncultured masses, there must be something that appeals to the eye: a popular faith, sustained only in doctrines, will never be anything but feeble and vacillating. But if the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God himself, belief would grow and strengthen like a tradition from one generation to another, and all the world would accept and revere it.’ 33
    Julius II did more than any other Renaissance pope to turn this dream, a blueprint for the future magnificence of papal Rome, into reality. During his pontificate, the Vatican Palace was renovated and its new apartments decorated by Raphael with paintings that simultaneously celebrated the progress of human learning and the enlightened teachings of the Church. The Cortile del Belvedere was begun. New palaces were built, streets were widened and improved. Julius founded the Vatican museum and established Rome’s most significant collection of the art of antiquity. He laid the foundation stone for the new St Peter’s. He commanded his principal architect, Bramante, to improve access to the city for pilgrims by straightening the Via Lungara and building a parallel street on the other side of the Tiber — the Via Giulia, the longest straight road since Roman times.
    He did all this, but at a cost. It was partly to raise the revenues for his many grand projects in Rome that Julius went to war so often. The territories he conquered became an important source of income, but the funds at his disposal could never match the scale of his ambition, so he resorted to other methods too. Simony and the traffic in indulgences — papally sanctioned pardons for sin, hawked across Europe by the agents of Rome — thrived under his pontificate. In the eyes of the pope and his advisers, the ends justified the means. Giles of Viterbo, favourite of Julius II and vicar-general of the Augustinian order, had a messianic vision of Rome becoming the new Jerusalem as the end of the world approached. Giles enthusiastically endorsed the sale of indulgences, never imagining the scale of the rebellion against the Church that this would soon inspire in Germany. 34 In 1517, only four years after Julius II’s death, Martin Luther composed his ninety-five theses objecting to the sale of indulgences, precipitating the Reformation.
    Julius II made some reforms to the monastic orders and dispatched missionaries to America, India, Ethiopia and the Congo. But he was destined to be remembered as a pope whose