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

temporal policy had eclipsed his spiritual office. His pontificate culminated in a tragic paradox. In trying to realise the most grandiose dream of the post-Schismatic papacy, he had only helped to shatter it for ever. Although he had striven with all his might to consolidate the papal states and assert the immutable authority of the one true Church, his unscrupulous methods had fanned the embers of the Reformation that would sunder the Church and transform the very landscape of European Christianity into a war zone. 35
    In 1523, looking back at the pope’s achievements from a post-Reformation perspective, Erasmus published a bitterly comic satire entitled Julius Exclusus . It tells the story of Julius meeting St Peter at the entrance to heaven and finding the gate locked against him. The pope protests, listing his military victories and citing the magnificence he has brought to Rome, but the saint remains adamant that he will not enter: ‘You are a great builder: build yourself a new paradise.’ 36

    From the moment of his election, it had been inevitable that the ‘great builder’ would call on the services of Michelangelo. Rome already contained an impressive advertisement of the artist’s skills, in the shape of the Pietà , and stories about the marble colossus that he had created in Florence must soon have reached the pope’s ears. Here, plainly, was an artist who could work on the scale demanded by Julius II’s own enormous ambition.
    The call came in the spring of 1505, when the pope summoned Michelangelo to Rome. Well aware that papal patronage would open a new world of opportunities for him, the artist was happy to obey. According to Condivi, the pope spent several months wondering how to make use of Michelangelo’s gifts before finally conceiving the idea of commissioning him to create his own tomb.
    Michelangelo proposed a design of stunning scale and complexity, which Condivi describes in considerable detail: ‘to give some idea of it, I will say briefly that this tomb was to have had four faces: two were to have been eighteen braccia long to serve as the sides, and two of twelve braccia as head and foot, so that it came to a square and a half. All around the exterior there were niches for statues . . .’ 37 There were to be more than forty of these statues. Some were to depict the liberal arts as slaves, indicating that with the death of Julius painting, architecture and sculpture and ‘all the artistic virtues’ had been reduced to a state of feeble passivity. Others were to represent angels, both sad and happy, to lament the passing of Julius and to rejoice at his entry into heaven. There was even to be a second monument within the monument, a great tomb resembling a temple to house the sarcophagus containing the pope’s remains.
    So began what Michelangelo would, in later life, call ‘the tragedy of the tomb’. It was a project on which he embarked with the highest hopes, but that was destined to be beset by a thousand interruptions and delays — one that would preoccupy him not only for years, but for decades of his life, and that would only be realised, belatedly and long after Julius II’s death, in a much reduced form. It is hard, however, to share Michelangelo’s belief that the failure of the project, in the form that he first planned it, amounted to a tragedy.
    The Louvre in Paris contains certain figures of the slaves, which the artist brought to varying states of completion, of an undeniable pathos and beauty. But the fact remains that the artist’s initial proposal was a megalomaniac fantasy, an obscene monument to ego, pride and power. The oppressive object described by Condivi would have been no mere tomb, but a self-sufficient building, combining the functions of chapel and sarcophagus. It would have towered fifty feet in the air and would have occupied an area of eight hundred square feet. Its exterior would have been decorated with a multitude of niches, each containing a