Alessandro de’ Medici became Duke of Florence, and disgraced his family by his rapacity and cruelty. Hundreds of those who had fought for the Republic were tortured, exiled, or slain. Fra Benedetto was sent to Clement, who ordered him imprisoned in Sant’ Angelo; there, said an uncertain report, the monk was starved to death.52 The Signory was disbanded; the Palazzo della Signoria now began to be called Palazzo Vecchio; and the great eleven-ton bell, La Vacca—the Cow—that had from the lovely tower called so many generations to parlamento, was taken down and broken to pieces, “in order,” said a contemporary diarist, “that we should no more hear the sweet sound of liberty.”53
IX. CLEMENT VII AND THE ARTS
The Pope’s treatment of Florence confirmed the degeneration of the Medici; his efforts to restore Rome revealed a spark of the administrative genius and esthetic appreciation that had made the family great. Sebastiano del Piombo, who had portrayed him in maturity, painted him now as an old man, somber, deep-eyed, white-bearded, giving benediction; apparently suffering had chastened and in some measure strengthened him. He took vigorous action to protect Italy from the Turkish fleets that now commanded the Eastern Mediterranean; he fortified Ancona, Ascoli, and Fano, and paid the costs by persuading the consistory of June 21, 1532—over the opposition of the cardinals—to impose a levy of fifty per cent upon the incomes of the Italian clergy, including the cardinals.54 Partly by selling ecclesiastical offices, he raised funds to rebuild the property of the Church, to restore the University of Rome, and to resume the patronage of scholarship and art. He took measures to ensure a proper supply of grain despite the raids of Barbary pirates upon shipping near Sicily. In a remarkably short time Rome was functioning again as the capital of the Western world.
The city was still rich in artists. Caradosso had come from Milan, Cellini from Florence, to raise the art of the goldsmith to its Renaissance zenith; they and many more were kept busy making gold roses and swords of honor as papal gifts, vessels for the altars, silver staffs for Church authorities and processions, seals for cardinals, tiaras and rings for the popes. Valerio Belli of Vicenza made for Clement a magnificent casket of rock crystal, engraved with scenes from the life of Christ. This, now one of the most precious objects in the Pitti Palace, was presented to Francis I at the marriage of his son to Catherine de’ Medici.
The decoration of the Vatican stanze had been resumed in 1526. The greatest painting of Clement’s pontificate was done in the Hall of Constantine: there Giulio Romano pictured The Apparition of the Cross and The Battle of the Milvian Bridge; Francesco Penni painted The Baptism of Constantine, and Raffaello del Colle portrayed Rome Presented to Pope Sylvester by Constantine.
After Michelangelo—and now that Giulio Romano had migrated to Mantua—the ablest painter in Rome was Sebastiano Luciano, who acquired his sobriquet del Piombo when he was appointed keeper and designer of the papal seals (1531). Born in Venice (c. 1485), he had the luck to be taught by Gian Bellini, Giorgione, and Cima. One of his earliest and finest pictures—The Three Ages of Ages—shows him as a delectable youth between two famous foreign composers then in Venice—Jacob Obrecht and Philippe Verdelot. For the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo he painted —or finished for Giorgione—a vivid representation of that saint in the fever of composition; and about the same time (1510) he copied Giorgione’s most voluptuous manner in a Venus and Adonis whose generous women seem to belong to a golden age before the birth of sin. Probably in Venice also Sebastiano painted his renowned Portrait of a Lady, long ascribed to Raphael as La Fornarina.
In 1511 Agostino Chigi invited Sebastiano to come to Rome and help adorn the Villa Chigi. There the young artist met Raphael, and for a time imitated his style of pagan ornament; in return he taught Raphael the Venetian secrets of warm coloring. Soon Sebastian became a devoted friend of Michelangelo, imbibed the Titan’s muscular conception of man, and announced the aim of wedding Venetian color to Michelangelesque design. He had a chance to do this when Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici asked him for a picture. Sebastiano chose as his subject The Raising of Lazarus, in deliberate competition with the Transfiguration that Raphael was painting at the time (1518). Critics did not unanimously contradict his judgment that he had equaled Leo’s favorite.
He might have progressed further had he not been too readily content with his excellence. A passion for leisure kept him this side of genius. He was a jovial fellow who could not see why one should wear himself out either for superfluous gold or for such a will-o’-the-wisp as posthumous fame. After he had received his sinecure in the Vatican from his patron made pope, he confined himself for the most part to portraits, in which few painters have surpassed him.
Baldassare Peruzzi was more ambitious, and made his sonorous name ring for a generation across the mountains of Italy. He was the son of a weaver. (Artists are mostly of lowly stock: the middle classes seek utility first, hoping to have time for beauty in their senility; aristocrats, though they nourish art, prefer the art of life to the life of art.) Born in Siena (1481), Baldassare learned painting under Sodoma and Pinturicchio, and soon went off to Rome. Apparently it was he who painted the ceiling of the Stanza d’Eliodoro in the Vatican, and Raphael thought the work good enough to leave much of it unchanged. Meanwhile, like Bramante, he fell in love with the classic ruins, measured the ground plans of the ancient temples and palaces, and studied the diverse forms and arrangements of columns and capitals. He became a specialist in the application of perspective to architecture.
When Agostino Chigi decided to build the Villa Chigi, Peruzzi was invited to design it (1508). The banker was pleased with the result—the stately crowning of a Renaissance façade with classic moldings and cornices; and finding that Peruzzi could also paint, he gave the young artist freedom to decorate several rooms of the interior in competition with Sebastiano del Piombo and Raphael. In the entrance hall and the loggia Baldassare pictured Venus combing her hair, Leda and her swan, Europa and her bull, Danaë and her golden shower, Ganymede and his eagle, and other scenes calculated to raise the tired moneylender from the prose of his days to the poetry of his dreams. Peruzzi set off his frescoes with borders painted in such tricks of perspective that Titian thought them to be veritable reliefs in stone.55 In the hall of the upper floor Baldassare made illusory architecture with his brush: cornices sustained by pictured caryatids, friezes supported by pictured pilasters, mimic windows opening upon pictured fields. Peruzzi had fallen in love with architecture, and made painting its handmaid, obeying all the builder’s rules, but spiritless. Let us make an exception here for the Biblical scenes that he painted in a semidome of Santa Maria della Pace (1517), where Raphael had painted sibyls three years before. Baldassare’s frescoes stood the comparison well, for these are his finest paintings, while Raphael’s there were not his best.